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281. Menhir, a winter’s tale 2

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This is one installment of a twelve part excerpt from Valley of the Menhir. Check December 29 for an introduction to the novel.

Late in the afternoon of the fifth day, the storm abated, and by evening, it was gone. Marquart went out to the rimwall surrounding the top of the manorhouse to watch the sunset and try to guess how long the lull would last. He wanted to visit each of his wardens in his own house before the deep snow made travel more difficult.

The snow had stopped, but the sky was of low, unbroken clouds. The sun was setting red-bronze toward the western hills, painting the mounded snow in blue-gray and mauve.

Marquart leaned on the rimwall and smiled contentedly. Then he heard the cook’s cry; it was time for the evening meal. As he turned away, he realized that a part of his contentment came from anticipation. He was looking forward to seeing Dael. That he was looking forward to seeing her, was both a pleasure and a relief.

There had been plenty of women in Marquart’s life, but he had rarely spent more than a few days with any one of them. Fighting his way up through the ranks, he had always intended to marry, once he reached the station that required a wife. He had never particularly looked forward to marriage, nor was he prepared for the actuality of it, but here it was. And he was finding that he liked it.

In their chambers later, Dael shed her woolens for a light silk robe that clung to her lovely young body. He embraced her, kissed her deeply, and pulled her down beside him on the bed. He said, “What do you think of Clevis?”

Dael had not expected conversation. She said, “He is attentive and respectful to me, and he seems loyal to you. I like him better than the other two you brought with you.”

Marquart smiled. “Yes. Conger, and especially Hein, are a bit rough. They came with me out of loyalty, and that is worth a great deal, but they really don’t fit in here. Clevis is different. Clevis is like your brother Reece. They each came under my command when they were young, and as I trained them in my way of handling men, they became friends.”

“I’m glad you have a friend.’

“Dael, why did you agree to marry me?”

She wanted to give a stock answer, something out of a troubadour’s tale of romance, but she correctly judged that this was a time for honesty. She said, “Because you asked me.”

“I’m glad I did.”

She smiled and laid her head on his shoulder. “Thank you for that.”

“Did you know that Clevis was once married?”

“Clevis again!” she laughed, then sobered at once. “I am sorry,” she said, “Go on.”

“He said that I should confide in you; that I should tell you things I don’t even tell him. That’s hard for me. I almost never confide anything in anyone, but I will try, if you want me to.” continued tomorrow

280. Menhir, a winter’s tale 1

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This is one installment of a twelve part excerpt from Valley of the Menhir. Check December 29 for an introduction to the novel.

The first blizzard of winter moved in, and for a week Marquart stayed close to home, studying maps, records and journals. He had a banner made with the sign of the striking hawk in black on a field of blue, and set it flying above the manorhouse. It was the first time his kladak had been used for anything but marking his personal goods, and it gave him pleasure. The Valley of the Menhir might be small, backward, and forgotten, but it was his.

The Valley was roughly round, roughly forty miles across. The River Gull divided it in two, flowing in through a gap in the western hills, picking up half a dozen minor tributaries and debouching through a wide, low gap on the east.  It was navigable only for nine miles, from the sea to the place where the menhir lay. On the coast was a small seaport, Port of the Gull, through which the valley’s exports passed, when there were exports.

The Weathermistress must have been in a nasty mood the day the Valley was created. When protracted winds from the west brought in hot, dry air from the Dzikakai plains, there was drought. When spring rains rode the seawinds from the south or east, there were floods. In all seasons, there was uncertainty.

On the north side of the Gull were Marquart’s direct holdings. To his east was Jor’s land. Technically, it was Marquart’s; if he ever chose to give it to another warden, it would be his right. But Jor had lived there all his life, and had the use of the land from his father, who had it from his father, who had originally been granted wardency by some lord whose name Marquart did not even know. So Marquart had decided to leave him in place, at least for now, and see if he had learned a lesson. Marquart’s soldier’s instinct said that Jor had not, but there was nothing to gain in precipitate action.

