The houses here are only three or four feet away from the sidewalk. Homeowners compensate with these xerophyllic plantings that explode out of the itty bitty space allotted for them:
There’s something neat to look at on every block in downtown:
And yes, that says “Mexican, Pakistani, Indian” on the sign. It’s all one restaurant.
The trouble with plain-vanilla high fantasy is that it’s been done so much that none of the new stuff is particularly original anymore, and Shadowmarch is no exception. You’ve got your castle, you’ve got your conniving nobles, you’ve got your twin royals sent into exile, and the army of fairies that would like to take over said castle. Add to that a good sprinkling of battle scenes, women wearing trousers (shocking!) and a black guy who comes from Very Far Away and everybody thinks he’s incredibly exotic. Heck, the book’s even got dwarves. He calls them Funderlings but I know what you’re getting at, Mr. Williams.
On top of that, it’s got a sprawling Los Angeles of a plot. If you were planning on reading Shadowmarch and Shadowplay, I hope you weren’t in too much of a hurry because Tad Williams is going to bloody well take as long as he pleases to get where he’s going. The first two books of the expected trilogy, which are really one story split into two volumes to make them possible to lift, are at 1000 pages and counting. He has … let’s see, now … at least twelve POV characters. This is the sort of book that comes supplied with an index at the end.
Conditions like this typically make me want to throw the book across the room. So why can’t I stop reading?
It’s the characters. To tell the truth, Tad Williams is a talented storyteller. About halfway through the first volume I’d had just about enough of Prince Barrick whining about some family curse and I was on the point of throwing the book across the room. But– but– what was going to happen to Chert Blue Quartz? He isn’t some high-strung noble at all, but this, er, dwarf who’s just trying to do his job as a repairman to the vaults under the city. It’s obvious his wife Opal is the light of his life, he’s worried about this human kid he’s semi-adopted, and he’d really rather not get caught up in all the castle’s machinations and probably killed. Was Chert going to be okay?
Williams has such a knack for warm, human, likable characters that you want to forgive him everything. Yes, even the saucy barmaid. And the buffoonish poet. And the princess who’s pretending to be a boy. Even though they sound like stereotypes, they come across as real people.
And did I mention that Gyir is awesome? He’s a fairy. And if you confuse him with the sugar-dust-and-tutu type of fairy it’ll probably be the last thing you do. He’s a badass sword-wielding human-sized dude, one of the Fey Folk, from out of those old folktales where people called fairies the “good people” because they were so terrified of offending them. He doesn’t have any nose or mouth, so he breathes out of slits just behind his ears.
The second volume, Shadowplay, has so much more to offer than the first. The Shadowmarch trilogy is the opposite of those trilogies that sag in the middle; now that Williams has finished introducing us to everybody, which took him 500 pages or so, interesting things are starting to happen. There is something to be said for letting things unfold organically like this. The people in this world start to feel like old friends of yours. The last scene had me pumping the air when a certain highly sympathetic Vuttlander does not get killed off by the plot yet*. The final irony is that nobody knows when the third book in the trilogy, Shadowrise, is going to be published.
Is everybody going to be okay?
* I would bet money that Captain Vansen is going to bite it. It’s like he’s walking around with a bull’s-eye taped to his armor.
So, I was just writing a scene where Our Heroine happens to be on a high balcony and she can see the tops of many buildings below her. And then Word wanted me to change “rooves.” Aware that Word Spellchecker has the IQ of retarded lettuce, I went to the dictionary. No entry. I turned to Google, and there the Urban Dictionary gave the definition as:
The plural of “roof,” for people too dumb to know that the real word is “roofs.”
Whatever happened to poor old “rooves?”
I mean, the plural of loaf is loaves, dwarf is dwarves, and chief is chives. Okay, maybe not on that last one. But I’m sorry to see poor, downtrodden rooves, the way I’ve been pronouncing it all my life, get smacked around like that.
Also, Google helpfully suggested two searches that may be related to rooves: “pituitary gland” and “anaconda.” What the heck?
Who knew that if you set a bad D&D campaign to music, the result would be something pretty good? It’s not clear what the band Rhapsody had been drinking when they created Enchanted Lands, Vol. 2: The Dark Secret Album, but I’m glad they did. A hardy band of adventurers set out to kill “Nekron, the demon king” in a cycle of heavy metal songs:
It was a good time for all creatures of the earth,
But fate decreed that the dark prophecy of a demonknight
Could bring a tragic end to this peace
Scarring their lives forever!
If you can bring yourself to stop giggling, you might notice that the music is pretty good. It’s got some nice heavy rhythms, good guitar riffs, a good vocalist. The photoshopped castle with the lightning effects in the music video is definitely a highlight. And is that … is that … Christopher Lee?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMeBTmiX4g&hl=en&fs=1&]
Here’s some of the English Department’s offerings for next fall term.
110 English Literature I Yep, that sounds nice and basic.
112 Intro to American Literature So does this course. It’s got the word “intro” in it.
114 Shakespeare I
Shakespeare’s as difficult as you want him to be. You could be reading Midsummer Night’s Dream or you could be reading King Lear. Moderate.
259 Advanced Essay Writing Advanced. Now we’re talking.
272 A Journey into Journalism
313 The Faerie Queene Getting into the really meaty literary territory…
314 Paradise Lost
A grandmaster challenge. Paradise Lost is commonly regarded as an Everest of literature, second only in degree of difficulty to The Waste Land, the K2 of literature. So what English class could possibly get a higher course number than Paradise Lost? What is the very pinnacle of study, accessible only to highly trained senior-level majors?
