Missing the obvious

Last time, I said this:

I can't actually think of any examples of myth-chasing plots in fantasy or sci-fi off the top of my head, unless you include the vast number of fantasy stories which feature prophecies.

I clearly wasn't thinking too hard about the sci-fi, because there's one obvious myth-chasing plot that turns up all the time. It's based on the Fermi Paradox, which basically goes like this: given the size of the universe, and even moderate probabilities for the emergence of intelligent life, where are all the aliens?

There's a huge amount of sci-fi on this topic, although a lot of it doesn't really qualify as myth-chasing. In David Brin's Uplift series, for example, the explanation for the Paradox forms the basis of the setting, but it isn't really a mystery. Sometimes, though, it's all about trying to chase down the solution to that puzzle. Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series is an excellent example, and perhaps that's why I like it so much. My recollection is that first book in the series -- Revelation Space [2000] -- even begins on an archaeological dig.

Oh, hey, look: Jo Walton wrote an article on the Fermi Paradox in science fiction for Tor.com. So there you go.

I've also been pondering the possibility that the Big Dumb Object story is somewhat related to the myth-chasing plot. There are obvious differences -- the Big Dumb Object isn't exactly something you have trouble finding! But the process of unravelling its purpose, and how it got from there (wherever there is) to here, is not entirely dissimilar to piecing together the truth behind a myth. Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, though. What do you think?

Things I like #6: chasing myths

I blame Indiana Jones. Or possibly the The Goonies. If there's a plot that I'm a total sucker for, it's the one where the protagonists go off chasing a myth that -- gasp! -- turns out to be real. It's pretty clear I'm not alone, since this is a storyline that turns up again and again: the National Treasure movies, the Mummy movies, The Da Vinci Code [2003] by Dan Brown, the Uncharted video games, the Supernatural TV show, and probably dozens more examples.

So what's the appeal? The easy answer is familiarity. All of the things in the list above rely on that for their success, with varying degrees of cynicism. I think it's no coincidence that a lot of them aren't actually very good. "Everybody loves Indiana Jones, right? Let's do that, only different!" might be enough for a diverting 90-minutes (or 300 pages), but it's probably never going to be more than that.

I don't want to suggest, though, that the myth-chasing plot can never rise above the level of nostalgic light entertainment. I'm pretty sure I don't think that's true -- I mentioned my love for the Mellified Man story arc in my review of The Dervish House [2010] by Ian McDonald. It's a perfect example of this sort of plot. So what makes it better than the awful National Treasure movies (aside, obviously, from the quality of the writing)?

I think the first place that myth-chasing plots fall down is that they go for the obvious targets: the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny, Shambhala. And then, of course, they add Nazis. A big part of the joy for me in reading about the Mellified Man was that I'd never heard of it before. History is absolutely full of neat little things like that, which provide excellent leaping-off points for this sort of plot. Take the Baghdad Battery, or the sixteenth-century mechanical monk. The best of these stories seem almost unbelievable. I love being surprised by history.

When they're done well, myth-chasing stories actually give you two interrelated narratives, both of which are important. The first is the myth itself: where did it start, how did it weave its way through history, how was it changed and distorted by that passage, how did it eventually pass out of sight. The second is the story of the myth-chasers, trying to piece together this damaged and fragmentary trail.

It seems to me that those two interconnected narratives leave you with a lot of scope for interesting structural tricks. They also demand that you write intelligent protagonists, since we're talking about puzzles that have gone unsolved for a long, long time. I'd say this is a pretty common failure point for myth-chasing plots. 

I'm not sure where I come down on the need for realism. Clearly I'm not a stickler for it, otherwise my love for The Mummy wouldn't be so deep. But ambiguity is often much more interesting. It's never really discussed whether the Mellified Man actually has miraculous healing powers, because it's mostly besides the point. I suppose it depends on what sort of story you're trying to tell.  

I'm particularly interested in how you might use this sort of plot in fantasy or science fiction. It's easy enough to write about the Holy Grail, but what if your setting doesn't contain familiar legends to fall back on? It's a much trickier game then, particularly in anything shorter than a novel. You need to build up the myth, and then take it apart again. 

Incidentally, I wonder what the Holy Grail story might look like five hundred years from now? Does the arrival of Wikipedia mean these myths will essentially cease to evolve?

