Author Archives: Mike Reeves-McMillan

About Mike Reeves-McMillan

Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
Nov 23

Sensawunda!

Posted on by

So, since my last post, I’ve started on the first book of the Institute Arcane series. Working title is Novices.

And my thinking on the setting has developed. I said in the previous post that when I came up with the idea of the magical Great Work being a network of canals, I felt like it maybe should be something with more sensawunda. Well, Fred (Damon Knight’s name for the subconscious assistant that all writers have) has done good work, and sensawunda is now all over it.

There’s still a network of canals, inspired by the British canal system that helped launch the Industrial Revolution. But now it’s a network of air canals, with constant winds, contained within invisible force fields, propelling levitating air-barges and rapid courier boats. A kind of magical hyperloop, if you will.

The original dull stone cube of the Institute Arcane itself has become a thing that I love: a magical castle with bizarre, even whimsical architecture, making full use of the magic system’s ability to play with gravity and set up constant movement in air and water. I’m sure it will get even more strange and fun as I develop it (while remaining carefully distinct from Hogwarts, which has a high proportion of whimsy for its own sake).

I often read fantasy novels – mainly ones set in a version of our world, rather than a secondary world like this one is, but sometimes secondary-world too – where I feel like the magic that’s described doesn’t make enough difference to the world at large. It’s as if it’s only been worked out just enough to cover the central plot, and not all of the things that are off-camera or in the background. I don’t want to make that mistake here.

We see the Institute through the eyes of Gwin, a student who’s dreamed of going there most of her life, and who is all about the sensawunda of it. She thinks the Institute is just terrific, and even though I plan to have her become a little bit disillusioned with some aspects of it, the place itself is still cool.

So far I’m almost 10k in. I’d toyed with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo with it (since I’m in a NaNo Storybundle at the moment with my nonfiction book The Well-Presented Manuscript), but I’ve had some issues with my old shoulder injury which are limiting how much I can type, so I’ll probably not get much further than that in November. That’s fine; hopefully I can rehab my shoulder and do a bit more when I’m on my Christmas-New Year break.

Because the sensawunda is strong with this one, I’m taking my time getting to the inciting incident, but it will come soon. And it’s not coincidence or luck that brings the characters together – they’ve been selected for a project; nor is it a battle against any kind of Dark Lord, but (as per my earlier post) the creation of a Great Work of magical wonder, the abovementioned air canal network. While I’m at it, I’m undermining some romance tropes, as well. I know exactly what readers will be thinking by this point, and I am going to gleefully subvert their expectations, in a way that I hope will not be a disappointment but a thought-provoking twist.

Most importantly, I’m enjoying this new world and what I’m doing with it. The characters are emerging, are distinct from one another, and will mesh well together. I’m still a touch concerned that I don’t have quite enough plot for later on; but I’m sure Fred will come through for me again when it counts.

Oct 13

New projected series: The Institute Arcane

Posted on by

So I’ve decided to do a series set in a magic school: the Institute Arcane.

No, it won’t be another sub-par Harry Potter ripoff, such as the market is currently awash in. Honestly, it’s more Brandon Sanderson than J.K. Rowling, in the sense that there are very specific limitations built into the magic system, and those are both creative constraints for me and also key drivers and shapers of the story. (Rowling’s magic system, like her worldbuilding generally, is loose, inconsistent, whimsical, and not always fully worked out.)

This is a university, too, not a high school; it has more kinship with the school at Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea, or for that matter with Pratchett’s Unseen University, than with Hogwarts. But you can’t escape the shadow of HP whenever you write about a magical school.

Part of the overarching story for the series is that the characters are setting out to create a Great Work. Creating a magical wonder is not a thing you see too often in fantasy; usually, you’re seeing the characters questing for (occasionally, destroying or witnessing the destruction of) a wonder from earlier, mightier times.

