Black Gate

I am trying to write a synopsis and outline of a novel I have been picking up and putting down any number of times over the last however many years, a space-opera-ish sf piece called Invisible House. Putting to paper the important essentials when my head is utterly tangled in the details of individual scenes is really hard work. When I take too much out, it starts to seem very pedestrian and boring; when I put too much in, I’m not distilling the story adequately for this particular form.

“On being just complicated enough” is the title of a famous article by Tony Wallace, a grand old man of my graduate department. It is about the complexity of cultural taxonomies, not writing, but too much of my graduate-school education involved the wrong things sticking in memory, and in this case the title adhered while the content has sublimated away.

“Being just complicated enough” is emblematic for me as the goal of a writer. In my own case the problem is a persistent tendency to make things too complicated. At Clarion, Damon Knight (in his last year of teaching there) told me, “You have a fertile mind,” and he did not mean it particularly as a compliment. William Blake has some line about every bird being an entire world if you look at it properly, and that, alas, is what too often starts to happen when I write.

Regarding the synopsis, I picked it up again a few weeks ago after a long dormant period and was surprised to discover I’d worked out a whole bunch of details about the last quarter of the book that had been extremely nebulous in my mind. But when I started working on it those paragraphs started to expand… turned into chapter outlines…chapter treatments… Not a bad thing! But I still need the synopsis to market the book. Must turn the world back into a bird…

I recently rented Son of Rambow, a coming of age tale in which two British schoolboy outcasts — one, Lee Carter, a bully and troublemaker, the other, Will, a shy kid raised by his widowed mother who belongs to a strict religious fundamentalist sect — develop a common ground on which to become friends. Lee’s one interest, besides causing mayhem, is filmmaking, particularly action movies such as Rambo. Will has a highly developed imagination and has secretly written a fantastical book in which the hero rescues his father from the forces of evil (and you can figure out where that idea comes from even without ever having read Freud). The two partner to realize Will’s fantasy as a movie to be submitted to a young filmmakers contest. Complications ensue when Will casts a visiting French exchange student, who everyone in school worships as the ultimate in coolness, in a lead role; the move results in Will gaining in popularity himself while Lee becomes marginalized. Meanwhile, the religious sect is beginning to suspect that Will is violating its precepts and Will has to be more inventive in accounting for his whereabouts when he sneaks off for filming.

The English film had a limited release in the U.S. and is perhaps under the radar for the average Netflixer. It is of note to BlackGaters not only because of the fantastical theme of the boys’ movie, as well as the archtypical nerdish attraction to find comfort in fantasy escapism, but because the director is Garth Jennings, who previously directed the celluloid version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which I haven’t seen, though I’ve heard fans are less than enamored of). Based in part upon his own childhood experiences, the movie is all the more remarkable because with one exception (Jules Sitruk who plays the French student), all of the child actors were neophytes (one of the minor characters is played by the grandson of Stanley Kubrick), though you’d never know it. If you’ve had your fill of the trite and true variations of this theme that are always playing at your local megaplex, check this one out. It restores your faith in the idea of film as a thoughtful medium, as opposed to the usual appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Gathered as we are around the virtual fireplace this week on the Black Gate site, with each of us blogger-types introducing ourselves and sharing some of our insights or opinions or our unique perspective based on how far along we are with our own writing projects, or what sort of specialist knowledge we can impart on the Black Gate community, I am confronted again with a problem I’ve had to deal with on my own blog. Namely, trying to appear interesting.

Being a writer of fiction, I could of course just lie and tell you about my experiences as a test pilot, or the time I spent as a plumber in Ulan Bator. But that, as the man said, is practically dishonest. So I tried to think instead about the sorts of things I’d be blogging about here, and what kind of qualifications I might have that meant that what I had to say was worth the time you’ll take to read it. It was then that I hit upon an interesting bit of self-knowledge, namely, that I came rather late to the kind of fiction you’ll see us talking most about on the site, the sort that appears most often in Black Gate.

So, my bona fides in this area show me to be a bit of a johnny-come-lately. I did scarf down The Hobbit in elementary school, it being the first book I remember buying with my own money, but I never got around to finishing The Lord of the Rings until I was nineteen. And, while Dungeons & Dragons and the Dragonlance books acquainted me with every fantasy trope from elvish tree-hugging to mace-swinging holy men, I doubt if I could have told you what a Sidhe was, or how the clerical prohibition against edged weapons actually had historical antecedents. Apart from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I wasn’t versed in any epic fantasy, for all my heroes dwelled in the world of science fiction.

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As my inaugural post here at Black Gate falls upon a holiday, I asked Howard Andrew Jones what sort of topic might be appropriate.  Perhaps a survey of the role of birds in fantasy, or the importance of radical Puritanism in the work of Robert E. Howard, or the secret predatory nature of the common turkey . . . friends, have you ever seen a raised eyebrow sent via email?  “Maybe if you just introduce yourself,” he said.  A wise man, that Howard. 

