The Staging Point

Reason Magazine (which I’m finding to be an increasingly good online read lately) has an interesting interview with Vernor Vinge about the Singularity and related topics. Very thought-provoking stuff. The whole concept of the Singularity is, my wife assures me, crazy; but it’s a fascinating idea nonetheless. Anyway, if you, like me, eagerly anticipate the day when the stars are right and our AI overlords will take over to make things right again, go check out the interview. And if you’ve not read Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep or (my favorite) A Deepness in the Sky, hasten thee to a library and check ‘em out–they represent some of the best sci-fi I’ve read in years.

Things have been quiet here lately… too quiet, perhaps. After some reflection I’ve decided that a bit of change may do me some good–so I’ll be taking a little break from this blog for a while. I am confident I shall return before too long, but I’d like to take some time off to focus on some other writing projects for a bit. Granted, I haven’t really been posting here regularly for a while anyway; but by actually writing a post acknowledging this, I’ll feel a bit less guilty about concentrating my online energy elsewhere.

It’s been real, it’s been fun, it’s even been real fun. I’ll be back in a while. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.

This must be somebody’s idea of a joke. They couldn’t have thought of a different name for that?

Spotted on Wikipedia:

Admit it: now you’re curious.

Since I subjected you to my thoughts on vampires in my last post, I figured that I might as well share my specific thoughts on one of the two vampire-themed novels I mentioned: Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Note: mild spoilers follow.

This is quite the ambitious novel: it’s a loose modern retelling of Dracula from the perspective of several generations of historians who are hunting for clues through letters, diaries, and manuscripts. The book’s narrator is the latest in a long string of historians to get obsessed with everybody’s favorite Impaler; and as the plot develops, she of course begins to suspect that Dracula himself is still lurking about causing mischief.

The good:

• Dracula (and vampires in general) are way cooler when they’re portrayed as terrifyingly evil supernatural villains, not angst-ridden, sexually-ambiguous Anne Rice antiheroes. Fortunately, Kostova paints Dracula and his ilk as unabashedly Evil, while avoiding any hint of “I vant to zuck your blood” campiness.
• The story is told largely through the medium of letters and manuscript excerpts from the Middle Ages to the modern day. For the most part, it works, and adds a lot of flavor to the story.
• Lots of cool details about life in early Cold War Eastern Europe. Definitely more interesting than the usual European History sites (Paris, London, etc.).
• Plenty of clever references to Stoker’s Dracula.

The bad:

• An overly sappy Hollywood ending sort of spoils the wonderfully melancholy tone of the book’s first 600 pages. The book almost manages to be a heartbreaking story of love and loss, as the curse of Dracula takes its toll throughout the lives and deaths of several interesting characters, but the ending doesn’t quite work.
• Most of the letters and manuscripts use the same voice and writing style, even when they’re supposed to be different people writing in different decades. It doesn’t kill the story, but it requires some extra suspension of disbelief.
• Perhaps this is just a feature of the Historical Mystery genre, but the plot involved an awful lot of this: Protagonists go to Site A, where they find a clue leading to Site B. They go to Site B, where they find a clue leading to Site C. They go to Site C… etc. etc.

All that said, this was a fun book. It’s not summertime right now–I am, in fact, trapped somewhere in the ice-encrusted depths of Michigan winter–but this would be a perfect summer read. More involved than your typical pop fiction, but not too weighty. With vampires!

Note: I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I feel like talking about vampires. You’ve been warned.

Call it the Year of the Undead, if you will. Thus far in 2007 I’ve read exactly two novels, and both of them were about vampires: Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which was quite good, and Tim Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard, which was superb. I did not intentionally set out to read two books about the unquiet dead–I did not realize they had that subject in common until I cracked the covers–but I’m glad I did.

I’ve always found vampires to be fascinating, as far as unholy abominations go. I loved Stoker’s Dracula as a kid; Dracula served for years as the perfect model of the horror-story villain in my mind. He was cruel, vicious, and predatory; he was also patient, intelligent, and exceedingly clever. My favorite horror villains are those that simultaneously play on both existential and visceral fears, and Dracula did just that: on the one hand, he’s an unnatural, spiritually disturbing horror that casts doubt on everything we believe about life, death, and a benevolent God; and on the other hand, he’s a near-unstoppable physical threat that wants to punch holes in your throat with his teeth and suck the lifeblood from your body. (Other horror-story villains that fit this model are the creature from Alien, which I’ve discussed before, and Stephen King’s “It,” which manages to be both an alien cosmic horror and a child-eating evil clown that lives in the sewers.)