Western fantasy has its roots in medieval and Renaissance literature, and medieval Europe was looking back on the days of Rome, when great construction projects like the aqueducts were created. To the medieval mind, these were the works of giants, inconceivable in scope; they were able to create awe-inspiring cathedrals, true, but it sometimes took generations. I assume that’s where fantasy gets the whole “works of the ancients” trope from.

I’ve worked on projects pretty much throughout my working life. When I was a book editor back in the early-to-mid 90s, each book was a project, and it took multiple people to bring it to fruition. Since then, I’ve worked on many IT projects, large and small, usually for big manufacturing businesses or public infrastructure organisations, which (like the projects themselves) are an example of many people coming together to achieve things that nobody could achieve alone. So doing a series in which a big project is the overarching plot is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

The Great Work itself is probably going to be a system of canals, with magical currents to push the boats along. It was canals, not railways, that initially made Britain the world’s first industrial nation, creating wealth, lowering the price of goods, and accelerating the gradual shift in the balance of power in society away from people who owned land to people who owned businesses, as well as being one of the preconditions for urbanisation and everything that went with that. There were, of course, bitter fights over most of the individual canals and over the canal system in general, nor did the building of the canals go smoothly in many cases. And, as always, unprincipled people saw the opportunity to make some easy money by selling stock for something that might or might not ever exist, and if it did exist, might not make any money. So there’s plenty of conflict baked right in.

Shropshire Union Canal near Norbury Junction

When I was initially considering canals as the Great Work, I wondered if I should do something with more sensawunda, something less pragmatic and more exciting. But a canal system that revolutionises the economy is very on-brand for me.

The kind of work I do, and the kind of work done by the people I do that work for, is not spectacular. We’re not going to get prizes for it. Wikipedia would say that we, and our work, are of “questionable notability”.

But you would notice if we stopped.

I read a book a little while back by an (I assume) callow youth who portrayed, more or less incidentally to his plot, a society completely composed of elite geniuses. Missing from his conception of the world was the fact, known to us who have been around a bit longer and toured the concrete corridors behind the scenes, that no society can function just with an elite. The world works even as well as it does because millions of ordinary people turn up every day and do their unspectacular jobs, often with considerable devotion.

And my fiction sets out to celebrate that, in the Gryphon Clerks (not only civil servants, but engineers, doing what they do each day to make people’s lives better), and in the Auckland Allies books (underpowered magic users stepping up to defend the city because there’s nobody else).

I’ve never been poor. I’ve been short of money, but that’s different from being poor. I always had my solidly middle-class parents (both schoolteachers, plus my father made an extra income from writing sports books) to fall back on if I really needed to. My ancestors were not so prosperous; my mother’s family were all skilled tradespeople with their own small businesses in the male line, and farmers on her mother’s side, while my father’s ancestors worked as sailors, fishermen, and the like. His father drove a train, and his mother’s mother kept a boarding house near the end of the railway line (which is how they met).

So I don’t have much direct knowledge of what it’s like to be really struggling, though I do have a family background that’s relatively humble just a couple of generations back. My world is, and always has been, composed of what used to be called the “middling sort”: not wealthy, not poor. The big layer of folks in the middle of the sandwich that keep the wheels turning. And so that’s who I like to celebrate in my fiction, though I’m also planning to toss in a noblewoman in reduced circumstances and a street thief, just to mix it up.

But I’ll put them in a school for wizards, because why wouldn’t I?

Aug 14

More on Portal Fantasy

Posted on by

I recently read a book that got me thinking about portal fantasy again. (For my earlier thoughts, see On Portal Fantasy.)

It was itself a recent portal fantasy, and the way in which it got me thinking about the genre was not a good way. The protagonist goes to another world, where the inhabitants are suffering under a dictatorship. It’s ripe for change, but the people themselves aren’t able to bring that change; that needs the special person from our world. She triggers the change by introducing a different element to their act of religious worship, which, instead of finding deeply offensive, they welcome.

