Bits and Pieces

A lot is going on, both with my personal life (job hunting, nothing too serious) and with reading/reviewing/commentary. So this shall be a catch people up sort of deal more than anything really substantive.

First off, David Anthony Durham makes an outstanding post in response to an observation of mine in a comment to an earlier post of his regarding "color blindness." Click on the link above and see discussions here, here, and here. Oh, and here and here as well. Lots of heres, but before you go there to make it "here," more below. Needless to say, you can read my opinion all over the place inside Durham's blog entry and in the first two links after that.

Shortly (as within the next hour or the next 48 hours) I'll be posting an interview at OF that Rohini of The Pearls Are Cooling has been conducting via email with Karin Lowachee (Warchild, Burndive, Cagebird). I'll post a link to it here before the weekend begins, I hope.

Also, I've either bought or received ARCs for some interesting books. I hope to have reviews up in the next few weeks/month for the following:

Tim Pratt, Hart & Boot & Other Stories (Night Shade)

Margo Lanagan, Red Spikes (ARC I received today)

Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Well of Ascension (ARC I received last month)

Jay Lake, Trial of Flowers

Nathalie Mallet, Princes of the Golden Cage (ARC being sent by Night Shade)

Greg Rucka, Patriot Acts (Review Copy I received from Bantam this week)


Furthermore, I plan on posting una revista en español sobre Trescientos millones, por Roberto Arlt en mi otro blog, Vaguely Borgesian.

Doubtless there'll be more in the coming weeks, but this is what I have on tap through the end of this week and perhaps into next week, where I hope to get a co-written review of Brian Ruckley's Winterbirth up and perhaps start reading Karen Miller's Innocent Mage. Until next time, keep it...err, no....word to your mo...no, that's not it. Peace and bacon grease? Still cheesy.

Bye?

Yes. Bye.

A little bit of that old-time magic

With the release of the second novel of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, The Well of Ascension, just a few weeks away, I thought it was time that I finally made a few comments about it here on the blog. (I know what you're thinking. Who is this guy, and why is he posting here?) Anyway...

Over the course of the past decade, or so, epic fantasy has been facing the addition of a handful of new descriptors, at least those for those stories termed "cool" by the masses. Those adjectives: Gritty, Grim, Realistic, hard-hitting, etc. It seems that in many circles that the "grim and realistic" style equate to some sort of better fantasy style. I think this might have more to do with just who is writing that type of style (Martin, Bakker, Erikson... each to some and different extents), more than anything else. But, that is a digression that I think Larry and I might just tackle in our upcoming conversation about Brian Ruckley's Winterbirth (stay tuned for that). Then, of course, Scott Lynch's debut, The Lies of Locke Lamora, hits and everyone gushes over that fun and 'light' story. I'd like to argue that there is some appeal yet for that more traditional fantasy tone... the one of adventure and high story. Lynch wasn't writing anything terribly new afterall, but he did manage to capture the attentions of many a folk. (To some extent Gene Wolfe did the same with his Wizard Knight books, though in typical stylistic Wolfe fashion).

So, what does any of this have to do with Sanderson and Mistborn? Well, for one, I think that Sanderson is quite well skilled in writing a fantasy story in that more traditional style. The two Mistborn novels are far less gritty and realistic than many of the other contemporary novels. Book 1, The Final Empire, has much in common in the setup as Lynch's novel. We have a group of extremely talented criminals setting up to pull of a big and awfully risky job. The stakes keep getting higher. The leaders of these thieving crews are geniuses, but yet are enigmatic and somewhat haunted by their pasts. Both novels have that sense of high adventure, entertainment, that is sometimes more nebulous in some of the "realistic" offerings.

Here's another bit, for my money, I think that I preferred The Final Empire, a bit more than Lynch's novel. Why? Well, for one, I much preferred Sanderson's Kelsior to Lynch's Locke. Kelsior is the sort of character that just worked for me. He seemed more dynamic, more realized, and let's just say it, more bad ass. Secondly, I like the base premise that Sanderson was working from in his created world. Here is a world that was threatened by a great evil. The prophesied hero arouse. The great evil was thwarted. The great hero was seduced by his power, broke the world, enslaved the people, made himself a god, and set up a truly tyrannical empire. 1,000 years past, and everything is still pretty much terrible. The book reads and feels like a traditional high fantasy, but one that went terribly wrong a long time ago. Sanderson brilliantly plays with this concept, building in the readers mind a recognizable history for his world. Nearly any fantasy reader who reads this novel will be commenting to themselves... "I've read that story before, but how did this all happen?" So, the ideas themselves aren't completely original, but Sanderson is crafting this story in a different way.

Finally, I have to yet again comment on Sanderson's "magic" system. Allomancy. A very limited set of the population can augment their own physical or mental abilities by consuming and then burning specific metallic elements. For most of those, they can only augment a single attribute. For a very small group, they can burn all the allomantic metals, these are the Mistborn. Think Jedi powers meets David Farland's Runelords, but Sanderson's creation is unique and quite captivating. One of the true strengths of these novels is how Sanderson uses Allomancy to enhance the story, the delve his characters, to create both benefits and negatives.

The first novel in the series is very much a caper novel. It is fast paced, clever, and captivating. Sanderson's world building isn't heavy handed but actually quite well achieved. The action is often intense. There are a handful of truly interesting characters. There is humor. There is tragedy. There are lines of gray, and there is black and white. While I felt that the ending was a bit of a cop out, it was still a fitting and satisfying ending.

The second novel is not a caper novel. We have the remnants of the first novel having to figure just what to do, how to survive, after the events in the first book. Brandon Sanderson has, a few times now, claimed that he was most worried about how he could pull of this second installment of the series. It is, of course, the transition book. He needn't have worried so much... or maybe it's good that he did. He pulled it off. The Well of Ascension delves much more deeply into the nature of that old history. Sanderson is exploring not only his characters, their motivations, weaknesses, but he's also looking at the nature of knowledge and power in the context of a fantasy story. Oh, don't worry, it's well done. Also, there is a fair share of great action scenes, and a further expansion of allomancy. It's important to note that while this novel seems to be following a little more closely the fantasy tropes known by nearly all readers, Sanderson is still playing with our expectations and concepts. There is always something deeper going on here.

