Another Reason to Like George R. R. Martin

George R. R. Martin is having a good year. First, Game of Thrones is now airing as a(n apparently fantastic - I haven't been able to see it yet) HBO show. Second, he finally finished Dance With Dragons after six long years.

Now a clueless reviewer labels GoT as male fantasy, and Martin takes issue with this.

A choice quote:

if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?

In the light of certain sf/f authors identifying their stories as male-oriented - like George Lucas - it's great to see a major male fantasy author standing up for female fans and saying, fuck you, this isn't just for boys. Martin was already my favorite epic fantasy author - this only raises my esteem of him.

Read the whole thing here: "Boy Fiction?"

Show Me This:

Here is what I would absolutely love to see or read: A fantasy (or contemporary sci-fi) television show or book series with strong, realistic character focus, creative/surprising plot and action elements, female characters as good as male characters (and not just as interesting; they should be just as badass and plot-important as any of the male characters; if one character has to be Most Important, I'd prefer a female, just because you see that less often), a cast of characters who aren't all straight and/or white, multiple actively bisexual characters, and strong polyamory, queer, and sex-positive themes.

For the record, what I'm working on fits this description either perfectly or partially. (Specifically, the book fits all of it; the script I'm doing a little less so, but hey, I'm co-writing it.)

This is one reason I'm looking forward to the Game of Thrones TV show (and why I love the books); the book series fits all of the above except that the poly/queer themes are only minor (and thus sadly may not make it to the show), most of the characters are at least nominally white, and there's only one major actively bisexual character. But everything else fits - and this is all in SPITE of the extremely male-dominant anti-feminist pseudo-medieval setting. I don't favor epic fantasy, but I make an exception here.

(That might be misleading. I love the idea of epic fantasy, but since I want character focus and not setting focus, I usually end up disappointed by the genre. This includes The Lord of the Rings books; in the movies, you at least had the actors to convincingly emote. You don't get that in the books - not enough, anyway.)

If you know of a book or book series that fits all these criteria, point me the fuck to it. I don't think it exists. (I *know* there's no TV series that does.)

Which is, of course, why I have to write them.

Rambling on Fantasy

Because I am lazy, here's a blog post I wrote a while ago - October 2007, in fact - yet never finished:

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'Burying reader under a dumpload of facts' (I think I stole that quote from someone, not sure who anymore) is the bane of sf/fantasy. One of the banes, anyway. It's a bit difficult to have an outsider's perspective when you're making up the world in your own head.

Then again, that doesn't take cliche into account. The Lord of the Rings Rip-Off No. [Insert Arbitrarily Large Number Here] may well count as being written with an 'outsider's perspective'. In fact, the parts of the regurgitated fantasy world the author invented themselves stick out because those are the only parts the author bothers to explain. Unfortunately, this can be extended to plot and character motivations just as much as setting...

And there's always things like vampires, where authors sometimes even start out by explaining which cliches are true, which are untrue, and which the narrator (read: author) thinks are utterly ridiculous (read: unkewl). (Vulnerability to garlic? Not in MY vampires!)

Annoying though this is, it does speak to a central problem of sf/fantasy, which, come to think of it, is merely an exaggerated version of the Setting Problem all stories have - how do you get all this info across to your reader without annoying them? Which is bad, which is good? Purely, I suppose, good info would be info relevant to the character, and bad info would be info relevant only to the author. But what about info irrelevant to the character, but relevant to the reader?

I guess that's why the Newbie Initiate character is so popular. Too bad they're usually boring as shit.

Dungeons & Dragons: Satan's Game

(If you don't get the title, look up Dead Alewives. Really.)

On my other blog, in the bowels of LiveJournal, I do a series of posts entitled "The Monsters of Dungeons and Dragons", in which I explain the monsters of Dungeons and Dragons. Since I started the series, a new edition of D&D has come out. I haven't got to that yet. I'm still in the letter "H" of the old Monster Manual! Maybe I'll never finish this, but who cares - it'll be fun while I still feel like it. ...Which I guess is sort of circular.

So far I had 15 parts, and now part 16 is online. A list of links for your convenience:

Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

And now... The Monsters of Dungeons and Dragons, Part XVI, from Gorgon to Half-Fiend. Read them if you're in the mood to be entertained by nerdy things!