After some vicissitudes for her, the domino effect from her (relatively minor) action brings down the dictator, whereupon she turns around and goes back home, leaving the locals to sort it out from there. (Of course, nothing in real-life history suggests that there will be any kind of problem at all when a place with a diverse population that has been under a dictator for many years is finally cut loose; coughYugoslavia, coughIraq, cough, sorry, something in my throat.)

If you are thinking, “That sounds like the White Saviour trope,” that’s what I thought too–except that in the book, the protagonist is not white. It is still pretty colonialist in its effect, though.

I posted on the Codex writers’ forum, of which I’m a member, about this, and the resulting discussion has helped me work through some further thoughts on portal fantasy. Discussions on that forum are confidential by default, and I don’t want to take anyone else’s ideas and claim them as my own, but I will talk about what I came up with myself, acknowledging that it was the context of being able to talk them out with other people that helped me develop them. I’ll also briefly mention immigration, which was discussed by other people in the thread, though I don’t have a lot to say about it myself.

So, a theory: portal fantasy is one part of a wider group of genres that also contains (some) utopian fiction, Lost Worlds, fantastic voyages, and (some) planetary romance. Possibly (some) alternate-world-hopping fiction, (some) multiverse stories, and (some) time travel also.

It’s sometimes said that the only two stories are “someone comes to town” or “someone leaves town”. This genre is about “someone really leaves town”. It’s a visit to a place that is strongly Other, and what happens there says a lot about how we feel about the Other.

Early on, when most people didn’t travel much; travel was difficult and dangerous; and people not very far away were extremely different, the Fantastic Voyage predominated. Think Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, early medieval examples like Brendan the Navigator, the later medieval Travels of Sir John Mandeville, and, as late as the 18th century, Gulliver’s Travels. (Sinbad the Sailor is not much earlier than Gulliver; it’s a late addition to the Arabian Nights, though it’s based strongly on medieval models.) Because most of the world wasn’t mapped, any strange thing could be over the horizon. C.S. Lewis embeds a Fantastic Voyage in a portal fantasy with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and, because Lewis was a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature, it contains many of the classic features.

Ancient ship 6th c. BC (2)Usually, the travel in these stories was by ship, since this was the fastest and safest method of travel at the time (though neither very fast nor very safe by modern standards). However, you could also walk or ride to strange places; the Silk Road, for example, as described by Marco Polo in the late 13th/early 14th century, led to places that were legendary or completely unknown to Europeans. Familiar places and strange places were contiguous, just a long way apart with a lot of tedious travel in between, as they are in most secondary-world fantasy (think about Bilbo and the road that goes from his door in Hobbiton all the way to Mordor and beyond).

Later, as the world became more thoroughly mapped, the possible number of locations for strange places and their strange inhabitants shrank, and became confined to distant, uncharted islands and remote mountains (Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, set in the then-uncharted interior of New Zealand; Charlotte Perkins Gilmore’s Herland and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, both set on remote, inaccessible plateaus in South America; Shangri-La in Tibet; etc.). More had already set Utopia on an island in the 16th century, and for that matter, most of the strangeness in the Odyssey takes place on islands. Even as late as the late 20th century, Paradise Island/Themyscira, the Savage Land (hidden in Antarctica), and Wakanda were credible locations, at least for comics.

Gradually, though, all of the Earth was mapped, and the Other land had to be further away. The Celtic Otherworld provided inspiration for George MacDonald, who influenced Lewis, and there you had portal fantasy (as I argued in my previous post). There was the Hollow Earth idea, too, and trips to the moon by various means (starting with Kepler’s Somnium and Godwin’s The Man in the Moone in the 17th century and leading through to Wells and beyond), and gradually you got planetary romance, with A Voyage to Arcturus via crystal ship, and John Carter projecting himself to Mars by willpower alone, and then Northwest Smith a bit more realistically going by rocket. And then, as we learned more about the planets, that too started to become, not impossible, but consciously retro; when Lewis published his Space Trilogy, he knew that Mars and Venus weren’t really as he portrayed them, but he didn’t care, because that wasn’t his goal. It was a way of putting his protagonist in a strange Other place.