While I didn't enjoy The Well of Ascension quite as much as I did the first novel in the series, I still think it's a good book, and a very good second book in a trilogy. Mistborn is not a gritty, realistic style fantasy novel. It's got much more in common with that high adventure, but it is a dark and well realized world. Sanderson has created a world and story that has a unique feel to it, one that at least lets it stand apart a little. For me, those are good things. Gritty for gritty sake doesn't sit well with me. Good storytelling, realistic or 'romanticized', is what gets the job done for me.

Basically, for those of you eagerly awaiting the next Martin, Erikson, or Lynch's third novel... why haven't you read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn?

Question: Do you find that you have a style preference? Do you prefer the more realistic, gritty epic? Would you prefer the slightly more romanticized high fantasy style? Or, just give you a good story, you don't care either way?

Reflections upon lost identity and older SF

This week is International Blog Against Racism Week. It is rather fitting that I was made aware of this by reading Sarah Monette's LJ recently, as there is a related topic that has been on my mind for quite some time. There have been many posts about how insidious and pervasive racism today is, but not so much about some of its most devastating effects, such as the wiping out of one's cultural identity.

I am a fair-skinned, dark ash blond-haired, gray/blue-eyed male. By all accounts, I would be labeled as "white" and there I'd go, free to be able to be "color-blind" as much as I could ever hope to be. But in reality, I am not completely of European descent. Like many descendants of the first settlers west of the Appalachians, I have a substantial amount (at least 1/8, perhaps closer to 1/4) of "Indian blood." Just that very term alone, quite common until the past couple of decades, ought to indicate just how the native groups were viewed by the European-descent settlers. (For the record, my mother's side is mostly Cherokee and Chickasaw, while my Irish last name comes from my dad's side.)

Growing up about 30 miles west of Nashville, TN, I heard all about the First Thanksgiving when in school, how the local tribe fed those poor starving Pilgrim souls who were hell-bent on bringing Christianity to North America. With the exception of my Kindergarten teacher (who was part Native as well, I believe Apache or Hopi, I cannot remember which), never much was said about the native cultures from which I or many of my classmates were descended in part. We knew all about what it meant to be Irish, however - wearin' the Green on March 17th, perhaps saying "Erin go braugh," but nothing about "Civilized Tribe" of the Cherokee, except a very brief mention of Sequoyah and his Cherokee syllabary or perhaps some brief bit about the thousands who suffered on the Trail of Tears (including Sequoyah), with hardly a pause in the action before we rushed head-long into Manifest Destiny and the "conquest" of the West.

I feel a bit of an ache right now, not having grown up learning about one large part of my ancestry. Diminished, not really knowing even today what customs or traditions the Tennesse Cherokee and Chickasaw tribes had. While there have been some improvements in how these are covered in the history textbooks, there is still much room for improvement. Only a single introductory chapter for hundreds of native groups, with just a few bits and pieces of information about defeats at the hands of the European settlers and life on the reservation. Hardly a word still about what it means to belong to such a group.

I often wonder if this sense of absence was one of the motivating factors for me becoming a cultural history grad student over 10 years ago. Although my research primarily focused on 20th century German religious/cultural history, I had a secondary field that focused on the disappearance of oral cultures in the 15th and 16th centuries with the advent of the printing press. Whole ways of life that had lasted for hundreds of years, mostly gone within a handful of generations. Barely a memory, outside of various superstitions or clichéd expressions that are barely worth a thought, much less a momentary pause to consider.

Time is not a friend to cultures, I know. Even the most tradition-bound societies change over time. But when there's this almost casual disregard for other cultures, this ranking of them as "advanced" or "primitive" based on one group's standards for technology and living arrangements, part of me just wonders if maybe there's a sort of covert, insidious racism that belies our surface intentions of embracing others. The American "Melting Pot" ideal of the 19th and early 20th centuries is one such example - sure, send over your poor, huddled masses and we'll melt them down, take some yummy "ethnic" foods, and recast these sons and daughters of Italia, Russia, etc. into "Americans," devoid of any past association to their homeland except for some "foreign" last names and perhaps the odd church, mosque, or synagogue. Keep a few past associations, but for the most part, it was time to follow one model, that of the WASP "American."

Things are different today to an extent and I'm happy to see this. Although xenophobic attitudes are emerging more to the forefront today in the guise of the battle over "illegal immigration," (incidentally, Mexicans were not under a quota until the 1960s, perhaps due to the fear evoked by Julio César Chávez's unionization of the migrant Latino workers) more is being learned and shared about various cultural traditions.

Even SF has seen somewhat of a shift. Much of the Golden Age SF reads like WASP propaganda being regurgitated for another generation - go forth, explore, conquer, settle for the Good Ol' US of A/Human Race. Whoo-hoo! Just zap a few bug-like critters in spaceships and we're good to go! Those darn pesky aliens...living up to their etymology of being "other." If we have to mention them at any detail, well, let's look at them from our point of view, that of the explorer, the conquistador, perhaps.

There is much in that which will appeal to readers today. Not to me, however. While First Contact sorts of stories are interesting, I find myself wanting to know more about how things appear to be from the "other" side. How do "we" (speaking of those who seek to explore/conquer) look to those being threatened by this advancement? What is the risk of things being lost, of disappearing into a vortex of forgetfulness and perhaps oblivion? What fragile beauties are being overlooked just to slake the thirst of those descendants of those whose vision of culture/society won out over others'?

And what risks do we run in being so assured of ourselves and our "place" that we might just end up obliterating other cultures/groups of people without a scarce thought for them as such? If this is not one of the more callous and destructive aspects of racist thought, the presumption that one's culture is "by nature" more worthy of being preserved than another's, then what is racism?

