01/22/2012

Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea and Comparisons in Recent Fantasy Literature

After reading my last post, wherein I suggested that matters of race were perhaps glossed over in Bujold’s Shards of Honor, a fellow tweep suggested that I read something by Ursula Le Guin.  I did.  The Wizard of Earthsea is the first book in the Earthsea series published in 1968.  I thoroughly enjoyed this tale and hope to eventually read them all.

In brief, as I do not wish to drop too many spoilers, The Wizard of Earthsea is about Ged, the youngest of many sons whose mother dies when he was still a baby and whose father paid little attention to him.  Ged is an inquisitive naughty child who learns quite by accident how to use magic.  He is taken under the care and tutelage of his aunt, a witch, and taught elementary magic.  Ged’s life on the island of Gont is fairly idyllic until it is raided by outsiders.  In a show of incredible strength and courage, young Ged weaves a spell that gathers fog around the village and uses it to hide his people and trick the raiders long enough for them to fight back and prevail.

Unfortunately, Ged uses all of his strength in the casting of this spell and is left in a trancelike state in which he neither eats nor sleeps.  News of his deed reaches the wizard Ogion the Silent who eventually takes Ged with him for training in the ways of wizardry.

This is just the beginning of this flawlessly woven tale.  Ged does not remain with Ogion.  He ends up going to a school just for wizards which is located on an island.  He makes friends, and an enemy.  He often doesn’t follow the rules and his most unfortunate downfall is hubris, so much so, that in an effort to prove himself, he casts a dangerous spell he’s been warned against.  This act changes his life forever.  Ged eventually graduates and so begins the second half of this tale, which in my opinion is the best half.

Does any of this sound like Harry Potter to you?  If you read this tale, you’ll certainly find multiple similarities, and on the flip side, just as many differences not the least of which is the writing style.  Le Guin’s prose is fluid as is this tale, whereas, in my opinion, HP’s language is colorful and tense.  While both stories are well written and feel clearly as if intended for a younger audience, Earthsea unlike HP, focuses on the entirety of Ged’s life, up to about 19 years old, as relates to his particular life challenge, an arrogance that leaves him scarred in more ways than one.  We don’t get a blow by blow of each year at the school as in HP, however each chapter in Ged’s life is riveting and well draw guiding us to the final defining event of this tale.

There is a central message here.  Actually, there are several.  I like messages in my fiction. They help me connect with the characters and make me care about the events of the story.  As with HP, we see the importance of friendship and perseverance, but more deeply, we see Ged learn patience, humility, and the importance of knowing oneself.  While I am making comparisons, I’ll mention that I liked Ged more than Harry because he was so much more flawed and had so much more internal work to do.  He wasn’t as much of an underdog as Harry, but his own personal failings were, as I’ve already mentioned, his greatest challenge in life.  Ged does triumph in the end, but not after great personal sacrifice and hard work.

Ah, I did mention matters of race, didn’t I?  Let me start by saying that Le Guin wrote a clearly multicultural, multiracial tale, but it was done in such a way as not to give the differences any more importance than they ever should in life.  In other words, the characters were diverse, but this diversity only served as enhancers and descriptives, never as points of division or derision.  This is going to sound cliché, but Ged’s best friend was black.  And guess what?  So what?  Who cares?  It didn’t matter, and it didn’t mean anything other than, he had dark skin.  I love that!

I’ll soon be moving on to the second book in this series, The Tombs of Atuan.  I hope that I get to see Ged again.  I’ve grown to care about this character and I feel invested in his continued growth.

Of note, I’d like to mention one other element of this story that I’ve seen echoed in recent fantasy literature.  In Earthsea, everyone has a real name, one that is kept secret because those who do know the name can exert a bit of control over the owner.  We see a very similar theme repeated in Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle.  While I do not personally believe that Paoilini or Rowling stole ideas, I do think that this goes a long way toward proving the point that few ideas are ever really original.  Wondering if anyone else saw the similarities, I Googled a bit and came upon a statement made by Le Guin in which she states, “could have been more gracious about her predecessors. My incredulity was at the critics who found the first book wonderfully original. She has many virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. That hurt.”

Ouch.

I give The Wizard of Earthsea a 4.25/5.  I liked Earthsea and recommend it to adults and children alike.  It is a good clean read.

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01/08/2012

Bujold’s Shards of Honor: Art Imitating Life

I finished listening to Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold this weekend.  I’d never heard of Bujold before Shards of Honor and I was excited to come upon such a prolific award winning female sci-fi author.  I wasn’t disappointed.