395 Toni Morrison
Dang, lady. You write some challenging books.
Sometimes it’s useful when you’re halfway through a book to stop and ask yourself, “If an asteroid struck right now and all the characters died, would I care?” It was at that point in the book that I quit trying to read Perfume.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is a nose – he can distinguish the chemical compositions of thousands of scents just by smelling them, even pick up the scents of things like glass and water. He experiences the world primarily through his nose. And he’s on a quest to create the perfect perfume. The only problem is that he has to murder beautiful women to obtain his special ingredient.
It sounds like a really cool premise, doesn’t it? But I have a hard time slogging through a book when I can’t relate to the main characters at all (cf Tigana). It’s not merely that Grenouille is a bad guy. Putting an antihero at the center of your book is an excellent artistic choice and makes for some of the world’s most celebrated literature (cf Frankenstein). Grenouille was like an alien to me while I read about him. The way he relates to the world and the way his mind works is so different that I kept jumping out of the story, going “Huh?” instead of getting lost in the narrative. Fantasy and science fiction writers have to write about some pretty weird individuals sometimes, and it’s our responsibility to make them understandable enough that readers can connect with them.
Would have been even funnier if they’d ruined the pasta because none of them have cooked anything in, like, ever, but alas.
Deep, dark, and rich, in a chocolate torte laced with cyanide sort of way.
I picked it up because Amazon.com said people who bought Edgar Allen Poe also bought this, but I was still expecting more of a historical novel than the terror ride of my life. It’s 1873 and Sethe is an ex-slave. She lives all alone in Cincinnati with her daughter, Denver, the only child she has left. Her two sons have run away from home and her older daughter is dead. During the book, she’s haunted by the past in every meaning of the word.
Paul D, who used to be a slave on the same farm as Sethe, arrives on their doorstep one day. Denver resents that they’re attracted to each other. They think Sethe’s husband died trying to escape the farm, but nobody knows for sure. Just to make matters worse, then a mysterious young woman with no wrinkles in her skin shows up, calling herself Beloved.
When Sethe’s daughter died eighteen years before, Sethe didn’t have enough money for a headstone. She was able to barter sexual favors with the engraver for just one word. Not enough for Dearly Beloved. Just Beloved.
Is Beloved the evil ghost of the dead little girl? Has Sethe finally lost her mind? Both? You just don’t know, even after it’s all over.
The best part of the prose is not what Morrison says, but what she leaves unsaid.
But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon tied around a curl of wet wooly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.
Deliciously terrifying.
Literary lessons learned:
Here’s one that’ll bust your noodle: it looks like fictional characters could pass the Turing Test. Imagine that we’re text-messaging each other, and I answer all your questions as one of my favorite imaginary people, like Lyra Belacqua. Our conversation might go something like this:
Interviewer: Hello, Lyra.
Lyra: How do you know my name, then?
Interviewer: Well, I–
Lyra: What is this place? You’re one of them Gobblers, en’t you?
Lyra: Where did I learn how to type?
Theoretically, this could go in indefinitely. I’m using all the intelligence of my brain to convince the interviewer about Lyra’s intelligence. It only breaks down when I reach the limits of my knowledge about Lyra or we run into some logical inconsistencies due to the fact that she’s from another dimension. You can see that that second problem happened pretty fast, but maybe somebody skilled enough (Lyra’s creator?) could fool the interviewer every time. Are we supposed to conclude that imaginary people are intelligent? Where do they keep their brains?
I’m bringing up the subject because it’s so compelling for writers such as myself. One of the common experiences for a fiction writer, across all genres, is that it feels like one’s characters are alive. My characters are like the most wonderful imaginary friends; I don’t write their dialogue, I just let them talk. And this experience doesn’t have to happen to just authors. Some characters have captured the public attention so thoroughly (like the Tin Woodsman, for example, or Harry Potter) that they can live independently of their creators. But if characters are intelligent, then we writers are all psychotic. We’re all multiple personality disorder cases with a bunch of knights and talking dragons bopping around in our heads. And some days, that’s what it feels like.
Maybe the best way to look at this is to go back to what the Turing test was supposed to prove in the first place. We tend to regard it as just a sentience test. But the grand old man Turing himself introduced the idea with a sort of parlor game where both a man and a woman pretend to be women. Somebody runs typewriter-generated messages between them and an interviewer (if only he’d known about Instant Messenger!). If the man wins the game by convincing the interviewer that he’s the woman, Turing says we can conclude he’s got a pretty good understanding of gender. Likewise, in the more famous version of the test, if a computer is smart enough to convince an interviewer that it’s smart, it must be pretty smart. Okay. So far, so good. So, if an interviewer becomes convinced that Lyra Belacqua is a real person, then
Lyra Belacqua must be pretty smart.
I must be a pretty good actress.
Which is it?
Here’s what I think, anyway. Characters are particularly good memes. Those are those ideas that can hop from head to head, taking on lives of their own. (Yes, kind of like LOLcats, but more sophisticated than that.) Viruses aren’t alive, but they can hijack the machinery of a cell in order to act like they’re alive and reproduce. Characters aren’t intelligent; they’re “personality fragments” that can sieze hold of a person’s imagination and act like they’re real. Lyra uses my brain (with my permission, I hope!) to answer the interviewer’s questions. And there’s a plot idea in that. What if there is a character whose personality is so virulent that his author goes nuts?