There were four other wardens, each with land and a fortified house. Wardency was a normal and reasonable way of distributing responsibility for the valley, but there was a catch. Like Jor, they had all lived for generations on lands they thought of as theirs. After generations of peace, every warden’s family was bloated with useless uncles and aunts and nephews and cousins. The serfs could not produce enough to feed them all.

“What this place needs,” Marquart said to himself, “is a good war to weed out the warrior class.” But he didn’t mean it. He had seen too much of war to want it visited on his new home. continued tomorrow

279. Introduction to A Winter’s Tale

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My novel Valley of the Menhir starts with the coming of the Gods. An abbreviated version of this appears in 239. Morning of the Gods. Rem and Hea separate upon arrival. Rem begins to raise an army and sires a son, the Shambler, who will be the bane of his new world – and of Rem, himself. Hea, with the best of intentions, sets into motion forces she underestimates and soon cannot control.

In the world of the menhir, a soul, at death, is joined (enreithed) to a menhir, where it finds  both peace and a dissolution of individuality. The souls of those who die alone, or far from a menhir, shortly dissipate, dissolve, and cease to be. Every soul faces one fate or the other; there is no half-way state. There are no ghosts in the world of the menhir.

Yet.

Hea has a problem. She has placed a geas of infertility on Rem’s rampant son and has hidden his only child from him, both without the Shambler’s knowledge. That hidden child has grown and sired two sons of his own. Hea has seen that the offspring of the next generation will be a force to save or destroy the world of the menhir. She does not know which. The unborn’s power clouds the runeboard, leaving her uncertain of what path to take.

The Shambler is driven out by his father, then returns to kill him and take control of the army he has raised. Now Hea has to act, but without a clear knowledge of what will result from her actions.

Hea does know that she cannot let the Shambler find out about his offspring. But to watch over them herself would, by her own presence, bring them to the Shambler’s attention. She makes a fatal compromise. She chooses to stand between the soul of a newly dead, Baralia, and her enreithment. Hea makes Baralia a tortured ghost — a soul hung half way between death and her final rest — and forces her to watch over Marquart, who will be the father of the coming nexus of power. It is a fatal error.

If Baralia cannot know peace while Marquart lives, then he will not live long.

*             *             *

That’s a lot of narrative to densepack into the first eighteen pages of a manuscript. Marquart will be our main character until Tidac, his son, eclipses him in our affection.

We meet Marquart as he enters the Valley of the Menhir. The High King has given him lordship over the Valley, but he isn’t happy about it. He has been dismissed from service, and given this troublesome valley to rule. You’ll get the details over the next two weeks.

Marquart finds that another has taken his place as Lord of the Valley, subdues him handily, and makes a life-long enemy. No matter; he is quite capable of dealing with human enemies. The ghostly figure of Baralia, who will attach herself to him like his personal Iago, is another matter.

The story of Marquart’s first months in the Valley of the Menhir is A Winter Tale, driven by hunger for power, hunger for importance, and the sheer hunger of starvation. Marquart has inherited a land where there are not enough serfs to provide for the mass of useless nobles, and still have enough food for themselves. This is the first problem Marquart sets out to solve.

Normally all this would be presented in Serial, but Raven’s Run will have that side of the double blog tied of for some time yet. A Winter Tale will appear in A Writing Life through the first three weeks of January. 

Enjoy.

278. The Veil is Thin

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Christmas, the most beloved holiday, has passed. Five days ago, the sun ended its southing and began its return, but still the days of darkness are upon us. The veil is thin between the worlds, and for a time, the order of things is turned upside down.

Now the calendar year is ending and there are festivals, but sometimes they don’t make sense because they have migrated beyond their origins. They grew up in one place, and are now celebrated in another. Christmas in Europe and America means snowmen and a roaring fire in the fireplace. Christmas in Australia means sunbathing, surfing, and a barbie on the beach. (That’s barbecue, not the excessively-skinny doll.)