In brief, SOH follows the character of Captain Cordelia Naismith.  She, along with her crew, is on a survey expedition on an uncharted planet.  The camp is attacked Barryans (hope I said that right) and one man is killed.  Cordelia and one other crew member are left behind as the crew escapes.  Cordelia is taken captive by a Barryan named Vorkosigan who is also somehow left behind.  The story that stretches out from here includes political intrigue, mutiny, vendettas, weird blood-sucking vampire balloon creatures, galactic war, big brother type government control and paranoia, and even a subtle romance.  That’s a lot, but not too much.

The Vorkosigan Saga, of which SOH is only one of the books, is similar to the Foundations series by Asimov, in that an entire culture seems to have grown up around the explorations, colonization and settlement of people from Earth on other planets.  SOH is different from Foundations however, as it is less concerned with the foundations of these societies/civilizations including the hard science, and more concerned with the people within them.  This makes for a friendlier story for those people who find hard science fiction…hard.

I like the language Bujold uses in this book.  It is clean, direct, and is descriptive without choking up the forward motion of the story.  The dialogue is necessary and often witty.  I came to quickly care about these characters but even more significant, I came to understand them, and as such was able to anticipate what they would desire, or feel, or how they would act/react.

There were a few nuances that I looked for in this story that seemed missing, not the least of which were explanations of matters pertaining to race.  I’m not necessarily talking about race in human terms, but race in any term.  I may have misunderstood, but I initially thought Vorkosigan was non-human, until there was an obvious attraction between he and Cordelia and he asked her to marry him.  But then, there were subtle hints that while they might both be human, they might possibly be from different races, because when Cordelia’s crew comes to rescue her from a Barryar ship, she tells one of her crewmen that based on his appearance, he could not pass for a Barryan.

All of this aside, I am always curious in stories such as these, about the status of race in the future.  Specifically, if we can overcome them, and if there is any hope.  The same sentiment holds true for how I feel about matters of faith.  As we often look to our science fiction as a guide for scientific advancement, life imitating art, I often look to science fiction and fantasy as a hope-filled window into what our futures might be.

I did appreciate Bujold’s handling of cultural differences.  Vorkosigan comes from a clearly defined patriarchal heritage which depends on strict adherence to matters of class and station.  The Barryar people are also warriors, sort of watered down Klingons.  Cordelia comes from a less formal culture, much like ours.  In fits of anger, she gives Vorkosigan an earful about what she thinks of his barbaric culture.  Cordelia later comes to understand and sympathize with some of the Barryar eccentricities and in the end leaves her home world of Beta to live on Barryar, becoming fully entrenched in their way of life.

All in all, I thought that SOH was a fantastic read, one I think is worth listening to a second time so that I can pick up on the plot points I feel certain I missed.  I give this story a 4/5.

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12/25/2011

Sircarius: Behind the Character – An Interview With Lindsay Buroker

Lindsay Buroker: Thanks for having me on your blog, Khaalidah! A Sicarius-centric interview sounds fun. I’ll see if I can answer without giving away any spoilers here. Any fantasy-loving readers who stumble across this and haven’t read the books can grab The Emperor’s Edge for free right now. And I hope folks will stop by my official fantasy author blog too.

Khaalidah: Every time I read a scene featuring Sicarius, I get excited.  Right now, I am almost halfway through Dark Currents, the second book in the Emperor’s Edge series.  Unlike many sequels, this one is proving to be just as interesting and edgy as the first.   The crew, Books, Maldynado, Akstyr, Basilard, Sicarius, and Amaranthe are trying to solve a case and hopefully clear their names.  I’ll give no spoilers. In Dark Currents we’re getting to know the characters better this time around.  The only person whose motivations and interests continue to remain unclear is Sicarius’s.  I’ll admit right off that Sicarius is by far my favorite character.  Initially I couldn’t put my finger on why, but then I had a recent epiphany and I realized that I like Sicarius because he reminds me of another character that I totally enjoy.  Spock.

1. Sicarius’s first appearance wasn’t in Emperor’s Edge, but another of your novels called Encrypted.  He was a teen in that story, so I’m guessing he is about twenty or so years older in Emperor’s Edge.  Did you know when writing Encrypted that Sicarius would eventually appear in other works?

Chronologically speaking, yes, Sicarius’s first appearance is in Encrypted, but I actually wrote The Emperor’s Edge first. I hadn’t originally intended to use any of the same characters in the two stories, because they were supposed to be stand-alone novels. (At the time, I was thinking that I’d go the traditional publishing route, and conventional wisdom there says not to write in a series, because if you can’t sell the first one, there’s no point in having a second.)

