Showing posts with label S. M. Stirling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label S. M. Stirling. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2023

Based on a True Story

Historical fiction typically places invented characters and plotlines against the backdrop of real events, sometimes including encounters with famous people of the past. But historical novels of another type retell actual episodes from the past and differ from straight history or biography by introducing made-up incidents and characters without violating the recorded facts as generally accepted. Then there's the oxymoronic "nonfiction novel," exemplified by works such as Truman Capote's IN COLD BLOOD and Alex Haley's ROOTS, purporting to report history as it happened but in novelistic style, also with the insertion of invented walk-on characters, minor incidents, and dialogue:

Non-Fiction Novel

Wikipedia remarks that the definition of the form can be "flexible." Judging from the range of their examples, the word I'd use is "fuzzy." Some of the books they mention strike me as simply standard-model historical fiction. So the difference between that genre and the so-called nonfiction novel seems to be one of degree.

Sharyn McCrumb has written several novels based on murder cases in American history, notably THE BALLAD OF FRANKIE SILVER, THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, and THE UNQUIET GRAVE. She includes afterwords supplying the real-life background of the stories. In the author's afterword to THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, she answers the question of how much is true with, "As much as I could possibly verify." In the story itself, she fills in the gaps with her own conjectures based on what she considers the best evidence. THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, while also retelling an actual trial, takes some liberties with history, as McCrumb explains in her afterword.

Barbara Hambly's novel about the later life of Mary Todd Lincoln, THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, with flashbacks to the former First Lady's youth and her marriage to Lincoln, follows a similar narrative strategy. It adheres to historical facts as known while creatively expanding on them.

Alternate history is a different thing, making deliberate changes in critical events to create a counterfactual world. For instance, S. M. Stirling's currently running series based on the premise that Theodore Roosevelt regained the presidency in the 2012 election is one outstanding example. Secret history, on the other hand, tells stories of critical events that fall between the cracks in documented history, without contradicting recorded facts (e.g., magical combat between British and German witches during World War II in a world otherwise resembling our own past).

What about autobiography? CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN, by Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, has been labeled a "semi-autobiographical novel," although from what I've read about it, the contents are factual. The book does skip around chronologically, however, and it omits some facts, mainly that the Gibreth family never had twelve children living at the same time. The death of one daughter in childhood is not mentioned. The "All Creatures Great and Small" series, by James Herriot (real name Alf Wight), shifts further toward the fiction category. While the incidents in the books really happened, names and other identifying characteristics of people in the episodes have been changed.

How far can a work that claims historical accuracy go with author-created elements before it crosses the line between straight history or biography and fiction?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 02, 2023

Vampires Rule

I recently read a novel with an unusual slant on a world ruled by vampires, DAY BOY, by Trent Jamieson. It takes place in a rather dreary post-apocalyptic world. The narrator is a teenage "day boy," a vampire's mortal servant. These vampires suffer from the movie-invented disability of helplessness during the sunlit hours, so they can't get along without human helpers. One thing I admire about this novel is the realistic treatment of predator-prey ratios. The narrator's small town harbors only about five "Masters" (vampires). While they don't normally kill their donors, they still exercise caution about expanding their own numbers.

It's listed on Goodreads here, with reviews, including mine:

Day Boy

Books and films about vampire-dominated worlds too often portray societies overrun by the bloodthirsty undead, with ordinary humans as a small, hunted remnant. There's no way that model would be sustainable unless the vampires can survive on animal blood and/or a reliable supply of bagged blood. For the latter, they would still need human victims to "donate" unless a synthetic substitute has been invented, as in the Sookie Stackhouse series and its TV adaptation, TRUE BLOOD. And even with the artificial blood supply, in that series the undead remain a minority.

S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy, beginning with A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, features a subspecies of Homo sapiens who combine the traits of vampires, werebeasts, and sorcerers, with the power to warp reality in their close vicinity as well as control human minds. They aspire to restore the prehistoric Empire of Shadow, when they openly treated the human majority as livestock and slaves. The vampire-shapeshifter species is a tiny minority of the total population, though, as apex predators should be. For instance, in the present the principal antagonist reigns over her own private village where she's the only resident Shadowspawn. Its human residents are well treated, a few supplying her with blood in regular rotation, while most serve her in other capacities or just keep the town running. The blood donors ("lucies") have to endure only one downside to their pampered lifestyle, their mistress's cheerfully sadistic personality.

