Fantasy

Magic and immortality in Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

/ Simon

So that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Albert Camus – The Plague

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End took me a bit outside of my usual comfort zone. Erroneously referred to as “cozy” fantasy, this Japanese fantasy cartoon features an elf member of an heroic adventuring party who is motivated to retrace the steps of her former grand adventure after the death of two of her former party members from old age. Motivated by the death of her old party leader (and possible, but missed, romantic companion) Himmel, she takes on the adopted daughter of of another companion, the priest Heiter, as an apprentice and together the two magi travel north, to the site of the Demon King’s Castle, where Frieren’s party previously saved the world and ushered in a time of peace, so that they can find the place where souls go after death. Along the way they are joined by Stark, a human warrior who was apprenticed to Frieren’s living (but very elderly) companion Eisen. A romance eventually blooms between Fern and Stark. And so the core of the show consists of these three companions traveling northward, getting into little adventures and having remarkably deep conversations.

This show is a pretty classic example of Japanese engagement with existentialist themes. But, where works like Nier: Automata works with Sartrean and Beauvoirian questions of the construction of self-identity, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is more indebted to Camus.

This is something we can approach from multiple directions: there is a melancholia to Frieren that, combined with a preoccupation with memory and what it means to revisit a meaningful place after many long years, seems most akin to Return to Tipasa and there is an optimism about humanity that would harken to the Plague. This is a show about memory – the central question early in the series is what it means to be remembered. Himmel and Heiter were very old men when they died and statues of them in their youth dot the countryside. But these idealized statues belie the reality of the men they represent. It’s not that Himmel wasn’t an ideal hero – but he was more than that. He was more than a little bit vain. He was an optimist about humanity. He was a good companion, a good friend to his friends. Heiter was a drunk and a dissolute but also the exact sort of person who would adopt and raise a child as best he could because he knew it was the right thing to do. Our access to Himmel and Heiter comes mostly from the memories of Frieren, a person who has an absurdly long lifespan and who has seen close friends come and go many times in the past. So what does it mean?

We learn that Frieren’s favourite spell is one that was created by her own mentor, now long dead and we know that she loved Himmel in a deep way that is difficult to define but no less profound for its ambiguity. Frieren learns from her companions and adds elements of their passions and interests into her own self-identity. She is always thorough exploring dungeons because Himmel loved dungeons so very much that, in expressing his love, he lives on in her. But the show wants us to understand that memories are fickle. Frieren regularly encounters villages that her party passed before. Nobody lives who remembers their last visit or, in one particularly poignant incident, a single very elderly Dwarf still remains who was there before, but he’s struggling with dementia and, even in life, his memory of that incident dims every day. And so Frieren must watch as the people she knows fades into myth, as even she, herself, becomes a mythological object.

The early episodes of this series are preoccupied with death and loss. When we see how Heiter came to care for Fern she is on the verge of suicide. He persuades her not to because of the loss of memory that her death would entail. Memory is situated throughout this series as a good in and of itself. This scene is one of the first places where we can see the show grappling with the question of absurdity. Fern is a young orphan who watched her parents die and yet it is for the sake of their memories that she steps away from suicide. There is something Sisyphean in persisting to remember when memory necessarily includes the memory of pain. We must imagine Fern happy.

It is good to remain in contact with the past. There is a sadness in the loss of that connection. And the series does start with a remarkably sad tone as we watch our title character openly weep at Himmel’s grave and then again at Heiter’s deathbed. This adds additional poignancy to the episode-long quest to find blue flowers to plant around a statue to Himmel. Frieren seems sincerely joyful as she goes about hunting down Himmel’s favorite flower and it’s a joyous moment, framed by an explosion of petals and a swelling score, when she finally finds the flowers. This scene becomes very nearly surrealist with how it substitutes an abstract symbol for a moment of action.

And, of course, the subsequent episode, which brings into the series the idea of magic as something violent and dangerous (something that is only done after establishing how much Frieren uses magic for the beautiful and the mundane) shows us something else about the value of memory. During the Hero Quest the demon Qual was such a terrible threat that they were unable to kill him, instead sealing him away. Qual had developed a specialized attack spell which would penetrate defensive magics. When Frieren releases Qual from his prison she kills him with a single blow after both she and Fern demonstrate how their defensive spells are impregnable against his killing magic.

It transpires that, after trapping Qual Frieren, and other wizards, devoted considerable energy into understanding his spell and into refining defensive magic to respond to it. What was once the state of the art has become the basis upon which the art has been constructed. Qual is remembered as a terrible threat but he no longer is one.

This is an interesting problematization of the show’s initial call to hold onto memory in that it shows how important it is to keep memory in the context of the present situation. This feeds strongly into the dialectic between Frieren and Serie that occupies the final few episodes of the season and demonstrates a remarkable thematic cohesion within the series.

Stepping back it’s interesting to see the reception of Frieren in that it’s often lumped in with “cozy” fiction. I think this is a mistake. The show is paced a bit oddly. It will go two or three episodes at a time full of peaceful, quiet, domestic vingnettes before having an episode or two of horrible violence. This doesn’t follow the “fight an episode” format of many other fantasy cartoons. But it’s not that the discomfiting bloodshed of grimmer or darker fantasy is absent; it’s just spread out. The story gives itself time to breathe and flesh out its cast as fully realized people rather than as heroic archetypes.

And this returns us to the third protagonist of the series: Stark. Our warrior is another generational descendent of the Hero Party. He is the student of Frieren’s dwarf friend Eisen – who has greater longevity than humans but has also got too old for all this adventure business. Stark struggles with fear. He fled his village when it was attacked by demons and is afraid to fight the dragon when he’s first met. Stark also faces a Sisyphean task as his chosen line of work constantly puts him into the position of confronting the things that terrify him the most. And yet he persists.

As they travel across the years of the show Stark and Fern begin a shuddering and rocky romance that is actually given the space in the story to feel real and not just like the obligatory protagonist pairing off that many fantasy stories do.

I think that what really separates Frieren from other series is that it has a sincere interest in people and in the connections they form. One of the key theses of these shows is that what makes people something better than demons is that people: humans, elves and dwarves build community. They show an interest in other people not just as instruments of their will and desires but as other subjects with lives, wills and desires of their own. Even some of the less savory people of the show, such as Übel are differentiated from demons by the extent to which they care about others.

In fact, Übel is particularly important for establishing this distinction. A trouble-maker and a merciless killer, Übel is particularly good at piecing together how other mages magics work. She accomplishes metamagical acts that the show tells us should be impossible, driven entirely by the intensity with which she concentrates her attention on the internality of her targets. Übel sincerely cares about other people, even her victims, in a kind of a perverse way. She understands that the key to people around her is their own internality and, especially when engaged in violence against other people, she strives to build empathy for those around her. This nearly paradoxical relationship divides Übel clearly from demons like Aura the Guillotine. Aura is intelligent, powerful, cunning and charismatic. She is also purely individualistic. And that unwillingness to understand the internality of others is what kills her. Frieren wipes her out with ease because her solipsism makes her easy to dupe.