My name is Scott Oden, and I – like those who have blogged before me – am a writer; my genres of choice are historical fiction set in Antiquity and historical fantasy.  I maintain a personal blog and a website.  And I will tell you this upfront: I have a serious thing for Orcs . . . Tolkien, non-Tolkien, Greenskins, and even those ridiculous porcine brutes from D&D.  One of my hobbies is tracing their evolution through modern media (“research for a book,” I tell myself, in hopes of lending an air of respectability to what amounts to a peculiar obsession). 

As far as influences go, I owe a great debt to Robert E. Howard.  His grim and vibrant adventures have colored my own work since the day I first put pen to paper; indeed, it’s likely I would never have decided to try my hand a writing if I had not come across Conan of Cimmeria in my older brother’s library.  Tolkien, too, ranks high on my list, alongside Harold Lamb.  The latter’s Alexander of Macedon, which I read as part of a school project in the 5^th grade, directly inspired my second novel, Memnon. 

When not writing or reading, I can usually be found gaming – both old school dice-and-paper role-playing games and console video games.  I’m sure, as we go forward, little bits of all the things that hold my interest will make their way into my posts, and perhaps even what little wisdom I can muster on the business of writing novels. 

So, that’s it from me for now.  I wish everyone much happiness and contentment on this Thanksgiving Day!

You know that guy, Austin Tappan Wright, who spent his entire life writing a massive utopian novel Islandia, a fantastic work in every sense, which only saw print after his death?

I hate that guy.

Not because there was anything wrong with him, a fine person by all accounts, or his masterpiece, a cleanly written and intensely imagined fantasy. No, it’s just that one tends to hate what one fears and for a long time I feared a minor-league version of his fate. I often envisioned someone, after my death, clearing away my papers (or data clouds, or whatever we’ll be using for documents in the distant, I say distant, future) and finding references to someone named Morlock. “Did Enge write fiction?” they’d say in my recurring nightmare. “I thought he just killed undergraduates with humiliating questions about gerunds and Zeus’ sex life.”

Now, anyway, that won’t happen, thanks largely to the two people editing Black Gate. John O’Neill bought a few Morlock stories from me back in 2004/2005, and Howard Jones took a couple more when he was editing the e-zine Flashing Swords in its first and greatest iteration, and on the strength of the Morlock series I eventually got an agent and this summer signed a two-book deal with Pyr Books. The first book, Blood of Ambrose, is due out in April 2009. I don’t say success is imminent, certainly not with the financial crisis casting a shadow over publishing along with every other field of endeavor in the US, but my obituary will probably have occasion to mention my fiction when it appears in the county newspaper (or neural nanotransmitters, or whatever we’ll be using for news-media in the distant, I say distant, future). So: thanks, John and Howard. I owe you.

It’s not to repay the debt, which can’t be repaid, that I accepted their invitation to group-blog here. It’s that, when given a chance, I’m constitutionally unable to refrain from running my mouth about stuff on my mind, whether I know anything about it or not, and fortunately this is one of the three great purposes of the internet (along with pron and lolcatz).

The thing on my mind at the moment is unicorns. It started with the announcement of the upcoming anthology Zombies vs. Unicorns (edited by Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier), which struck me as a brilliant idea. (I had half a thought or so about it which I blogged here.)

Then last night, as synchronicity would have it, I read a W.B. Yeats play about players and pretenders, “The Player Queen”, in which unicorns loom large, although they never actually appear. Rumors of unicorns tag the local ruler as a witch; one second-hand report even has the unicorn and the reclusive queen doing the nasty. A drunken poet named Septimus defends the unicorn from any charge of impurity, but as the play goes on (and he sobers up?) he starts railing against the “violent virginal creature”:

If we cannot fill him with desire he will deserve death. Even unicorns can be killed. What they dread most in the world is a blow from a knife that has been dipped in the blood of a serpent that died gazing upon an emerald.

I’m not sure what half the stuff about unicorns in the play means, but it’s clearly a powerful symbol of otherness and hope. Since then unicorns have been used and imagined and reimagined so much that their emotional halo has been mylittleponied into blunt four-color rainbows. They’re overfamiliar. “They had their day but now they’re passé.” “That old preacher character don’t make me laugh anymore.”

In a way, this is inevitable. Any symbol, if it penetrates deeply into a culture, attracts parody and appropriation–it’s one way you can start to actually see the thing again, as opposed to scanning past it and saying, “Yeah, I know what that is.” Consider the million-and-one parodies of the Mona Lisa. They don’t diminish the original.

But it seems as if the poppification of the unicorn has gone beyond this, banalizing the image so that it is almost impossible to use it in a semi-serious context, even in fantasy where, one would think, an occasional unicorn might find an unspoiled field to roam in.

Can the unicorn be saved? Or is the image just used up and does it need to lie fallow for a century or two before it’s usable again?

I don’t know, but it’s a more important question than it might seem at first. The unicorn is just one instance of a larger trend where the tropes of fantasy have become so familiar they are almost toxic. Naturally the genre needs to go on finding new tropes (and it seems to me to be having a little trouble with that), but it would also be good if we could somehow detoxify the old ones, remake them, reforge those broken blades. If so, maybe even the sickly unicorn can take new life.

And if not–what were those ingredients again? An emerald, a snake, a knife…