Thanksgiving is an American holiday, full of New England foods like pumpkin pie, cranberries, and turkey. Right? Maybe. Under the microscope, it is exactly that. Looked at from a greater distance, it is one of a hemisphere-wide set of harvest festivals. This is not a global phenomenon, however. These festivals are tied to the temperate zone, where the cycle of the seasons rules all human life.

My interest in all this began with Christmas, but I came to realize that Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, New Year, St. Nicholas Day, Boxing Day, and a host of other holidays are all variations on the same theme.

There are three facets which these holidays share, in varying degrees. First is food, precious, and only temporarily abundant. Before Santa Claus and Walmart made Christmas a lynchpin of the economic system, gifts were small, and often consisted of food: apples, oranges, and cookies or other sweets.

You might remember from any of the movie versions of A Christmas Carol, that Bob Cratchit buys apples for his brood, while Tiny Tim wishes he could have oranges. Oranges were imported from the tropical realms of the British Empire and would only be found on the tables of the rich. In agricultural Europe, the harvest season filled the larders of the rich, but not so much the larders of the poor. With the onset of industrialization – the world of Bob Cratchit – this disparity became even more pronounced.

This is the second facet of these holidays, that those below beg or demand their share from those above — wassailing, often riotous, in the past — trick-or-treat today.

The third facet is the thinning of the veil between the worlds, with visitations from the dead. We don’t usually think of Christmas that way, but wait. The sub-title of A Christmas Carol is A Ghost Story of Christmas. And there are the four ghosts. Yes, four — don’t forget Marley, who says:

“It is required of every man . . . that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world – oh, woe is me! – and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!’’

So mix and match to suit yourself, and you will see that all these holidays of fall and winter are defined by the same three facets.

*           *           *

I polished my understanding of the interrelationship of the holidays during this last decade, but much earlier I understood to role of food and the onset of winter. Early in my writing career, I began the Menhir series, set in a realistic fantasy world where the hand of hunger lies heavy.

Midwinterfest was in a time of plenty. The tichan and cattle who were least valuable to the herds had been slaughtered as soon as the cold had set in reliably. Frozen carcasses hung in meatsheds all over the Valley – indeed, all over the Inner Kingdom. Hunger would come in late winter, as it always did.

The hardest months of winter are not the first, nor are the deepest the most cruel. As spring approaches, and the days lengthen, winter hangs on, well schooled in snow and ice and cold, and unwilling to relinquish its hold. Then, when the first green of spring is only a month away, comes the dying time.

An excerpt from that series, called Menhir: a winter’s tale, begins tomorrow.

263. Andre Norton’s Beast Master

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Not every draft post actually gets posted. I started one a year ago in which I asked “What science fiction or fantasy world would you most like to live in?” That’s not the same as which one do you like to read about. I love the Dorsai books, but I wouldn’t be caught dead in any of them. Or, if I were caught in one, I probably would end up dead.

The question never reached the website, but in the draft I answered, “Arzor”, which is the planet in Andre Norton’s Beast Master novels.

In many ways, The Beast Master is the ultimate early Norton. Many of her protagonists are orphans, and Hosteen Storm is a hyper-orphan. He has lost not only his family, but his whole world. He is haunted not only by painful memories, but by an oath sworn during his childhood. He has to choose between the angers of the past and the promise of the future, and in choosing, eventually finds a new family.

Hosteen begins the novel as a man apart, loyal only to his team of mutated animals, with whom he communicates telepathically. This kind of communication is a trope that Norton has used liberally, at least since 1952 with Star Man’s Son. (Incidentally, the first novel I checked out on my first visit to a library.)

Hosteen, half Navaho, half Sioux, chose to enter the Beast Master Corps, where he was teamed with a dune cat, an African eagle, and a pair of meerkats,. This was decades before Timon brought meerkats to everyone’s attention. They trained together, then spent the Xix war engaged in reconnaissance and sabotage missions. Now Earth has been destroyed, and the team is all that Hosteen has left.

He musters out on Arzor, a frontier planet much like his native Arizona. It is exactly what he would have chosen, but in fact he is impelled to go there in pursuit of revenge on a man he has never met. Hosteen will wrestle with himself throughout the book, torn between his oath and his growing respect and liking for the would-be victim and his son Logan.

Arzor is a transmogrified Arizona, with modernized cowboys on variform horses. Frawns look a lot like bighorn sheep; the yoris is clearly a distant relative of a kimodo dragon; the norbies are really, really tall Indians with horns. If you are inclined to cynicism (as I normally am) this could come across as a crude mashup. I have to fall back on my favorite phrase, “Somehow, Norton makes it work.”

For my taste, the trick is to come just close enough to the familiar, while keeping just the right admixture of the outré. It’s a tricky, narrow path, and nobody does it better than Norton.

When Hosteen first meets the man he has sworn to kill, he turns aside from the confrontation for reasons he does not understand himself. He subsequently becomes involved in an expedition to the Arzorean back country, which postpones his confrontation, but becomes a deadly adventure in itself. He and his team, with the aid of his would-be victim’s son, overcome an old and deadly enemy.

Finally, Hosteen’s oath can no longer ignored . . . but, even though the novel is nearing sixty years old, I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

Three years later, Norton wrote Lord of Thunder, a beast master sequel. which was quite good, though not up to the original. Four decades later, she wrote three more in the series in conjunction with Lyn McConchie: Beast Master’s Ark, Beast Master’s Circus, and Beast Master’s Quest. It seems that Norton liked Arzor as well.

The Beastmaster films are unrelated to the original, although the title is ripped off and the animal characters (two ferrets, an eagle and a panther vs. Norton’s two meerkats, an eagle and a dune cat) certainly looks suspicious. Caveat view-or.

262. Andre Norton’s Star Gate

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When I say Star Gate, I don’t mean the TV series. I also don’t mean the movie it was based on. I mean the original, from decades earlier, a novel by Andre Norton.

Andre Norton’s Star Gate came out in 1958 but It didn’t make it to any library I frequented. It didn’t enter my life until a decade later when cheap SF and fantasy paperbacks became generally available. Someone has an original edition for sale on the internet for $299, but at that price, I’ll never see the hardback.

Kincar s’Rud is called to the deathbed of the chief and kinsman he expects to succeed, only to find that it is not to be. He is told that he is only half Gorthian. His father was one of the Star Lords from Earth. To avoid bringing a bloody division to his clan, Kincar must leave succession to a hated cousin.

After generations on Gorth, the people of Earth have departed, but Kincar is told that a few remain, preparing to work out a separate destiny. Among these are his half-kinsmen, whom he must join. On his way he examines the few things given him as heritage and finds a Tie, a green stone amulet that is a tie to the three gods who rule his world.

Kincar is awed to be in the presence of Star Lords, and it takes him some time to adapt to their presence. This remnant consists of those who have formed so deep a bond with Gorth that they cannot bear to leave, even though all other Earth men have gone. Despite the good that Earth men have done on Gorth over the years, they eventually became convinced that their presence was warping the culture of the native Gorthians, and that they must, from conscience, depart. The few who did not take the ships out are also planning to leave, but by a different route.

They are pursued by native Gorthians as they try to find a place of temporary refuge, where they can construct a gate which will take them to an alternate Gorth where the native population never evolved; a place where they can remain in the land they love without doing harm. The gate is constructed hurriedly while under attack. All pass through, but Kincar is struck down harshly. The Tie he wears has reacted badly with the off world technology of the gate.

Here is classic Norton, with a medieval culture in conflict with an advanced technological one, and with real magic residing uneasily alongside real science. Star Gate is truly science fiction, but the fantasy touches that made the Witch World novels so appealing are already in place. (Aside: in the first Witch World novel, Simon Tregarth enters that world through a gate, which may be magical or alien technology. Norton never says which, but it’s probably magical, considering where he ends up.)

Kincar and his kinsmen emerge from the gate in a Gorth, but which Gorth? They have to explore to find out, and it quickly becomes obvious that they are not in the one they wanted. In this new Gorth, the Star Lords never departed. Worse, these Star Lords are cruel tyrants who have enslaved the native population.