But these days, if you want a fantastical setting with an anchor back to our world in the form of a character who goes to the setting and (usually) comes back, portal fantasy is probably your go-to. Though a lot of similar things can be done by other means; Michael Underwood achieves a kind of portal space-opera by having someone from our world go through a one-way, one-time teleporter from some Atlantean ruins, and I’ve read some alternate-world-hopping and time-travel fiction that’s not too unlike portal fantasy in many respects. Star Trek’s planets of hats have a good deal of the DNA of the fantastic voyage in them, too.

And just because we have so many stories like this over such a long period of time, certain tropes get embedded so deep it’s hard to see them. And some of those are about the traveler being superior to the weird natives and being able to fix their problems when they are helpless to do so, or the natives being valuable mainly for what they provide to the protagonist, and not being as real or as important or possessing as much agency as the protagonist. We do, after all, like a protagonist to have agency, right? (Though how much agency a Chosen One of prophecy actually has is debatable.) In the Chronicles of Amber, for example, Amber (and Chaos) are explicitly the only “real” places with the only “real” people; everywhere else is just Shadow, and Corwin has few qualms about recruiting an army out of Shadow and leading them to slaughter. This is an intensely colonialist mindset.

But not all the stories are like that, and they don’t have to be.

Part of the problem, I think, is that most societies, definitely including contemporary Western societies, foster an unconscious assumption in their citizens that Here is the best place to come from, and People from Here are the best kind of people, and other places aren’t quite as real or important, and if they do things differently that may well be because they don’t have the benefit of being from Here and knowing the correct way to do them.

This isn’t an inevitable part of the genre, though. The early works I described above, for example, where the Other place was intensely dangerous as well as strange, put the traveller at risk and at a disadvantage compared to the inhabitants–though even as far back as the Odyssey, the hero is a trickster who pulls one over on the locals and then leaves.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland gives us another model, also used in other utopian works (including Utopia itself): the Other place as critique of our society, as a way of speculating about how things could be different. Herland is like Wonder Woman’s Themyscira in that it’s isolated and hidden from the world (on a plateau in South America, rather than an island), contains only women, and is utopian. A group of men find it and variously are schooled in how to be more civilized/mess the place up because they refuse to be schooled. It’s not a great story as a story, but it does give an alternative model.

If we turn to a contemporary portal fantasy like Foz Meadows’ Manifold Worlds series, the protagonist goes to a deeply strange and quite dangerous Other place and is transformed by her experiences there (to the point of PTSD). Some things in the Other place are better, from her perspective, some are worse, and some are just different; it’s not a one-dimensional comparison. And, while she has some impact on events in the other world, she isn’t the sole special Chosen One who saves everyone, and the world probably has more impact on her than vice versa. (I’ve talked before about the difference between stories where the protagonist impacts the world and stories where the world impacts the protagonist.)

Not that impact on the protagonist in portal fantasy is new either. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader shows us Eustace’s transformation into a much better person; The Silver Chair follows up on this by showing us Jill’s transformation into someone who can stand up to bullies, though her and Eustace’s intervention is also important in the Other world. I highly recommend, by the way, the series on C.S. Lewis’s work currently in progress at Tor.com; it’s sympathetic without being sycophantic, and celebrates what Lewis was setting out to achieve and did achieve without ignoring the problems in the texts. There’s more to Lewis than his detractors often admit, though there are also more issues than his supporters often admit; this series does a good job of balancing those two perspectives, I feel.

I recently read another portal fantasy in this tradition, the rather lovely (and, in my opinion, funny) Pundragon by Chandra Clarke. The protagonist’s main contribution to the situation is actually to mess things up and then do his best to help the (more competent) local inhabitants to fix them; he returns to our world having sorted out some of his own issues and more able to deal positively with his life.