I was about two thirds of the way into Encrypted when I decided to add a messenger from the emperor to further complicate things for the protagonists. Well, I already had this assassin lurking around the empire, and I figured I could make the math work out nicely (Sicarius was young and still a touch impressionable in Encrypted, and that was important in the end).

I’d also, in Emperor’s Edge, given Sicarius a strange, alien knife, and I figured the events in Encrypted would be the perfect way to explain its existence.

I think it ended up being a fun treat for those who read the EE books first and then gave Encrypted a try. Sicarius, despite being more of a villain than a hero, has quite a few fans.

2. Sicarius turns out to be quite a talented man.  In Emperor’s Edge, besides proving he is supremely stealthy and deadly, he surprises us by being able to draw well, and he gives some insight as to his education.  Did this talent evolve as a plot device or was this a talent you’d given to him from the start?

Actually I teased the plot around to show off his drawing skills. And it’s no coincidence that we see Sespian’s architectural drawings early on. I wanted there to be hints throughout the story, so it didn’t come out of nowhere at the end when Amaranthe took a guess at Sicarius’s relationship to Sespian.

And, yes, he’s a little superhuman. Since we’re going to be talking Star Trek here, he’s meant to be Khan-esque. Of course, it’s a steam-era setting, and there’s nothing exactly like genetic engineering, but Hollowcrest and the old emperor did some selective breeding when they were having Sicarius conceived. And then they trained the heck out of him so he’d be good at everything that could come in useful for an assassin infiltrating other countries.

He’s honestly kind of a Gary Stu character (too perfect), but I don’t think folks have minded, maybe because he’s not the hero. In fact, he’s a force the heroine (Amaranthe) has to figure out how to work with, and ultimately he remains a little unpredictable and dangerous, even to her. (I’m writing the fourth book right now, he’s going to make a choice that gets her in serious trouble.)

3. I’m almost at the half way mark in Dark Currents, and I don’t want to give away any spoilers for those who aren’t completely caught up with the series, but will we ever get the true story behind who Sicarius is, how he grew up, and why he was trained to be an assassin?

More or less (hm, I gave some of that way in the last answer!). I’ve been letting a little more about his past out in each of the books.

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a story that’s set during his youth, and showing some of what he endured growing up, but it’s hard for me to write stories without humor and dialogue (silly banter between characters, oh, yes!). That’s difficult to do without a lighter character around to balance out Sicarius’s taciturn nature. In Book 4, we’ll meet someone who was involved with one aspect of his training, though, so maybe we’ll get a few more details that way.

4. There is some mention, mostly at the end of Emperor’s Edge and some during Dark Currents that estimate Sicarius’s age, mostly in reference to his relationship with the young emperor.  Do we know or will we ever find out exactly how old he is?  Also, will we ever learn the details behind his surprising relationship with the emperor?

Yeah, people have to do some math to figure it out, heh. He’s thirty-six, thirty-seven in the EE books.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever give more details about how that relationship came to exist than are on the page in EE2 (Dark Currents), but we’ll get some more on how Sicarius got fired and what exactly happened to the old emperor to cause Sespian to inherit the throne so young.

5. As I’ve already mentioned, Sicarius totally puts me in the mind of Spock from Star Trek TOS, and to a lesser extent Worf from Star Trek TNG and DS9.  Mind you, Spock is certainly not a trained killer, as is Sicarius, but there is this literalist intelligence that I think both share.  It’s Sicarius’s stoic demeanor that I find attractive in a character because there is always this sense that there is a mystery just beneath the surface.  What were your inspirations for Sicarius?  Was he a difficult or easy character to draw out?

Sicarius is definitely a logical and controlled guy, but, like Spock, when he slips, you get a glimpse of his humanity and the raw emotion behind that careful façade. He’s intelligent, but he was also indoctrinated to be loyal to the throne and to carry out orders to the letter, so free thinking and creativity weren’t encouraged. That’s where Amaranthe comes in (maybe she’s Captain Kirk to his Spock, though she doesn’t sleep around with green-skinned people…)

As for inspirations, I don’t really remember. Most of the EE crew have been roaming around in my head for ten years or more (for me, it was a long path to getting “serious” about writing and finishing and polishing novel-length adventures), and Sicarius has probably changed the least over the years. He’s one of those rare characters that pop into your head fully formed.