Humanity is presented as flawed. Aristocrats are haughty and tempermental. Wizards are prone to feats of absurd violence and treat life cheaply. While the series shows considerable affection for the peasantry they, too, are not idealized. Even the peasantry make mistakes. But the show tells us that people working together to form community can overcome the absurdity of their situation not in some climactic battle that sets the world right but in a continual process of building up even as things fall apart again.

The Hero Party ushered in an era of peace and yet Fern’s parents died in war only a few decades later. When Heiter takes her in it’s because he believes it’s what Himmel would have done in her place. The absurdity of the world is overcome again and again.

As the series progresses to its final arc the show becomes even more pointed regarding the absurd. Frieren has a tendency of getting trapped in an undignified position. This is a recurring visual gag going as far back as the first few episodes. We often, in montages, see the back half of Frieren protruding from an object after she allowed her curiosity to override her better judgment.

The classic version of this gag is to show Frieren caught by a mimic. The way mimics present to magical senses is such that there is a 1% chance a chest containing a magical item such as a grimoire will falsely register as a mimic. On this basis Frieren regularly disregards her personal safety to open mimics in the off chance that they’re actually treasure chests with grimoires in them.

And this helps us get at how Frieren’s immortality is really deployed thematically. Early in the series Fern complains about Frieren’s squandering of her considerable talents on mundanity to a herbalist they’re staying with. The herbalist explains that Frieren, being ancient beyond reckoning, has a different perspective on the world and on time. The herbalist describes this as wisdom. This seems dissonant with the sort of person who will take a 99% chance at getting chomped by an angry monster for a 1% chance at treasure. But the point is raised that, over her vast life, Frieren has got many grimoires out of many treasure chests that had a 99% chance of being mimics instead. It’s absurd, of course, in both senses of the word. But the lesson Frieren, as a character, teaches us is to embrace absurdity in all its forms.

And this brings us to the dialectic between Frieren and Serie.

Serie is an even more ancient elf than Frieren. Called the living grimoire, Serie taught Frieren’s mentor and has shaped human magical institutions for the milennia that followed. Serie has literally forgotten more about magic than most beings know – something hammered home by the show’s presentation of how Serie gifts any one spell she knows to any mage who passes the first-class examination. Doing so mystically causes Serie to forget the spell she has taught (though she can devote centuries to relearning these spells, something she doesn’t see as a major problem on account of her agelessness.) Serie doesn’t like Frieren much and actually fails her from the first class mage exam on the basis that Frieren is not the sort of mage that Serie wants her to be.

Serie sees magic as project in the sense of the word deployed by Bataille – that of something imposed from without as an ordering purpose or telos. Serie thinks magic should fuel ambition in some way. She treats this nebulously. It is not that every mage should be a would-be conqueror. But rather it’s that every mage should treat magic as a tool for accomplishing a goal that is something that could be validated as valuable by others.

Frieren runs counter to this. She collects spells as a hobby and has a lot of interest in hedge magic. Fern expresses frustration that Frieren spends so much time chasing spells that do ridiculous and pointless things such as turning sweet grapes sour or making a cup of hot tea. But Frieren says she has been improved by this hobby – that she was more apathetic before she did. Her bumbling around the countryside collecting little, pointless, useless spells helps her to empathize better with others. Frieren celebrates the idea that magic doesn’t have to have a project, that magic is something that goes beyond the bounds of utility or even of beauty (an objective for magic to which she is more closely aligned).

Considering how this show plays with the idea of future generations iterating upon the lives of their predecessors it’s hard not to see Frieren’s difference from Serie as being just such an iteration. But, of course, this iteration is absurd too. Despite the Hero Party ushering in an “era of peace” war didn’t vanish. Many mages remain soldiers or assassins who use magic to kill. Frieren kills demons without remorse and with overwhelming force. In the face of this it seems somewhat absurd to spend decades bumbling across the continent helping farmers and herbalists with mundane tasks in exchange for room, board and a few useless spells. She could be a great person. She was a great person. And, since it’s heavily implied that she’s still pretty young by elf standards she has much potential to continue being a great person. Instead she’s going on a years-long quest to see if there might be a place where the souls of the dead gather, a place she might see Himmel one last time. Serie responds to absurdity with the order of project. Frieren responds to absurdity by openly embracing it and riding within her condition. There’s a sense of wuwei to her actions.

From a critical perspective this puts Frieren, as a character, into the same category of wizard as Le Guin’s Ogion the Silent. Frieren’s magic is the lawless magic that will not serve project, the inarticulate magic that pushes us past the bounds of experience. I know it’s odd to situate a peaceful, quiet, show about small relationships as if it were aiming for the sorts of limit experiences we usually associate with Barker’s fetish demons and yet in her rejection of project in the face of the absurd there’s no other word for it. Frieren’s magic pushes past experience via uselessness rather than via pain but it pushes past experience all the same. If I had a complaint with Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End it’s that it ends rather abruptly. The last arc of the season takes place at a bottleneck city. The protagonists need accompaniment by a first-class mage to continue north. Fern passes while Frieren fails and then they just leave the city again. This is likely an artifact of its adaptation from a manga. It seems an appropriate end to a chapter in the middle of a book. It is a less appropriate end to a season of television.

But in a way this unsatisfying conclusion also serves the goal of asking the audience to wholeheartedly embrace absurdity. There was a situation. Then it ended and everybody moved on.

On Visual art and politics in the 2024 edition of Dungeons and Dragons

/ Simon

The former lead designer of D&D 5e, Mike Mearls has been doing a bit of a vlog tour lately about what he feels are the failings of the system he designed and his opinions regarding the 2024 revamp of said rules. During one stop on that tour, Mearls stated that he believed that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) had decided to eschew the construction of setting in the 2024 revamp in favor of more complicated mechanics because they were concerned about political blow-back.

Image property of Wizards of the Coast used under fair use terms in a work of art criticism.

But of course there was blow-back. There were extensive complaints from the right regarding the visual art throughout the book. The art contained too many black people, too many physically disabled people, too many fat people, too many old people, too many gay looking bards. There was blow-back regarding the exclusion of orcs from the monster manual and there were complaints about “Mexican Orcs.”

I cannot know whether Mearls is correct or incorrect in his analysis of WotC’s motives. But what I can say is that if a person believed they could escape the scrutiny of politicization of pop culture by leaving out any suggestions regarding culture then they didn’t look enough at how the far-right associates with visual art in particular.

Walter Benjamin asserted that a key characteristic of fascism was to aestheticize politics. He asserted the Marxist response should be to politicize aesthetics. Now what Benjamin, an art critic and a political philosopher, meant was that the fascist project looked at politics as an aesthetic project – their political actions were a series of aesthetic gestures – such as trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico or threatening to send the FBI after Hockey referees. Even the most abhorent of fascist acts were largely justified on aesthetic grounds, calling the targets of persecution ugly, subhuman, degenerate.