A 1991 anthology, UNDER THE FANG, collects a variety of original stories on the theme of vampire-dominated societies, including a collaboration between Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Suzy McKee Charnas in which Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain and Charnas's Professor Weyland meet in unpleasant circumstances. You can find copies of the book here:

Under the Fang

Considering that vampires are typically envisioned as solitary predators, it seems likely that if they did take over the world, they wouldn't bother with the day-to-day business of ruling. They would probably control human officials who'd do the actual work, while the structures of society would function much as usual, aside from the obligation of catering to the needs of the vampire lords. As Stirling's evil Shadowspawn princess asks in A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, "Do I LOOK like a bureaucrat?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 06, 2018

Alternate Timelines

One of my favorite authors, S. M. Stirling, recently launched a new alternate-history series with BLACK CHAMBER, published in July of this year. His website has begun displaying sample chapters from the first sequel, due in spring of 2019. Reading them started me thinking about the effects small or large changes might have on the historical timeline. The POD (point of departure) for the Black Chamber universe—the moment when it diverges from our reality—occurs in 1912, when President Taft dies prematurely and Theodore Roosevelt returns to the White House (instead of Woodrow Wilson becoming President). With no constitutional term limits for the presidency at that time, Roosevelt has free rein to shape the nation according to his principles. Not only the circumstances of U.S. involvement in World War I but the direction of the entire twentieth century will change. The main story line of the novel begins in 1916.

If you could go back in time and alter the twentieth century for the better, what single action would you take? Killing Hitler before he can do any damage immediately springs to mind, of course. However, aside from the ethical problem of murdering a person who hasn't yet committed evil deeds, killing Hitler never works. TV Tropes even has a page on this topic, "Hitler's time-travel exemption." One example: In an episode of the later incarnation of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, a time traveler from the future installs herself as a servant in the household of Hitler's parents. She finally manages to kill baby Adolf along with herself. The nursery maid, however, is so terrified of Herr Hitler's probable reaction to the loss of his son that she substitutes a look-alike infant taken from a beggar woman. So history still plays out with an Adolf Hitler, just not the original one. Nonviolent ways of eliminating Hitler might work, such as preventing his parents from meeting, kidnapping the baby and having him adopted by a nice English couple, or giving young Adolf a scholarship to art school. Would forestalling his political career actually prevent the war, though? Some authors speculate that, given the conditions of post-World-War-I Europe, the Nazi Party would come to power anyway with a different, possibly worse tyrant in charge.

Arguably, the most productive single thing you could do to avert the catastrophic events of the twentieth century would be to go to Sarajevo in 1914 and arrange for Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car to be re-routed so the assassin would never have a chance to shoot him. But would the erasure of the assassination definitely prevent the Great War? The nations of Europe, with their weapons development and entangled alliances, had been building toward that conflict for decades. It's not unlikely that some other spark would have set off the conflagration anyway. Various speculative fiction authors disagree about the ease of altering the timeline. Do we embrace the "Great Man" theory, where the removal of one person makes all the difference? Or do we lean toward Heinlein's position that "when it's time for railroads, people will railroad"? In Stephen King's novel about a time traveler who tries to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy, saving Kennedy creates a major disruption in the flow of history, but not for the better.

Jo Walton's fascinating novel MY REAL CHILDREN takes a unique approach to the theme. The protagonist, as an old woman in a nursing home, remembers two different lives in two worlds (neither of them our own timeline). In one, the more prosperous and peaceful version of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she suffers through an unhappy marriage. In the other timeline, which verges on dystopia, she has a generally happy life. If she has the power to make one of them definitively "real," which should she choose?

In most of Heinlein's time-travel fiction, he reveals that no change actually occurs, because the traveler's actions simply bring about what was destined to happen anyway. The past as we know it already includes whatever input we contribute—as in, for instance, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER. Some other writers postulate that history inevitably tries to repair itself when "damaged." Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series illustrates the elasticity of the timeline. Claire (a visitor to the eighteenth century from the twentieth) and her husband Jamie can make small changes, but all their attempts to prevent or mitigate Bonnie Prince Charlie's disastrous 1745 campaign fail. The ultimate example of this principle may be "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester. The time traveler assassinates a series of successively more important personages without ever managing to make a permanent mark on the past.