Dracula is a great, inhuman threat; he long ago shed what passed for his humanity. Stoker doesn’t do much to humanize Dracula, offering only a few tidbits through which to empathize with the vampire–most notably Dracula’s final smile (of relief, presumably) upon being staked and destroyed. Much has been made of the sexuality of Dracula, and while there’s certainly material in Dracula to fuel that interpretation, I never found it to be terribly interesting. Even if we subject Dracula to a lot of pop-Freudian analysis, the creature that emerges is most analogous to a sexual predator, and thus still belongs firmly in the category of Evil. That’s the way I liked my vampires: unrepentently evil, fated to be taken down in the end by a plucky band of heroes.

I avoided reading Anne Rice’s vampire novels for quite some time, knowing that they did away with the vampire-as-villain tradition and replaced it with undead who were angst-ridden, sexually ambiguous, and more or less sympathetic. When I finally got around to reading Interview with a Vampire, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Interview, at least as I read it, retained (with lots of purple prose) the existential horror of the vampire condition but struggled with whether or not the vampire’s loss of humanity was a free choice or an inevitability. The vampire Lestat argues that the vampire’s undead state removes him from the reach of any moral limitations, whether they’re imposed by God or constructed by human society. The novel’s protagonist, the vampire Louis, feels the pull of this nihilistic philosophy but fights to retain his humanity. The idea that Lestat might be right–that vampires, removed from the possibility of grace, have no reason not to fully embrace their predatory instincts–lurks menacingly behind the story at every turn.

This is, behind the sometimes gratuitous and lurid surface of the story, the stuff of an old-fashioned morality play, and I found that it fit rather well with my vision of Dracula as an inhuman Evil. Dracula was a being who embraced the power of his vampiric state at the cost of his humanity and conscience. A vampire that refused to renounce his humanity would be, in a sense, not a true vampire at all, but a human being cursed with a particularly dreadful fate–not a villain.

Unfortunately, Anne Rice’s sympathies seemed to lie more with the nihilistic vampire Lestat and less with the tortured vampire Louis. The sequel to Interview stars Lestat, who is actually revealed to be a world-famous goth-rock star; I’ve never made it through this novel despite at least three attempts to finish it. My feelings about this were best expressed years ago by a Mars Hill Audio interviewee (I unfortunately forget his name) who remarked that without the backdrop of moral struggle, Rice’s vampires stopped being interesting characters and became ridiculous parodies of themselves: “superheroes with fangs,” I think may have been the phrase he used. At this point, we’ve moved well beyond the (intriguing, to me) stark morality of the traditional vampire and into some sort of post-modern silliness, and it’s here that I lose interest. In the end, I decided that while Rice’s take on vampires was a somewhat intriguing one, I really preferred the more black-and-white Evil Undead in the Stoker tradition.

Both of the books I mentioned above–The Historian and The Stress of Her Regard–feature vampires (or vampire-like creatures, in the case of Her Regard) that draw more heavily from the old-school Stoker-esque Dracula than from Rice’s morally-free undead. The Historian is the most straightforward about this, as it’s actually a book about Dracula. Her Regard features stranger and more complicated vampires, but they’re definitely alien and evil, at least by any human standard. To which I say: bring on the garlic, crucifixes, and wooden stakes! Those old-fashioned morally Evil vampires always were the most interesting kind, and I’m glad to see them cropping up after a decade or two of morally ambiguous undead.

I spent a few hours the other day reading Transformers fan fiction.
I know some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, “I always knew he would come to this point… but I hoped he wouldn’t.” And for the rest of you, yes: I am talking about fan-written fiction based on the world of the Reagan-era transforming Robots In Disguise–Optimus Prime, Megatron, and the whole crew. But I’d like to think aloud a bit about this topic, because I have a dark confession to make: fan fiction, whether it’s about Voltron or G.I. Joe or the X-Files, fascinates me.

It doesn’t fascinate me in the sense that I particularly love reading it, although I’ve read some pieces of fan fiction that were enjoyable. Some fan fiction is, of course, quite wretched, for various reasons; much of it is badly written, and some of it exposes you to sanity-shattering ideas and images that will remain seared into your psyche until the merciful hand of Death finally ends the horror. (You know what I’m talking about; and if you don’t… cherish your innocence while it lasts. It is, alas, too late for me.)

But I don’t want to talk about the really bad stuff. The sort of fan fiction that interests me is the serious kind: the reasonably well-written, often lengthy, often surprisingly entertaining stories that people write in an earnest effort to explore and add depth to the characters and places of imaginary worlds not their own.
The question that always springs to my mind upon coming across fan art–whether it’s a story, a piece of artwork, or a song–is: Why didn’t this obviously talented person put their skills to use creating art that is their own?