As a result, the far-right remain very alert to “degeneracy” in art.

It’s very obvious, particularly from the art direction in the Player’s Handbook that WotC wanted to suggest “people like you” play Dungeons and Dragons. A vast variety of body types are displayed in artwork of player characters, in particular, so that any given reader can find someone Like Them in the book.

This works incredibly well. When I was reading through the Player’s Handbook, my daughter, who plays D&D rarely and always an elf druid, looked at the gnome illusionist and said, “That’s me.” This self-recognition is clearly the moment WotC were seeking with their art direction. They want Dungeons and Dragons to be a big tent that lots of different people will buy. But, for the far-right, they will identify these aesthetic others as being “not me” and will prioritize that. Observing the change to orcs from a horde of monsters that can be killed without moral interrogation to “Mexicans” likewise plays into far-right fears in North America regarding the otherness of Latin American people. Right wing preoccupation with being morally disallowed by contemporary culture to deny humanity to the real-world human other is reflected in what they observe as a moral disallowance to deny humanity to the textual, inhuman, other. Unfortunately the only way to square the problem of wanting “this is me” art without upsetting the far-right requires an art director to only include “me” images that would not be treated as othered by the far-right. A book depicting the player character as an interchangeable set of straight, able, white men would not sell as many copies of course, especially not in a set of books that were marketed so much on the quality of the art within them.

As such the exclusion of culture does nothing to actually appease the right-wing commentariat. Nor would any gesture short of complete capitulation to the far-right. I do think that a more likely reason for the exclusion of explicit setting elements (aside from a brief sample setting of Grayhawk in the DMG) is so that they can sell more books later. We know, for instance, that Eberron and Faerûn setting guides are scheduled for release later this year. These cultural / setting elements can be portioned out across these subsequent books, increasing the likelihood that DMs who want to know, “OK but what is elf culture really like” can buy a book for that specific question. “Preorder now on D&D Beyond!” (All I can say is that I hope Ed Greenwood gets a payday for the Faerûn book.)

This sort of DLC mentality isn’t a good thing of course. But I do think it squares the circle of visual art that was guaranteed to offend the far-right with the absence of text that would offend them better than the assumption that everyone just missed what the art directors were getting up to.

World-building: a genealogical approach

/ Simon / 1 Comment

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges – On Exactitude in Science

There has recently been a surge of interest in Vajra Chandrasekera’s 2023 essay The Lone and Level Sands.

Chandrasekera is largely arguing from a position contra Jason Kehe in Wired regarding the quality of Brandon Sanderson. “Kehe—who is obviously a fan, who else could read 17 to 20 novels by any given author and be familiar enough with the lore to claim bona fides—takes the criticism of Sanderson as a poor writer of prose to a very familiar place: story over sentences, worlds over writing,” he says.

Chandrasekera ends his essay calling for, “a place where the sentences matter, and are the whole of the matter,” arguing for prose quality over the encyclopedic tendency of the world builder. However, with the recent resurfacing of this essay there has been some discussion regarding the vagaries of the definition. Simply put, it seems that for some world-building means any construction of setting; for others world-building is the insertion of setting that is extraneous to the utility of the story; for others world-building is a specific method of systematic de-mystification which seeks to provide an authoritative claim as to the truth of the setting.

How one feels about world-building thus becomes multi-varied based on two questions: which definition of world-building does a person adhere to and how do they feel about that?

The earliest approaches to the idea of world-building refer to the construction of simplified “worlds” for the use in scientific thought-experiment. In the 1920 work Space Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity Theory, Arthur Eddington says, “The reader will easily see that a being confined to the surface of a sphere and not cognisant of a third dimension, will, so to speak, lose one of his dimensions altogether when he watches things occurring at a point 90° away. He regains it if he visits the spot and so adapts himself to the two dimensions which prevail there.

“It might seem that this kind of fantastic world-building can have little to do with practical problems. But that is not quite certain. May we not be able actually to observe the slowing down of natural phenomena at great distances from us?”

For Eddington there is a pedagogical and epistemological purpose to the built world – to provide a setting in which a difference allows for the exploration of the consequences of the laws of physics. Another of Eddingon’s examples involves the movement of light through an impossibly vast and free-floating body of water in space. The difference between the “absolute world” that Eddington describes and these simplified possible worlds is a useful tool to explicate how similar functions interact with difference – meanwhile their simplification creates a sort of scientific parsimony wherein the built world contains only those elements necessary for the thought experiment. The body of water is only water. It doesn’t contain land or creatures, there is no passing debris beyond light swallowed by it. It’s water because water contains the qualities necessary to make transparent how gravitation effects light in this case.

An oft-cited early essay on literary world-building is Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories from 1939. Now this is an interesting inclusion considering the extent to which Tolkien argues against rationalization in it, saying, ” I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.” Tolkien argues against treating “fairy” to narrowly – to signify fairies or elves as the subjects of stories – and, instead argues that fairy stories are stories about the condition of faerie – a totalizing setting that contains the creatures of faerie, their lived environments and their metaphysical bounds. This is critical because, for Tolkien, fairy stories should be true in a metaphysical sense of the world and that truth depends not on a rationalization but rather on a mystification of the audience.

In fact Tolkien is quite critical of the scientific urge within literature, saying of anthropologists and folklorists that they are, “people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. ” Tolkien believes that folklorists tend to flatten stories: “We read that Beowulf “is only a version of Dat Erdmänneken”; that “The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast,” or “is the same story as Eros and Psyche”; that the Norse Mastermaid (or the Gaelic Battle of the Birds and its many congeners and variants) is “the same story as the Greek tale of Jason and Medea.””

Ultimately Tolkien seeks to create a form of belief in the audience and argues that creating a mode in which an audience can believe the truth of a fairy story is the ideal mode for the creation of those things that are valuable in a fairy story. Tolkien sets up the author as a demiurge, the secondary-world is the creation of the author just as the world is the creation of God. We should create a world crammed full of all the things in existence when creating a world. We aren’t seeking the parsimonious model of Eddington’s scientific worlds but rather to create a reflection of divine Truth. And this must mean that the world of the story is even vaster than what the author sets to the page. For Tolkien a fairy story must exist in an unbounded world: “Endings of this sort suit fairy-stories, because such tales have a greater sense and grasp of the endlessness of the World of Story than most modern “realistic” stories, already hemmed within the narrow confines of their own small time. A sharp cut in the endless tapestry is not unfittingly marked by a formula, even a grotesque or comic one. It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the “picture” end only with the paper.”

Richard Lupoff’s description of Edgar Rice Burroughs, in 1965, is interesting in how it fuses together these seemingly incompossible forms of worldbuilding. He says, “In short, Burroughs had created a fully-visualized hero – thirty years in apparent age but actually ageless, a professional soldier, an adventurer – and had transported him to a fully visualized alien world, the planet Barsoom, which we call Mars. Barsoom was fully equipped, far beyond even VanArnam’s description, with geography, history, mythology, flora and fauna, human and inhuman inhabitants, science, politics, religion, architecture, law, and every other institution to be expected in a fully developed world.”