I ask this, wondering still what all has been lost to me and those such as me...

Interview with Sarah Monette, Part II

Part I

One recurring motif that I noticed (especially in Mélusine) is that of the labyrinth. From seeing the social relations inside the city, to the recesses of Felix's mind, to a very real one later on, I kept getting this sense that labyrinths occupy some sort of significance to the overall story arc. Is there anything to this, or am I but guilty of reading too much into a text?

Well, my title for the series is The Doctrine of Labyrinths, so, yes. Labyrinths are a recurrent motif throughout the four books, significant for all kinds of reasons.

One of the more personal labyrinths that I noticed while reading the first two volumes is that of the emotional conflicts between Felix and Mildmay. There were many times while reading both novels that I wondered if there would some sort of a sexual relationship between the two, but then I also was left wondering if that might be too simplistic of a reading. Is it possibly just a subtle, society-wide sexualization of same-sex relationships that is altering how we view fictional interactions of characters of the same sex (I'm thinking Sam and Frodo here, among others)?

There are two different problems here. One is society's sexualization of same-sex friendship; the other is what Felix actually wants from Mildmay and vice versa.

Felix is sexually interested in Mildmay; that's not meant to be ambiguous. Mildmay is not sexually interested in Felix; that's not ambiguous, either. It does create a great deal of tension between them, and the question of how they resolve the problem is a very important one in the narrative of all four books.

The question of homoeroticism and the sexualization of non-sexual friendships is a very thorny one, and I don't have any good answers. There's a book by Eve Sedgwick, Between Men, which argues that the purpose of female characters in much Victorian fiction is to negotiate the homosocial and homoerotic tension between two men. What seems to be happening in more modern fiction (at least, this is one trend) is the excision of the mediating heterosexual female figure, whether because the two male characters move from a homosocial/erotic relationship to an openly (or covertly) homosexual one or because their friendship is privileged by the narrative to the extent that there's no perceived need for mediation. Partner-stories (as beloved of TV and movie cop dramas) are homosocial to the extent that a female romantic interest can only alienate the partners from each other, not resolve destructive tensions. (It's very tempting to cite the X-Files here, where Carter made the cataclysmic mistake of trying to make Scully be both a homosocial partner *and* a mediating heterosexual romantic interest. Scully and Mulder's relationship works as *partners*, but never gels again once the romantic element has been introduced. And it makes Scully much more overtly and cripplingly feminine and feminized.) And I think the line is honestly very blurry between intense homosocial love and homoerotic love, just as the line between homoerotic and homosexual can be blurry.

But the line between the social/erotic and the erotic/sexual is, I think, much clearer. Frodo and Sam (in Tolkien--Jackson's interpretation is a different ball of wax) have an intense homosocial friendship which does occasionally veer into the homoerotic (Frodo waking up in Rivendell, Sam finding Frodo naked in Cirith Ungol), but never into the homosexual. (There's so little sex in Tolkien to begin with that positing a sexual relationship where he doesn't explicitly admit one is reading against the text to the point of distorting it. Distorting the text isn't necessarily a bad idea (I love the homoerotic-bordering-on-homosexual tension between Aragorn and Legolas-- You look terrible. --in Jackson's movies), but it's important to recognize that's what you're doing.)

Where was I? Oh, right. Human relationships are complicated and messy, and I think it's okay to admit and recognize that--especially in fiction, where the characters are always carrying thematic and sometimes symbolic freight--sometimes the boundaries get blurred. An extremely intense emotional connection is about as controllable as a paint balloon.

Interesting analogy there about the controllability of intense emotional connections. One observation about Felix and Mildmay I heard recently is that their characters seem to be complementary halves of a complete person. One suffers from intense internal anguish, the other from a physical curse; one is very well-educated but yet has poor people skills, while the other is semi-literate but seems to be much more adept at understanding others’ emotions. Would it be fair to say that it’s the intertwining of Felix and Mildmay’s personalities that adds quite a bit of this thematic and symbolic freight to the novels to date?


I darn well hope so Some of the ways they mirror each other are deliberate choices on my part; others evolved from exploring their characters and the way they interact with each other. But one of the things that interests me about them, and about their relationship, is that at the core of themselves, they are very much alike, but their defenses and facades are radically different.

Besides the four novels of your The Doctrine of Labyrinths series, what other projects have you been working on and/or have been published?

I have a collection of ghost stories coming out from Prime this year:

The Bone Key.

And in October from Tor, a collaboration with Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves.

Near the beginning of this interview, I asked you about the types of stories you loved. Here, at the end, I'm going to ask a related question that's much broader and perhaps much more difficult to answer (it's taken me literally hours to think about how to phrase this ): Over the years, I have read countless articles and blog entries about the various groupings within speculative fiction. But I have yet to read any opinion that is anywhere near a consensus on the issue of what speculative fiction means, both for an individual reader and for our various cultures. If pressed (and I guess I'm doing that now) to answer, what would you say is the meaning (or meanings) of these various speculative fiction groupings for yourself personally and perhaps for certain socio-economic groups within certain societies?


No, it's not unfair. It's a really tough question, though, and I'm not promising I have a good answer.

I'm going to begin by observing that the oldest literature we have is fantastic in nature: The Iliad and especially The Odyssey, 5th century Greek tragedy, Beowulf (I'm going to confine myself to Western European culture, not because other cultures don't have equally good examples, but because I can't talk about them intelligently. But there's all kinds of other stuff out there.) This isn't because of naivete; the ancient Greeks knew perfectly well that they were telling *stories*, not history. It's because fantasy--stories that aren't bounded within realism --is *entertaining*. Grendel is much more compelling than whatsisface, the man who irritates Beowulf in the mead hall. I would suspect that this is the same reason so much children's literature is, if you look at it strictly, fantasy. Talking animals, anthropomorphized machines, toys coming to life. Children's literature, like mythology and folklore, is grabbing capital-S Story in great handfuls and grooving on it.