The opposite approach postulates that the slightest change will have vast consequences—the "butterfly effect." Appropriately, Ray Bradbury provided the classic example of this theory in "A Sound of Thunder," when a member of a tourist group traveling to the age of the dinosaurs alters his own future by accidentally killing a butterfly. The trouble with this story, alas, is that if a small change that far back could shift the entire direction of history, by the traveler's present day the alterations would have snowballed to such an extent that his native time would become unrecognizable, not just subtly distorted toward a dystopian outcome. On the same principle, consider the many alternate-history stories whose authors introduce famous people from the past in different roles from their real-life ones. Actually, depending on how far back the POD occurs, random alterations in meetings, matings, and conceptions would ensure that most if not all of those people would never be born. But what fun for writers and readers would that be?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Biology Marches On

I'm currently reading, little by little, a book by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (best known for THE SELFISH GENE), THE ANCESTOR'S TALE: A PILGRIMAGE TO THE DAWN OF LIFE. He structures the book by analogy with THE CANTERBURY TALES, with "pilgrims" joining the procession at various rendezvous points, backward from the most recent progenitors of humanity to the origin of life on Earth. At each "rendezvous," he introduces our "concestor" at that juncture, a coinage for "common ancestor." For instance, we meet the common ancestor of all known hominids, of hominids and other primates, of primates and other mammals, etc. One fascinating revelation of this book, for me, is how the classification of life on Earth has changed since my time in public school. In the 1950s and 60s, biology classes taught us to divide all creatures into two kingdoms, animals and plants. Bacteria, amoebae, and fungi got pigeonholed with plants, while protozoa qualified as animals. Today, biological science recognizes up to six kingdoms: Animals, Plants, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria/Eubacteria). Amazingly, according to Dawkins, fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants! Here we see an example of the trope "Science Marches On" (i.e., it's always possible for yesterday's established theories to be revised or replaced).

Similarly, during our elementary and high-school years (shortly after dinosaurs roamed the Earth), all humanity consisted of three races, then called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. The song we learned in Sunday school about God's love for "all the little children" classifies them into "red and yellow, black and white." The three-race system of categories lumped "red" (Native Americans) in with the Mongoloid (Asian) ethnicities, not unreasonable considering the probable Asian origins of the original inhabitants of the Americas. If Inuits had been mentioned, they would probably have been included with the Mongoloid groups. Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders weren't brought up at all, much less Australian Aborigines and the Ainu of Japan. Aside from the fact that "race" in the old-fashioned sense is no longer considered a valid scientific category anyway, the ethnic divisions of Earth's population are more complicated than we were taught as children. A popular-culture example of unquestioning acceptance of the three-race system appears in James Michener's TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC. (It's not quite explicit in the movie, although "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" makes the implications clear enough.) When Nellie discovers that her French suitor has fathered illegitimate children by a Polynesian woman, she's appalled because, in her Southern world-view, there are only three races—white, Oriental, and Negro. Polynesians obviously don't belong to either of the first two, so they must be the third. (She uses the other N-word, however.)

Theories of the ancestry and origins of humanity have changed radically in recent decades, with new fossil discoveries and cutting-edge technology for detailed DNA studies of population movements. The film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY looks charmingly naive nowadays, with its dramatic scene based on the simplistic, now-abandoned assumption that our development into sapient beings sprang from our learning how to make weapons in order to kill things. (Elaine Morgan, in THE DESCENT OF WOMAN, labels this anthropological construct the "Tarzanist" theory.)

Coincidentally, I'm now rereading a duology by Rose Estes, TROLL-TAKEN and TROLL-QUEST. This fabulous urban fantasy (published in the 1990s) portrays the creatures we call "trolls" as descendants of Homo erectus, driven underground by the worldwide dominance of Homo sapiens. One of my favorite contemporary vampire series, S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy (A TAINT IN THE BLOOD and sequels), postulates that his vampire-werewolf-sorcerer subspecies split off from "normal" humanity during a long period of isolation in the last Ice Age (a motif borrowed from Jack Williamson's classic DARKER THAN YOU THINK and updated with allusions to modern genetics and quantum mechanics). As reported in recent news, many scientists now believe that other hominids such as Neanderthals and the "hobbits" probably coexisted with and may have interbred with Homo sapiens. Keeping informed on latest developments in biology and anthropology can help authors create realistic, believable alien species.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, March 01, 2018

From the Dark Places

I'm thrilled to announce that my horror novel with romantic elements FROM THE DARK PLACES has been re-released. It's one of my books originally published by Amber Quill Press, which closed in 2016.

From the Dark Places

The title comes from a verse in the Psalms, "The dark places of the land are haunts of violence." The inspirations for this story include H. P. Lovecraft, Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and its sequels, C. S. Lewis's THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, and Dennis Wheatley's occult novels about heroes battling satanic cults. Does that mean any fans of one of those authors would like this novel? My best guess is—not necessarily.