For Lupoff the question of building a world was a matter of craft. That genre fiction is replete with fantastical settings is a given. Instead it is a question of how an author goes about realizing this world such that an audience will enjoy reading stories set within it. These, then, help us to see how our different definitions of world building arise: genre fiction has often shared a readership with scientific non-fiction where the construction of simple and parsimonious worlds was, even in the early 20th century, a well-established method for considering problems. Tolkien, held in the highest esteem created an argument not for parsimony in constructing worlds but rather in a kind of lush overabundance of detail designed to help an audience suspend disbelief and experience the demiurgic creation as a form of truth. These two strains then filter into practical craft considerations: put in a lot of setting detail so that we have a world that can be believed in. But, being rational Men of Science, we had best make sure that these worlds are systematic and consistent; the irrational might be disbelieved.

Hilariously this chimera would likely have Tolkien and Eddington both rolling in their respective graves. But this is all rather old news. Lupoff’s book about Edgar Rice Burroughs was published in 1965. Surely we’ve progressed the discourse subsequently.

In 2007 M. John Harrison approached the subject – arguing ultimately that world-building was unnecessary. “It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study.” It’s Borges’ map that was a perfect replica of its territory. But if Harrison sees world-building as Sisyphean then the question arises as to why he’s so specifically critical of this Sisyphean task over any of the other Sisyphean tasks in writing. For Harrison this is a matter that what he calls worldbuilding fiction, “becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one.”

“This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake,” Harrison says, bringing into the conversation the Barthean idea that fiction doesn’t consist of an active authority and a passive audience but exists in the discursive interplay between author and audience. The author, putting too much labour into world-building, is subordinating the audience too much to their authority.

The author chokes out the possibility of imaginative agency for the audience by grounding the fiction too much in the detail of the world. Harrison is concerned with the ideology surrounding this chimerical world-building, calling it, “It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker.” It’s interesting that this criticism functions poorly for the openly theological ideas of Tolkien’s essay specifically because Tolkien did not view fairy stories as watches. Tolkien believes that fairy stories end with just-so vagaries in order to demonstrate that the world of the story necessarily extended out beyond the bounds of the page. However it works well against the successors to Tolkien who, taking a page from Lupoff, have bonded the parsimony of scientific world building to the pursuit of Truth in Tolkien’s. Though Harrison is happy to leave this mess at Tolkien’s feet it does, in fact, depend on a much more protestant religiosity than Tolkien could ever possess. There is a desire in the SFF idea of world building to create a rationally realized world rather than one that feels True. But I sometimes question whether SF fans even notice the difference. Harrison does hit the nail on the head toward the end of his essay when he treats this form of world-building as a remnant of a “fossilised remains of the postmodern paradigm.” Of course the separate world-building concepts of Eddington and Tolkien were themselves very modernist – each attempted to present a grand an unifying narrative about the world: Eddington’s was scientific and Tolkien’s religious. However the syncretic desire to merge these two together is, certainly, a postmodern affectation.

In 2014 Michael Moorcock spoke with John Picacio from Locus Magazine about his then-forthcoming novel The Whispering Swarm. In that article, Moorcock argued he dislikes being called a world-builder because he believed it, as a notion, belied a “failure of literary sophistication.” Moorcock, with characteristic bluntness, calls worldbuilding “anti-romantic rationalization” and lays blame at the feet of John W. Campbell. He also says, “I’m not trying to convince you this is going to be real. I’m trying to convince you these ideas have to be considered, that what’s going on in the world has to be thought about.” And so we can see that Moorcock shares Harrison’s concern regarding the tendency of an over-sufficiency of authorial instruction to limit the avenues for audience imagination. Campbell, who demanded the stow-away die at the end of the Cold Equations, could be something of a perfect vector for the protestant syncretization of parsimonious scientific modeling and a Christian pursuit of Truth via secondary creation. It would certainly fit with the John W. Campbell who assisted L. Ron Hubbard in the founding of Dianetics after all. However, as has been pointed out by the blogger who operates under the “heresiarch” pseudonym, Moorcock’s demand for the necessity of character is no less vulnerable to historicization than the world-builders focus on setting is. They argue stridently, and convincingly, against the idea of necessity as appropriate to any discussion of literature. Effectively nothing in literature is strictly needed.

They also say, “To condemn all of worldbuilding, you ought to be going after the strongest cases: this IMO means Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, a book which sadly no one has read,” and this is interesting specifically because of what Always Coming Home is: it’s a work of speculative science.

Specifically, Le Guin constructed an ethnography for a possible future people of California. It does all the things ethnographies do – it analyzes their writing, explores the structure of their myth and poetry, it interrogates how their folkways interface with their material culture. Always Coming Home is hardly a novel although it is certainly an excellent work of literature. But, rather, it’s attacking Tolkien from the opposite end, so to speak, and giving the anthropologists and folklorists their due, telling Tolkien that his search for an idealized Truth via the whole-cloth construction of myth missed the point of considering what a myth, in its specificity, might be for when not for the construction of an English national identity.

Le Guin’s work plays well both to problematize Tolkien and to knock some of the wind out of Moorcock’s sails by demonstrating that literature need not be a character study to be, well, literary. However I don’t think that Le Guin works well to particularly problematize Harrison except in as far as her work demonstrates that there are other ways to get at building a world and reasons to do so beyond reifying a protestant ideological mode of treating the world as a watchmaker’s product. But I think one would be a fool to fail to situate Le Guin, especially, within the postmodern mode that Harrison criticizes in his essay.

In 2020 Helen Marshall interrogated Harrison’s critique of world-building along with some of the critiques of it. She cites Charles Stross who says, “The implicit construction of an artificial but plausible world is what distinguishes a work of science fiction from any other form of literature. It’s an alternative type of underpinning to actually-existing reality, which is generally more substantial (and less plausible – reality is under no compulsion to make sense.)”

Marshall points out that, “If, as he says, reality is under no compulsion to make sense, how can art ever produce a plausible and coherent yet realistic world? In fact Stross wants the opposite of this sort of messy, inexplicable real-realism. Instead he turns to fiction because ‘worldbuilding provides a set of behavioural constraints that make it easier to understand the character of my fictional protagonists.”‘

She claims that Stross is openly advocating for the construction of hyperrealities, the very thing that Harrison critiqued previously, because it it allows Stross to make-visible those things that were invisible before.

In short Marshall points back to Eddington and his massive globe of water and says, “you’re just doing this again.”