(I'd post them here, but I don't know how to duplicate the LiveJournal-specific codes. Perhaps if I figure that out...)

Oblivion

I've been playing video games again a little bit lately. Well, one video game: Oblivion, being the fourth installment in the fantasy role-playing game series, "The Elder Scrolls".

I play video games, as most people do, for a variety of reasons. A less entertaining reason is that it's a stress reliever. A more entertaining reason is that I enjoy being in the role of someone who can accomplish spectacular things in other worlds, living through dramatic stories with no consequences to myself but emotional ones. I want to call lightning with the power of my mind, find ancient supernatural artifacts in underground caves, leap off mountains and survive. This is why I tend to play video games like "Oblivion".

"Oblivion", and the Elder Scrolls series in general, is a roleplaying game, and is somewhat unique in the video game world. The game starts you off as a forgotten prisoner in a dungeon; what you did to be put in the dungeon is never explained. As the game opens, the Emperor of the continent, voiced by Patrick Stewart, comes traipsing through your prison cell. His guards are very annoyed to see you there - apparently your cell houses a secret escape route from the city (if only you'd known!) and the Emperor is being chased by assassins. It looks like a bureaucratic mix-up stuck you in the middle of this - or maybe Destiny, because the Emperor recognizes your face. It seems he's seen you in his dreams. Before the next few hours are out, he'll be dead, and you'll be tasked with the mission of finding his illegitimate surviving heir and delivering to him a supernatural heirloom.

The story continues from there, of course, but if you just follow through that story and nothing else, you're missing the point. The world of "Oblivion" (and its predecessors "Morrowind" and "Daggerfall") is huge and open. It is over 16 square miles wide in 'real' absolute terms, with giant cities, small towns, open tracts of wilderness, rivers, mountains, swamps, forests, and people everywhere; that's not even counting the alien world of Oblivion (a combined metaphor for outer space and hell, believe it or not) which the player can venture to. It's a world to get lost in.

Sure, technology puts limits on the realism; some of the world is randomly generated, the people who populate the world have limited dialogue, and, well... you're playing a video game. It's as unrealistic on the edges as you would ultimately expect.

Still, "Oblivion" is powerful in that, within the loose bounds of the fantasy world provided, you can be anyone. You choose and design your own character, appearance, personality, skills and physical traits. It's easy to design a range of characters who do completely different things in this other world, live in different cities, befriend different people. This is the appeal of the role-playing game; god forbid I play a game like "World of Warcraft", in which the possibilities are truly infinite because you're surrounded by real people. It's this kind of thing that turns people into addicts, who sacrifice their outside social lives on the altar of a fantastic world where they can live lives they never could in the outside world.

Not I. There's an edge of frustration involved, and for me, it makes me want to write. A game like "Oblivion" has an inevitable story problem; it's sharply limited despite the openness of the world. There's only a few conversation options, and an ultimately finite number of unique stories you can experience in the world. Inevitably, most are predictable, and the ones that are surprising still amount to very very short stories once you subtract the amount of fighting and looting and exploring that you do to get from point A to point B. The beautiful world of the game triggers inspiration; walking down a woodland road in the rain holding an enchanted sword gives one a sense of possibility, a sense of wondering, for me, what this character that I have so carefully created might be doing or feeling walking down this road in another world. The game, good as it is, cannot but fall short of these speculations. It's from these frustrations that stories can be born.

On Wand Decay, Part Two

I was running through my old blog posts, wondering why I don't update more (and resolving to do so, once again), and I realized that back in July, I missed a fascinating comment by one Luke Maciak of Terminally Incoherent. My original post was questioning why Magic Items Of Magicness never break down in stories in the fantasy genre. Luke's response merits its own (if very, very late) post.

Luke points out:

I'd imagine that in a world where magic would actually exist an enchanted sword would sometimes need maintenance or recasting of said enhancement - especially after heavy use.

Most RPG's both pen and paper or computer based do have some restrictions on magic items that zap things, or cast spells themselves. Wands and staves usually have "charges" and once you drain them you either have to wait till they recharge or the item is simply spent and must be re-enchanted or discarded.