Realism, and realistic novels, are a much more delicate and sophisticated mechanism. It's harder to tell a satisfying story when you're bound by the rules of Life As We Know It. Because real life is not like fiction; it doesn't have meaning or structure or any of the things we expect our fiction to have. I don't think it's an accident that strict realism is a very late development in world literature; it demands, ironically, a readership that is either sophisticated enough to appreciate the author's negotiations with the limits of the form--or has bought into the belief that stories shouldn't be fun. Serious literature is very suspicious of fun, and that's been true as long as serious literature has been around. Shakespeare in his day was popular trash.

This looks like the high-brow/low-brow divide, but my point here is that it *isn't*. Shakespeare, if I may co-opt him for my argument, hasn't changed an iota in the 400 years between populuar trash and serious literature. He's still got the same breath-taking poetry, the same intense exploration of love and kingship (to pick two of his recurring themes), the same dazzling verbal wit. The bawdy jokes are still there. The fantastic elements are still there. Shakespeare, also, is grabbing Story in big messy handfuls and enjoying the heck out of it. Which does not decrease his literary merit.

The protocols of reading realistic fiction privilege authors who work inside a very small box. Faberge worked inside very small boxes; I'm not saying that realism's very small box is inherently inferior to the enormous sandbox of Story all around it. But it's also not inherently *superior*, which is the line the academic and critical mainstream has been trying to feed us since (I think) the advent of modernism. (I'm not sure where to draw the line on that one, actually--and of course if we don't oversimplify it, it was a gradual sort of thing through the 18th and 19th centuries. But the last three-quarters of the twentieth century saw the dogma solidify its position and start pounding the table.)

Science fiction and fantasy are all about the sandbox. I don't know if it's the same for every author and/or reader, but I know that for me, I find realism's very small box *boring*. (This is personal taste, not an aesthetic judgment. I don't deny the artistic merit of realistic fiction, but I cannot read it to save my life.) It's hard for a story to hold my attention if it doesn't have a spec fic element, and I've never in my life had an idea for a realistic story occur to me naturally. (I wrote a couple, just to prove I could do it, but that was deliberately setting out: Today I will write a realistic story. And anyway, one of them cheated by using metafictional techniques, which is just another way to get out of the box.)

So that's one thing science fiction and fantasy (which I'm going to abbreviate as sff) means: it means breaking open the box. It means getting down and dirty with Story. It means having *fun*. But sff, in breaking open the box, also permits extremely serious stories to be told. 1984, for example, which uses realism in its own way, is nevertheless outside the canons of realism. You can't tell that story inside realism's very small box, and it is a story that needs to be told. The Lord of the Flies likewise, and The Handmaid's Tale. Feminism, to give one example of sff's relationship with a subculture, has turned to sff to imagine worlds in which gender plays out differently (Tiptree, Russ, Le Guin), and we, both as individuals and as a society *and* as an intermeshed network of societies, need that ability to play and hypothesize and experiment.

Rejecting the canons of realism does not mean rejecting reality. It frequently means the opposite, as I am not the first sff author to observe. Sff lets us look at our world from new angles, under different lighting. It lets us take things to their logical conclusions and then assess them. As my friend Elizabeth Bear says, it lets us break things and explore the consequences.

Meaning is a slippery sort of thing to try to assign and tends in my experience to lead to reductive thinking. ( The meaning of Hamlet is ... ) But sff means the ability to dream, and the ability to play, and I think those are very valuable things indeed.

Would it be fair to say, speaking of the origins of Realist Literature, that it is an outgrowth of the Naturalist movement in France in the late 19th century that had among its members painters such as Monet and authors such as Zola? There is something about this style of literature which leads me to question whether or not the Author is asserting more of an active presence inside the Text, trying to manipulate it more overtly and to draw some of the focus away from the Story which has been the main draw for readers for ages. Would you agree or disagree with this statement?

Naturalism certainly has its part to play--although it's also worth noting that Monet's work, like that of his fellow Impressionists, warps right through realism and out the other side. But Zola and Balzac and Stendhal and Ibsen and and Eliot and of course the Russian novelists, Dostoievski and Tolstoi ... a lot of nineteenth century literature is increasingly realistic (Flaubert springs immediately and horrifically to mind) and increasingly disapproving of non-realistic narrative--while at the same time there's a counter-movement of novelists who are equally concerned with *social* realism but interested in other kinds of causality and connection. I'm thinking specifically of Villette, which is both realistic and powered by something closely kin to dream logic.

But, yes, realistic fiction is a highly artificial construct and often explicitly rejects the patterns of fictional narrative (Madame Bovary, in which Flaubert's *point* is that real life isn't like fiction, even if he has to invent a fictional life in order to prove it).

Would it be fair to argue then that what Realist literature aims to do is to concentrate more on examining our lives from way up close (e.g. the stereotypical middle-aged woman's mid-life crisis) while SFF literature looks at life issues from a distance (e.g. groups of people living elsewhere, doing that Star Trek "to boldly go where no one has gone before")?

That *can* be true, but I don't think it works as a generalization, because realism can work on the macro level--Michener, for example--and science fiction can work on the micro level--Ursula K. Le Guin's work.

Your comments here and on your blog leave me wondering if the delineation between Realist and Speculative-oriented literature is something vague, or if there is a truly fundamental divide. Could you please elaborate on how these two are divided?

Well, it depends, and what it depends on is the author's intent. Because kinds of stories like magical realism or slipstream depend on realism, depend on conjuring the real world with breadth and depth and shadows and dust bunnies, in order to make the slippage into contra-realism both seamless and startling. On the other hand, realistic fiction that *rejects* the fantastic is obviously insisting that a divide be defined and defended--although I think there may be rather less of that in contemporary literature than one might be inclined to think looking at the rhetoric on both sides. But I'm not widely read enough to comment.

Based on what little I've read, I tend to agree - it's almost like trying to determine what 50s music is "rockabilly" and which is "country" - it seems to come down to arbitrary preferences than to anything that can be defined.

One last question, a bit different from the rest: I was reading this old post of John Scalzi's Friday when I came across a bit about the group sing-along of "Down to the River to Pray." I have to ask: You're at a convention and it's karaoke night. Would you go up there and sing, and if so, what song would you pick for you and your fellow writers to sing?

As it happens, there's a karaoke party at Wiscon every year, and I avoid it like the plague. Karaoke is Not. My. Thing. But to answer your question in the spirit it was asked: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited."

That would be great to witness, considering one of my SNs and all! Thanks so much for doing this interview with us, Sarah!

Thank you, Larry! I've enjoyed this interview very much.

--Sarah

Review of Sarah Monette's The Mirador

Ghosts are very prominent in our lives. Whether one believes in the paranormal or not, most people do accept the notion that past events can reappear frequently in various guises to haunt us. Some of the more interesting character-driven stories involve people who are haunted by aspects of their pasts that they would rather others not see or understand. Shakespeare's Hamlet in part is as much about past deeds haunting others as it is of an actual ghost seeking his living son to exact vengeance upon his murderer. In Sarah Monette's third novel, The Mirador, the two half-brother main characters, the Cabelline wizard Felix Harrowgate and his one-time assassin sibling, Mildmay the Fox, experience ghosts both literal and metaphorical.

The action begins roughly two years after the final sequence of events in The Virtu. Both brothers have paid a heavy toll in vanquishing (so it seems) their mortal enemy. But each has been affected deeply by traumas inflicted upon them by Melkar and much of the action of The Mirador revolves around the exploration of just how much Felix and Mildmay have changed in those intervening two years.

Instead of using Felix and Mildmay as the only two first-person point of view references, Monette introduces a third, almost equally conflicted character, the actress Mehitabel Parr to the PoV procession. Haunted by her own past and having agents of the rival Bastion wizardry school blackmailing her, Mehitabel finds her entangled even more in the vicious courtly intrigues of Mélusine, entanglements that force her to interact even more with the two half-brothers.

Unlike Mélusine or The Virtu, which featured some travel sequences (not to mention external conflicts against a deadly foe), most of the action of The Mirador revolves around internal conflict. How will Felix and Mildmay deal with their pasts and new revelations from new characters that might threaten the fragile balances they have achieved at great cost within themselves? How are their many real and metaphorical ghosts going to be exorcised? How are their inner conflicts shown in their actions to those closest to them, including Mehitabel and Gideon, Felix's paramour and one-time associate of the Bastion? These questions take up the vast majority of The Mirador's pages.

Some will find this almost exclusive devotion to the exploration of Felix and Mildmay's inner conflicts to be boring or that they detract from what arguably could be called a rather hasty end to the novel. I, however, will not make that argument, merely just note what some might consider to be a weakness (a relative lack of external plot action until the final three chapters) I believe to be a deeper and necessary exploration of the Felix and Mildmay characters.

Monette recently revealed to me in an interview that the overarching title (which does not appear inside the book itself) for the series is The Doctrine of Labyrinths. This is very apt, especially for the labyrinthine twists of past deeds and guilt that have caused the characters to feel their way, almost virtually blind to themselves and to each other, for most of this novel. It is a natural outgrowth of the mazes of Mélusine and The Virtu that are as much metaphorical as they were virtual in those earlier scenes. I suspect that this maze of conflicted feelings and guilt will resolve itself in some powerful fashion in the final volume due next year (previously called Summerdown, now apparently untitled). For this to occur, however, it seems that a novel such as The Mirador had to devote its energy to the internal rather than to the external.

That is not to excuse every lapse of pace, however. There were a few times in the middle where it seemed that the pace dragged a bit, as the arguments and mistrust of earlier chapters appeared to be repeating themselves in slightly different forms, but this I consider to be minor to the overall effect of establishing two haunted, traumatized people set to hit the road for a virtual and metaphorical journey that might just possibly bring them some semblance of resolution.

Summary: The Mirador is the third of four planned volumes that detail the adventures and conflicts of two half-brothers, Felix Harrowgate and Mildmay the Fox. Using alternating first-person PoVs (a third is added for this volume), Monette depicts in great detail the conflicts, fears, and desires of both Felix and Mildmay in three fashions: 1) How each sees the other, 2) How each perceives himself, and 3) How an outsider close to them sees each brother. The culminative effect is to create a 3D composite image of each character, allowing the reader to see beyond the façades into the tortured souls of both Felix and Mildmay. Highly recommended for fans of Monette's series and for others who prefer internal conflict stories to those that revolve around external quests.

Release Date: August 7 (US) Hardcover

Publisher: Ace Books

Interview with Sarah Monette, Part I

Sarah Monette is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer who writes primarily in the fantasy and horror fields, with occasional ventures into Science Fiction, according to her website. She has published two novels, Mélusine (2005) and The Virtu (2006), with another related novel, The Mirador, set to be released on August 7th by Ace Books. In addition, she has a short-story collection, The Bone Key, scheduled to be released later this month by Prime Books and a collaborative work with Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves, to be released in October 2007 by Tor Books. Sarah and I conducted this interview by email over four weeks and this is the first of two parts, with the second to be posted early next week, to coincide with my review of The Mirador.

Sometimes in order to understand a book or series, one has to know something about the author who wrote the book. What can you tell us about yourself, your background and how it might relate to your first two novels, Mélusine and The Virtu?

I grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I've been reading fantasy and science fiction all my life. I have a Ph.D. in English literature; my specialty is Renaissance drama. I double-majored as an undergraduate in Classics and Literature (an interdepartmental program between Comparative Literature and English), and my love of languages is all over my books: Ancient Greek, Latin, French, Old English . . .

You mention your love of languages is all over your books. One particular case sticks out: Mélusine itself. Is there some sort of thematical connection between the city and the medieval legend of the woman with a serpent's lower body?

As an alert reader pointed out to me, there *is* a monster beneath the city who is female and who has a serpent-esque lower body. I have to admit, though, that that wasn't intentional.