But if what Stross is doing is simply a fictional version of Eddington’s thought exercise then how can we take his claim seriously that science fiction is unique in all forms of literature from doing so? Philosophy and science have been eating science fiction’s lunch for a few hundred years now in that regard. And this is the problem with trying to disentangle this chimera. Without Tolkien’s idealism, without his explicitly theological search for Truth, then all that is left of world-building is the thought experiment. Without the thought experiment we’re just still writing fairy stories. In either case the encyclopedic impulse of the world-builder becomes a bit of fannish silliness forced upon the audience by an author who won’t get out of the way of their own text.

Marshall argues that this is largely an economic activity, Echoing several prior authors she notes that market conditions prefer “encyclopedic, extendible, franchisable, consumable” art. Authors simply follow suit. This mirrors Chandrasekera’s argument that much of Brandon Sanderson’s tendency toward world-building is tied into his position as a business-person, as a start-up founder more than as an author. Sanderson has a financial incentive to be interested in a consistent ecosystem of products that locks in readers. If a reader is conditioned to expect the systematics of a Cosmere book they might look askance at Mordew or Ambergris.

Marshall argues that what Harrison is seeking is, “a mode of attack that would destabilize and unsettle, that would reveal the world as incoherent and painful rather than unified and offering the possibility of choice.”

She chronicles Harrison as having a nearly Brechtian desire to demystify fantasy for material reasons – “We learn to run away from fantasy and into the world, write fantasies at the heart of which by some twist lies the very thing we fantasise against,” she quotes him as saying. She places Harrison into a lineage including Mervyn Peake and China Mieville, citing Jeff and Ann VanderMeer regarding the foundation of the New Weird movement.

Ultimately Marshall proposes three solutions to Harrison’s attack on world-building. The first is to, like China Mieville, double-down on world-building, and use it to allow the creation of a fantasy that “interrogates the relationship between belief and reality.”

The second is to operate within the mode of Jeff VanderMeer and, as he suggested in Wonderbook to argue for “sufficient mystery and unexplored vistas, consistent inconsistency, multicultural representation, extended, literalised metaphors, multiple operational realities, collective and individual memory and imperfect comprehension.” The third is to follow Timothy Morton’s path into speculative realism. I have explored the relationship between VanderMeer and Morton previously and found this argument of particular interest.

She argues that Harrison ultimately rejects the idea that readers should believe (or even enjoy) built worlds as if they were real.

And so what we have is a story of a century of progression through modernity and into the postmodern followed by the recognition that the postmodern condition has reached its limits. World-building is a postmodern chimera of modernist rationalism and equally modernist reaction against rationalism. It paradoxically demands a multitudinous panoply of detail in order to make transparent problem-worlds fit for solving problems.

If we express skepticism for world-building it should be clear to an audience that this is not a matter of being skeptical of the power of setting. However we must not make the error of Stross and believe that setting only exists within the confines of genre, or that any setting is more or less artificial than another.

In fact, we can abandon Baudrillard’s anxiety in favor of a Deleuzian recognition of the powers of the false. We may not agree with Tolkien that there is any Truth to be found in an act of demiurgic creation but we can recognize how both Tolkien’s unbounded abundance and Eddington’s careful parsimony create a false image of the world – and that their capacity for action depends on that falsity. As Marshall points out, a built world cannot be as inherently contradictory as reality. There’s too much of the watchmaker’s stink upon any setting. And heresiarch is quite correct to point out that the watchmaker’s simplification applies as much to the inner setting of character as to the external setting of mise en scène.

But, just as this is the case, a built world allows us to highlight contradiction and inconsistency. VanderMeer’s ideas of consistent inconsistency, the blending of extended literalised metaphor into the assumed real stratum of a story and Morton’s use of the hauntological and the eschatological allow us to interrogate socio-cultural problems with the same sort of transparent clarity that Eddington sought for the mathematical problems of special relativity. Always Coming Home provides an excellent precedent for this sort of an operation, showing how a focus on setting can allow us to interrogate our own relationship between folkway and material culture as if we were anthropologists in the future.

Perhaps what sits so hard in the mouth of many critics regarding Brandon Sanderson’s school of world-building is that it becomes too systematic for its own sake without doing much of interest with it. Sanderson is not a talented enough writer to really tell us anything about his characters but his fantasy worlds are ultimately derivative enough that they don’t have much to say about our world. They become floating escapist signifiers that exist principally to entrap an audience in a labyrinth of rules and sour them on anything that doesn’t adhere to these arbitrary laws.

This is, however, not a critique of world-building qua world-building. It’s a critique of Sanderson’s prioritization of business over art.

As Harrison rightly points out, world-building is inherently political. But Marshall is right to problematize this by demonstrating how any given politic within fiction can be subverted by a cunning enough writer. As such we would, perhaps, be wise not to condemn world-building entirely but rather to guide artists to consider what their worlds are for. When you decide what is consistent and what is inconsistent, when you decide what to show and what to hide, whether to write about trees or whales or the layout of fantastical cities, ask yourself why. Ask yourself not whether the world will convince an audience of its truth but rather what it can do with its falsehood. What games are you playing with the audience and to what end?

Review: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu – Making battle kites cool

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The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is many things: a retelling of the fall of the Qin dynasty and the Chu-Han Contention which followed (an incredibly exciting historical period often overshadowed by the Three Kingdoms period which, together with the Chu-Han Contention bookended the Han dynasty); a thoughtful exploration of morality and governance; and a ripping good secondary world fantasy with strange innovations (battle kites) and interesting characters.

I’m excited to see that this is book one of a planned series and am VERY curious as to whether Liu will follow the story of Kuni Garu or whether he’ll jump forward to some of the other notable periods of excitement that peppered this time period.

This story focuses mostly on the lives of two men born after the rise of the first imperial dynasty of the former Tiro states – a confederation of island nations centered around one very large island which share a common culture and history.

An emperor, Mapidéré overthrew the squabbling kingdoms and established a dynasty largely out of a sense of grievance at how his nation was treated compared to the others. He quickly begins pushing forward grand engineering schemes, standardizes the alphabet, weights and measures and then begins questing for immortality, ignoring how his empire is crumbling around him.

While on tour he falls ill and dies and his ministers conspire to have his heir killed and replaced with his younger son, a child who is easily distracted by the power hungry prime minister and the scheming chatelaine. Rebellions arise quickly, and two people: the capricious but sincere Kuni Garu and the noble absolutist Mata Zyndu come to the fore-front of the rebellion. As they fight against imperial authority they begin to see each other as brothers. But Zyndu is uncomfortable with Garu’s often dishonorable tactics, while Garu is disturbed by Zyndu’s brutality.

As the old empire crumbles, so to does their friendship.

Before I get any farther a warning, things will get a bit obliquely spoilery. So, if you know about the history of early Imperial China, or if you read the wikipedia links I posted at the top please consider yourself warned.

The Grace of Kings as historical fiction

It’s very easy to identify the historical counterparts to many of the key players in the novel very early on. Kuni Garu is identifiable as Liu Bang the moment he joins the rebellion, as one of the most enduring establishing myths of the Han is played out on the page. With Garu marked as a stand in for the Han founder, it becomes clear that Mata Zyndu is playing the role of Xiang Yu.