Kincar’s group decides to delay building another gate to pursue their dream world. Since Star Lords have so tainted this Gorth, they feel obligated to set things right. This brings Kincar into conflict with his evil alternate father and into an alliance with his hunted alternate self.

*****

A decade after I first read Star Gate, I ripped Norton off for one useful bit. On our Earth, if you had an ancestor named David who’s father was named John, he would be David Johnson or David Johnsen or David Jensen or David Johns. On Gorth, he would be David s’John. I liked that so well that I made it the basis for kinship terminology on the World of the Menhir. Thanks, Andre.

261. Andre Nortonʼs Sword Trilogy

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This post and yesterday’s are about the Sword Trilogy, Andre Norton’s first multi-book story. You can read the posts in either order.

Some of Andre Nortonʼs earliest work came during and just after World War II, and today is called the Sword Trilogy. I reviewed the last and best of the three books yesterday. A few are available today in paperback reprints, but the original hardbacks mostly ended up in libraries and command high prices today. Fortunately, all three are available as e-books, if you can tolerate a boat load of typos.

The Sword is Drawn came first in 1944, and was one of Norton’s earliest books; the fifth, if bibliographies can be trusted. My library rescue copy was printed by Oxford University Press, London, 1946, presumably under wartime austerities. It is a slender, ragged volume that needs to be read with a delicate touch.

In a forward to the book, Norton praises the World Friends’ Club for their work in establishing “pen friend” relations between youths of various countries before 1939, and adds:

Now again letters are finding their way by sea and air all round the world. It is possible that in these friendships lies the hope of lasting peace and the vision of a new world.

The four sections of the novel are set off by letters from the young protagonist Lorens van Norries to his American friend Lawrence Kane. Lorens is the grandson of Joris van Norries, head of the House of Norries, renowned jewelers and bankers, but he has been raised as an outcast. In the opening paragraphs, Lorens visits his grandfather’s deathbed and finds that he has been raised away from the family for a reason. His grandfather has foreseen the coming of the Nazis and now entrusts Lorens with the location of the family treasure which he is to dedicate to regaining the Netherland’s freedom. Unfortunately, the Nazi’s are not fooled, and Lorens has to run for his life. He is transported to England by Dutch smugglers, turned underground fighters.

Lorens ends up in Java, still a Dutch possession with a House of Norries presence, and there the war catches up to him again as the Japanese invade. He fights his way through the jungle and ends up fleeing by air toward Australia, where his plane is shot down and he is crippled. Heroes who are physically or emotionally crippled, and fight through anyway seems to be a Norton specialty.

Healed, but unable to fight in the traditional manner, Lorens has an interlude in America where he enlists an underground organization to transport him back into occupied Holland. There he recovers the treasure entrusted to him and uses it to advance the Allied cause.

The Sword is Drawn is a disjointed book, a round-the-world stumble back to where it started. This may be a problem for some readers; I find it a strength, as it mimics the chaos of war. The Sword is Drawn is a moody book, informed by the vision of a people who have been ground down and are still fighting back.

And then the war was over. The second book of the Sword Trilogy, Sword in Sheath,  came out in 1949 and has a mood in stark contrast to the first. Lawrence Kane – sometimes called Kane, sometimes Dutch, but never Larry – and Sam Marusaki, are back from service in WWII which included OSS work. They are called in unofficially, ostensibly to find a missing airman but actually to look for Naziʼs who had gone to earth in the East Indies after the war. Kane is the pen-pal to whom Lorens van Norreys sent all those letters and, sure enough, van Norreys shows up by chapter three, where he and Kane meet face-to-face for the first time. At this meeting we find out that, after the close of the first book, van Norreys spent the remainder of the war in the Dutch underground.

Every verbal exchange between Kane and Sam is couched in light banter, which somehow, unbelievably, still sounds like Norton. Lorens, Kane, and Sam set out on a Dutch tramp steamer to explore the area around the Celebes, where they fall in with Abdul Hakroun, a pirate who is willing to fight Nazis if there is a profit in it for him. Several mysteries entangle them until they find a lost civilization, a missing treasure, and a stranded Nazi sub. All this sounds very predictable for an espionage novel, but Norton’s touch saves it. Still, it is the weakest of the three books.

260. Early Andre Norton: At Sword’s Point

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This is not bait and switch. This week will be devoted to early Nortons, but the news of Fidel Castro’s death makes a few timely words necessary.

This morning I watched some of Castro’s victims being interviewed, people of middle age who were forced to flee their homes as children. Many were still mourning the loss of parents as their families were separated when they fled to America. It begs the question: how can the expulsion of Cubans from Cuba be wrong, and the mass deportation of undocumented American residents be right?

*          *          *          *          *

This post and tomorrow’s are about the Sword Trilogy, Andre Norton’s first multi-book story. The other posts this week are also devoted to very early Nortons.

In my library (spare bedroom) there is a shelf of books on languages, and prominent there is my collection of books on how to teach yourself Dutch or, more properly, Nederlandish. Why Dutch? Why not German which I sort of learned in high school, or Hindi which I kind of learned in college? I could give you logical reasons, but they wouldn’t be honest. The truth is, I fell in love with the Netherlands, and a Norton novel was the cause.

The book was At Sword’ Point. I read it in high school and I re-read it every few years after that until the last library discarded their last copy. Then I bought it used through mail-order. Naturally, it turned out to be a discarded library book. I have it on the desk as I type.

Quinn Anders shivered as he limped up a moss-greened walk to the square New England house and raised his hand to the polished brass eagle doing bored duty as a knocker.

In the first sentence we know that Quinn is not a fire breathing super hero. He shivers. He is also not a perfect physical specimen. He limped. We learn later that he has suffered from polio, a disease common in the era, and that his scholarly nature comes from time spent bedridden as a child. By the time Norton tells us this, we want to know. It is not a narrative intrusion, but an answer to questions she has already teased into our minds.

She also informs us that she is an old fashioned writer, not afraid to use more words than are necessary (the polished brass eagle doing bored duty as a knocker, for God’s sake) and that her writing will be circuitous. That’s Norton. If you don’t like that first sentence, you had better go read someone else.

It worked for that era (and for the multitude of Norton fans). When the novel was published in 1954, the Soviets were consolidating their hold on Eastern Europe and had just detonated their first H bomb. The missile race and the space race were in the near future and escaped Nazis filled popular literature.

Quinn Anders is seeking help in finding out what happened to his older brother, killed in an auto “accident” in the Netherlands. In fact, his brother was part of an unofficial underground, headed by Lorens van Norries, whom you will meet tomorrow; the group came together in resistance to the Nazis, and has changed enemies to resist the Soviets. Quinn goes to  the Netherlands to finish the book his late father began on an obscure order of knights from the Middle Ages. At the same time he is looking for clues to his brother’s death, and to the ancient, gem encrusted porcelain knight that was his brother’s last gift.

He succeeds, of course. No spoiler alert needed for that statement. He also finds himself accepted by a band of like minded adventurers. That is, he finds a family, which is a familiar pattern in Norton, and in young adult literature as a whole.

At Sword’ Point is well plotted and satisfying, but what lifts it above other Norton works is the brooding atmosphere of the Netherlands, half medieval and half modern. I fell in love with the place. It didn’t hurt that Lorens and Kane had had lives of their own in earlier books, which I discovered afterward. You’ll hear about them tomorrow.

257. Who Knows?

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Who knows? Probably the internet.

The internet is science fiction at its best. Back in 1986, when I bought my first Mac, it came with a program called HyperCard. It was a crude, early version of what has now grown to be the internet. It allowed you to create mini-documents called cards and connect them via buttons so you could jump freely from one to another. I dreamed of creating a database of everything I wanted to keep at my fingertips. Then Newton came out – Newton was a proto-tablet that didn’t work very well – and I saw the pair of them as my own personal Tricorder.

Just dreams. Both hardware and software were too crude to be more than a tease, and even a tiny database takes a vast amount of time to create.

