Lo, I am interviewed at Clarkesworld.

A while back, John Klima invited me to be in an anthology called Logorrhea.  The concept of the anthology was stories based on the winning words of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.   He gave me a list of possible words (some of which were already spoken for) and asked whether any of them had a story in ‘em.

It took me about a minute to choose.  I wanted Cambist.  (And my thanks to John Paola for winning with that word back in 1977.)

A cambist is an expert in the exchange of foreign currency.  For that last few years, part of my for-fun reading has been books on economics for us lay folks.  It’s been insanely nifty.  And yes, I am a big ol’ geek for thinking so.

Magic (and I know this looks like a non-sequitur, but hang tight for a second) is making something true that was not true or possible that was not possible by the combined act if will and speech.  If I could hold out my hand and yell “Fireball” and a ball of fire sprang from my fingertips, you’d think that was magic, right?

And if it took two people, both yelling “fireball”, and the damned fireball still appeared, that would still be magic, right?

So when we say “this coin is the container of abstract value” and just like that, the coin is the container of abstract value, dude, that’s magic.   And a million things that weren’t possible before become possible.  I can get enough lightbulbs to keep my home noonday bright anytime I want, and with almost no effort.  How much effort would it have taken me to craft those bulbs by hand?  Would I have been able to keep up with them as they burned out?  How would I make the filament?  Or blow the glass?  Or create the vacuum?

But through the simple act of collective will, I can sell a story called The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics to John Klima, take the check to my bank, and turn words that I made up out of my head into lightbulbs that let me write long after midnight.  Through money anything becomes expressible in terms of anything else. Money is the most powerful magic system humanity has ever created, and it’s better than religion because it works.  If there wasn’t a story in that, I figured I might as well go back to tech support.

Along with my little offering, the inimitable Jeff VanderMeer wrote a story using each of the words the rest of us had chosen, and making a kind of mini-zeitgeist for the book as a whole.   It’s called Appoggiatura.

Jeff’s story is being podcast — my little portion and everyone else’s too.  Check out the whole project or else read on.  Here’s what Jeff VanderMeer made of my little word and the magic in it:

CAMBIST

At the Anadolubank in Istanbul, Hazine Tarosian has handled them all.
Crinkled and smooth, crisp and softly old. To her, new bills smell like ink
and presses moving at high speed. There's a hint of friction in the paper,
of burning smoke, that gives motion to the images, living contrast to inert
cold coins. A burst of sunflower, bee in orbit around pollen, for the
Netherlands. Ireland's beefy headshot of James Joyce, with Ulysses on the
other side. The sibilance of Egypt's Arabic letters against a backdrop of
Caliph-era battlements, in the distance a verdigris dome, last link to
fabled Smaragdine. The careful detail of Thai King Bhumanibol calm upon his
throne, sword across his lap, a flaming mandala at his back. Or even
Portugal's massed galleons listing, sails taut against the whorled wind, sun
a complex compass.

Hazine has begun to believe that the value of such wonders should be based
on something more lasting than the rate of exchange. The verdigris dome in
particular has so enthralled her that she even bought a book about
Smaragdine called The Myths of the Green Tablet and a few old coins that she
keeps in a display at her bank office.

For months now the image of the dome has come to her at night. She is
floating over it and it is floating up toward her, until she's falling down
through the dome and she can see, distant but ever closer: a green tablet, a
ruined tower, an entire ancient city.

This dream is so vivid that Hazine always wakes gasping, the solution to
some great mystery already receding into the darkness. Friends tell her the
dream is about her job, and yet it informs her waking life in unexpected
ways, imbues certain people and things with vibrant light and color. She
keeps the Egyptian bill in her wallet. The suggestion, the hint, of
Smaragdine, is so potent, as if a place must be hidden to become real.

Is this, then, the power of money? Hazine thinks, bringing tea and the
newspaper back to bed with her in the mornings, her lover asleep and
dreamless beside her.

Chris the Bookswede has posted one of my favorite quotes and my take on it in his Quote of the Week feature.

Pat, over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, is running a giveaway of the new Wild Cards book Inside Straight. It’s an advanced reader’s copy, and it’s going to be autographed by all nine of the writers in the book (m’self included).

And if you were wondering whether the book was worth picking up, there’s a review over at fantasybookspot.

And so, after a brief pause for conventions and virii, back to the report.

1) Setting as setting

The physical setting of a story — the gardens and architecture and skyline — is important in all novels, but the toolbox that epic (or second-world, since I haven’t gotten to the post about The Large Canvas) fantasy gets to use in evoking it is limited compared to other genres.