This lends a certain air of inevitability to the story. If Ken Liu had decided to unambiguously set the story in China as opposed to the Tiro States, if he’d removed the Crubens and the airships from the story (and all of these things are delightful, but the story could exist without them) this book would be a straight-up historical fiction, and an exceptional one. Garu as Liu Bang does an exemplary job bringing life to an incredibly complex figure: a commoner who became emperor, a man who reformed many of the excesses of his predecessors but who betrayed his friends, a king who is celebrated historically despite an acknowledged streak of low cunning that would have, in another time, made him not much more than a bandit. Likewise the tragedy of Xiang Yu, who was peerless in battle, but who always made the wrong decision off the field, is rendered beautifully through Zyndu.

Most of the key historical moments of the Chu-Han Contention are explored and dramatized throughout the story, while the blank spaces of historic lives: the loves, fears, hopes and frustrations are filled in with deft skill.

This makes it even more interesting that Liu chose to make a fantasy story instead of writing a history.

The Grace of Kings as morality tale

The issue of ethics is what divides Zyndu and Garu throughout the story. They have vastly divergent opinions on the right way to govern a state, the right way to act in  a war, the right way to deal with enemies, the right way to reward followers, they even differ on what constitutes loyalty, and under what circumstances loyalty is owed.

Zyndu is generally brutal to prisoners, but late in the book, when a general with substantial personal valor opposes him, he treats the general and his followers with a surprising level of respect, because they faced him in a straightforward test of arms. Even though the general fell to him, he still respected him.

On the other hand, Zyndu cannot seem to forgive Garu for having succeeded in taking the imperial city without substantial loss of life or harm to civilians because he did so through trickery.

Kuni Garu spends the entire book worrying about whether or not he is being a good person as well as a good ruler. It’s made very clear that he wants to protect the populace. Garu is horrified by the human cost both of bad rulership and of war. It’s likewise very clear that he’s an ambitious man who wants to forward his own rise from street rat to emperor. In order to achieve his objective he’s willing to betray friends, use spies, lie, kill, and put his own family’s life on the line repeatedly.

Eventually the book decides that the ethics of a ruler must be, due to the very nature of ruling a state, different from the ethics of a single person. The book is ambivalent about whether Kuni Garu is really a good man. It is more clear that he is a good ruler; and suggests that in the span of history that is what will be remembered.

I suspect one of the reasons Liu chose to make this story into a fantasy was so that he could have the freedom to explore these issues without being entirely bound both to historical record and to the extensive body of commentary on the rule of the Han founder that has arisen over the last two thousand years.

The Grace of Kings as fantasy

But there’s another thing that sets The Grace of Kings apart from historical fiction. I’ve previously argued that Sanguo Yanyi was a fantasy novel, or at least the precursor to one, because of the introduction of supernatural elements such as the omens that foretell the death of Dian Wei and the deification of Guan Yu.

And this is another arena that Liu is having a lot of fun with. The pantheon of gods that preside over the Tiro states are a living, breathing and vibrant part of the world. They are constantly meddling with the lives of the mortals, and the book explores an important question: if there’s a god on every side of a conflict, do they cancel out?

Much like Kuni Garu’s goodness the answer is ambivalent. What is made clear is that humans will always be free to interpret design manifestations to benefit themselves, and that ultimately people are the guides of their own fates, even if they can be tempted or pushed by gods. Luan Zya’s divine book won’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know, and Mata Zyndu’s decision to sacrifice soldiers en-masse to one capricious god is something he must own, along with the consequences of that act.

The pantheon of gods that occupy this story are not the deities of Chinese myth. They aren’t the Buddhist kings of hell, nor do they bear much resemblance to the vast panoply of gods that occupy the Taoist cosmology. But they are also some of Liu’s best inventions. I enjoyed the battle kites, airships and mechanical crubens, but the story could have progressed just the same without them.

But without the gods of the Tiro states it would be a very different story, and the ideas they inject play beautifully off the exploration of ethics that occupies The Grace of Kings as a morality tale. By taking the bare events of the Chu-Han Contention and then weaving a story around them in a secondary fantasy world, Liu has managed to make a historical fiction into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Even though the fate of Mata Zyndu will be evident to an informed reader very early on, the question of how he gets there, within himself is open to question. As the story explores both the question of whether this noble, honorable, brutal, vulnerable man is good or not, and as it explores whether he is the captain of his fate or a victim of divine intervention it manages to make that doom into more than a clever retelling of history.

Final Thought

I rarely review a book if I don’t think it’s worth reading, and this is no exception. Though somewhat weighty at around 620 pages, this is definitely one worth reading.

Ken Liu has a deft command of language, history and the humanity that underpins all of his characters. I admit, I’m biased, secondary fantasy stories derived from Chinese sources are literally my favorite things to read, and they’re damn rare. But beyond my personal preferences, this is just a good book.

Furthermore, it’s a book that shows the value of fantasy. Because this didn’t have to be a fantasy, it’s so grounded in a deep appreciation of history that it could have easily been a historical fiction instead. But it is improved for being one.

Abercrombie, Martin and Magic-Light Fantasy

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I’m going to put this up here now, I might include spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire in this post. Stop reading now if that bothers you. There will be spoilers in the very next paragraph.

The last book came out two years ago and so I’m not going to care if you are still watching season three and don’t want to know, for instance, that Jon Snow was stabbed in the back by his brothers and might be dead. After all, come on, if you haven’t read A Song of Ice and Fire yet why are you reading the blog of some minor fantasy author?

There might be spoilers for other books, also published more than a year ago, but you probably won’t care, because there’s no HBO tv show about them yet.

I’m going to also say, straight up, that there should be more TV shows based on magic-light fantasy series. After all, they do them in China all the freaking time and although sometimes terrible there’s also some really entertaining television that comes out of the genre.

The blog Wuxia Edge is a great resource for those television series and you should totally read them.

What is Wuxia

I’m going to be jumping back and forth a bit between authors like George RR Martin and Joe Abercrombie on one side and authors like Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng on the other. That’s because there is a large precedent for fantasy with a lot of the characteristics that Martin really pioneered in English in the 1990s going back to the early 1900s in China. This is a genre I’m particularly fond of and it is just as influential to my writing as the other newer fantasy authors I’ll be mentioning.

In fact, the Black Trillium is effectively a wuxia story so, yeah, influence.

But outside of a small fandom the word hasn’t spread into North American consciousness beyond the possibility of a suspicion that it involves kung fu in some way. (BTW: don’t get me started that they changed the name of the film linked above to “Dragon” for the NA release. So damn lazy.

In shortest form, Wuxia is a modern genre of Chinese historical fantasy. Specifically it is a genre which grew out of the tradition of stories of youxia, knights-errant, who collectively formed an underworld of bandits and heroes whose conflicts frequently reflected the political struggles of dynastic China.