The other big experience that people have of going to a strange Other place is immigration. That’s not an experience I have had personally; my great-great-grandparents (and one great-grandfather, at the age of 9) were immigrants to New Zealand, but since they all died long before I was born I don’t even have personally transmitted stories of what that was like for them. My wife is an immigrant, though from another Western country, which does make a difference to one’s experience (and she looks like the majority of the New Zealand population, which also makes a difference). That’s not, in short, my story to tell, or something I feel qualified to discuss in any depth, but I do look forward to reading portal fantasies that reflect the immigrant experience.

Of course, that may well mean that the shape of the story is different. Not “there and back again,” a classic hero’s journey over the threshold into the Other place and then back again to the familiar, but going to embrace the unfamiliar and then stay there, however much you long for aspects of what you’ve left. Also, bringing change and enrichment to the Other place from a position of having less agency than the inhabitants, not more.

In any case, if you’re about to write a portal fantasy, please think about the tropes, and what they’re saying about the Other, before you use them.

Jun 29

On Disagreement

Posted on by

I’ve recently realized that people being friends with other people with whom they have significant philosophical differences is a bit of a theme in my books.

It first comes up in City of Masks, my first novel, where two elderly scholars sit firmly on opposite sides of a philosophical divide that is also political, and which is attached to factions that are literally at war in the city. (I based the factions extremely loosely off the Guelphs and Ghibellines, with possibly a touch of the Blue and Green factions that started out as fans of chariot racing in the Byzantine Empire and ended up as political and, some say, religious parties, each supported by what amounted to street gangs.) The two men have been friends since their youth, and live together, and while they argue and bicker over their beliefs, they are always staunch allies for each other when it counts.

I’ve recently re-read the existing three novels in my Auckland Allies series, because I want to write a fourth one, and one of the things I did there that I don’t see done often is that different characters have quite different beliefs about how key components of the magical world function. In most fantasy novels, if there’s a theory of magic at all, there’s one theory of magic, which is universally accepted and correct.

A moment’s reflection on any given discipline will tell you that this is unrealistic. (Of course, fantasy novels are unrealistic by definition, but my feeling is that the non-magical bits should be as realistic as possible; you get a certain number of suspension-of-disbelief points from your audience, and you shouldn’t squander them.) Practically any real-world phenomenon you can name, if you consult enough experts, will be explained by at least two mutually incompatible theories, of which each has its staunch adherents, and neither of which can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Both of them are almost certainly incomplete and, in some ways, misleading. This doesn’t stop passionate support of one or other of them being an excuse for politics and interpersonal rivalries.

Unlike the bickering scholars in City of Masks, Dan and Tara in Auckland Allies don’t (so far) argue about whether demons are just elaborate spells with personality-like user interfaces, or actual beings; they had all of those arguments years ago, they each know the other’s position and that it isn’t going to change, so they don’t revisit the dispute even when it comes up in conversation. But the disagreement is there, under the surface. They are on the same side, though, when it comes to action; there’s never any question of that.

The reason I mention this is that we’re in a historical moment where people are forgetting that you can disagree profoundly with someone on a philosophical or religious or political point, or on how the world is as well as how it ought to be, and still be that person’s friend and even supporter. A great deal of space exists between “you agree with everything I say and are fully behind every part of my agenda” and “you hate me and fear me and should be burned at the stake on social media for it,” but that vast gap is not often acknowledged. US political polarization, aided by both mainstream media and social media, has created the environment of us vs. them; you’re in or you’re out; you’re a member of my faction and therefore can do anything without being criticized, or you’re a member of the other faction and therefore can’t do anything without being criticized.

This kind of attitude breeds a kind of distributed McCarthyism, where one has to say the exact right things in front of the court of social media or lose one’s career without appeal. It creates a chilling effect, where people don’t dare to express particular opinions if they want continued access to certain audiences or other groups, because those opinions have been deemed unacceptable in any form, and no discussion will be entered into.

That’s not for a moment to say that anyone should be able to say any offensive thing they like without being challenged on it. Again, though, there’s a vast gap between politely expressing a disagreement about beliefs and placing yourself in implacable, hate-filled opposition to people who hold a different belief.