If a story is set in the world that the reader is familiar with — either by walking out into it every morning or vicariously through our shared knowledge of history and consumption of media — the writer has a very powerful technique available to bring the readers into the setting. You just say it. Watch this:

1930s Berlin.

Those words alone carry a weight — the ruin following the Great War, the rise of Nazism, that creepy guy who ran the club in Cabaret. It’s not a full image, but the sense of the place as drawn from the reader’s half-digested memories of reading the Diary of Ann Frank and anything by Alan Furst, watching that old documentary about Leni Riefenstahl that your ex-boyfriend liked so much, and on and on and on. Granted, the author can’t control exactly what image the words create, but simply by having existed and left a wake, the setting of 1930s Berlin is likely to mean something.

I expect some of you to be unconvinced at this point. To say (as that homunculus in my head) that just gesturing at a place and time might have some effect, but it ain’t much. So on with the experiment.

620s Parrinshall

Compare for a moment the difference between your own reaction to a setting with a shared cultural background and one that doesn’t have the weight of context behind it. If I haven’t convinced you with that, I’m not going to. Let’s move on.

The power of naming a setting and relying on the reader’s context doesn’t restrict itself to cities. Set a scene in “a college coffee shop” or “an old Louisiana junkyard” and you get a lot of the same effect whether the reader is sitting at a coffee shop when she’s reading your work or has never been to a junk yard in Louisiana. By drawing from the culturual context, you’re already ahead of the game.

Now, I lied up there at the top. I said that epic (or second-world) fantasy doesn’t have this tool. Of course it does. It’s just poisoned. Because what we can hark back to is other epic fantasies. Watch this:

A tavern

And like that, the experienced reader of fantasy knows everything. The doughty keeper, the thick brown stew, the bard sitting before the roaring fire, the man sitting alone in the shadows who isn’t what he seems. Probably with an orc-infested dungeon somewhere nearby, if they’ve played D&D.

It’s a fine, fine line between culturally ubiquitous context and straight-up cliche. That there crosses it.

So instead, epic fantasy requires us to build from first principles — vision, sound, touch, taste, scent — and make a physical place in which the action plays out that’s compelling and immersive. Oh, and do it fast enough that it doesn’t slow the plot down.

Tolkien, the touchstone of the genre whether we like it or not, didn’t suffer this. When Frodo and Sam walked into that ur-tavern in Bree with its doughty keeper and Strider lurking in the shadows, it hadn’t been done to death. Tolkien also wasn’t making his living writing fiction, and so could afford to take a very long time (commercially speaking) to refine his visions of the Mines of Moria and Rivendell and Mordor. You can find the proof of that in the reimaginings of his settings by visual artists since The Lord of the Rings first came out. Even more than the characters or the plot, the places in Tolkien are memorable.

Those of us who toil in Tolkien’s shadow have that to match, and it’s not a bad measure to judge second-world fantasy by whether you remember the places. I would go so far as to suggest that George’s success with A Song of Ice and Fire maps to the number of memorable places in the world. The Wall, Winterfell, the Aerie. When I think back to other fantasy series, I can remember characters and events, dramatic moments in the plot, and sometimes the general feel of the story even without specifics. I don’t think anyone has drawn as many powerful places as Tolkien and George, at least for me. Back when “novel” was closer to its original meaning, this was what it was all about — being someplace new and amazing through the collaboration of the author’s language and reader’s imagination.

Granted correlation isn’t causation. It’s possible that I remember the places because something else in the story was drawing my attention. Some equally wonderful city or valley may have been in another fantasy that I’ve overlooked because of this other thing being missing. But I can say that the deeply imagined, well-drawn specific places that I do remember give me a better connection to the land in which the story happens.

And it turns out that creating an identification with place is critical. Which takes us to the next issue.

2) Setting as Milieu

Consider for a moment Stephen R. Donaldson.

When I first met the man, his Thomas Covenant books were the second best-selling fantasy in the English language behind Tolkien.  (Third, in his words, if you also count the Bible.)  He owned the joint.  Then he finished the second chronicles.  I haven’t talked to him about this, so here I begin to project.  I imagine myself in his place, having written six (for the time) large books about the same character and theme.  Ready, perhaps, to do something else.

The new project didn’t fall far from the tree.  In it another character — a woman this time — was thrust into a world with a preindustrial economy, European window dressing, and magic. The two books of Mordant’s Need didn’t sell as well.  Donaldson’s next big project — the Gap Cycle — is reputed to have dropped in sales again.  The possibly apocryphal quote from Donaldson: “I thought I had a million Stephen Donaldson fans. It turns out I had a million Thomas Covenant fans.”