Wuxia is fantastical within very limited constraints. There is a template of abilities that youxia could access that could easily be seen as supernatural. These included:

  1. Qinggong – “Lightness Skill” was a subset of abilities that allowed the characters in wuxia to make incredible leaps, to move with exceptional speed and to fly.
  2. Neigong – “Internal energy” was a process through which characters could heal themselves or others through the manipulation of energy. They could also enhance their own strength, resilience and the potency of their other abilities by practicing neigong techniques.
  3. Extreme martial skill – This included strength and finesse that crosses the line into supernatural levels, the use of patently bizarre fighting techniques and the ability to wield cumbersome, unlikely or improvised weapons.
  4. Magical weapons – These generally had three characteristics: increased resistance to damage, unnatural sharpness and the ability to enhance the strength of the wielder. They are often coveted.

And that was it. With a few notable exceptions there weren’t other magical elements to the stories, nor were these elements presented as being unnatural. The characters were exceptional but any individual could achieve at least  some measure of their ability through diligence, hard work and sufficient luck.

These magical elements and the societal fantasy elements of the underworld of heroes and villains is what separates Wuxia from straight-up historical fiction. It’s not much. The world of Wuxia is nearly our own. However creating a fantastical element gave Wuxia authors the license to interrogate their own history, their myths and their ideals in a way that would strain the bounds of suspension of disbelief in a less fantastical historical thriller.

By introducing a fantasy element, the authors of Wuxia stories gave themselves freedom to push their social and moral implications of their stories into uncomfortable territory.

This included:

  • Frequently questioning the parental analogy for teachers and leaders which was a hallmark of Confucianism.
  • Questioning the virtue of political and religious leaders.
  • Questioning the nature of patriotism vis a vis the state.
  • Challenging the divide between law and justice.

This is not an exhaustive list.

And this brings us to the magic-light fantasy novels of the post-GRRM English scene.

Before Game of Thrones

Prior to Game of Thrones the majority of commercially available fantasy was a tired retread of Lord of the Rings. (Ok, I’m going to stop right there and make sure to point at the words commercially available I know just as well as you that there were plenty of people like Barry Hughart, Christopher Priest and Ursula K. Le Guin writing innovative and unusual fantasy that was nothing at all like Tolkien between the end of the 1960s and the mid 1990s – but  most of them weren’t widely read and certainly weren’t widely read outside of fandom; that was still the domain of Eddings, Brooks, Anthony, etc.).

There was also a moderately broad view, stoked in part by Tolkien’s loud protestations against allegory in fantasy that fantasy fiction should be escapist adventure fiction rather than trying to comment on deeper matters.

And the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire changed that with the swing of a headsman’s blade. It was evident this wasn’t escapism. What’s more, it really seemed that Martin was trying to tell us something.

This idea – that fantasy didn’t have to equal simple escapism – took off and now we have a much richer genre as the deeper fantasy reaches broader audiences.

Enter Joe Abercrombie.

Questioning the Nature of Heroism

The Heroes is Abercrombie’s second most recent book and it blew my mind. The six-hundred page tradeback abandons any hint of magic (the “wizard” in the book uses politics, threats and three cannons), it abandons an epic scale, confining action to a single valley and it uses a medieval battle as an opportunity to interrogate the idea of heroism.

In the story it presents us with:

  • A boy headed to war for the first time with dreams of being a hero
  • An ancient corporal who survived many previous engagements and who has a terrible reputation
  • An old war leader, weary of the fighting and aching from age and misuse
  • A young princeling with a reputation for loose talk and cowardice
  • A disgraced sword master who wants to die
  • The politically ambitious daughter of the commander of the army
  • A collection of vain and useless generals and lords

And the story invites us to look at the unvarnished actions of these various protagonists as they fight and die over the course of three days and ask whether any of them are heroic.

Is the death-obsessed master a hero for being undefeated in the field of battle when, inside, he’s a bitter and miserable shell of a man?

Is the boy who hides in a closet and kills another boy on his own side one day a hero for saving the man standing next to him on the next?

Is the woman who recovers sixty prisoners and carries a plea for peace a hero when her own friend is dragged off by a brute to a life of slavery and abuse and she does nothing to stop it?

And beyond inviting us to ask what constitutes a hero the story is willing to ask whether heroism is something to aspire to in the first place. Why, in fact, would anybody want to be a hero?

Don’t get in your own way

Magic is fun. I wouldn’t be a fantasy author if I didn’t like putting some in my stories. But here’s where I’m going to make the pitch for toned-back magic. For reasons that should be obvious, Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing have been circulating a lot this week. The best takeaway from them is, in my view, that a writer should not “distract the reader from the story.”

Fantasy frees us to talk about big concepts. It gives license to our audience to suspend disbelief about the little things enough for us to test concepts that might not fit otherwise. It does this, in part, by requiring us to suspend our disbelief about big things like how physics works.

That’s a pretty big risk. Good fantasy is always a gamble.

Fantasy and the fine art of rules – Part 2

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Worldbuilding Rules Yesterday I discussed the necessity of bounding a fantasy world with rules of some description. I said that the rules should reflect the theme of the story in some way and should build internal consistency.

I also hinted that, while it was necessary for the author to understand the rules governing a fantasy world it was not necessary for the audience or the characters to. That’s what I’d like to elaborate on today.

The Ignorant Character

Characters come in all stripes. There could be characters who are deeply enmeshed in the cosmology and metaphysics of their respective universes. These characters might understand the minutiae of how their worlds are governed. Gandalf is one of the most active and aware members of the Wise of Middle Earth. There are few characters who understand the rules underlying Middle Earth better than he does – maybe Galadriel – maybe…

Other characters might start clueless, but learn over the course of the story. Lyra may arrive at a deep understanding of the universe with Will by the end of the series, but when we first meet her at the start of His Dark Materials she doesn’t have the first clue even how daemons work – let alone any of the deeper secrets beyond that.

Some characters might even bumble through their universe entirely ignorant to how it works, never becoming the least bit enlightened.

But whether it is the high fantasy of Lord of the Rings, the cosmological metaphor of His Dark Materials or the absurdist sci-fi setting of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all of these books have settings bound by rules – even if those rules are that in an infinite universe the most improbable thing can, and probably will, eventually happen.

Careful with that exposition!

Just because you’ve calculated the universal constants of your fantasy world into a complex set of equations does not mean your audience needs to see it. Exposition is one of the greatest stumbling blocks of genre fiction.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the great masters of early science fiction were just notorious for unnecessary exposition. (Don’t get me wrong, I love the Foundation series, but it was rife with clumsy exposition including frequent occasions where Hari Seldon or his ghost would pop up and explain the story in detail.)

Fortunately, genre authors have gotten much better about this sort of thing.

I can’t rave enough about the Quantum Thief and its sequel, the Fractal Prince. Post-human heist capers with a culture and technology both fully realized and almost entirely alien, these books have sometimes faced some flak for their lack of exposition. I know a few science fiction readers who were frustrated by the book for that reason.