The city was one of the last things to get a name--in the original draft (and several subsequent) it was deliberately nameless. I talked myself out of that before an editor had to, but it was extremely hard to think of a name for the city. I chose Melusine on a parallel with Medeia and Lamia--great mythic female monsters. On the same principle, the world is named Meduse. Not that that enters into the stories anywhere.

Speaking of your Ph.D., have you found yourself mixing in elements of what you did your research on into the stories you write?

Oh yes. I wrote my dissertation on ghosts in English Renaissance revenge tragedy. You can see the interest with ghosts ALL OVER my fiction, both long and short, and my love for the theater has a lot to do with Mehitabel Parr's character in particular. I also had more fun inventing plays than I probably should have: The Singer's Tragedy may be my favorite.

What was “it,” if “it” can be defined, that led you into writing?

If there's an "it," I don't know what it is. I started writing stories when I was eleven, but I think I'd always told myself stories--if I wasn't reading them.

And what sorts of stories appealed to you most and are these sorts reflected in your writing today?

The first story I ever wrote was a ghost story. The second story I ever wrote was an Epic Fantasy Quest. So the answer is yes.

I've loved fantasy since my father read me L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which he started doing when I was very very small. There's never been any doubt in my mind that that's what I wanted to write.

When you began writing short stories and later your novels, were there any preconceived goals that you had in mind that you wanted to accomplish with your writing?

Actually, I began writing *novels* first. Short stories were a later development and one that it took me a long time to get the hang of. I didn't write a successful short story until 2000.

As best I can remember, I wanted to be a professional writer pretty much from the moment that first story (when I was eleven) started getting positive feedback from my parents and teachers. Along the way, I've developed strong opinions about art and ethics, etc. etc. But in the beginning the only thing I wanted to accomplish was to have fun, and I'm still trying to hold onto that.

Speaking of these "strong opinions" about art and ethics, I was recently skimming through your website and came across a July 2006 post of yours about eleven things that you would try not to put in a fantasy novel unless you were undermining them. To what extent are your characters subverting those elements?

Heh. I had to go reread the post to remember what it was I was abjuring.

1. You will notice that no one ever describes the Virtu as an orb. Even though it is one.

2. Felix is beautiful. Whether he's good is a far more problematic question.

3. Oh, I fight with the quest plot. I do. Mélusine and The Virtu are sort of a quest, although several alert reviewers have remarked that the quest isn't the important part. The Mirador is not a quest, and it was the hardest book to write of anything I've finished to date. Summerdown *is* a travel narrative in large part, but it isn't a quest.

4. "Specialness" is another one of those qualities that Felix exists in an adversarial relationship with. He's got most of the markers: beauty, unusual coloring (especially his eyes), traumatic past (with scars!), extraordinary charisma, most powerful wizard in the whole of whatever, etc. etc. But the underlying principle of Felix's character is the observation from real life that many extraordinarily charismatic people are also cruel and petty and frequently real jerks. Not *all* extraordinarily charismatic people, I hasten to add. But I've observed the phenomenon often enough to find it interesting. So Felix is Special, but he's also an asshole. And the traumas in his past have given him defensive mechanisms that are frequently dysfunctional--the way defensive mechanisms often are.

I suppose I didn't eschew the trope of Specialness so much as I faced it head on with psychological realism.

5. A Companion to Wolves, which I wrote with Elizabeth Bear, comes out from Tor in October. QED.

6. This one, I actually abjure.

7. Mildmay is as much an argument with this trope as Felix is an argument with Specialness. He *is* a social predator and he *is* sympathetic (although I am stunned at *how* sympathetic readers seem to find him)--but I hope I've managed to complicate the situation beyond that.

8. Malkar is pretty much Evil, but in The Mirador and Summerdown, I've worked hard to create antagonists who aren't Evil, simply antagonistic.

In my own defense, Malkar was invented when I was 19. I've grown up a lot since then.

9. Well, Felix is a campaign against heteronormativity all on his own.

10. Ironically, Summerdown does feature what one might call a P.R.O. But we are introduced to it in the first scene and there are hellish consequences.

11. Nobody in these books even knows the *extent* of the world. Felix has to do a lot of heroic grandstanding, but the immediate effects are generally confined to the area of a city. Of course, the social and political consequences would snowball, but that's not something Saving The World tends to think about.

You've chosen to tell the stories of your two main character, Felix and Mildmay, via dual first-person PoVs. Was this an intuitive choice or were there many false starts and frustrating failures before you were able to discover their voices?

In early drafts, Mildmay sounded EXACTLY LIKE Felix.

Evidence here.

On the other hand, these books have *always* been first person. When I started writing them, I didn't *want* them to be first person, because I didn't think I could write first person well. But Felix's story refused to be told in any other voice.

Homosexual leads are not very common in secondary-world fantasies. What sorts of difficulties, if any, have you had in terms of portraying homosexual characters as fully-realized characters and not as characters whose sexuality overwhelms the rest of their personality?

That, actually, I haven't had any trouble with. Or at least, none that I'm aware of.

A friend of mine in the UK, Roh, who recently read Mélusine at my urging noted that to her there seems to be a tendency among female authors that she's read when portraying homosexual characters, especially males, to present them as somewhat "fragile". Here is a copy of a message she sent me recently on this topic:

"Anyway. I am beginning to notice, or to think I notice, an intriguing trend. It sums up very crudely as: When a Woman Author Writes From The Male PoV, The Male Is Marked As Physically UnStrong (Without Being Emasculated). For short, I label this phenomenon "The Mark" (regardless of grammar). I sort of pick up books written by women where a main character is male, and I wait for him to be, well, beaten up. Or raped. Or tortured. If nothing else, I look for them to be slim, even thin. A lot of the text gets devoted to these woundings, and to the recovery process, and to the physical sufferings of the male character as he suffers. It gets concentrated when it's a gay male, I think."