At the Symposium, we had a short thought experiment on the issue:  By show of hands, we voted whether the Harry Potter readers among us would be more likely to pick up 1) a new book by Rowling set in a new School of Magic universe unrelated to the Harry Potter series or 2) a new book by Rowling explicitly set at Durmstrang, but not related to the plot of the Harry Potter books.  Overwhelmingly, we opted for 2.  I suspect the public would do the same.

Setting is also milieu.  Stories set in the same fictional universe support one another, and generate a sense of the familiar in the readers — a sense of returning. There are several examples of authors who have found strategies to address this:  Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is large enough to accommodate almost any story and still be a “Discworld” story, Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cosmology puts an underlying setting to connect many of his books, Robin Hobb’s fantasy works have until recently all been tacitly connected by being in the same world.

This is more than a cynical way to increase sales.  The impulse to connect things also appears in writers with a sufficiently huge body of work and enough market power to do anything they damn well want:  Stephen King and Robert Heinlein.  Both of these men began explicitly drawing connections between thier earlier works later in their careers.  That can’t be because they were afraid of losing readers.  I think instead they were responding to the same thing the readers are — writers and readers aren’t really all that different.   And that brings me to the thesis of this setting-as-milieu section.  Ready?

There was a time when we read books for excitement.  The word itself — novel — is a give-away.  Reading was the way people could go places they couldn’t go, see things they’d never seen, experience things they would never do.  That role has been taken up by some other media and the relative ease of air travel.  For the most part, those of us who are still reading are doing it for comfort.

Settings in second-world fantasy are serving two masters.  On the one hand, it is someplace new, different, exciting, memorable, and huge.  On the other, what we’re creating isn’t a new frontier, but a new home.  Once we’ve made it — even if it’s as big as the universe or bigger — it’s a place we want to stay.

Stephen Donaldson knows this.  Fatal Revenant — the second volume of the new Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant — debuted at 12 on the New York Times Bestsellers list.  The Thomas Covenant fans are coming home.

Lo, I am BoingBoinged.

 [I have been convinced in the comments that second-world fantasy is a better term for what I’m talking about.  The “epic” aspect will be addressed in a later report.]

Even as I sit down to write this, a very small Nick Mamatas homonculus in the back of my head is flipping me off, calling me stupid and storming away in a huff. He’s got a point.

Definitions are tricky by nature, and offering one up gives the impression of having solved a puzzle. What is Epic Fantasy? Well, this is, and anything that doesn’t fit the definition isn’t. That kind of proscriptive rigor is doomed, but being doomed doesn’t take away from the essential dignity of the effort. I’ll just take a moment to point out that what I’m saying here isn’t intended to tell the reader what they should think but rather to clarify what I do. When I say Epic Fantasy, I mean this. If you mean something else, please do make that explicit. Thanks.

Epic fantasy is (1)fiction in (2)an ahistorical setting with (3)magic, and usually but not exclusively with (4)preindustrial technology. I should say that I don’t draw a distinction between Epic and Heroic. If you do, you’ll want to make that explicit. (The homonculus waves its arms in rage at my refusal to stand and fight. Hard life, bein’ a homonculus.)

So let’s start in.

1) Fiction

The least controversial point in this formulation is that epic fantasy is a subset of fiction. These are invented stories about invented people taking part in actions that (at least on the small scale) didn’t happen. They don’t even have the dubious claim to reality of history or religious texts. More importantly, they don’t assert themselves to be real in a way that is intended to convince the reader. Even if the narrator of the story says that the recounted events really happened, this is recognized as part of the fiction.

It’s ain’t real. Cool?

2) an ahistorical setting

Here, things start getting tricky.

Looking at a few of examples of epic fantasy may help here. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is alleged to be in a sort of human history, but not ours as we know it. As we look at our historical timeline from prehistory to the present, there is no place where Middle Earth would fit. Donaldson’s Land in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is explicitly a different world existing outside our history (though Covenant himself is placed within our world as a man living in the late 20th century). George’s Westros is clearly not intended to be read as connected to our own world. And so on.

There are also a lot of fantasies that do occur within history. Crowley’s Little, Big; Most of Charles de Lint’s work, any of the hundred thousand urban fantasies in which elves and vampires inhabit modern Chicago or similar settings. I don’t intend to dismiss those, except in the sense that they aren’t what I’m talking about here.

Another term that gets used here often is “second world” and I suppose that’s just fine. Explicitly, epic fantasy (as I use the term) involves the existence of a second world either in relation to ours (a la Donaldson) or as an entirely separate reality (Martin). The important thing is that the story happens outside our history.

What about Naomi Novik? Not epic fantasy? Nope, not for the purposes of this discussion. Maybe alternate history would be a better fit.

China Mieville, on the other hand, could be. It would be impossible, for instance, to relate the founding of New Crobuzon to (for instance) the Truman presidency. The two exist in separate worlds, and that separation is central to the reader’s experience of the story. I’ll go into this again in the report on setting as character. (As an aside, I agree with Jeff VanderMeer’s assertion that Mieville specifically and the New Weird in general makes the most sense when considered as a marriage of epic fantasy and visceral horror as championed by Kathe Koja and Clive Barker.)

3) Magic

This is the second least controversial point about fantasy (be it epic, urban or any other flavor); It’s got magic. It is possible, I believe, to write an epic fantasy in which nothing particularly magical happens (Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint is an excellent example), but those are few, far between, and not typical of the genre. Fantasy without magic is like a bird without flight — it happens sometimes, but not so often as to spoil the point.

As another aside, we broke magic down into three rough categories:

A) Magic as alternate physics: magic is a set of universal rules accessed by anyone with sufficient technical knowledge. If you wave the wand the right way and say the right words, the effect occurs reliably and for anyone.

B) Magic as negotiation with a sentient universe: magic is a suspension of physical laws mediated by some entity that exists outside those laws and is not subject to them. The mage is in the position or prayer, supplication, binding, etc., and the magic requires more than technical knowledge. It’s only available to special people who the universe as a whole or the magical entities in specific can recognize as special.

C) Magic as an extension of the body: magic is the direct exercise of will over matter. Most of us are able to move our bodies simply through an act of will — I decide to move my hand, my hand moves. There is no intercessor. Magic can also be an extension of that past the limits of the body. The mage focuses on the candle, and the flame appears and so on.

So why magic? Descriptively speaking, because when I get together a bunch of fantasy books, they’ve pretty much all got magic in ‘em. When I get a book with just a little magic, it’s called the “fantastic element” (Niccolo’s divining in Dororthy Dunnet’s House of Niccolo series — which is otherwise strict historical novels). In practice, the existence of magic marks something as a fantasy.

Proscriptively, I can speculate, but there are a lot of folks out there who’ve done a much better, deeper, and more footnoted version than I can muster.

4) Preindustrial technology

A large part of the conversation revolved around Tolkien. Love him or hate him, his work is the touchstone of modern fantasy, and pretty much everything since is either an homage or a critique. There’s actually some variation of tech level even within Lord of the Rings, but the vast majority of fantasy involves an explicitly preindustrial technological bent.

And, what the hell, let’s put too fine a point on it. Most fantasy is a vision of Europe sometime after 500 and before 1450. Merely preindustrial isn’t enough. Very little fantasy is set in an explicitly Sumerian milieu. Likewise the Indus Valley. Likewise Han China or sub-Saharan Africa. There are a lot of civilizations and epochs that could be borrowed from the way that Tolkien borrowed English culture. And while they are used occasionally, and some gain notice, the standard setting remains the European dark ages.

One theory put forward to explain it runs like this: Tolkien tapped into a literature of childhood for many of his readers. People picking up Lord of the Rings when it first was published had grown up on Robin Hood and King Arthur and other source material from which Tolkien drew. There was a resonance with the reader’s childhood that gave the books a power which other settings would not have.

In the generations since then, Tolkien himself became that literature of childhood. Terry Brooks and Stephen Donaldson got something like the same resonances because they were reacting to Tolkien (as have we all, one way or another and whether we like it or not).

It’s a pretty theory, and I want to be convinced by it. So far, I’m not totally sold. I do agree, however, that there is something nostalgic about epic fantasy’s harking back to times that we imagine to be simpler than our own. Like political conservatism (but not identical with it), epic fantasy seems to indulge the longing to return to a better age. That in this case the age is explicitly mythical forgives a lot in my book.

I’m not sure what this implies for those of us who are writing fantasy now. Certainly there are a wealth of writers who are chafing under the expectation of kings, knights, and barons. I’m one of them. Reader’s expectations, however, may still be such that these excursions into other places and times are done at the author’s risk.

So, as groundwork: Epic fantasy is fiction in an ahistorical setting with magic, and usually but not exclusively with preindustrial technology.

Next up: The Role of Setting

The symposium went off as planned. I have about four and a half hours of recorded conversation that I’ve been reviewing and thinking about and trying to put into some order in my head. I’m not going to make the recordings public. In order to get folks to talk about what I wanted to know, we had to talk about some of our colleagues - -both their strengths and their weaknesses. Broadcasting that kind of thing is unprofessional and counter-productive.

The participants were George RR Martin, S.M. Stirling, Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, Ian Tregillis, Ty Franck and myself. I expect the report on the symposium to take a while to get out completely. The topics we chewed over tend not to have particularly well-defined boundaries, and putting them into a taxonomy here is trickier than I expected it to be.

I’m beginning with this outline both to give an overview of what topics we discussed and provide myself with a sort of working plan for how I talk about it in public.

TOPICS:

1) Definition of Epic Fantasy:

This is in part an exercise in setting boundaries. What exactly is epic fantasy for the purpose of this particular conversation, and what isn’t. (I didn’t want the group to have to take on the burden of outlining all the differences between Laurel K. Hamilton and Jim Butcher in order to define urban fantasy, for example, when that wasn’t the subgenre I was interested in.)

I’ll summarize the definition we came up with here and then spend a full post on it later. Epic fantasy is fiction with an ahistorical setting and magic. That sounds really simple. We took a long time getting there, and we still don’t all agree.

2) The Role of Setting

One theme that arose in the conversation that I think deserves more attention (ie a separate blog post) is the role of the landscape as a character. Epic fantasy seems to have a great deal to do with place (not something I’d considered much when I first went into this). Tolkein’s Middle Earth, for instance, is filled with memorable places — Rivendell, the Mines of Moria, Mirkwood, etc. — that invite the reader’s imagination as much or more than the characters or plot.

One consequence of this that I at least hadn’t noticed was a massive tendency for readers to defect when the world itself is changed, but to stay on when the new book/trilogy/series is set within the same world.

3) The Hero’s Journey/Clute’s “Greening”/the plot

There are several ideas about the necessary and/or appropriate plot structure for a fantasy novel. I am comfortable with none of them, but when I write that post, I will do my best to outline them (as I understand them) and give an idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

The moral structure of the epic is closely related to this, since the plot is an explication and example of a moral system. Yeah, I hadn’t noticed that either, but it does help explain with The Lord of the Rings became a classic and The Worm Ourboros didn’t.

4) Fan Service

Oh, this one’s an interesting problem. We borrowed the term from anime where it’s used (I’m told) to refer to the scenes that may or not make sense, but that have to be there to meet the expectations and appetites of the fans. This issue is, I think, the rabbit hole that leads to a very strange and I suspect illuminating analysis of what genre writers (and probably all writers) do. The single term stretches from whether it’s okay to treat the readers with contempt to the tension between accessibility and sophistication to what exactly it means to “sell out”.

5) The Large Canvas: A Metaphor for Something

Throughout the conversation, certain phrases kept popping up: broad scope, painting on a large canvas, big stories. I’m not sure we managed to say explicitly what this was all a metaphor for (we don’t actually have canvases, and the big in stories isn’t actually word count, no matter what it seems). I’ll try to give an idea of what a “large canvas” actually means and what techniques we thought of that might serve it.

6) A Plan of Attack

Of course all of this was ultimately self-serving. I’ve just turned in the last of my Long Price Quartet books, and I’m looking down the barrel of planning the next project. The underlying agenda of this symposium was to help guide me in that. That, the final post on the subject, will outline what I think I need to do and how I intend to go about it. (This has a certain Babe Ruth hubris about it, I know, but I’ll do what I can.)

Next up: The Definition of Epic Fantasy

I slightly under a week, I’ll be driving to Santa Fe for what I’ve been calling The Symposium. A few of us in the local writing scene (the whole local writing scene is *way* too big to fit into a house, much less have a decent single conversation) are going to get together to talk about what the strengths and weaknesses of epic fantasy are, what reader expectations are in picking up an epic fantasy book (or series), and how meet, exceed, or defeat those expectations.

The guest list right now includes George RR Martin, S. M. Stirling, Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass and a couple other folks who I’m not sure want their names publicized so I’m not going to mention them just yet.

The thing is, I’ve just finished my big fantasy project. The Long Price Quartet, though only half in print at this point, is done for me apart from the corrections and editing. I’ve learned a lot from writing them — mostly I have a better idea how you write a novel. But now that it’s time to try pitching Tor a new project, I find myself wondering how to better structure something that complies witth he structures and expectations of epic fantasy, satisfies the reader, and still does something fresh and new and fun for me as a writer.

As it happens, I’m in the middle of a bunch of the best minds in the field, so I thought I should ask.

Next Friday, I’ll find out.

If any of y’all have questions that you think it would be useful to chew over in that company, I take suggestions.

There’s another interview up for Hunter’s Run