I read it through the lens of a fantasy reader, and thought it one of the best works of science fiction of the last decade. This is because Rajaniemi didn’t bother telling me what gas the spaceship ran on (well actually, he kind of did, but he did it in an off-hand and organic way). What he did do was tell why these things mattered.

Fantasy and the Fine Art of Rules

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Worldbuilding RulesA lot of fantasy writers aren’t fully comfortable with rules. In fact arguments against the rule of rules are pretty common on a lot of writing sites, especially those populated by new writers.

And I understand. Fantasy is the genre that embraces magic. And a lot of people magic as being the infinity of possibility made manifest. Magic can do anything – that’s the whole point.

So if we are writing in worlds defined by their lack of limitation anything should be possible… right? Right??

Well, not exactly. Because there’s this little thing necessary for suspension of disbelief – it’s called internal consistency. And that is a harsh and unforgiving taskmaster.

We can contrast a (narratively) successful fantasy story from one that is less so largely by looking at which stories keep better track of their own worlds.

In our successful example the rules of the world are clearly well-understood by the author. This doesn’t mean that she isn’t able to startle or delight with the flights of fancy she conjures with her magical take on England and Europe in the time of Napoleon. It’s just that it all seems to fit. Everything from the mytho-history surrounding magic to the culture of magic users ties together seamlessly into a perfectly realized world.

In our less successful example the world is constructed hodge-podge. Elements are (to be gentle) borrowed from diverse sources without any specific concern for how they actually fit into the overall continuity of the world. Most of the time things get shuffled in for reasons no more thought out than that the author thought it seemed neat. Furthermore the actual capabilities of any given component of the story (such as the protagonist’s “Talent”) expand or contract in scope depending on the needs of the narrative. The Nightside books are readable – but there’s no denying that they are a veritable lace of plot holes and nonsense.

As a result it’s much more easy to feel like Clarke’s world is a real world.

Rules define this internal consistency. They can be high order things like “nothing is ever free” or specific like “you must use blood sacrifice to power dark magic which is defined as X” – they should point toward the themes of your story either way.

But just because a fantasy story should be constrained by rules doesn’t mean that your audience, or even your characters need to know about them. I’ll get into rules and exposition tomorrow.

Five Fantasy novels you should have already read (but probably haven’t)

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There’s a lot of good fantasy novels out there. It doesn’t help that fantasy authors are frequently among the most prolific writers in genre, churning out a book a year or more for decades.

When you find a fantasy author you like it’s all too easy just to stick with them. These books are ones you might not have heard of. But each of them is a brilliant work – what’s more, they represent some of the more unusual and challenging stories in fantasy.

1.  The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet

Ever meet a book that can break your heart? This is one of them. My immediate response to the story is that it reminded me, in the telling, of Le Guin. There was a similar ephemeral quality to the prose.

However this story of prophecy, murder and betrayal is much darker than Le Guin’s books. In Nola, Sweet has created a beautifully realized protagonist, one whose vibrancy radiates throughout the story. And because Nola shines so brightly you feel the pain of her tragedies ever more sharply.

This book is not an easy book. It is however achingly beautiful and if you haven’t read it you should now.

2. Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart

Fair warning: this one is a little difficult to track down.

It’s not available as an e-book nor was it available in print in any bookstores I could find. Ultimately I had to order the book online and then waited two agonizing weeks while Canada Post promptly lost it.

But it was worth the wait. Barry Hughart deftly accomplishes something which all too few fantasy authors attempt. He creates a fantasy story set in a world that is not based on mediaeval Europe and succeeds.

Basing his world loosely on Tang dynasty China, Hughart manages to weave together Chinese folk stories and a strong historical understanding of the first Chinese imperial renaissance without allowing the details to overwhelm his work.

I loved Under Heaven and River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay and I don’t want this to sound like an indictment of either of these books, but Hughart employs a defter touch with his use of myth and history. He’s comfortable and confident enough with the historical material he uses to throw caution blithely to the wind.

This willingness to take risks allows him to create a romping adventure in which a dissolute and possibly immortal scholar (he claims not to be but he’s far older than any reasonable person ever could be) and an innocent peasant take on the roles of Holmes and Watson, solving an ancient mystery while engaging in daring do such as a steampunk helicopter escape from a giant invisible spider.

With inveterate scholasticism and bizarre flights of fantasy it’s unsurprising that Bridge of Birds won several awards when it was originally published. And yet, the publishers had trouble marketing the book and Hughart eventually withdrew from writing after only three novels.

3. Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell

I’ve got a soft spot for a coming of age story and this one is a doozy.

A bitter-sweet story about class and privilege, fear of the other, sex and death, Wild Girls is not an ordinary YA novel. I was lucky enough to have a chance to hear Atwell reading from Wild Girls. I say lucky because I might not have ever picked the book up if I hadn’t.

But I’m glad I did. This is the way urban fantasy is best done – with a light touch to the spectacle and a heavy dollop of characterization. Wild Girls is a true pleasure to read. If you haven’t read it yet I strongly suggest you read it right now.

4. Three Kingdoms / The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

Ok, this one is stretching the definition of fantasy a bit in that it’s a historical novel written in Ming Dynasty China. It is, in fact, one of the earliest true novels ever written anywhere and more people should read it for that reason alone. Happily a very good translation was published by Beijing Foreign Language Press. It may be difficult to find but I would suggest perseverance.

Why do I call Three Kingdoms a fantasy novel? The truth is that it entirely pre-dates such a thing as genre distinctions. That being said, the fusion of myth and history, the inclusion of the deification of Guan Yu and the lasting influence that this book had on the fantasy stories of Asia all point towards a novel which is closer to fantasy than any other modern genre. The novel can ultimately be summed up by the author’s thesis:

“The Empire, long divided, must unite: long united, must divide.”

It chooses as its protagonists not the ultimately victorious Cao Cao (who makes for one of the most exceptional villains in the history of literature) but rather the oath garden brothers Liu Bei, Zhang Fei and Guan Yu. By choosing to frame history through the lens of the most legendary figures (and also the least successful figures), the Three Kingdoms became a bit of a subversive story.

That element of subversion has led to it becoming one of the most frequently cited stories within Asia, spawning countless movies, video games, television shows and literary works.

5. Above by Leah Bobet

Returning to the present day, Above is another Young Adult entry on this list. This unapologetically Torontonian story (you can even see the CN Tower front-and center on the cover) plays out similarly to some of the works of Neil Gaiman as it tracks the slightly magical outcasts who live in the catacombs beneath the city.

Above brings sensitivity, strength and a strong political consciousness / conscience to the genre. Bobet understands how to infuse a Young Adult novel with her passion and her ethics without ever becoming bombastic or heavy-handed.

Furthermore her protagonists, a boy with the features of a lion and an artist’s soul, a wounded girl who is also a bee, a man whose touch is electric and several more are well realized, beautiful, flawed, monstrous and heroic. If you don’t already own a copy of this book you should buy it right now.