I was wondering if this is a perception you've heard often in regards to Felix or some of the other characters, as what my friend pointed out to me is something that I have noticed, especially in contrast to how a Hal Duncan portrays his homosexual characters, although I'll admit that I'm not as well-read on this issue as I wish I could be. If you'd like to answer it and have it be part of the interview, I'll try to think of a way to condense it into a single, short question, as I am really curious about this issue now.

I think this does happen to gay male protagonists (the most obvious example is Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald-Mage books). And I think Felix does fall into this trap to a certain extent, although in my defense I will say that the reason he gets raped is because I was interested in the tension inherent in a character who could be both rapist and victim. Which could have been a woman, or a heterosexual man, but it was most obvious and easiest to mobilize with a gay man.

I also chose a gay male protagonist because my abiding interest is in the power dynamics of human relationships, especially sexual relationships, and it is VERY VERY HARD to write about that with a heterosexual female protagonist without pigeon-holing her and yourself into either a re-inscription of patriarchal gender roles (male dominant, female submissive) or a simple gender reversal (female dominant, male submissive) (which I did work with some in my novella, "A Gift of Wings," in The Queen in Winter). A lesbian relationship is also a possibility, but it's far more interesting and attention-grabbing to take power away from a man than it is to give power to a woman.

I'm not sure I've said that very well.

I was also trying that apply-psychological-realism-to-trope thing again--because, actually, my experience differs from your friend's, in that while the trauma to the gay male lead is frequently shown in exhaustive detail, the recovery tends to be glossed over. Hence, Felix spending most of a book insane--and the point of the next three books is, in very large part, the fact that there aren't any easy fixes and that recovery is a process that you never get to the end of.

And that raises a related observation: In our society as a whole, depictions of male rape vary considerably from those of women in general, if such depictions are ever brought to light. I seem to recall reading somewhere that in fiction, female rape is often a plot device that serves to illustrate the external inequalities of power distribution, but that male rape becomes something that is not just internal, but often is either "too powerful" or too much of a taboo to be examined at length within the story. What would you say in response to this and the perception that male rape is, somehow, fundamentally different from female rape?

I think our cultural reactions to rape are intensely problematic and damaging, regardless of the gender of the victim. I'm certainly prepared to agree that male victims face an even greater stigma than female victims, and that that's as terrible as the fact that rape victims face any kind of stigma at all. And I want to be really clear that when I talk about rape in fiction--rape as a trope, rape as a narrative device--nothing I say should be considered to apply to rape in reality.

I think you're right that in fiction, male rape is more taboo, and hence more titillating, than female rape. It's hard to get at the right words to unpack this, aside from pointing out that women have been being raped in literature and mythology for pretty much as far back as we have anything written down. The Sabine women, the Trojan women after the fall of Troy, Io, Europa, Leda, et cetera et cetera et cetera. It's so common that children's books of Greek mythology don't even leave those stories out. All they have to do is suggest that the women enjoy it, and they're home free, not to mention reinscribing yet another toxic
fallacy about rape for another generation.

Male rape, on the other hand--it does feature in Greek mythology, with the story of Ganymede (Zeus wants him as a ... a cup-bearer! Right!), but other than that, there aren't any representations of it that I know of until ... okay, the earliest example I can think of is Deliverance(1970), but I'll be the first to admit my knowledge here is not encyclopedic. My point, though, is that in fiction, male rape is a much less utilized trope than female rape--although it's rapidly becoming a cliche in its own right.

Also, because we live in a patriarchal society and have for several thousand years, there's nothing new or shocking about the idea that women are victims. (I'm not saying this is a good thing, mind you.) You can get more narrative charge out of victimizing a man and you aren't reinscribing the same old gender role patterns into that ever deeper groove of men act and women suffer.

Would it then be fair to say that what we’re witnessing when we read fiction concerning male rape is a transgression of social roles, something that shocks us, makes us reconsider what is going on in regards to "normal" power structure relationships, something that might just cause us to think about where we set our limits when talking about gender roles?

Hopefully.

Which is to say, I don't think that's always what's going on, on either the author's side or the reader's side, but it is definitely one of the potentialities in literary depictions of male rape, and one of the ones I find most interesting.

***

This is the end of Part I. In Part II, Sarah talks about the title for her series, the relationship dynamics between Felix and Mildmay, upcoming projects, the sexualization of same-sex friendships, speculative fiction as compared to "realist" fiction, among many other things. Hopefully, this second part will be up by the middle of next week, our schedules permitting!

An Interview with Carol Berg

From Wikipedia, The free encyclopedia:


Carol Berg is the author of several fantasy novels, including the books from the Rai-Kirah series, Song of the Beast, and the books from The Bridge of D'Arnath series. She lives in Colorado, and is the mother of three boys. Before writing fulltime, she designed software.


Which of your characters do you relate to the most?

I relate to certain aspects of all my characters. I think most fictional characters express something that their author has found interesting about people, whether inside him- or herself or from observing others. But one of the delights of writing fiction is to write people more heroic, more passionate, more careless, more foolish, more daring than oneself, to challenge them with interesting adventures, and see how their lives play out. I would make an extremely boring fantasy character.

As for which one in particular, I feel closest to... Well, of course, Seri is a mom - but my kids never got into quite the pickle Gerick did, and Seri was so extroverted and determined from early on that I would find her quite intimidating. Seyonne dealt with the kinds of conflicts of beliefs and ideals, and the disillusionments that we all go through, while retaining his faith in the intrinsic goodness and generosity of those around him - but thank goodness I've never had to face the things he did while he was gaining that bit of wisdom. And he was a warrior which gave him a whole level of experiences that I, thankfully, have not had. Now I'm thinking of it, maybe Jen, from Daughter of Ancients is the one I'd get on with the best. She loved her family, was good at math, and not so good at the extraordinary things. She got riled up about politics, but felt pretty helpless to do anything about it, and had those few awkward physical things she couldn't get over (hers was heights, mine is walking over rushing rivers on logs). But she accomplished more than she expected and came up with some talents that surprised even herself. Yep, I think it might be Jen.

How did you become interested in writing?

