writing

The World of Magic and Monsters

While working on a draft for a story set in the Ancient Lands for while now, I’ve still been struggling to come up with plots that really embody the themes I have in mind for the world and evoke the style of other works that greatly inspired me. In situations like these I always find it very helpful to get back to the very basics and make a list of the works I want to emulate, and then try to find what elements they all share in common. And it did help quite a lot this time as well. Looking at Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Metal Gear Solid, and various wuxia stories, I noticed that they all share the trait of having a kind of separate and hidden community of heroes and villains who share knowledge of things mostly unknown to the rest of the world.

It’s made the most explicit in the wuxia genre in the form of the Wulin, the “community of kung-fu”. In most wuxia tales all the masters of kung-fu know each other, either personally or by reputation, and tales of their deeds spread quickly among all practitioners of the secret arts. Regular people know of this hidden world, but they know very little of what’s going on inside it, the alliances and rivalries inside it, the exact nature of the supernatural arts, and the special traditions and customs these people observe. Something very similar is found in Star Wars with the world of the Force that includes the Jedi and the Sith, but also the Witches of Dathomir, the Sorcerers of Thund, and many other minor groups. In Metal Gear Solid you have this crazy world of super-powered super-spies, which really is very similar to the whole superhero genre. While not made explict but still present, there is a similar exclusive community in the Indiana Jones movies which includes Indy, Marion, Beloq, Mola Raam, and all those Nazi leaders. In the Witcher stories there seem to be something similar going on with most sorcerers, witchers, and alchemists being in complex web of relationships that covers all the Northern Kingdoms. Another great example are the roleplaying games of the World of Darkness, where it is spelled out explicitly right in the name. It’s a whole different world that geographically overlaps with everyday life and occasionally interacts with it, but for the most part remains hidden from normal people. Which is just as everyone involves prefers it.

When working on outlines for Ancient Lands stories, I most often end up with a generic monster or haunted ruin piece that frankly even bore me. How is it going to entertain anyone else when even I don’t feel really excited about it? I occasionally considered approaching new ideas for stories as Star Wars fan fiction and then just moving them over into the Ancient Lands. But I think many of my very early ideas for the world already provide a solid foundation that can easily be expanded into such a community of the supernatural which would make that step unnecessary. A special World of Magic and Monsters. The Druids were conceived that way from the very beginning. Not an actual organization with hierarchies and headquarters, but an informal association of shamans and witches who keep each other informed about what they hear about sorcerers and demons. Going a level higher there already exists an implicit community of witches, priests, monster hunters, and treasure seekers. While their goals are different, the knowledge they come across and have use for is often the same. And it makes perfect sense that those who explore ruins of the Ancients have close connections to shamans or monster slayers.

I would not go so far and make it as explicit as the Wulin in wuxia, or as clearly separated from normal society as the World of Darkness, with strict laws and traditions. That would seem inappropriate given the wild and disorganized nature of the world as a whole. But I like the idea of part of the world running by special rules and relationships that you really can only learn about if you are initiated into this community. You may know that a neighbor used to be a monster hunter and now he’s just another old man tending a small garden, but when he gets visited by mysterious strangers nobody really knows what kind of things they might be talking about all night behind his door. I also really like the idea of everyone knowing everyone and no antagonist being a random stranger. It always makes the world feel much more alive and connected and also supports the idea of a world where everything is decentralized and governed by personal connections.

Fantasy needs monsters

When I got back into fantasy books a year or so ago, I noticed that there seems to be a quite pronounced scarcity of monsters and nonhuman humanoids in the vast majority of works. When you talk with people about Sword & Sorcery, many have a very firm stance that it has to be human-only and that you can’t maintain the structure, dynamics, and themes of the genre if you include elves, trolls, or dragonmen. Today I came across a short article on another site which I’ve read and very much liked a while back, by a person whose opinions and understanding of the workings of fantasy I usually very much agree with and respect. The main thought was that monsters should be very rare and be limited to the truly unnatural, with a very distinct separation from normal wildlife. And I very much agreed with it, since it helps to ensure that the encounter with an actual monster will be something special and that the audience feels like there’s really an extraordinary danger.

I now very much think that I was wrong about it. Much of contemporary fantasy could be accused of being mostly a fictionalized version of the middle ages with the occasional sprinkle of magic here and there, but very little fantastic elements as far as the plot is considered. But even that would not be correct as many of these worlds are really more like 20th century societies in fictional lands that use technology that superficially looks medieval. I mentioned the relationship of humans, nature, and the divine in my review of the academic book Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy Literature, but I am going to lay it out again in this article that is directly at fantasy writers. The idea that nature is something that surrounds human cities and is separate from the human world, and that the divine aspect of the universe is located in a completely different place or dimension is very specific to modern western thought. It has been argued that the foundation for this is already found in the myth of the Garden of Eden, when humans were instructed by God to rule over all animals and plants, but it really developed to its current form through the ideas of Enlightenment and Humanism. (Which since the late 19th century got exported throughout the whole world together with the western education system and the modern principles and procedures of science that were based on that conception of the world, so it’s not strictly a European and North American thing anymore.) But in the kinds of societies after which almost all fantasy lands and cultures are modeled this whole concept fairly alien. Even in medieval Christianity, where the distinction between humans and animals was pretty clear, God was generally assumed to work directly in the everyday world, either actively or through agents. And the believe that there were other human-like people living in distant parts of the world was very widely spread. The land of the dog-headed men was a frequent topic among explorers and even the church had serious debates about what to do with them once their land is found. A quite common opinion was that they should be baptised and integrated into the church, just like all other humans. Assuming they are not already Christians.

Fantasy is obviously something you can’t do wrong. Pretty much every world imaginable can be well suited to be the setting for a certain kind of story. But lots of writers, and especially fans, make a pretty big deal of these worlds accurately portraying the technology of various historic periods and places. And often having fictional creatures around is perceived as being too fanciful and unrealistic. But at the same time there is generally no effort made at all to even somewhat approximate the way these people saw the world. We’ve had an interesting discussion at Fantasy Faction a while back about the possibility of “mythic fantasy”, and another one just last month about fantasy books in which religion and religious believes play an important part. (In both cases the search for existing works came up almost blank.) When you look at epics from antiquity and the proto-historic periods before it, it is very easy to see how very mucg similar they are to modern fantasy books, which have of course been very much inspired by them. But in those epics, the borders between human, nature, monster, and gods is often so thin and blurred that it’s not really there at all.

The book I mentioned above examines a small number of 20th century fantasy writers who went against that and deliberately set out to tie human concerns together with nature and the affairs of the gods. The gods don’t make any appearance in The Lord of the Rings, but it’s always clear that there are higher powers at work and that Sauron, Gandalf, and the elves are all major players in a conflict that is much greater than the kingdoms of man. In The Hobbit, Beorn is both a man and a bear, but different from either. You have eagles who are taking direct action in the struggle between mortals and immortals, and trees who walk and talk like humans. And of course all the talking spiders. Pretty much everything that Tolkien did was mindlessly copied countless times without understanding why he did it and what their purpose was. But this dissolving of the boundaries between humans, nature, and the divine was almost universally ignored, perhaps because it was too subtle to even notice without understanding it. There’s not really a lot of different creatures in Middle-Earth when you compare it to most roleplaying games and videogames, but all of them do not exist to create contrast between the natural and the unnatural, but to make such a distinction disappear. In European myths about fey beings, they always are as much part of nature as they are divine, and most of the time they also look very similar to humans. Even the classic fairytale witch is not just a regular old woman who knows a bit of magic, but also a monster. (Maybe I write an article about how the witch is the female counterpart of the ogre one day.) In any attempt to create “mythic fantasy”, the path into the world of spirits and magic should not lead through the wardrobe or the rabbit hole, but instead it needs to be identical with our own. In many mythologies, the Underworld is not another dimension, but an actual cave system that can be entered through any deep enough cave. To have fantasy that is in any way inspired by myth and tries to capture its essence, I think monsters are not just permissible, but mandatory. Without them and the dissolution of boundaries they present, any work can not go beyond the scope of pseudo-history.

Book Review: Nature and the Numinous in Mythpoeic Literature

Today I am reviewing a very different kind of book. It’s neither a novel nor a writing guide, but actually a scientific book written by Chris Brawley and released last year by McFarland as volume 46 of their series Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy is not popular science, but the real deal. Proper academic literature written by and for scientists. I had not heard of Chris Brawley before and didn’t find any info on him in a quick online search, but this book touches in scociology, anthropology, religious studies, and literary criticism. I’ve studied cultural studies, religion, and intercultural communication for several years and this is just the type of book we’ve been using all the time. You probably won’t find it in regular libraries, but university libraries might either have it or could get it from another university that does. If it’s a topic that really interests you, it’s also not too expensive to just buy it yourself. (The book includes a list of all the other books that have been released in the series. “Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films”, “Ursula Le Guin’s Journey to Post-Feminism”, and “J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Howard and the Birth of Modern Fantasy” are all titles I want to hunt down.)

It’s a very interesting book. If you can read it. This is at times pretty heavy stuff. Being an American academic book, the way it is written and the content explained is relatively easy to follow. It’s nothing like German academic books where it often seems like the authors are trying to write in code to prevent the contents falling into the hands of the uninitiated and being released to the general public. (It’s easier for many German students to read American academic books in English than German academic books in German.) But knowing its audience, it does rely on a good amount of preexisting familiarity with the field and jumps straight into the deep end. Someone who is not familiar with many of the technical terms might possibly miss more than half of the information presented in it. But first semester students manage. If you really want to know what this book has to say on its subject, I very much recommend giving it a shot. Even if you don’t understand half of it, the other half might still be quite eye opening.

The main topic of the book is the numinous in the stories of Tolkien, Lewis, and Le Guin. The numinous is a concept that probably very few people outside of this segment of academics have heard of, but it’s not really that difficult to understand. It was introduced about a hundred years ago by Rudolf Otto to help with discussing religious experiences. The central idea is that people occasionally have moments in which they become aware that the world and life are more than just the things they normally pay conscious attention to, which results in a feeling of amazement, wonder, fascination, elation, and possibly fear. Otto argues that such experiences are universal to humans in all places and all times, but people explain these moments and emotions in a wide range of ways based on concepts from their culture and religion. Religious studies is a field that stays neutral and detached from any assumptions about the existance or the nature of the divine and limits itself to the way how cultures and communities deal with such questions, which is a segment of anthroplogy and sociology that can be scientifically studied like any other human behavior. As such, Otto did not attempt to define what could possibly be the source of these experiences, so instead of a noun he refers to it with an adjective that describes it’s most relevant quality. It is numinous. Whether people think of it as God, nirvana, eternity, or a fluke of the human brain, the people who experience such moments become aware of something that to them feels numinous. (From latin “numen”; a divine presence.)

While many writers of fantasy and their readers aproach their works as adventure stories with magic and strange creatures, some see their own works not only as entertaining diversions, but have the aim to create stories that are “eye opening” and get the reader to think about their everyday world in a different way. Not simply to change opinions, but to see more, think more, and feel more, and to experience the world and life as more than just rational facts. Brawly quotes Tolkien that “what fantasy does is to help lift that “veil of familiarity” and allows us to “clean our windows” so that we see the world clearly, and religiously.” Other authors that are examnined in this book are C.S. Lewis,Samuel Coleridge, George MacDonald, Algernon Blackwood, and Ursula Le Guin, which is a quite homogenous group as the author admits himself, with Le Guin specifically included to provide some contrast. But since the topic of the book is quite specific, concentrating on a quite narrow segment of fantasy fiction is not a serious disadvantage. His point probably comes across much clearer than if he would examine a very broad range of highly different writers and works.