Why are they pouring time and energy into writing stories set in, say, the Star Wars universe, when they have no real ownership of (and certainly no legal right to) that universe? Why spend hours sketching elaborate pictures of He-Man characters, when you could be drawing up fantastic images of your own creation? Why write long, introspective essays about the effects of war on the Decepticon Soundwave’s relationship with his family, when the same story with the names changed would be a perfectly respectable novella that isn’t tied to a cheesy (and copyrighted) ’80s cartoon universe? (Wait—Transformers can have children? But how do they *EMERGENCY BRAIN SHUTDOWN*)

My usual reaction–and I think the standard reaction–to fan fiction (and art, and music, etc.) is to see it as the result of stunted or broken creativity. These fans have trapped their own considerable creative potential in a box built by somebody else. They lack “true” creativity that would inspire them to create their own characters and worlds, and so they squander what artistic vision they have on other people’s work. This is an especially frustrating observation because some of the fan fiction/art out there is really, genuinely, good. A lot of it is written or drawn by people who, judging by the quality of their fan art, really could make a go of it in “real” art or literature, if they would only try. (Somehow, I don’t picture most fan fiction authors also writing a lot of original material at the same time, although this could be a false impression.)

But I find this reaction unsatisfying (and unduly harsh). For one thing, it’s fairly strict and demanding in its definition of “true creativity.” Over the years, I’ve come to suspect that there are different kinds of creativity out there, and that some people are extremely creative but would simply rather put that creativity to use refining others’ works, rather than “reinventing the wheel.” This creative eye spots (or invents) depth and nuance in characters and places that the rest of us casually dismiss. I don’t know why somebody would look at Soundwave (the Decepticon who transforms into a cassette player–admit it, you remember it well) and think “I’d really love to explore the emotional havoc the Transformers war is wreaking on his family life.” But hey, the end result is a story that’s strangely interesting and certainly adds depth to a cartoon character otherwise saddled with a completely one-dimensional personality. That might be a bit weird, but it’s not a bad thing, and if it’s either Soundwave fan fiction or no creative output at all from this amateur writer, I’ll take the fan fiction.

One of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate the odd creative value of fan fiction is that I see a lot of this type of creativity in myself, specifically as it’s evidenced in the way I play roleplaying games. I love to run roleplaying games, and as any gamer will tell you, it takes at least a modicum of creativity and storytelling ability to run a successful roleplaying game. But I have the hardest time in the world coming up with my own game and adventure ideas from scratch–I almost just can’t do it. After 15ish years of gaming, if I were given a blank notebook and instructions to write a cool game adventure, I would probably just stare blankly at the pages for a while before finally producing a stale and unoriginal variation of something I’d seen or read before.

But give me a pre-written adventure–where somebody else has sketched out an outline of the adventure and its characters–and I’m golden. I love taking adventures others have written and reworking them to fit my preferences and the interests of the friends with whom I’ll be gaming. I’ll often wind up practically rewriting the entire adventure–changing characters, locations, plotlines, dialogue, and everything else to fit my interests. Why, if I can competently rewrite and run somebody else’s adventure, don’t I just write my own from scratch? Because for some reason, I need a creative groundwork laid out for me before I can unleash my own creativity.

That’s why I’m hesitant to look down on fan art of any sort: it’s genuine creativity at work, and just because it’s using non-original ideas as a launching pad doesn’t lessen the value of the work put into it. It may be that this is an incomplete or underdeveloped creativity, but I suspect it’s more likely just a different creativity. It’s creativity that works best when the initial groundwork has been done, leaving the artist free to sketch out their own vision atop that foundation.

Let’s face it: your meticulously-written epic about the romantic tension between Storm Shadow and the Baroness isn’t going to launch you into the halls of literary fame, but if it’s the story your Muse demands of you… well, get out there and get writing.

How can you not love a book that presents, with a perfectly straight face, the following two lines

The man gaped at her. “Are the apes after Kenny? I knew something like this would happen.” — p. 134

Doyle kept his face impassive, but his mind was racing. God help us, it’s Romany again, he realized. What in hell is the man up to here? What can he hope to gain by brainwashing Lord Byron and turning him loose to make semi-treasonous speeches? – p. 203

Both quotes are from Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, a time-travel novel that was definitely one of the best books I read this year. A very fun read, if you’re looking for something entertaining and a bit light-hearted. Really, I can’t recommend it enough.

I’m having a bit too much fun with LibraryThing’s UnSuggester, which analyzes your book preferences and recommends books that you probably wouldn’t like. From the main page:

Bring on the guilty reading pleasures!

I thoroughly enjoy stories set in the post-apocalyptic genre. Whether it’s nuclear MAD, alien invasion, killer plagues, or any one of the many other likely triggers of the End of the World, I enjoy watching the End unfold. Plucky bands of survivalists, roving mutant beasts, radiation-blanketed wastelands–it’s all good.

