I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

One of the benefits of being a friend of the author is: sometimes you get free books.

And this was quite a good free book, so I’m reviewing it. Not in hopes of getting a copy of the next one at all, of course. I’m much too high-minded for that kind of thing. *looks suitably virtuous*

( So let us consider The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim Hines. )

Continuing on with the What I Like series, I have been reflecting on where my genre fiction tastes intersect with my Literature tastes.

I enjoy a good deal of 19th C lit of all sorts, but the authors I am very especially fond of are Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf. Comparing them to my genre fic favorites and considering just what it is I enjoy, not just about reading them, but about analyzing them, I have concluded that I like authors who turn their brains inside out on the page.

But, and this is an important caveat, I also require a modicum of poetry to really hold my attention. That was my problem with Heinlein–well, one of my problems, to go along with my disgust for his rampant misogyny. His stories read as though he turned his brain inside out, indeed, and then just shook it over the page, squashed the pages together, and sent that off to the publisher like some kind of verbal Rorschach blot.

I require some linguistic artistry to go along with the brain-guts, otherwise I just get bored.

On reflection, this is often my problem with science fiction in general, at least the kind written by actual scientists and science associates, who, as a general rule, cannot write poetry to save their souls. Limericks, yes; poetry, not so much.

On a similar note, not only is brevity the soul of wit, it is the soul of keeping me reading. I have about the same tolerance for reading minute descriptions of machines as I do for reading minute descriptions of buildings and clothing, which is to say, very little. Jane Austin and David Brin both win on this score. Issac Asimov frequently loses and the less said of James Fenimore Cooper the better.

It’s really too bad there isn’t some kind of litmus test I can do on new books, a carefully calibrated metaphorical strip I could dip between the covers to see what colors it turned–whether I’d get that turquoise tinge that means poetry plus brain-guts or the flat indigo of just poetry. Which interests me about as much as just brain-guts, which is to say, yawn.  Jacket blurbs are worthless for this purpose.

Oh, well. I guess I’m stuck with standing in the aisle flipping through my prospective books and hoping for a bit of nicely turned gut phrasing to catch my eye.

I think I have identified one of the things that leads me to like an author’s writing: when they write in several genres at once.

I knew Bujold did this, and Pratchett. But they’re both the kind of writers it’s easy to think of as simply exceptional. What I just realized, recently, is that some of my other favorites do this too. Barbara Hambly, for example.

Hambly writes science-fiction and fantasy. She writes horror. She writes historicals. She writes romance. And the thing is, she writes all of them at once. While any book of hers may lean toward one more than the rest, you can pretty much count on all those genre threads being in every book.

Of course, this means that she doesn’t usually follow most genre conventions of any of them.

Take the horror, for instance. Hambly’s books have plenty of it, whether gruesome and unknowable creatures from beyond the stars or the depths of human depravity and cruelty. But it’s never the point. It’s just there, and the characters have to deal with it. Which means she can’t be easily categorized as “dark fantasy” either, because the fantasy elements generally contribute to a very optimistic story, overall.

Or take the romance. Her books do generally feature multi-verse spanning, life altering love found at long odds. But her characters deal with it as one would expect people in the middle of deadly crises to do: “Wow, this is incredible! If we live, let’s have a good snog/marriage/deathless bond, okay? Now duck!”

As for the historical aspect, well even without her biographical blurb I’d have guessed she had either an advanced degree or an advanced hobby in history. Her narratives are chock full of little details that unmistakably set the stories in place and time. But it’s still the characters who are the point, not the details, and a lot of the books are set in places and times that didn’t actually exist, which makes it hard to call them historical fiction.

She writes against the genre grain, which I find charming. Also something I should probably keep in mind when next browsing the library or bookstore shelves.

Personal HP worldbuilding ahead, which may or may not go toward fic. This is mostly just reading some of copperbadge‘s fic and frustration talking.

Becuse, good grief Rowling, could you be sketchier or more illogical if you tried with both hands?

Known: Hogwarts is the only secondary school for wizards in the country.

Known: Rowling says there is no University for wizards in Britain.

Personally known: It is not feasible for such things as research or skilled professions like the medical profession to go on without more intensive education in specific fields than is shown at Hogwarts.

Extrapolation: The population of wizards in comparison to non-wizards must be very small if the entire secondary-schooled population fits in one castle with a mere score of teachers. The population of those who wish to go on to careers requiring tertiary education may, then, be too small to support a university that has sufficient diversity and resources to serve them all. Nevertheless, they must be trained, lest they all kill themselves and each other.

Possibility One: Tertiary education is on the apprenticeship model. Each profession has its own training system and takes care of its own fledglings. Auror’s Academy and medical internships, that sort of thing.

Possibility Two: Wizards who require further education in experimental and research procedure share facilities with one or more non-wizard universities, simply ‘borrowing’ rooms, buildings, libraries and the like, modifying or hiding them as required.

Corollary for Two: Passing the NEWT in Muggle Studies is absolutely required of wizards going on to tertiary studies in such fields.

Possibility Three: British wizards must go abroad to universities that are on the continent in order to get tertiary education.

Conclusion: If Rowling wanted to roll back time in the wizard culture a few hundred years, then she should never have also included institutions such as a ministry offices dedicated to research or a medical profession that appears effective enough to require advanced education and certification.

In addition, the lack of centers for advanced learning implies a certain lack of emphasis or value, in the wizard culture, placed on the study of things that are not immediately useful to a specific vocation. Such study is precisely where a good many advances in understanding the workings of the world around us come from. Particle physics, for instance, is not often immediately useful, but discoveries in that field have the potential to eventually accomplish things that are purely imagination right now, and so people study it. Wizard culture does not appear to value that kind of forward drive, witness the antiquated educational system under discussion and their astonishing ignorance of the far larger non-magic culture in which they are lodged.

From which I further conclude that Rowling’s wizards actually have good cause to fear discovery by non-wizards, because, magic or no, at this point the Muggles would roll them all up in a few months, if there ever appeared to be a reason to do so. Vandalism, attacks and wanton interference with people’s minds would probably provide that reason, should it ever come to light for the population at large.

So, here’s what I don’t like about that epilogue.

( Spoilers, needless to say. )

And that is why I don’t believe in this epilogue, any more than I believe in the Digimon Adventure 02 epilogue. Not plausible + regression = just disgusted.

Spinning off from Resonant8′s entry on character making, and the discussion following, I find myself wandering in thought toward the writers of the Endicott Studio, toward Ursula K. Le Guin and her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, and toward Lois McMaster Bujold and her Vorkosigan books.

At first glance, one of these things is not like the others.

The Endicott writers such as Emma Bull, Charles Delint, Terri Windling and all her proteges have, I think, an obvious resonance with Le Guin. As Le Guin points out, the story of the Hero and his linear conflict with, not uncommonly, most of the rest of the world, is the most valorized literary model of Western storytelling. There are, however, other ways of telling a story, and other stories worth telling. Those other stories are often the ones that the Endicott writers focus on. The world of their stories does not make sense (as per Mr. Clemens’ dictum); what we see instead is the characters attempting to make sense of their world–not always successfully and certainly never completely. Their stories and characters wander, picking up as they go things that seem meaningful or interesting to stow in the bag of the story. Some of those things prove not to be meaningful to the immediate story, after all, and, in a proper Hero story, would have been snipped out in the telling… or, at least, in the editing. Here, they are not, but rather left in the bag to puzzle everyone with their presence. “Secondary” characters have just as full a life and existence as “primary” ones, only we see far less of those lives, often leaving us wondering what was left untold. We are not directed to the triumphant or tragic end of the story, but rather tempted toward the outskirts and down side alleys. This is especially obvious in the Bordertown anthologies, in which the writers shared their characters back and forth, pulled them into each other’s stories and chucked them out again, willy nilly and with no enlightenment to show for it. The conflict that the characters think they are in often turns out to be a mistaken perception.

This is Carrier Bag writing.

And that brings me to Bujold. Because one of the more consistent themes in the Miles Vorkosigan books is that Miles throws himself into the conflicts in his life with every ounce of energy and spirit that is in him… only to find that the conflict is a mirage and his hands pass through it and he lands in an ungraceful heap in the middle of another situation entirely. By all rights of character, Miles should be a Hero. And sometimes he is. But those times are, as he puts it, matters of “forward momentum”, of running full tilt along a highwire, because if he stops he’ll waver and fall. Exciting. Desperate. Unsustainable.

Is that not the essence of the Hero story?

Recently, and, tellingly, as Miles gets older, Miles comes to reject that model. He is still the Hero, at times. But now, instead of running, he stands still. Instead of his military career he embraces a political one–and not the politics of conflict but the politics of family, of kitchen negotiation, of cultivation. Instead of the stories of the bag-carriers being subordinated to The Story of The Spear-carrier, it happens the other way around. Miles is the Hero in the service, not of Accomplishment, but of Existence–not the linear, or even the circular, but the still and the wandering.

Bujold has put the Hero in the Carrier Bag.

I find this delightful, but it is true that such departures often fail to endear a story to an audience grown to expect Heroes with spears and without bags, and nicely spun yarns that don’t snarl. I suspect that the presence of the Hero, despite his Bagging, is one of the reasons Bujold has better sales, and considerably better market staying power than the Bordertown books. By the same token, I suspect Bujold’s tendency toward bag-narrative is a significant part of why she has a smaller following than, say, Mercedes Lackey.

Jumbled up bags are fascinating, but they are not quick.

These, then, are my own models of character building (and, indeed, world building). The guiding concept I have taken from these stories is not to select a specific conflict to motivate my characters, but rather to elaborate wildly and somewhat omni-directionally on my characters’ potential lives and then choose a handful of threads from that tapestry (or snarl) to tell about in a given moment. The choice of threads narrows the scope of what is told. But my most favorite stories are the ones that tell, one way or another, everything that the chosen viewpoint can see in that swatch.