Today, the internet does what I dreamed of doing in the days of HyperCard and Newton. I use it to do research for this website. Sometimes I’m looking for things I don’t know, and it works fine for that. Primarily, however, I use it to check details on things I already know.

Here is an example. Years ago I wanted to look again at the Sherlock Holmes quote about furnishing your brain. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here it is:

“You see,” (Holmes) explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

I thought this was in one of his middle stories. It wasn’t; it was in the first, A Study in Scarlet. To find it, I pulled down my complete Holmes in two volumes and spent an hour looking, but I couldn’t find it. I stumbled across it by accident months later.

So today I did an experiment. I went to my search engine and typed in “brain attic”. It returned a page with ten responses. Six of them referred to the Holmes quote. I opened one, copied and pasted into this post, and you just read it.

Here is another example of finding things I already knew. In my post on The Monkey’s Paw, I wanted to use a quatrain from the Rubaiyat. I knew it well, but not well enough to quote for publication. I didn’t want to spend time getting out my copy and reading through its pages, so I typed a fragment – “dId the hand of the potter shake” – into the search engine and up popped:

After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?

Notice that I scored a hit even though I had left out “then”.

Earlier today, I was writing about the Lord Darcy stories. I didn’t want to misspell Randall Garrett’s name (How many Ls, how many Rs, how many Ts?) so I typed it into the search engine and got my correct spelling along with a great deal of additional material that I didn’t need.

That I didn’t need at the moment, that is, but information that will be there when I do need it. Like I said at the top, the internet is science fiction at its best.

243. On Fantasy: Archaism

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Marion Zimmer Bradley is well known for her fantasies, but she cut her teeth on science fiction. Her Darkover series was a massive best seller in its day. Darkover is a planet in our universe, populated by humans from a stranded starship, whose powers of the mind come (quite scientifically) from the pollen of psychotropic plants and from interbreeding with non-human natives. Lost and out of contact with their technological roots, they evolve a feudal society. They create an archaic world from a purely science fiction starting point.

Of course this is a reductionist view of a complex and massive series of novels and short stories. But it makes the point that archaism in fantasy is easy to achieve. You could almost write a formula:

HORSES + SWORDS + MAGIC = FANTASY

Of course it takes more than that to achieve good fantasy.

The time before known time is an ancient idea. Atlantis and Mu fit into it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came before recorded history. So did the world of Conan. The worlds of Michael Moorcock seem to be of this nature, but a closer reading will have to follow them sideways in time. Alternate histories allow access to archaic worlds coexisting with our modern world. We can go to other 2016s, where the Native Americans are the only Americans, or Rome still rules, or Muhammed became an atheist. Take your pick, and if you can’t find what you like, you can write your own.

Remnant stories also let the past live on. Professor Challenger found dinosaurs still living deep in the Amazon. Hilton’s characters found Shangri-La. Even Rick Brant, in the favorite series from my childhood, found a lost remnant of an earlier age hidden in the Himalayas in The Lost City.

You could go sideways in time, or backward, or to some lost valley and find dystopian, crowded cities, but that almost never happens. Archaism is about escaping modernity, crowding, complication, and life in cities. Back to simpler times. Back to the good old days. Back to the land of childhood. Back to the middle ages where knights in shiny armor rode pretty horses and rescued damsels with big bosoms and pearly teeth from dastardly villains – or dragons.

Does anybody believe this? Of course not. Does anybody want to believe? Of course. And in the friction generated when those two truths rub together, the fire of archaism is born.

So our hero goes back (or sideways) and he/she finds the land of her/his heart’s desire and it isn’t what she/he expected at all. But it isn’t bad. There are problems to overcome, heartaches to endure, and villainy to face, but so what? That’s true in Portland, and Austin, and New York City as well. In the new/old world  there are beauties and wonders, in addition to troubles. And it’s probably green, with trees and meadows, even if it also has rain and snow instead of eternal sunshine.

Above all, there aren’t any traffic jams. And the cell phone never rings.

Wait a minute. I’ll get my backpack, and we can go.