I'm certainly not one of these people who wrote novels in first grade! Though I've always loved reading and I had excellent English teachers throughout my schooldays, I always detested writing. In fact, one reason I majored in math in college was to avoid writing papers. As for "creative" writing, I never did much of it, except for those poetry assignments in school - ugh. I assumed that inventing an entire story, with plot twists and interesting characters, and such would be horrifically difficult and boring because you had to plan it all out in advance.
But back in 1989, a few years into my software engineering career, a coworker/friend and I had a crazy idea over lunch. We decided to write each other email letters in character just for fun. I went back to work that afternoon, and at an...ahem... "lull" in the late afternoon, I started the first letter. Before I knew it, I had written twenty pages! Over a period of a year and a half we wrote 32 letters apiece. Fairly ugly writing, but a good story with some fun characters. And I learned you didn't have to plan it out in advance. You could live the adventure along with the characters. Once we had finished the "letter story," I couldn't quit! For years, I wrote just for the fun of it, learning about fiction writing as I went along. But in 1998, I started writing this story about a musician being released from a long imprisonment, and I knew it was better than anything I had ever written. So I went looking for information about the publishing business, and the rest, as they say...

How did you become interested in the fantasy genre?

I've been a reader forever. I read most everything except pure westerns and category romance. But in college, my roommate loaned me this series called Lord of the Rings...and I was fascinated, not so much by the story, which was pretty straightforward, or even the characters, who were in some cases a bit flat, but by the tangible reality of a magical world. The books read as if those places existed. That vivid believability is something I strive for in my own writing (without Tolkien's linguistic minutiae!) When I started writing, I enjoyed the opportunity to incorporate all the other genres I loved - mystery, adventure, times and places that were not the here and now, spies thrillers, mythology, fairy tales, romantic suspense, along with the broad reflection of humanity that one can find in classic books of any genre, from Dickens to Tony Hillerman. When people ask me if I might ever move on to mystery or mainstream, I ask them (and myself) why I would ever want to do such a thing? In no other genre do you have the freedom to write exactly the stories that you want to read as you do in this one.

What are you writing after the Lighthouse Duet?

I am still thinking about that. I spent an intense two-and-a-half years on the Lighthouse books, following an intense three-and-a-half years with the D'Arnath books, so I want to give myself a bit of time to let some ideas gel. Currently I have two projects I'm playing with - one a YA about a boy who has been raised to have no imagination, and another that I call my "broody necromancer double agent" story. But then again, I had so much fun writing the novella for Elemental Magic that I'm also considering some shorter pieces that are tied into my existing worlds.

Are there any plans to write any other stories set in the world from the Rai-kirah trilogy after the novella "Unmasking"?

See the previous answer. Up until Elemental Magic, I've not written much of anything short. I have one short story firmly buried in my trunk, and I've been known to throw out 25K from one of my novels in a month! So I was pleased to find out I could write the kind of complex, layered story that I like in the shorter form. And it was really delightful fun to step back into the rai-kirah world. I've always said that I put Seyonne and Aleksander through so much trouble that I believed their story was finished. But "Unmasking" takes place about forty years before the beginning of Transformation, which means everything we learned in the three books is out the window. Short answer: Yes, I am definitely considering writing some other short pieces, but I've not spent much time thinking about exactly what as yet.

What types of experiences have contributed most to the writer you are today?

Reading. Growing up in a household where reading for pleasure was not only encouraged, but practiced. Reading novels. Reading newspapers and magazines and nonfiction (well not TOO much of that). Reading about exotic places and great adventures and how people who are not me live. Reading good stories.

Raising kids. Amazing how this leads you to actually think about so many issues, from how humans learn, to sexuality, to how humans perceive the world and other humans, to what one might do to keep people who depend on you safe. Kids make you try things you might not otherwise (like 500-mile bicycle trips). Reading to kids makes you catch up on books you missed (Loyd Alexander) and revisit things you love (Zelazny's Amber).

Falling in love with the natural world. I always enjoyed "being outside," and lots of my childhood playtime was spent in mock covered wagons or spaceships or some other kind of adventure outside under the trees. I loved building houses for fairies. But I was a city kid and we weren't able to travel a great deal, so I was already in college the first time I saw real mountains in person, and a newlywed the first time I went camping in the Rockies. There's a reason mountains play an important role in all my books!
Living. I often think how many books I might have published if I had started writing in the years I stayed home with my kids, and then I think...nah... I could not have written the books that I write now back then. I needed to spend all that time acquiring material.

What do you consider your biggest success?

The fact that somehow I am able to connect with such a wide variety of readers. I hear almost equally from men and women, from high school/college students to people older than me. I've heard from men in the service who've said that Seyonne's experiences as a warrior has meant something to them. I've heard from women who've said that Seri's strength as a mother has inspired them and Gerick's perverted childhood has wrung their hearts. I hear from aspiring writers and readers who've read infinitely more books than I have to people picking up their first fantasy because someone has told them about my books. I've heard from readers on five continents. I never expected that.

And because I've been really surprised by the amount of negative, generalized comments I've heard about female fantasy authors lately, I'd be curious to know: Do you ever feel like people take your work less seriously because you are a female fantasy author?

Sure. Though I have absolutely no data to back that up, only vague perceptions when I see who gets mentioned for what in our industry rags and who gets heavily promoted by their publishers. Of course, some people dump all fantasy writers in one bucket, proclaiming that we could not possibly be serious writers or that we all write children's stories or monster books or Dungeons and Dragons level stories. I've had people tell me that they don't read fantasy because they like to read about "real people." Some people assume writers write fantasy so they don't have to do research or address Big Questions. And yes, some people dump all female fantasy writers into one bucket, assuming women write Big Fat Fluffy Fantasies that are Tolkien clones or romances thinly disguised as fantasy. Some people think women can't write men or real adventures, and they don't want to read books about some seventeen-year-old virgin playing with magic jewels and unicorns. All I can say is that those people don't read the right books. They're missing out.

Thank you for your time and patience. We wish you the best of luck with your work.