I came across this book entirely by accident while looking for any possible pieces of writing advice regarding religious elements in fantasy, since I’ve long been feeling that most fantasy I’m seeing is somewhat stale or even sterile when it comes to being “magical” and “wonderous”. At some point this book title showed up among the search result and with my background in cultural and religious studies recognized it as being exactly about the kind of thing I was trying to get some insight on. Even though none of the authors examined in this book are of the kind I usually read. And though the book is not about writing advice at all, I found it extremely helpful for my own purpose. One of the big points made by the book is that both Christian thought and Western Enightenment are centered around the basic assumption that there is a clear distinction and separation between humans, the divine, and nature. If the divine does exist, humans are not part of it. Humans are also not part of nature. They look at nature from the outside and maipulate it for their own benefit or accidentally causing damage that will become a problem to them in the future. And this position is highly criticized by the examined writers and their stories often tend to tear down these distinctions and seprations. In their stories, humans are part of nature, and both humans and nature are part of the divine. And frequently play very important roles for the fate of the gods and the universe.

The Lord of the Rings is always a good example, not just because it’s so well and widely known. In the world of Middle-Earth you have the ents, who are both like humans and like trees. And there are the eagles, who are animals that can talk and also clearly have some strong connection to heaven. In The Hobbit, you also have a man who is both a human and a bear. And of course there’s also Gandalf who has a human body and lives among humans, but also is divine in nature. Or the elves who are both like people and also at home both in our world and in heaven. Tolkien blurs the lines of what is human, animal, plant, or deity. There are no borders between them, only gradients. And this unification of human, nature, and divine certainly fits the concept of the numinous. An increased awareness of the universe as a single whole. I always wanted to create stories with a strong presence of a Spiritworld and cultures that see their world in an animistic way. Reading this book helped me quite a lot in understanding how that might work in practice.

This books is certainly not for everyone. But if you have some interest in the subject and get an opportunity to flip through it, I very much recommend giving it a look.

Names for Fantasy genres that have some merit and those that don’t

I wrote about the problems of the names used for various types of fantasy fiction at some point last year. But a recent discussion at Fantasy Faction did get me to think some more about it. People categorize most fantasy stories by different genres, which generally is a reasonable thing to do. But in practice many of these genres are not only not defined in even a loose sense, they are also often used completely contradictory. Some of them do have some real merit and are useful in helping people to get a general idea of the style of a work and to find other works of a style that they like. But others are really useless at best or needlessly confusing at worst, and in my opinion should no longer be used by people.

The Good

Epic Fantasy: While there is a lot of disagreement what exactly defines a work as Epic Fantasy, there seems to be very little contention about which works are included in this genre. Most importantly is obviously The Lord of the Rings, which really is the gold standard. Epic Fantasies are stories that are about a transformation of the world or a all the lands inhabited by a culture. Ofte it is the reinstating of an old order that has been lost, but in any case it leads to the creation of a better future for everyone. (Which may or may not include the villains.)
Urban Fantasy: I’ve also never seen any real confusion here. It’s any work set in the contemporary world, or a fictional world closely modeled after it, with the addition of magic and magic creatures.
Sword & Sorcery: Sometimes misused, but it is known exactly who created the term and what he was intending by doing so. Michael Moorcock wrote in a magazine that someone should create a term for the kind of fantasy that he and others were writing to distinguish it from the type of The Lord of the Rings. Fritz Leiber thought that they should call it Sword & Sorcery. So the actual definition of the genre is “the writings of Moorcock and Leiber”, and he also elaborated that he considered Robert Howard to be the best writer of this genre there ever was. What the stories of these three authors have in common is that they deal with protagonists who stand outside of regular society and its rules and commitments and fight for personal goals and by their own moral rules by facing enemies and obstacles head on, generally having to deal with supernatural threats like sorcerers or demons.

The Bad

High Fantasy: This term is hugely popular and used all the time. Probably because it can be applied to pretty much everything and has no actual meaning at all. What does High mean? Much? Good? Much Fantasy and Good Fantasy are not genres. The only consent there seems to be about High Fantasy is that Urban Fantasy is not included in it. That’s really not enough to go by for a genre.
Heroic Fantasy: This really just occured to me today, but I think it’s actually just as bad as High Fantasy. What does the term tell us? That the protagonist is heroic and does heroic things. With the implication that there will be action. Well, which fantasy story doesn’t? If you count them as fantasy, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are probably not Heroic Fantasy. But that’s also really not enough to make it a genre. Both The Lord of thr Rings and Conan are often called Heroic Fantasy and they are clearly completely different beast caterint to entirely different tastes.
Dark Fantasy: Really the same problem here. It doesnt really tell us anything about what kind of story we can expect other than it won’t be flowers and rainbows. And again, which fantasy story isn’t. Thankfully this never really caught on and we should just forget about it.

The Ugly

Low Fantasy: High Fantasy is already bad. But this is much worse. It only tells us that it’s not High Fantasy, and with that one not actually defined it has no meaning at all. Some people use the term, but there is absolutely no agreement about what it’s supposedly describing. Sometimes Conan is Low Fantasy, sometimes Narnia is. It’s completely unusable.
Grimdark: Grimdark is a joke that got lots of people laughing for the wrong reason. The term comes from the tagline of the wargame Warhammer 40,000, “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”. The earliest versions of the game were an obvious satire of hypermasculine and hyperviolent fantasy and sci-fi and mocking the 14-year-old boys who loved and often came up with all that nonsense. Obvious to anyone but those 14-year-old boys. They didn’t get that they were made fun of and that other people enjoyed it for being stupid and ludicrous, like deliberately watching terrible movies or reading The Eye of Argon. I remember not too long ago when “grimdark” was used as a derogatory word to mock terrible gritty and violent fiction similar to that parodied by Warhammer 40k. But apparently some of the creators and fans did not realize that they were mocked and in recent years started using the term themselves. The term Grimdark now refers to both the parody of a genre as well as to the genre itself. How weird.

The inherent racism of Star Wars

I am as big a Star Wars fan as you can get before it gets insane and embarassing. But I am also highly critical of it and more than just willing to recognize its many flaws. And, oh dear, there’s so much of them. But one of the biggest ones is one I’ve almost never see discussed anywhere.

Star Wars, at it’s very essence, is fundamentally racist.

And this has nothing to do with Lando Calrissian or even Jar Jar Binks. People have complained about the Neimodians talking in a Japanese accent and being show as ruthless conquerors driven by greed, and I can understand that to some degree. And really, the makeover of Watto in Episode II is indeed the most racist shit I’ve ever seen outside of Nazi propaganda cartoons.

"All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." — “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

But no, I am not talking about that here. The problem I want to adress is at the same time less controversial but also much, much farther reaching. Many worlds in science fiction often get accused of being Planets of Hats, where the whole population really has only a single defining trait. Star Wars does that too. And very hard. And all the time. Even ignoring the accents of Neimodians and Gungans and any resemblance they may have to those found in some parts of the world, the entire worldbuilding of Star Wars is based on a way of percieving people and cultures that has a clear and unambigious term: Racism.

Racism, at its very core, is not specifically about discrimination or hatred or limited to any minorities. These are issues that result from racism. Racism itself is the idea that a group of people who share a common ancestry can easily be defined by a few traits that are shared among all of them. So if you have seen one person of that group, you know not only everything about that group, but also everything about every single member of that group. Racism is the idea that shared biological ancestry makes all people of that group the same in several fundamental traits.

And nowhere in fiction have I ever seen this principle applied so consistently and agressively. Though I think it neededs to be added, that this is primarily about the Expanded Universe, all the novels, comics, and videogames that build upon the movies. The movies themselves are relatively free of this since it is rare to ever see more than a single individual of any species other than humans. But in the EU it’s really bad. If you have one character of a species appearing in the movies, even in a really tiny role, that character is almost always turned into the universal archetype for the entire species in all subsequent works.

Take for example the Bith. The Bith really only appear for a few seconds and have no relevance to the plot. They are these guys.

