Pat over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has posted the full text of my short story The Best Monkey as an excerpt from the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol. 3.

Just wanted to drop a line to let y’all know that I’ve got two new short stories coming out. “The Best Monkey” is in the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol. 3 coming out in March and “The Curandero and the Swede: A Tale from the 1001 American Nights” in the March F&SF.

I’m fond of both stories, and I’m looking forward to having them out in print.

It’s official. An Autumn War is out, and so far people like it.

For all of y’all in Albuquerque, I’ll be doing a signing with brief dog & pony show at Bookworks 7 pm on July 31st. Come on by. There’s a pretty good coffee shop right there too.

For all of y’all who are planning to his Worldcon (or at least vote on the Hugos):

Monday is the last day to vote. It’s probably too late to send them in the post, but you can do the thing online. If you haven’t read the nominees . . . well, you’re probably hosed for novels. They’re more than a normal human could suck down in a day. But the novellas, novelettes, and short stories make for pretty good reading.

Vote your conscience, and I’ll catch you at the loser’s party gathering for the differently victorious.

The fine folks at Locus are offering to send you a copy of my interview postage-free (read: $3 cheaper) or totally free with a subscription.

In other news, holy shit! I’m interviewed in Locus.

For them what’s interested, my story The Cambist and Lord Iron is (at long last) online.

It’s late getting out, and it’s up against Ted Chiang, David Moles, and Greg Egan (twice), so if y’all could do me a favor and repost that link, I’d be obliged.

The other stories are also available through the Denvention page for such things.

There are reasons I love technology.  One, among many, is that I can get swamped for literally months at a time — moving, running after a toddler, writing a whole damn book — then listen to the original conversation that started m on this little project.

There are also reasons I don’t love technology so much.  Like even after months of procrastinating and putting it off the Right Answer doesn’t magically appear on the tapes.

Thus, guaranteed of failure, I leap into the fray.  Come on along.

Part one:  Plot as Meaningless Term

Plot is like “time” and “love” — we all know what the word means until we start looking at it.  I was on a plot with Melinda Snodgrass once where we all had to say what we meant by he word plot.  Consider these:

– Plot is the literal events that occur in the story

– Plot is the scenes of a story in the order that the reader encounters them (as opposed, say to the characters in the story, which is the action)

– Plot is the sequence in which information is released to the reader — through either action or exposition — that forms the subjective experience of the story

In the end, I think we have the choice between true but imprecise (plot is what happens) and precise, but dodgy (plot is the way in which theme is literalized within the narrative).  Seriously, this is a large part of why I kept balking at writing this section.  I don’t think I’ve met two writers who meant the same thing when they said this word.  The dark secret is, the word plot doesn’t actually mean any one thing.  It’s like “dementia” or “autism” — it describes a cluster of related but non-identical things.  It’s a spectrum diagnosis.  So if I seem to hop back and forth between levels, compare apples to oranges and both of those to rhinos, forgive me.  I blame to the tools.

Part Two: The Fantasy Ur-Plot(s)

In the Symposium conversation, Walter and George both brought up models of the fantasy ur-plot as described by John Clute and (haul that corpse out again) Jospeh Campbell.  I don’t pretend to any great scholarship on eith of these folks, but I will do my best.

Clute’s thesis as I understand it can be unfairly simplified this way: At the beginning of a fantasy, nature (or possibly Nature) is out of balance.  A spiritual malady expresses in the physical landscape (through war or famine or a deep and terrible shadow — whatever).  The hero of the fantasy brings about renewal (what Clute calls “regreening”), in which the world is restored to its proper order.

Campbell’s version of this is the hero’s journey that we’ve all been slogging through since the generation raised on Star Wars got tenure. Briefly, the something calls the hero to his adventure.  He (usually he) refuses the call.  Then he’s pulled into it anyway.  He retreats from the world into a series of numinous encounters and returns to the world at the end of the story, armed by his transformative experiences to save or at least improve the world.

Both of these analyses are much more cogently made by the men what came up with them, and both of them have real power.  Clute is, as far as I can tell, more interested in the connection between theme and landscape.  Campbell is more involved with the fantasy as psychological and spiritual metaphor.

With no disrespect to these schema, I would like to present a third alternative for the Basic Fantasy Plot.  See what you think:

A farmboy turns out to be named by prophecy as he Chosen One who will defeat the Dark Lord.  He (usually he) goes on a series of adventures, picking up colorful sidekicks, until the last few chapters where he faces the Dark Lord, almost looses, and then wins.

Okay.  That was glib.  But here’s the thing, that third one — cheesy, stupid, risible as it is — actually has a lot of power in it.  When I was 16, I read that story until the spines broke and I had to buy another copy.  Even now, I look at it and I’m torn between mocking the low, unsophisticated, stupid, triteness of it all and remembering with fondness bumbling around for five books with Garion and Ce’Nedra (I mean Ce’Nedra?  What’s the apostrophe for?  And when did I become such a sophisticate that I started looking down on that kind of name?).