I did love Spock when I was a kid, so maybe there’s some of that in there, and I also had a fascination with ancient Greece at one point and read everything I could find on the Spartans. Sicarius probably came out of that, though obviously there are a lot of uber-soldier type characters out there, too, so I wasn’t doing anything original with him. One choice I did specifically make, that’s perhaps a little different from the norm, was not to have him turn out to be a good guy underneath it all. He’s not a sadist, but he’s never going to develop an altruistic streak either.

Readers might be interested to know that the first novel I wrote with the EE characters had Sicarius as the leader of the group, and Amaranthe didn’t even exist yet in my mind. That was the first story I ran through a workshop, and a couple of readers hated Sicarius. As I’ve said, he really is more of a villain than a hero, so I think it works much better now where he’s not the protagonist and we have a more sympathetic hero (heroine) to guide us through the story. At first, I just added Amaranthe to the group, but things got more interesting when I decided to make her the leader.

6. I know that you are currently working on EE4, which is exciting.  How many do you have planned?

I have six books planned, mostly because that’s the number it will take to let every side character have a chance at being a secondary POV character. I plan to wrap up the Forge-as-villain story arc by the end of the sixth and have some sort of resolution with Sespian and Sicarius, and also with Amaranthe and Sicarius.

I haven’t decided if all of the characters are going to make it through to the end, but I hope to leave things open in case I’d like to do more stories in the future. I’ll probably take a break and work on something else after Book 6 though. Some folks have let me know that they’d dearly like a sequel to Encrypted, and I have an urban fantasy series idea percolating in the back of my mind too. I also have a rough draft of a novel with my goblin heroes (middle grade fantasy) that I’d like to get back to at some point.

I obviously need to write faster!

7. Do you have plans to write any stories in which Sicarius is the protagonist?

He’ll be the secondary POV character in Book 6, so that’ll be, at least in part, his story. I’m not quite sure how I’ll write him, but spending time inside his head should be an interesting challenge.

I do have an old short story from Sicarius’s point of view that takes place when Sespian is about five, and I’ve been trying to locate that. I think it’s on a computer that’s defunct at the moment. If I can find it, I might put it out there for folks, if only as a freebie on my website.

8. I noticed on your website a picture of Sicarius drawn by one of your fans.  It was pretty good.  How does it feel to have fans drawing interpretations of your characters?

It’s very cool. I can’t draw myself, so I love seeing what people come up with. I’ve only been at this a year, but I’ve already had fan art and lots of nice letters from folks, along with a couple of people asking if they could write fan fiction. Someone even made a role-playing-game setting based on the Emperor’s Edge world.

These are the sorts of things I knew happened for traditionally published authors that have been in the biz for years and have a huge fan base. As a self-published author, I wasn’t expecting anything like that, so it’s been a very cool surprise.

9. Lastly, if I may, I’d like to direct this last question to Sicarius himself.  What of all the things in the world do you want?  Why?

I tried to talk Sicarius into answering this for you, but, alas, I lack Amaranthe’s gifted tongue. His response was simply to stand there and stare at you without a word…

Thanks Lindsay for agreeing to this Sircarius-centric interview.  I like that word.  This interview has given great insight into the man and your process, not to mention it was just plain fun having you here.  Sircarius is by far my favorite character but by no means the only interesting one in the EE series.  I hope I can have you back again one day.  

Happy reading and happy writing.

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12/10/2011

The Currents of Space: The Real Parallels of Race, Class, Culture, and Economics

*No real spoilers, so please do read.*

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Asimov, an absolute science fiction great, is genius in his ability to remain timely with The Currents of Space, nearly 60 years after it was published.  He has successfully woven a comprehensive and complex tale that weaves a valid story that features so many aspects such as politics, race and class, economics, love and loyalty, psychology, and good ‘ole basic human weakness.  You’d think that with all of that, The Currents of Space would be a heavy read.  Surprisingly, it isn’t, another testament to Asimov’s writing prowess.

I recommend it to anyone to read, including teens and adults.  If my ten year old could handle the political stuff, I’d give it to her to read too.

The Currents of Space was published in 1952.  This is the most astonishing point to me, as some of the insights into racial/cultural/class issues are ahead of their time, written with an understanding that comes from someone who might never have had to suffer the injustices he writes about with such fluency and sympathetic understanding.

Florina is a planet renown for growing kyrt, a product used to make clothing that only the most privileged can afford to wear.  The native Florinians, fair-skinned and typically blond and blue-eyed are the “slave” labor used to produce kyrt.  The Florinians are considered stupid and child-like.  The Sarks, a ruling class that originates from the planet of Sark and has colonized Florina, benefits most from the production of kyrt.  Kyrt cannot be successfully grown on any other planet, for reasons we don’t learn until the end of the novel, hence making it an even more valuable commodity.

The distinct parallels between our regrettable history of slavery, racism, and classism as compared to the lives of those in this book is significant.  Kyrt=cotton.  Florinians=Africans.  Sarks=the wealthy.  None of this however, is astonishing.  The elements which captured and surprised me were Asimov’s insights into real human motivations, and how he was able to use this insight to create believable sympathetic characters…on both side of the divide.  Actually, I should say on all sides of every division.  As in real life, there really is no black and white, but instead multiple shades of gray.

The Currents of Space ends in that ever gray area, which is much more akin to real life.  In other words, while there may be some elements of redemption, there are no true winners and everyone loses something.  Nevertheless, the conclusion was a satisfying one.

When I took a political science course in college many years ago, I had to read Orwell’s Animal Farm.  While an interesting read, I think that this book would have been even better as a unique fictional entre into the world of politics and issues of class and race.  It would have been a tad more relatable in any case as here, we are dealing with actual human beings.

I didn’t know, until I started writing this review that The Currents of Space is actually the second book in a trilogy called The Galactic Empire series.  The preceding book is called The Stars, Like Dust, and the succeeding book is called Pebble in the Sky.  I’ll have to dig up the other two and get to reading those as well.

There is only one other science fiction book that I have read, with similar elements, that I liked as much, actually better, and that would be Robert Heinlein’s, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I give this one 5 stars.

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12/07/2011

An Unproductive Woman – Chapter 1

Today Fatima will arrive. She will be the new wife, the one who will give Adam the son that Asabe had not.

Asabe was in the kitchen, preparing food for the walimah. She privately prayed the new wife would not arrive. Already Fatima was quite late, two hours. Perhaps Asabe’s prayers would be answered, and she would be left alone with Adam. Perhaps not.

Adam’s agenda, though, was quite the opposite of Asabe’s.

Adam stood beneath the cool winter sun at the end of the walk near the wire fence that surrounded his property.  Adam shielded his eyes as he stared down the road for signs of an approaching vehicle in a billow of sepia colored dust.

Adam had never seen the woman who was to be his bride. However, he had in his possession one of her photographs, taken five years earlier when she was only nine years old. The photo revealed a thin girl, the color of sweet cinnamon with eyes large enough to drink up the world. She was awkward looking then; but now, Adam reasoned, she’d be a ripe young flower on the very threshold of her bloom. A woman. His bride. Adam was eager to compare the real face of his bride with the face he’d held in his heart for months. His eyes never wavered from the road in the distance.

Adam had never intended to take a second wife; he’d promised Asabe. That was before he knew that she would not give him a son. No children at all.

Even a whining girl would have been better than nothing.

“I’ve found the girl I intend to marry,” Adam announced two months prior. “I know that you do not want me to marry again, but I must. If it disturbs you, if you find it too painful, I will divorce you if you like; but I know of no other man who would want an unproductive woman.”

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12/04/2011

The Things That Drive You

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. -
William Shakespeare

I suppose many writers feel like I sometimes do, chronic manic-depressive, muddle-headed, confused.  There are days when I have so many ideas, and I simply want to kick myself for not having the immediate wisdom or time to get these visions down on paper before they are lost.  I often wonder where those thoughts go, that character that pops up and starts to tell a story but is gone with the wind before finishing the tale.  Do they go to some junk heap in an imaginary world?

I am rambling, I think, but that’s because I am utterly giddy at the fact that my muse, that intangible bundle of ideas and passion, has returned.  Last year, about the same time, October-ish I had a similar lapse in creativity, and I think it actually lasted longer, likely in part to some personal difficulties.  It’s bad enough to lose the spark, but to heap on additional troubles?  A little angst might lend me the passion to write, but too much makes everything grind to a halt.  Beside, speaking strictly for myself, any writing I do while angst driven ends up being dribble anyway.

In any case, this time I kept my head and my heart busy.  I tried to renew my relationship with God.  This keeps me grounded, keeps me thinking straight, and making choices for the right reasons.  I also listened to a lot of books on my iPod, which kept the ideas flowing.  I forgave myself for not producing, which took the weight off my back.  Lastly, I recently ordered a Kindle.  I realized one day that it had actually been a long time since I’d read a book.  You know, words on paper or, as we’re in the 21st century, a screen.  The Kindle seemed like just the thing, and I’m loving it.

What do you do the recapture your muse?

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