The bar in which Luke and Obi-wan meet Han Solo and Chewbacca happens to have a band of Bith playing during the few minutes they stay at that place. Do we learn anything about these guys at all? No, nothing. Except that these are in a band that plays in a bar. As the EU is concerned, this is everything you need to know about the Bith. Because in the EU, the Bith are a species of performance artists and musicians. All of them. That’s what they are known for throughout the galaxy. When musicians get mentioned, very often they are Bith. It’s like the Bith have a monopoly on playing music for the whole galaxy.

Here we have a group of Jawas. In their natural environment. Shoting at droids to repair and sell them. Jawas have many appearnces throughout Star Wars, but in the movies themselves I believe they really only have one significant appearance. (Other than background dressing.) And they are always surrounded by metal scrap and working on salvaged machines. Most often traveling around in their huge brown, angular trucks. Because in the movies there was one group of Jawas who had such a big brown truck, wore brown robes, and apparently salvaged broken droids to make a living. One group of 10 or 20 individuals. And what they did on that one day instantly became the template for the entire culture and nature of the whole species. You have seen one Jawa, you have seen all Jawas.

And there are virtually no exceptions to this rule. Chewbacca can fix shapeships and droids and in his backstory he used to be an imperial slave. Pretty much all Wookies you’ll ever see are good with machines and the entire species has been enslaved by the Empire. And not just the empire. In the days of the Old Republic, 4,000 years before the Empire, they were being enslaved by the Czerca corporation. Once a slave, always a slave. The whole species.

All Sullustans are good pilots, all Bothans are spies or politicians, all Verpines and Sluisi are great mechanics, all Twi’lek women are strippers, all Trandoshans are bounty hunters, Rodian culture is all about hunting, all Gamoreans are mercenaries, all Hutts are criminal businessmen (…slugs), all Chiss are military geniuses, all Noghri are super stealthy assassins, all Ithorians are pacifistic, all Corellians are roguish pilots with a problem for authority, all humans from Tatooine are farmers. It goes on and on. (And, being Star Wars, on, and on, and on, and on…)

In the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, the basic concept of racism is an actual fact. If just see one member of a species for a few seconds, you know everything there is to know about the entire species and every single individual. I can understand how it happens on a single episode of Star Trek that visits a planet only once, which then is never appearing again. But when it happens over decades and is done by dozens of writers in completely different stories, I find it rather inexcuseable.

Honorable mention goes to my favorite Twi’lek Nawara Ven, who has the distinction of being not some sly gangster but a starfighter pilot/lawyer of unquestionable integrity. But then, being a lawyer does kind of put him into a similar niche as smugglers and spies. It’s just their nature, I guess…

Awesome future novel idea #2

We were just talking about possible action movie sequels we would like to watch, and someone brought up this piece of pure genius:

Djingis Khan vs. Predator

It sounds like Frankenstein vs. Space Vampires at first, but I think it’s actually a briliant idea. I thought the Predator series had already done everything that could be done with the concept by having 1vs1 in the Jungle, 1vs1 in L.A., and Team Death Match on a Jungle Planet all covered. But who is to say that the Predator from the first movie was the first that ever came to Earth for hunting? All these dudes care about is finding the biggest baddest motherfuckers in the universe and challenging them to a fight to the death. And the whole point of the series is that these fights are not about fancy weapons but about the challenge. When one of the Predators sees a guy with a sword in an open field in the third movie, he’s all up for it and doesn’t use any of his high tech gear. And there have been plenty of badass warriors throughout all of human history, which a Predator probably would enjoy very much to fight. Doesn’t have to be the Mongols and it could just as well be the Romans, the Celts, ancient Indians, or pretty much anybody else.

Since I don’t expect it to be made into an actual movie, I think it’s still a great idea that could be made into a novel, and a completely serious one. A classic fantasy monster hunt, but it turns out that the demon is actually an alien and it’s supernatural powers are actually the result of the strange artifacts it carries. I think it could work either as a pseudo-historical story or be set in an all out fantasy world. Mixing fantasy and science-fiction is no new idea, but that always had a 30s or 60s retro-style to it. This seems like a very interesting way to explore the idea in a more modern style.