I can't actually think of any examples of myth-chasing plots in fantasy or sci-fi off the top of my head, unless you include the vast number of fantasy stories which feature prophecies. Can you think of any? Suggestions welcome in the comment thread, or via ambiguously worded postcard mailed to the usual address just before the Nazis snatch you!

Things I like #5: smashing genres together

Aside from both being really good space operas, Elizabeth Bear's novel Dust and Ian McDonald's novella "The Days of Solomon Gursky" don't really have a whole lot in common. There is a connection, though, and with hindsight its so obvious I'm kicking myself for not noticing it sooner: although both are clearly science fiction, they've both got a healthy dose of fantasy mixed in.

I'm not just talking Clarke's Law ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"), although there's certainly some of that in there. I mean that each of them appropriates some of the trappings and stylistic conventions of fantasy. Dust has warring noble houses, a quest, mythical creatures (well, technology dressed up as a mythical creatures). "The Days of Solomon Gursky", in its later chapters, starts to feel as much like mythology as science fiction.

That's the connection it took me a silly amount of time to see: genre-mashing. I think the thing that clarified it for me was reading Greg Bear's Hull Three Zero. It was a much straighter science fiction novel, despite (I feel) plenty of opportunity to throw something else into the mix. And it just didn't capture my imagination like Dust did.

It doesn't just have to be science fiction and fantasy, either. The books that got me back into reading science fiction were Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space and Chasm City, both space operas smooshed with gothic horror. China Mieville seems to specialise in this sort of thing. Karl Schroeder's Virga series of novels, Finch by Jeff Vandermeer, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. A great many of the novels that have left me feeling like I just read something really exciting whacked genres against each other.

I really have no idea how difficult it is to write something like this. I suspect very. But I'm going to have to try. I wonder if it is something that the authors set out to do consciously? I'd guess yes for Lies of Locke Lamora and maybe Dust, but perhaps no for the Alastair Reynolds novels, but those really are guesses.

Yeah, I know, there's not a lot of deep insight in this post. I suppose time will tell whether that's because I'm just starting out at this sort of thing, or because I lack the capacity for insight. I'm hoping for the former!

Things I like #4: ordinary things made extraordinary

Rather than spend a long time trying to describe this one, I'm going to give you two very different examples.

The first is a story I recently heard on Escape Pod called "The '76 Goldwater Dime", written by John Medaille and narrated by the always-excellent Norm Sherman. It's about a guy who collects coins. And what could be more ordinary than that? But these coins, boy, they certainly are not ordinary. I can't really say much more without giving it all away -- go and listen to the episode. Or, heck, you can even read it in its entirety (it isn't very long) at the link I provided above.

My second example isn't even a story. I read about it in a post on Jeff Vandermeer's blog. Some of his Finnish fans had created t-shirts and hockey jerseys for a fictional team called the Tallahassee Tentacles, named for Jeff's home town and the frequent occurrence of squid in his fiction. I'm Australian -- sport is a pretty ordinary, everyday part of my life. I really liked the way the Tallahassee Tentacles turned that on its head.

The trick, of course, is that nifty transformations like this don't make a complete story on their own. I think you could argue that "The '76 Goldwater Dime" would have functioned better as a piece of flash fiction, and although the Tallahassee Tentacles hint at a story, they aren't one yet.

Still, they're a great hook to drag people like me in.

Things I like #3: writing for the sheer joy of it.

I just got through reading a short story called "Zeppelin City", by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn*, and it was very timely. I've been thinking about the purpose of genre fiction recently, worrying over questions of worth (if you can't write a worthy story, should you write one at all? What about a clever story?). "Zeppelin City" crossed my path at exactly the right moment because it didn't fret itself over any of that. It was just plain good fun.

It felt to me like the authors were having a grand time writing it. It was full of things that are cliched enough to be dangerous (brains in jars! Rhetoric-spouting revolutionaries! Daring girl pilots and grubby-but-cute engineers!), but written with such affection that you had to forgive them. Or perhaps congratulate them. Because brains in jars are cool, right?

I feel like I don't read this sort of story very often. Probably because it is a tricky thing to pull off successfully. I remember feeling the same way after "The Hero", by Karl Schroeder, and it was enough to send me chasing off after some of his books. I seem to recall it happening during parts of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, too. The sense that the author wrote something because they thought it was cool, and that I was having fun reading it for exactly the same reason.

So there you go, another thing I like: writing for the sheer joy of it.