I'm reminded of a remark about friendship in one of Peg Bracken's books (I think): "People are friends in spots." Just because you have something in common with one friend and other things in common with another doesn't guarantee that those two people will hit it off together. Likewise, I've often been surprised with the result when I've recommended a book to a fellow reader who I thought would love it. Different readers like the same book for different reasons. The fact that the other person and I share a mutual passion for a certain book or author doesn't mean he or she will love another work I think has the same appeal. For example, many fans of S. M. Stirling enjoy his fiction for (among other elements) the meticulously and vividly rendered battle scenes, which I skim over. In his "Emberverse" series, which begins with the collapse of civilization in DIES THE FIRE (when all advanced technology stops working permanently), I love the characters, the worldbuilding, and the gradual rebirth of magic as the gods turn out to be real (although what, exactly, the "gods" are is not immediately clear) and many societies that arise after the catastrophe model themselves on such templates as the feudal system of medieval Europe or Celtic, Norse, or Native American myths and cultural memes. Some subscribers to the Stirling Yahoo list, on the other hand, have mentioned that they have little interest in the medievalist and pagan revival material; they'd be just as happy if the series didn't include that stuff at all. The latest installment, set mainly in southeast Asia, includes a Korea ruled by dark forces with a quasi-Lovecraftian vibe. I reveled in that; some fans seemed to find it an unwelcome distraction from what they mainly look for in those novels. Anyone trying to recommend books on the basis of "if you like DIES THE FIRE, you'll like [blank]" would have to suggest entirely different works to me and those other fans. Similarly, if a reader told me she liked vampires, I'd have to ask, "What kind, and what do you like about them?" before I could recommend a reading list or guess how she'd feel about my vampires.

So—if you enjoy occult thrillers about conflicts between cosmic good and evil with a Christian slant but not heavily "inspirational," you might like FROM THE DARK PLACES. Especially if a northern California setting appeals to you. Some fans of Lovecraft's mythos might enjoy this book, while others might dislike it as "Lovecraft light" because it doesn't embrace his view of the universe as a vast, meaningless void of matter and energy in flux, indifferent to humanity. People make friends with books "in spots," too.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Optimistic Disaster Fiction

In the current LOCUS, Cory Doctorow writes about his forthcoming novel WALKAWAY, which he labels a "utopian disaster novel." In a deliberate "rebuttal" of the disaster scenario or post-apocalyptic saga where civilization disintegrates into chaos and most people turn into raging savages the moment our technological infrastructure collapses, he has written a story "about people doing right for one another under conditions of adversity." He describes this book as "a weaponized counternarrative of human goodness":

Weaponized Narrative

After all, in the present state of society, do most people indulge in any greedy, lawless behavior they can get away with? No, says Doctorow, most of us are restrained by our sense of what's normal and decent. Although I applaud his message about empathizing with the people "who are picking up the pieces and starting over again. The helpers" (a term he borrows from Mr. Rogers' famous statement about how to discuss scary news stories with children), the word "weaponized" in the context of celebrating goodness irresistibly reminds me of the maxim, "Fighting for peace is like fornicating for chastity." The imagery contains a certain inherent dissonance. Still, Doctorow deserves praise for rejecting what he calls the "old narrative, the xenophobia story," which "makes crises into tragedies."

A good example of the kind of disaster fiction he favors can be found in one of my favorite series, S. M. Stirling's "Emberverse," which begins with the apocalyptic novel DIES THE FIRE. Granted, civilization does collapse, with a great deal of violence involved. As the inciting catastrophe, every form of advanced technology—electricity, internal combustion, nuclear reactions, gunpowder or any other kind of explosion, steam power—instantaneously and permanently stops working. Our large cities and their surrounding suburbs can't sustain themselves in preindustrial conditions, so of course millions perish horribly. The focus of DIES THE FIRE and the series as a whole, however, centers on the people who work together to save as many of their neighbors as possible and build new communities. Despite the mass die-off, the cannibalism (which we only hear about, not see firsthand), and the brutal gangs that seize power in some areas, this is the most humane and, yes, optimistic post-apocalyptic series I've ever read.

What other examples of optimistic disaster fiction exist in recent fantasy and SF? (With a positive tone overall, that is, not just culminating in a "happy ending" reversal at the conclusion like the "Hunger Games" series.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt