Posts in the "Uncategorized" Category

• GUESS THE TRUE FACT AND GET ENTERED! … INTO A GIVEAWAY!

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  To celebrate the release of my debut, No Return – which occurred on March 5th — I’m giving away a signed and inscribed hardcover copy to one lucky individual (from anywhere in the world) who guesses the correct answer to the question below. (Also check out Roger Bellini’s similar giveaway of my book here! I believe you have one more day to enter that one.)

  So… in the comments, just state your guess by next Wednesday (March 27th), and if you’re right you’ll be entered into the random drawing! You may — MAY! — get an extra pass into the drawing if you say something amusing or simply insulting in defense of your choice.

  Here goes…

  Which one of the following ten statements about me is true?

  1. My pet capuchin monkey has not one but two third nipples… which I guess would make only one a third nipple and the other a fourth nipple. Still. I like saying that he has two third nipples. It’s, I don’t know, cuter or something.

  2. I don’t celebrate Christmas.

  3. In early 2008, I wrote a short story about a little girl with a strange power that gave her control over crustaceans. It was called “The Girl What Oystered.” It won the Nebula Award for Best Undersea Story, a category only offered that year.

  4. I’m an absolute idiot for sitcoms from the 80s and 90s. I’ve seen every episode of Cheers and Frasier dozens and dozens of times. I often eat a 6,000 to 10,000 calorie meal while watching an hour of television I’ve literally seen on 40 other occasions.

  5. Since the age of 19, I’ve only held two jobs. From 1999-2007, I worked for a company that sells edible mushroom-growing kits. From 2008-on, I’ve been an insurance salesman, selling piece of mind to people who fear what the apocalypse will result in massive flooding of their basements. With blood.

  6. When I was a kid, my brother shot me in the thigh with an arrow. It got infected and I was in the hospital for about two weeks, nearly losing my leg in the process. As a result, I have a deathly fear of arrows and any other long pieces of wood with feathers attached.

  7. No Return is actually not my debut novel. I’ve written several others under my real name, Nathanial Penisburg. They are all about mutants with three nipples who get shot by arrows. Grim, grim stuff. Also, unicorns.

  8. I hate taking baths, especially with a glass of wine and a book. Soaking in my own filth? Sooooooo not me.

  9. My least favorite author in the world is Roger Zelazny. Despite a few comparisons that have been made between my own work and his, I find his prose to be pretentious and his characters to be entirely lacking in originality. I’m insulted immensely by the comparison, in fact. Now, if someone thought I wrote like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., I could die a happy man.

  10. I think that books with explicit sex scenes should be labeled. And then burned.

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• Action and Fight Scenes

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  When I begged for a topic online (I’m shit for coming up with topics) someone mentioned action and fight scenes. I’m down with that. I love writing some action and fight scenes! And it’s not even on my own day! Woot!!

  First a bit on my philosophy in employing action and fighting as a device:

  • Action and fight scenes are primarily OBSTACLES. They often aren’t even indicative of the major conflict but are there to stand in the way of the protagonist getting what s/he wants.
  • Thy often are FORESHADOWING. In a book I just finished, there is a fight scene between my antagonist and protagonist early on. That foreshadows their conflict and what is to come. It does a bunch of other things, too, actually: makes the antagonist and protagonist curious about each other and gives them a reason to resent each other. It builds tension between them. They don’t know each other and sparing puts them in conflict, even vaguely friendly conflict, right off. This doesn’t work with every character, but with my particular characters, this fight was the best way to launch their relationship.
  • Fight scenes need lots of other things happening to work as the CLIMAX. I think it’s fine to use action and fight scenes as climactic scenes, but it’s worth noting that at the end of the climax, most of the other issues had better be resolved.
  • It’s boring when your fighter is SO GOOD s/he can’t be beat. It’s not a crime for your hero to run away in the middle of the book.
  • Real fights are quick and deadly and messy, especially close fights, like with a knife, especially if your fighter is good. If a fight goes on longer than a page or two, I’d better have a damn good reason.

  Keep the fighter’s skill commiserate with their practice. Even Neo had to download the apps.

  As far as actual blocking of scenes, don’t write every blow. First, you’re probably not competent enough to describe every blow, all the feints, defensive maneuvers, shifting of weight, balance, forms, etc. (I’ve certainly never fought with a sword though I’ve seen lots of fights in the SCA and on film). But mostly, writing every blow is as boring as writing about each button when someone gets dressed. Like in sex scenes (also action scenes, btw) too much specific action kills the tension.

  That said, the specific blows and actions you do employ had better count and they had better be right. Well-placed detail lends credence and guides the reader, so get up and move. Block scenes out with someone. Use Barbies or  kids or whatever. Make sure your choreography is physically possible. Fights involve a lot of physics, especially a sword fight. If someone is outreached, they have to work out ways to work around it. If the opponent is taller or heavier, how does your protagonist defeat him or her? Everyone makes mistakes; is your fighter good enough to spot them? Or will s/he miss opportunities?

  It’s also a  good idea to get some help from a professional. I have two reference people who know fighting: one who is a swordsman and another who is a fight expert. They are my go-to when it’s time to write action and fighting. You’ll see me ask the hive mind from time to time, especially when it comes to weapons. I take it for granted that I don’t know. And if I do know, then I’m probably re-purposing an old scene without realizing it.

  I treat action scenes as learning opportunities.

  (Really, that’s how I treat all of writing.)

  (Which sounds totally pretentious, y’all. My apologies.)

  Action is…active. It’s heavy breathing, adrenalin, and roaring blood; grunts and cries; sore muscles; fear and its close cousin hate; blood and sweat. Fighting is messy and loud. Hurt and dying people scream and beg. If you cut someone’s throat from the front, there’s no escaping the blood. You’re going to taste it. When someone dies their bowels and bladder void.  The scent of too much blood and bowels makes us physically ill. Action stinks. It tastes bad. It makes even hardened warriors throw up. And if they do, or if they don’t, what does it mean to your character? I think action scenes work best when they concentrate on CHARACTER. I approach fights and action scenes with MOOD, which is driven and shown by SENSATION and REACTION, which is intrinsically linked to your character. It’s a neat little circle there…

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• Writing, er, Characters

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  Since Michael wrote about being a guy writing female characters last week, I thought I’d tackle being a woman writing male characters this week. Cuz I write a lot of them. Except, as you’ll see, the post became more about not writing female characters…

  I write lots of male characters. It gets awkward sometimes. I mean, I’m a female fantasy writer in 2013, right? Hell,  I’m supposed to see misogyny around every corner, and I’m supposed to metaphorically pump my Woman Power Fist within my fiction. Ha ha, I jest…kind of…not.  Sigh.

  Sometimes the pressure on writers, particularly female writers, in spec fic is intense. There’ve never been enough well-written female characters in fantasy, and I’m a female so I’d better damn well have some Strong Female Characters. While I’m a story-focused rather than issue-focused writer, such discussions are one of the things I love about our genre. It makes me think. (Scary. Dangerous. And worthwhile, I hope.)

  Because of the heavily male-populated book I’m working on now, my habit of writing male characters is something I’ve spent a lot of time mulling over recently. Why so many dudes? Is it because I’m accustomed to worlds, fantasy and real, where males have all the power? Do I somehow believe in some god(s)-given inequality between the sexes? Am I somehow wrong, as a woman, to not consider sexism/feminism a passionate issue? Am I gleefully naive,  blind to misogyny?

  Um, no.

  I finally worked out that for me it’s foremost a personal/personality thing. I have brothers. I have lots of male friends. I have a husband I adore. When I’m at a party, I tend to gravitate to the men rather than the women. I like hanging out with the guys. It’s not a new thing; my friends in high school were all male, probably because when I was in high school, back in the Dark Ages, more guys than girls were geeks. I fit in with them better. So when I gravitate toward writing male characters in my fiction I’m just doing the same thing I do in real life.

  And it’s not like I don’t have female characters in my books. Strong ones, actually… I don’t tend to think of male or female characters as bringing their particular gender-related experiences to the table or spend much time concentrating on gender at all.  I just “see” characters–more often than not they’re male–and I build stories and worlds around them.

  But still, the question of quantity nags. I wonder if my female characters are small enough in number to be called “token.”

  Out of curiosity, I did a quick count on my EXILE character list: out of twenty-eight named characters, ten are female. I don’t consider that too off since one of the cultures, about a third of the named characters, is blatantly sexist.

  But then, one of my unsold books have only four named female characters, and while they’re strong, they certainly are outnumbered. Why can’t my collection of “soldiers” in that story include women? Well…it could. But it’s simply not the world I built. I think it would feel forced. And frankly, while the book is about a great many things, it’s not about gender equality. All books cannot be all things to all people.

  Honestly, to date, the men do highly outnumber the women in my fiction, like it does in a lot of fiction. I can’t speak for othher writers, but for my experience, I think it might be because I feel outnumbered by men. Though humanity is divided fairly evenly, our culture, our world, our government, our genre is so male dominated it feels strange and contrived to even up the odds. And that, to me, is the real reason to write more strong female characters. It’s certainly something I’ll be thinking about in future as I people my books.

  Because really, I’d rather talk plain old genderless “Writing Strong Characters.”

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• Things I Learned About Science from Popular Entertainment

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  We don’t appear to have an assigned topic here in The Night Bazaar this week. But if you checked in hoping for a little something from me, I don’t want to disappoint you. What follows isn’t new (in fact, I included it in my ebook collection The Q Word and Other Stories), but I would venture a guess that many of you haven’t seen it. I hope you enjoy it. Just for the record, it’s Copyright 2009 Richard Lee Byers.

  THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT SCIENCE FROM POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT

  There are five kinds of scientific experiment (although occasionally research can fall into multiple categories):

  1. Mad. Mad experiments are undertaken purely to demonstrate that the experimenter has figured out how to do something no sensible person wants to do, like snuff out the sun, or melt everybody’s eyeballs. The distinguishing characteristic of a mad experiment is that there is no hope of a positive outcome for anyone, even the experimenter.

  2. Evil. Evil experiments are undertaken for antisocial but comprehensible reasons, like conquering the world, or exacting a gruesome revenge on those who played a cruel prank on the experimenter back in high school. Gadgets like death rays and mind control helmets often fall into this category unless developed to counter a clear and present danger like an extraterrestrial invasion.

  We should note that the distinction between mad and evil research may depend on context. If Lex Luthor tries to turn all humans into apes, we may well view that as mad. But if Grodd, who is an ape, attempts the same thing, we may discern a practical, albeit diabolical, reason for his actions.

  3. Reckless. Reckless research is conducted for worthy ends, but with insufficient attention to safety. Often the researcher has personal issues that convince him speed is paramount. “My wife is dying! So you bet I’m going to inject her with my untested serum of shark and vampire bat DNA! What’s the worst that could happen?”

  4. Unlucky. Unlucky experiments seem like they ought to be safe, but have disastrous outcomes anyway. You could try to develop the next generation of ShamWow and create a black hole. You could look through a telescope at a strange celestial object and get irradiated with an entirely new form of energy that turns you into the Amazing Antimatter Man. Sometimes these things just happen.

  5. Miraculous Breakthrough. The experimenter who makes a miraculous breakthrough leaps far ahead of current science and technology to achieve the seemingly impossible. He may, for example, build a faster-than-light spaceship when no one else has even worked out how to send a manned mission to Mars.

  Miraculous breakthroughs are most often accomplished by eccentric mavericks, especially those scorned by their colleagues. They also tend to occur in primitive and adverse circumstances. Some may wonder how Tony Stark could construct his first suit of Iron Man armor in a cave, with his injured heart giving out and terrorists threatening to kill him. But in fact, conditions were ideal.

  *

  The most difficult and important scientific problems are solved through the power of crude analogies.

  When something calamitous is occurring, like a breakdown in the structure of space-time, the government is likely to assemble a crack team of geniuses to save the day. These Nobel Prize winners tackle the problem with higher math, advanced technology, and all the other tools of their esoteric disciplines. Still, little progress can be made until an Everyman type finds his way to the research facility, listens to a brief explanation of the crisis, and then says something on the order of: “So you’re saying…space-time is like an onion!” This prompts the scientists to consider the problem in a whole new way and ultimately points to the solution.

  It helps if the Everyman has made a perilous cross-country journey prior to reaching the research facility, and if only hours or minutes remain before the developing threat progresses to a point where absolutely nothing can stop it.

  *

  Slow, careful remedies never work, but fortunately, they don’t have to.

  Scientists often plan to avert an impending disaster by doing something like meticulously placing charges, then setting them off at just the right moment and in just the right sequence. The purpose may be to knock an asteroid off its trajectory and so keep it from hitting the earth, or to start the planet’s core rotating again. Whatever it is, the scientists always agree that the fix must be applied with flawless precision.

  One can never predict whether it will be a meteor shower, a crewman falling prey to psychosis, or some other difficulty, but something always happens to keep the team from executing the plan in its original form. Instead, they find themselves reduced to detonating the bombs (or doing whatever) fast, by dead reckoning, at the last possible instant. Happily, this turns out to work every bit as well as relying on timers and computers.

  *

  If a machine can make something happen, it can make it unhappen.

  A good example of this is the machine Reed Richards builds in the first Fantastic Four movie to restore Ben Grimm’s humanity. When Ben decides he still needs his super-strength, he hits the button, steps back into the box, and presto, he’s the Thing again.

  You can observe the same principle at work in your kitchen, by using your oven or microwave to cook food, then make it raw again.

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• On writing compelling female characters

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  Since we don’t have a topic this week, I thought I’d continue our Night Bazaar trend of riffing on controversial, no-win topics. That’s how we roll, apparently.

  I saw an article in The Atlantic over the weekend, titled “The Mixed Results of Male Authors Writing Female Characters,” which basically states that men have difficulty writing realistic female protagonists. I noted it on Twitter, which led to some discussion on there with a couple of fellow (white male) writers, which left me feeling somewhat daunted.

  Personally, I would find it distressing to have my writing be deemed sexist in its portrayals of women. Yet I would be the first to admit that the kind of books I enjoy – and the kind of book I wrote in The Daedalus Incident – are typically written by men, with a very male-centric point of view.

  Nevertheless, one of my two main protagonists is a woman – and a woman of color, no less – and  several supporting characters are women. This was a very conscious decision on my part, an attempt to bring some gender equality to historical fantasy and space opera where, if we’re being honest, it often can be lacking.

  Until I really joined the diverse community of writers online, I didn’t have a great deal of knowledge of the challenges facing women authors, nor how those challenges were discussed and addressed, both in fiction and in life. It’s been an educational experience.  Flipping through my new copies of Daedalus recently, I couldn’t help but weigh my characters in the light of this article, my experiences of late, and portrayals of women in general.

  I have two settings in Daedalus – a Martian mining colony in 2132, and the sailing-ships-in-space thing set in 1779. The former is very much our realistic future, one in which I would hope women are treated better than they are today. The colony’s commander is a woman, as is her acting second-in-command, the aforementioned protagonist. In writing them, I viewed them as people first. Their gender wasn’t an afterthought, but I made the decision to make this era better, in terms of gender relations, than ours.

  The 1779 setting was very different, because in that historical period, women had exceedingly few options in society, and generally were treated horribly. I feel that my lead female character in that setting is very much a creature of her time, and I suppose in retrospect, I may be accused of furthering the kind of tropes that period literature imposed on women.

  That was intentional, to a degree. One of the things I enjoyed about writing Daedalus was the juxtaposition of the two settings, and the treatment of women and their life-options is part of that. I would also say that my main character in the historical setting doesn’t settle for what’s given to her, and takes as much as she can in any way she can manage. While she may be somewhat typical of the depictions of women for the period, she is also smart, capable, and instrumental in the success of the crew of HMS Daedalus – something not usually seen in the fiction of the Age of Sail.

  I tried to write well-rounded human beings. Gender is part of that, and certainly the female characters in my work have opportunities and, more often, challenges that arise from their gender. I tried to address these as fairly as possible.

  In the end, I simply did my best to, as they say, check my privilege at the door and write honestly about people going through extraordinary things. That said, I find myself agreeing with this article. I’m a white male, and I have no idea what it’s like to be a woman, and especially a woman of color, in today’s world – or in the past or future for that matter.

  Hopefully, I did all right. My goal is to entertain, and I hope there’s enough there so that everyone, regardless of their gender or background, will find something to like. I also recognize that someone, somewhere, won’t like something about my female characters. And that’s fair; this isn’t intended to be an apology, just a recognition that if that’s the case, I fell down as a writer and, hopefully, not as a person.

  In closing, I would simply echo the last paragraph of The Atlantic piece, in which critic Sarah Seltzer says:

  “…writing across gender may be harder, require more research and humility. We may fail or get ‘called out’ for letting our biases show, or being ignorant. But the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.”

  That sounds like speculative fiction at its finest.

  Michael J. Martinez is the author of The Daedalus Incident, due out May 7. He blogs and engages in rampant self-promotion at www.michaeljmartinez.net and on Twitter at @mikemartinez72. He has two galley copies of his book in hand, and will likely give them away at some point, so stay tuned!

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• A (Vaguely) Political Defense of Sword-and-Sorcery

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  Blame Zeus. Him and all the other Greek gods who couldn’t keep it in their pants. (Okay, tunics.) Thanks to their philandering ways, most heroes and kings of classical myth had a divine parent or grandparent.

  Or blame Merlin. He engineered or at least endorsed the test of the Sword in the Stone to identify the Rightful King, the dude whose bloodline gives him the mojo to do what others can’t.

  Whoever you blame, a fair amount of modern fantasy reflects its ancient and medieval antecedents by positing that somebody is the Rightful King, and if we can just get that guy’s ass planted on the throne (which often involves kicking some kind of Dark Lord to the curb), the feudal system will run like a well-oiled machine and make everybody happy. Look how swell life was in Middle Earth with Aragorn calling the shots.

  I don’t mean to bash these stories. I’ve enjoyed many of them, The Lord of the Rings included. Still, it’s interesting how ready modern American fantasy fans, people who presumably think Jefferson, Adams, and that crowd were on to something with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are to embrace stories predicated on the archaic proposition that some folks, by virtue of lineage or divine favor, are meant to lead, and the rest of us are meant to follow.

  Maybe we simply enjoy the action, magic, monsters, and the trappings of romanticized medievalism without taking the story seriously on any level.

  Or perhaps all such stories actually work as iterations of the Hero’s Journey. They’re allegories about the development of the self or the soul, and we take them that way and not as commentary on political systems or other mundane aspects of the external world.

  Or it could even be there’s a streak of authoritarianism hardwired into human nature, and it’s got to come out somehow. Some Americans look up to the British Royals and feel aggrieved when they get up to shenanigans. Others of us, at least while we’re caught up in watching Jason and the Argonauts, buy into the notion that it will set the world right if Jason reclaims the crown of Thessaly. Because hey, it belonged to his dad.

  Anyway, no matter why we’re drawn to it, I’m not suggesting fantasy of Tolkien’s sort threatens to turn us all into monarchists. If it could, by now, a lifelong fan like me would probably be immersed in some Jacobite conspiracy. Or busy trying to convince the Russians that now that they’re over the whole Communism thing, they ought to scrounge up a living Romanov to run the show. Still, even if it’s harmless, I’m glad the entire genre doesn’t reflect this reactionary way of looking at the world.

  Thanks to pulp writers like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber (I know Leiber kept writing long after the pulps folded, but he started there), we also have good old gritty, often cynical, and occasionally downright nihilistic sword-and-sorcery, where antiheroes live and die according to purely personal codes and authority is typically hostile and corrupt. Even when a more benign social order holds sway, it’s clear there’s no fundamental moral principle at work in the universe to legitimize and maintain it. To the contrary. Life is cruel and chaotic, the structures men build to stave off the entropy are fragile, and the next barbarian horde or cunning would-be usurper is all too likely to sweep them away.

  Even though, as a marketing label, the term has lost some of its cachet, the fundamental sword-and-sorcery attitude is an approach to fantasy that’s still with us today. The protagonists inhabit the same sort of amoral world in Glen Cook’s “Black Company” novels and George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” sequence.

  People sometimes call works with Tolkien’s sensibility high fantasy and sword-and-sorcery low fantasy, with the implication that the latter is the inferior form. Maybe Joseph Campbell has persuaded them that fantasy should always recapitulate the Hero’s Journey, and the picaresque exploits of Conan and the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd stray from the designated route. Or, such critics may feel the purpose of fantasy is to deliver moral certainty and the triumph of Good over Evil, and when Elric of Melnibone leads a foreign fleet against his own homeland in order to rescue his girlfriend, ethically speaking, things get a little hazy.

  But just because a story asserts that absolute Good and Evil exist and a certain social hierarchy is a product of the former, that doesn’t make it inherently lofty of purpose and profound. It makes it dogmatic and authoritarian. And when a tale doesn’t trade in moral certainties and views authority with a skeptical eye, that doesn’t necessarily make it trivial or thoughtless. It makes it humanistic and democratic.

  The latter perspective is more consonant with my worldview, and my work reflects it. The protagonists of my “Brotherhood of the Griffon” series are mercenaries (which makes them morally compromised from the get-go) trying to ply their trade in accordance with their own notions of integrity while satisfying unreasonable and sometimes tyrannical employers. Though urban fantasy rather than the swords-and-castles kind I’ve been talking about up until now, Blind God’s Bluff features an outsider protagonist fighting to survive in a milieu where honesty and fairness are nonexistent and every authority figure poses a threat. If there’s even a happy ending possible, he’ll have to make it happen on his own.

  No matter how wild and crazy I get with the wizardry, demons, and whatnot, that darker kind of fantasy (low fantasy, if you must) just rings truer to me than The Lord of the Rings, Lord Foul’s Bane, or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. So it’s what I expect I’ll go on writing as the years roll by.

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• Politics and the Literature of the Fantastic

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  Here are a few things I’m not at all inclined toward reading: books with extended battle scenes, books that detail law enforcement and/or court procedures in depth, and books wherein long political struggles are outlined. Generally speaking, if a novel contains any of these things, I’ll more than likely miss a great deal of whatever the hell is going on. Even if I like the book overall, I’m often appallingly unclear about which legendary warrior died in which battle and which side he or she fought for, which space pirates got arrested and how they were prosecuted, and how many sorcerous dissenters were in whatever campaign to unseat the king or queen or president and what their names and political associations were.

  It’s the whole process, honestly — of war, of criminal justice, of politics — that aggravates me and simultaneously puts me to  sleep. I hate all the maneuvering, the counter- and counter-counter moves. I read science fiction and fantasy to get to know unique characters, to get to know mindbogglingly cool worlds and cultures, to become emotionally and intellectually invested in speculation, and though these aims can be achieved through any event, I strongly prefer events that are not so… protracted. Also, though I like intrigue and drama and all that, I find warring, policing, and politicking to bring out the most contemptibly aggressive (or passive-aggressive)  in characters. No, I’m not much for the hardened-but-honorable soldier or the psychotically plotting general, the crooked cop or the disillusioned DA, and I’m particularly unsympathetic toward any character scheming for political advancement.

  Yes: you’d be safe in assuming I’ve never even been tempted to begin A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m sure it’s good — I know too many awesome people who love it to discount it — but I’m pretty sure a great deal of the series is involved with political scheming. (And wars, and criminals…)

  Of course, I’m not trying to be simplistic: there is more to politics than obvious political action. There are overt tracts of whatever political stripe one can imagine in sff, many of which have been mentioned this week. There are also more subtle works whose political content is harder to discern — whose persuasion is best grasped holistically, and often seems to stand at odds with the words and actions of the characters. This latter kind of narrative, which I think requires more of the reader, which often feels (or in reality is) ambiguous, which does not argue with the reader but suggests interpretations, is by far my favorite form of political work.

  What’s funny/sad is that, because of my general simple-mindedness and disinclination toward political content, it’s safe to say I’ve read a great many books and barely noticed there was something political going on. I think I’m far better at examining relationships than I am at understanding the economic structures that surely inform them. I know that China Mieville, for instance, is a socialist of a particular stripe (as am I), but I couldn’t have told you that from my reading of his work. Though I’m glad to know his political convictions are informing his work, I just don’t have the mind for easily eeking out such content.

  Hmm. Thinking on this, a few questions slowly occur to me…

  Could I call No Return (my debut novel, which you should totally buy) a political work? If so, what is the message? Does it reflect my (perpetually inchoate) socialistic leanings?

  Well, yeah, I suppose — to the first question. (Though that’s not saying much. Is there such a thing as an unpolitical work? Probably not.) I certainly don’t think I hit the reader over the head with it, but there’s no denying that my choice not to concern myself with royalty or other political leaders, and to only touch lightly upon matters of advancement within the ranks of the Outbound Mages (a group of astronauts who use alchemical means to reach orbit), says something about my priorities. No Return, clearly, is not a work wherein I concerned myself with the stratagems of leaders. If anything, I avoided making definitive statements about leadership, either benevolent or malevolent.

  This, of course, doesn’t mean I have no political message to convey. I am writing, very consciously, a form of moral fiction — a narrative that attempts to show the wages of uncompassionate acts. For me, this is a fundamental part of my fiction; I hope it is an unavoidable takeaway of reading the words I’ve written. I’m not engaged, at least in my own mind, in conveying an adventure, first and foremost. I’m trying to get at the core of how individuals contribute to society in a positive way. It is not enough, in this life and in my fiction, for a person to assume they are good people. It must be questioned, again and again, proven and disproven and proven again. I’d like to think I demand much of my characters — just as much is demanded of every person in a free society.

  As to whether it reflects my own political ideology, I’d hope that it doesn’t say much more than what I’ve outlined above: that individuals are a part of society, and that it is important to be engaged in the process of bettering it, first and foremost by guaranteeing that people are not crushed under anyone’s boot or iron fist.

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• Politics and SF/F: Like peanut butter and chocolate

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  Finally, an “easy” one. At least compared to religion!

  The question of politics in SF/F is a bit of a gimme, frankly, because this is where genre fiction seems to feel right at home. Some of the best politically themed fiction ever has come from SF/F, and that really helps counter the whole notion that genre fiction can’t be “literature.” (That’s one of my big pet peeves, actually, but that’s another blog post.)

  One could argue that Thomas More’s Utopia, which dates back to 1516, was the first fantasy dealing expressly with politics, as More placed his ideal society on a made-up island in the New World. The classics of the fantasy genre – hello, Tolkien and Lewis, and even Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – all had political overtones.