One of the books I’ve read since the Symposium has shed some light on this.  Compte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality.  He talks in that about one of the competing etymologies for “religion” being related to a word that meant “to reread.”  The stories that we go back to again and again develop a depth and a power, or (in this case) a genre.  If mystery novels are retelling the story of sin uncovered and romances are retelling the story of lovers kept apart by fate overcoming it (if it’s Pride and Prejudice) or dying in the attempt (Romeo & Juliet, Love Story), then maybe the farmboy and the regreening of the world aren’t as far from each other as it seemed to me at first.

Let’s turn for a moment to an example Walter made in the conversation.  The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison v. The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien.  The Worm Ouroboros has many of the trappings of epic fantasy: quasi-medieval courts,  supernatural elements like goblins and imps and demons, wars fought with nobility and heroism.  And yet, we don’t trace our genre to it.  We trace it to Lord of the Rings.

Lord of the Rings is different in two ways (well, more than that, but two ways that seem interesting to me).  First off, even with all the lords and ladies, the king returning etc. etc., the core story is about a middle-class protagonist.  Frodo isn’t Lord Anything.  Second, it isn’t a story about winning a war; it’s a story about disarmament. Gandalf and Galadriel could have beaten Sauron any old time.  But the Ring would have corrupted them.  The whole complex set of interwoven stories that *aren’t* Frodo and Sam Take A Freaking Long Walk details a distraction to keep the Dark Lord from noticing that a couple (well, with Gollum two and a half) humble people with no chance in the world against the power of Mordor were off to save the world.   And that moral core is why this genre reeks of Tolkien and not Eddison.

So here’s my next proposal:  The way mystery is about moral order being restored and romance is about star-crossed lovers being united, epic fantasy is about a person or small group of people who seem too small to face the challenges posed by an overwhelming evil in the world, and do anyway.

But wait! I hear you cry.  What kind of plot is that?  There’s no action at all!  No scenes!  How can you call that a plot?  It’s more a vague theme-y thing.  And sentimental too.

Yeah.  Fair point.  Like nailing Jello to a board, this.

Part Three: Plot Structure as . . . well, Structure.

Does it have to be a farmboy?  Does he have to be the chosen of prophecy?

Well, of course not.

Another of the difficult, confusing things about taking on a concept like plot is that on one hand, you can clearly do anything, and on the other hand, you clearly can’t.  Let me explain with an example.

Babylon 5 was five seasons of — let’s be generous — fairly spotty television.  The dialog was wooden, the special effects while nifty in their day haven’t stood the test of time, the plots were so desperately unoriginal they often didn’t bother to file off the serial numbers, and the acting included some of the most hilariously awful performances of all time.  Oh and the central love story was between two actors with the combined chemistry of bacon and ice cream.

X-Files, on the other hand, had everything that B5 didn’t.  Great actors, smart scripts, chemistry that most writers would sacrifice limbs to capture.

And yet  I watched the last episode of B5 and wept, and the  X-Files, I just eventually stopped watching.  B5 was an ugly success and X-Files a beautiful failure because Straczynski had a superpower and Carter didn’t.  Straczynski knew where he was going.

I went back and watched the pilot of B5 not long ago, and it was much worse than I remembered.  But it also had a tremendous amount of foreshadowing, some of which didn’t pay off until the last season, and in fact the last episode.  Walter’s formulation of this idea of plot is something like this:  you write a novel like you tell a joke — aiming to the last word on the last page.  Every character you put in play, every subplot you add in, every huge battle and quiet love scene, is in the service of making that last scene in the last book satisfying.  If it doesn’t do that, you probably shouldn’t have it there.

Babylon 5 did that if not perfectly, at least pretty well.  X-Files just went on and on, adding mythological detail and confusion, false revelation after false revelation until it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a satisfying ending.

The same holds true here.

I started out thinking about plot in fantasy by asking myself what had to happen in a fantasy story.  Did there have to be a hero who faces down a Dark Lord?  Does prophecy have to drive everything?  Hell, does the good guy have to win?  And each individual question I posed, I thought “No, that doesn’t have to happen.” And there are a lot of examples.  The farmboy could be a leper and a rapist, or a seriously depressed assassin, or a highclass whore who is deeply into her own pain.  And they all work just fine.

There isn’t a plot structure that epic fantasy demands, except that there are taut, well structured plots, and lazy, wandering ones.  The first kind is good.  The second one’s bad.

Part Four: Summa

A good epic fantasy plot is one in which a person or group of people who appear too small to defeat great evil in the world do anyway, and the last scene of the last book ends the story that began on the first page of the first one.  Beyond that, anything goes.  Credo.

I thought this was particularly interesting.  I’m looking forward to seeing more comments and reviews along these lines.

I distrust the soundbite nation.

Lo!  I am nominated for the Hugo award for best novelette.  So it David Moles, Ted Chiang, and Greg Egan (twice).

Check it out. 

[insert sound of Daniel’s head thumping against the wall]

I have great big news, but I am sworn not to reveal it yet.

[thump, thump, thump]

More soon, even if it’s accompanied by aspirin.