* "Zeppelin City" was originally published on tor.com, where you can still read it. I read it in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

City detective spots trend

Looking back over the list of books I enjoyed most this year, I noticed a couple of trends. The most pronounced is that six of the eight books I mentioned are urban novels. Actually, in the majority the city was basically an extra character -- Finch and The City & the City in particular. The second trend is that half of the genre novels I listed were detective stories. Two more of them featured law enforcement prominently.

Looking back over the complete list of things I read this year, it doesn't look like urban detective stories were all that common. They just turned out to be the ones I really enjoyed.

I think it's pretty obvious why I like urban novels: I live in the city (or, at least, very close to it). I also think that urban genre fiction is going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment, particularly in fantasy. That makes sense, I think. Ours is a largely urbanised society. Cities are what we -- both authors and readers -- know.

I'm less sure why I've enjoyed the detective stories so much. Maybe I'll get back to you on that one.

Things I like in SF #2: alien aliens

I'm not sure if this is a reaction to Star Trek, or a reaction to Tolkienesque fantasy, or something else entirely, but I like it when the aliens in my SF actually feel alien. I'm not just talking about them looking alien (although obviously that helps). I'm talking about alien psychology. It seems to me that so much of the way we think is influenced by our environment that I find it hard to believe that we'd have no trouble understanding a species evolved somewhere completely different.

Also, I'm not a fan of universal translators. At least, universal translators that work flawlessly. Everyone has played with Babelfish or some other online translator; you all know how bad they are, and that's on a single planet, amongst a single species. I don't know much about linguistics, but I do know that language is heavily influenced by culture, psychology, environment, and probably a dozen other things I haven't thought about. How the heck would you go about automatically translating something where none of those baselines were shared?

I suppose there are stories that this kind of thinking closes off for me. Assuming that alien-aliens is a hard and fast rule, of course (and I make no promises there!). No galactic clubs, where groups of aliens hang out and share knowledge and generally pal around. No Babylon 5. And maybe that's a pity.

Of course, it does provide opportunities. They can be excellent things for your characters to throw themselves against. How would we, as a species, respond to an alien race that we couldn't possibly communicate with? How would you respond to it? Unfathomable aliens can also make space feel really sinister -- they're out there, but what are they thinking? And would we like it if we knew?

Let me see if I can provide you with some examples where I've really enjoyed the aliens. There's "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, which is all about alien psychology. "From Babel's Fallen Glory We Fled" has a good automatic translator in it. The aliens in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books are pretty darned alien. I suppose there's classics like Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, too.

Aaaaand that's probably enough reading for now!

Edit: it occurs to me on re-reading this post that it is basically just a long-winded way of saying that I like hard SF. Who knew?!

Things I like in SF #1: vast distances and deep time

I felt a bit guilty about starting with a negative post, so Paul McAuley is going to have to wait. Instead, I give you the first in a possibly-continuing series: things I like in science fiction. 

Space is big (a phrase totally, deliciously ruined by Douglas Adams). I really like it when space operas can convey this vastness. There are billions of stars in our galaxy, but even if every one housed life the galaxy would still be mostly empty. You can hide just about anything out there, and it wouldn't even require much effort. There's something about that emptiness that really grabs my imagination. We're totally insignificant when pitted against it. It's menacing. And depending entirely on your perspective, it's completely quiet, or alive with the noise of the galaxy.

Predictably, I'm not very fond of faster than light travel. For one, it sets my physics-brain on edge (FTL automatically gives you time travel, and so if you've got one I want to know about the consequences of the other!). But mostly it slices out all that distance, all that lovely inky void.

If you've got huge distances and no FTL, then going anywhere is going to take a ridiculously long time. Even exchanging a digital handshake with someone living at our nearest stellar neighbour would take almost a decade. I love reading about what these massive time periods do to people. What's it like knowing you won't have an answer for seven hundred years? What's it like if every time you take a trip somewhere, hundreds or thousands of years pass before you're back in civilisation? How much do you forget? How do you keep some sense of continuity? Deep freezes, time dilation, cultural dislocation, altered perceptions of time, maintaining networks across impossible distances, the reality of staggeringly long life-spans; I love all that stuff.

Now I've got some reading for you. Here are some examples of stories that I think do vast distances and/or deep time well. A short story: Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds. A novelette: The Island, by Peter Watts (this won the Hugo this year). A novella: The Days of Solomon Gursky, by Ian McDonald. And a novel: Saturn Returns (the first of the Astropolis books), by Sean Williams.