  And as for science-fiction, well…let’s face it, sci-fi and politics were made for each other. Especially when radical ideas could get you ostracized, arrested or even killed, couching them in fantastical stories about high-technology, planetary warfare and future societies was a safe way to get the point across. Even going back to the forefathers of sci-fi, guys like Verne and Wells, you see a great deal of societal and political commentary there.

  To me, though, genre’s political standard-bearers will always be Orwell and Huxley. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Brave New World were required reading for me in middle school, if I remember correctly. In the face of the Great Depression, World War II’s horrors and the atmosphere of fear that shrouded the Cold War, these two guys really knocked it out of the park. When folks are afraid, they often seek reactionary measures to go back to the “good old days.” That, as Weimar Germany shows, can lead to a very dark place. Orwell and Huxley showed the end result of that impulse in its extreme.

  (As a bit of a sidebar here, one could argue that conservatives are taken to task in genre fiction far more than liberals. There may even be truth to that, especially today. But at the extreme edge of the political spectrum, the far-left and far-right tend to meet together in one ugly totalitarian mess anyway. So let’s not get into that so much.)

  My one knock on politics in genre fiction is that it’s rarely nuanced. Indeed, as time has gone on, fictional politics has gotten even more extreme – all these dystopias in today’s genre fiction had to come from some kind of political breakdown, after all. We almost never see the kind of political horse-trading we get in, say, the film Lincoln, which actually made the legislative process seem interesting. (And fantastical, as said process actually worked….) Instead, most genre fiction gives us a lot of evil empires and utopian societies, with very little in between.

  In our most likely future, the Earth is not about to enter into some socialist utopia, nor a deregulated capitalist free-for-all. Chances are, there’s no golden age ahead – not because we suck, but because all the alleged golden ages we site throughout history weren’t really that golden to those who lived through them. Even in the best of times, there’s always something to complain about, something to cheer and something that could stand improving. That’s politics.

  I would love to see politics dealt with more subtlety, and chances are I’ve missed a few books that have done so well. Not that I want to see something like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, mind you. Rather, something where politicians are faced with competing interests which both have valid concerns, and must navigate through to a solution while still keeping an eye out for their own careers.

  Oh, and with aliens.

  Michael J. Martinez is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Daedalus Incident, coming from Night Shade Books on May 7. He blogs at www.michaeljmartinez.net, Tweets at @mikemartinez.72, lives and works around the New York City area, and drinks only fine craft beers. He already has his publishing-day beer picked out: the 2006 Monster Ale from Brooklyn Brewery.

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• The end of the Trifecta: Politics

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  Draken is better at politics than he thinks.

  Around the time of my first reading of Narnia, I heard something that always stuck with me: The President isn’t allowed to keep any of the gifts he’s given during his Presidency. It didn’t really make sense; at the tender age of eight I didn’t realize politics is so rife with bribery. But then the Witch gave Edward the magicked Turkish Delight, only to call in that favor later. It all clicked.

  Politics is not my favorite topic. (I like to say I can’t have a political discussion without pissing off everyone in the room…pretty much, yeah. I hates them all, Precious.) To me, politicians are not special. They simply have a keen ability to read people and use their guilt like a honed knife. By that definition, I’d guess Tyrion is one of the master politicians in fantasy today.  Half the people around him don’t get his jokes, and they’re timed so well the other half can’t do anything but fume. He knows how to make friends and destroy them before they become too dangerous. Most importantly, he always finds a way to make his personal desires coincide with what’s best for Westeros. (For the record, he’s got my vote for Winning It All.)

  As I write I tend to think less about politics and more about character motivation, though I think my stories do lean toward political plot lines. I find politics so suspicious that I don’t know if I could force a character to use politics for Good. Draken might come close, but like Tyrion, he generally has his personal goal first in his mind. (He’s not half as clever, though.) Draken considers the goodness that comes out of his political maneuverings accidental. He’s so riddled with guilt he could never see how his own gain might benefit others. And other more political characters definitely use his guilt against him, which resembles real life to an uncomfortable degree.

  Who’s your favorite political character?

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• Faith and fantasy

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  I first encountered a science-fiction portrayal of religion in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In The Gods of Mars, when the people of the Red Planet grow weary of their long lives, they undertake a pilgrimage down the River Iss to Barsoom’s South Pole, where eternal paradise allegedly awaits. In reality, the land at the river’s end is a nightmare realm of slavery and death, a truth their priests selfishly and cynically conceal.

  Later, in The Master Mind of Mars, the sixth book of the series, a band of heroes discovers that the living idol of the city-state of Phundahl only talks because other unscrupulous priests speak through it like a megaphone. And meanwhile, here on Jasoom (or Earth, if you prefer), in the pages of Tarzan the Terrible, the apeman visits the lost world of Pal-ul-Don and finds its two indigenous peoples engaged in an endless religious war over the question of whether God has a tail.

  In other words, Burroughs’s portrayal of religion is consistently critical or downright satirical, and in this, his books are like most of the SF I read as a kid or in the decades since. Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 depicts a tyrannical future theocracy. So does Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness, with the twist that the rebels adopt the trappings of witchcraft to bring down the oppressors. In Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” adherence to religious dogma seemingly means extinction for the people of Mars, and in the same author’s Lord of Light, oligarchs rule a planet by impersonating the gods of Hindu mythology.

  In fact, I can think of few true SF stories (as opposed to those manifestly intended as fantasy yarns that just toss a little science or super-science into the mix, like Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows and Simon R. Green’s “Nightside” novels) that take a sympathetic view of religion. Frank Herbert’s Dune, maybe. But the esoteric belief systems in that work have more to do with psychic powers and racial destiny than they do with faith in the divine, and to my mind, they’re not religions in the same sense as the churches depicted by Burroughs and those who followed in his scoffer’s footsteps.

  I’m not a believer, so as you might expect, I’m okay with SF’s general rejection of religion as long as criticism of ideas doesn’t turn into bigotry against people. To me, the genre’s posture seems only natural, because a literature that celebrates science perforce embraces rationalism and empiricism. That way of looking at the world is inherently at odds with a faith-based perspective.

  But writers of fantasy and supernatural horror (like me) are in one sense excused from that argument. Our form of fiction is by definition the literature of not just the marvelous but the impossible. That means we can portray deities as real and religions as true without it necessarily coming across as advocacy of such beliefs.

  Although sometimes it is. C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” books are straight-up Christian allegories urging us readers to get right with the Lord. Lewis’s pal Charles Williams displays the same sort of missionary intent in novels like Descent into Hell and All Hallows’ Eve.

  I think it’s fair to say, though, that the majority of 20^th and 21^st Century fantasy and horror writers are guys like H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, L. Sprague de Camp, author of The Tritonian Ring and co-creator of the “Incomplete Enchanter” series, and, well, me. When we depict religious beliefs and institutions, it’s purely for the sake of a good yarn, with zero expectation or desire to have our conceits taken literally. That’s true even when we’re messing around with concepts derived from a real-world religion like Christianity, as Tad Williams’s novel The Dirty Streets of Heaven and the TV series Supernatural do to good effect.

  Unfortunately, a work’s manifest playfulness doesn’t always protect it against the charge that it’s offensive, blasphemous, or flat-out satanic. Some Christians view J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” novels as an attempt to seduce kids into practicing black magic. Such fears reflect a failure to comprehend what fantasy literature even is and make us devotees wonder if those who suffer them were born without imaginations.

  Accordingly, we’d be crazy to care about what such people think. But maybe there’s a subtler issue for skeptical fantasy writers to consider. When we write about the divine even though we believe what we’re depicting is impossible nonsense, can we still say something relevant to the human condition, or must we settle for creating something amusing but devoid of thematic heft?

  I think the best work of our predecessors shows we can say something meaningful. Cthulhu and Azathoth are mere figments, but Lovecraft employs them and the other entities of his mythology to provide a vision of limitless space, deep time, and mankind’s place amid all that vastness. It may not be the only truth of our existence (you kind of hope it’s not), but that it’s one truth is hard to deny. Similarly, in Fritz Leiber’s “The Price of Pain-Ease,” when the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd enter the realm of Death (the most genuinely godlike figure in their world of Nehwon) to redeem their lost loves, their experiences serve as a commentary on grief, despair, and the means by which people overcome them.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that storytellers should be forever preoccupied with theme, that when the words are flowing, the hero’s cracking jokes, the blades are flashing, the fists and bullets are flying, the monster’s attacking, the time bomb is ticking, we should stop and ask, “Am I saying something important here? Is there a message?” No. Screw that. Our goal is entertainment, and if a particular story or sequence “merely” entertains, that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s great.

  Still, though, I think many writers would cop to the hope that their stories provide a little something more than simple entertainment from time to time. If you’re that kind of writer and you’re bringing deities onstage, it may be worthwhile to put a little extra thought into how you portray them. They are, after all, likely the most awesome entities your characters will ever encounter, beings that embody their concepts of existence and the universe, and if you depict them in a manner that reflects that and resonates with whatever internal conflicts the mortals are experiencing, your story may be more powerful as a result.

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