Additive or buffing items (like the Mighty Sword of +1 Strength) usually never get depleted however. They probably should.

There's an interesting counterpoint for these statements: since magic is itself imaginary, why does it have to follow a particular set of rules? Who are we to say that magic power requires maintainable? Some would argue, further, that magic doesn't need to seem real in fantasy fiction - after all, isn't that missing the point?

To me, it's a question of believability. Magic isn't real, of course. If an author wants to go for believability, created a feeling of this-could-really-exist, then drawing real-world parallels is more important. So a magic sword running low on batteries, so to speak, can be more believable than a magic sword that never runs out of power. Everything in our world is governed by rules - magic should be the same, to a certain extent. (All fiction bends real-world rules to serve the plot, as necessary)

The importance of believability depends highly on the story; in epic fantasy (along the lines of Lord of the Rings) treating magic from a perspective of realism is a bad idea, but in contemporary fantasy this is more important.

Luke comments further:

As for cast spells many systems require skill checks before casting and have miscast effects which work similar to "fumble" rules for physical skill checks.

In most games I played the duration of spells that can be cast by PC's is strictly defined and the caster must periodically renew the spell to keep it in action.

Spell 'durations' are something familiar to anyone who's played a fantasy videogame or tabletop role-playing game; they exist because strict boundaries on character power are required to make the game fun. (Fumble rules - rules for what happens when someone screws up casting an in-game spell - are there primarily for entertainment value.) This is a principle generally ignored in fantasy fiction itself, though; usually the writers just "handwave" how the magic powers of magicalness actually work. If someone is unaffected by a spell, for instance, it's because he or she is "too powerful". If someone fails to accomplish something with magic, it's because they "weren't powerful" enough".

Certain fiction series attempt to establish "power levels" for characters, which are inevitably fudged or ignored soon afterwards. Notably, in books based on RPGs, rules for spells are generally ignored as convenient for the plot.

I've yet to see an effective set of (non-mystical) rules governing magic outside of fantasy games. The closest we get is the Midichlorian Explanation (also referred to as Doing In The Wizard - warning, clicking that link may ruin your life), where the question of Where Magic Comes From is answered using technobabble, science fiction style. All this usually does is annoy readers/viewers (see fan reaction to the new Star Wars movies explaining that the Force comes from "midichlorians"), and rarely affects how magic is used in the story anyway.

Why Don't Wands Break Down?

From the Turkey City Lexicon (an entertaining dictionary of writing terms which I've run into several times in the past, most recently via David Isaak's blog):

• AM/FM
  Engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic.

I'm pretty sure this bit of the lexicon refers to the habit of certain sci-fi books to feature Futuristic Technology that never fucks up, always acts perfectly. In essence, it's Magic.

But hey, why should Fucking Magic always work so perfectly, anyway? In fiction I've read, guns jam. Cars break down. Pipes get clogged, tires go flat, doors creak, metal rusts. But I can't remember the last time I read about a magic item suffering the effects of wear and tear. This is especially noticeable in Aar Pee Gees (role-playing games) that bother to implement the effects of slamming a sword into giant rats and creepy fucking monsters but work perfectly if you're using that sword to zap something with frost magic. Even if it's completely broken (unusable, in game terms). Magic mechanics are usually limited to 'mana' or 'magicka' bars; in other words, treating magic power like batteries. (Or, as in D&D, you get a limited number of 'spell slots'.)

Outside of the RPG world, in fiction, these limitations are usually ignored. Even the books based on D&D rarely if ever pay attention to 'spells per day'. (I admit I've not read many of these books, as they're often... well, terrible.)

In the world of books, the last time I remember seeing magic breakdown appear was the second Harry Potter book, where a character breaks his wand, and it spends the rest of the book making spells rebound, blowing bubbles and making someone barf slugs for a couple hours. But this wasn't wear and tear, note, it was the result of being snapped in half. I can't think of an instance where a wand stopped working because of, say, a faulty magic spark plug.

Now, sure, it would be a little silly if Sauron's One Ring ran out of battery power if worn too long, but what about the many, many modern fictive magic worlds that are less Epic and Mythic and more down-to-earth? Something to dump in the idea pool, at least...