And so it was that I was pleased recently to stumble across a behemoth 1980s post-apocalyptic epic that I’d somehow managed to miss–Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, a nearly 1000-page beast of a novel charting a classic Good vs. Evil struggle in the radioactive wastelands of post-WWIII America. McCammon is one of those authors who is done a severe injustice by the propensity of his publisher to adorn his novels with the sorts of cheesy-horror cover illustrations that you roll your eyes at in passing on your way through the Horror section of the bookstore. I’d previously read one novel of his–Boy’s Life, which I enjoyed and have mentioned here before.

I plunked down a few bucks for a charmingly-tattered used copy of Swan Song. I started reading it on the car ride home from the bookstore, and I finished at 2:30 am this morning.

I enjoyed it greatly, and so I’ll talk about it a bit. Swan Song came out a couple years after Stephen King’s The Stand (another 1000-page post-apocalyptic epic from the 80s) and bears quite a few similarities to King’s book; McCammon acknowledges the clear influence, but maintains that his story is a unique one. (I think he’s right.)

The setup is a classic post-apocalyptic scenario: Cold War tension culminates in a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. The first 100 or so pages of Swan Song introduce us to the assorted characters who will survive (through luck or providence), and who will soon become the heroes and villains of the post-apocalyptic world. In “the first shall be last” fashion, McCammon chooses some unlikely Heroes to survive the nukes and save the world from evil: an insane homeless woman, a washed-out show wrestler, and the young daughter of a “trailer trash” stripper. Those destined to become Villains hail from the opposite end of society: a respected retired military officer and a middle-class teenage boy who’s creepily obsessed with a video game he’s creating.

McCammon really hits his stride once the nukes hit and the various characters of the story begin their wanderings across blasted North America. There’s a really tense and brutal fight for survival in the depths of a Moria-style wrecked survivalist bunker where the colonel and teenage kid (Colonel Macklin and Roland, respectively) found refuge when the bombs hit; McCammon charts their degeneration from civilized humans to survival-obsessed monsters well. The heroes, meanwhile, begin to slowly converge on each other, running into a slew of inspired post-apocalyptic dangers along the way–mutated animals, a band of insane-asylum refugees roving across the Midwest, nuclear winter, the ruins of New York, and many others. And as they wander, they become aware that Something Else is roaming the wasteland as well–a clearly supernatural and thoroughly evil shapechanger who preys on the survivors, sowing death and despair wherever he travels. The Man with the Scarlet Eye (as he’s known) bears obvious similarities to The Stand’s Randall Flagg–a demonic being of unclear origins who’s up to no good. His counter is a girl named Swan (the trailer-trash daughter), who has the supernatural ability to heal and restore the land. Macklin and Roland assemble a Mad Max-style army of armored vehicles and begin rampaging across the Midwest; the Good Guys eventually meet up and begin to organize the survivors; and the Man with the Scarlet Eye sets out to kill Swan through human agents.

The stage is set for a Good vs. Evil showdown, and that’s exactly what happens. For all the horror of its setting, Swan Song plays out like a classic fantasy or fairy tale–the Good are really good, the Bad Guys are really bad, and you just know that the heroes will pull through against impossible odds in the end. (If you’re having trouble figuring out who the Bad Guys are, McCammon helps you out a few hundreds pages in by having one of the villains don an actual WW2 Nazi uniform, if that gives you an idea of the sort of moral drama we’re dealing with.)

So yeah, it’s a very fun story. Some parts were more interesting than others–the pace bogs down a bit in the third quarter of the novel as McCammon sets the stage for the final showdown–but overall it kept me turning the pages. By using nukes to destroy the world (instead of a plague, as King did), McCammon is able to play with a lot of vintage post-apocalyptic tropes; everything from full-scale battles between heavily-armed factions to two-headed mutant beasts to a band of feral gone-native teenage boys crops up at some point. And the final confrontation is pretty good, although at least one Big Plot Revelation is clear to the reader several hundred pages before it actually happens. The book’s main weakness, in my mind, is McCammon’s tendency to get melodramatic and overly sentimental at points, especially once all the Good Guys meet up and start building their Happy Friendly Community of Goodness. Some scenes are so transparently and artificially set up for maximum emotional punch that they lose their impact. And an awful lot of the friendly people (NPCs, if you will) encountered by the Good Guys seem to be repetitive and annoying variations of the same Gruff But Lovable Down-Home Country Folk template.

But who can complain too much about the minor weaknesses of a novel that gets so much right? Swan Song won’t be displacing Tolstoy anytime soon, but it’s a fun and fast-moving story that’s worth reading if you’re a fan of the genre. It’s put me in the mood to dig out a few other good post-apocalyptic tales and give them a re-read. If you’ve got any recommendations on that front, let me know; otherwise, just keep watching the skies and keep your powder dry.