Here’s my bottom line. I stand with all of my fellow human beings, but particularly the ones who treat their fellow human beings like fellow human beings. Often, that turns out to be liberals, but by no means always; and when it isn’t, then I don’t stand with them in that particular fight (while still standing with them as fellow human beings who deserve to be treated as such). I don’t have a political affiliation; I have a set of principles that doesn’t map well onto any existing political divide, but sprawls messily across bits of several of them.

And I believe that we need to remember that we can be friends and help each other without having to agree about everything.

And that’s as much as I dare to say at this time.

Apr 21

Realm Agents 2: Underground War, and a Million Word Sale

Posted on by

I’ve heard it said that your first million words is how you learn to write. If that’s so, then I must count as a journeyman; with the publication of Underground War, the second in the Realm Agents series, I now have just over a million words of novels and novellas available on Amazon. That doesn’t count the 30,000-word novella and the 43,000 words of short fiction that are exclusively available to subscribers to my mailing list, or the 30,000 words of uncollected short fiction I’ve sold to various venues (note to self: collect that at some point).

To celebrate, I’m having a Million Words Sale. All my novels and novellas are 99c each on Amazon for a week, including the new novel. There are 15 titles, so you can buy a million words of my fiction and still have change left over out of $15 (USD). Just follow the links from the sidebar on this site.

So, what’s the new novel all about? Here’s the blurb:

Dedicated agents fight against determined adversaries who want to bring down the realm.

Much has changed in the ten years since the Unification War created the new realm of Koslin and freed the gnomes from servitude to their dwarf masters. But every change creates winners and losers, and a loose and surreptitious alliance including old-line dwarves and separatist insurgents is fighting an underground war against the realm.

Opposing them, Piston and his dedicated colleagues in the Realm Agents use the latest in magical technology to track down and oppose political corruption and attacks against vital infrastructure. But will they be able to put the pieces together before a devastating strike destroys what they are sworn to protect?

Underground War follows straight on from the first Realm Agents book, Capital Crimes, and also brings in some characters from the Gryphon Clerks books (which share the same setting): Briar the snarky lawyer, her gentleman-friend Active Hedger, and Hope the brilliant mage all make appearances, as do Bucket and Braise, the gnome politicians, and Ladle, the newspaper editor. But there’s enough backstory slipped in that if you haven’t read the earlier books, or haven’t read them in a while, you can make sense of what’s going on; all my beta readers were new to the world, and they seemed to make out fine.

Still, why not get the other books and binge-read them? They’re 99c each.

Feb 08

On Portal Fantasy

Posted on by

This blog post was inspired by reading a book that had obvious debts to Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, and realizing that Amber is one development of the subgenre of portal fantasy.

Before I come back to that thought, though, I want to take a trip back to the origins of portal fantasy, and trace the highlights of its development through to the current small revival.

My theory of portal fantasy’s origins – and I think it’s a pretty well-founded theory – is that it comes to us via the influence of George MacDonald on C.S. Lewis, and ultimately has its roots in Celtic myths of the Otherworld.

As anyone who has dipped into Celtic myth will be aware, the Celts who made the myths that have come down to us regarded the stone “barrows” or burial mounds of earlier civilizations as the abodes of the faerie folk, and the entrances to them as entrances to the Otherworld, a world of gods or godlike beings, magic, and peril. Time ran differently there – a feature often seen in portal fantasy; an unwary kidnapped bard or other traveller might spend what seemed a night in the faerie mound and come out to find everyone he knew aged or dead. Rip Van Winkle is a version of this story, though the protagonist is Dutch rather than Celtic.

George MacDonald was thoroughly familiar with these legends (and many others, including the Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife), and used the idea of a magically-accessed Otherworld in two of his major works: Phantastes and Lilith. I have always considered Phantastes a dry run for the later Lilith; Phantastes isn’t a bad portal fantasy, in my opinion, but Lilith is a great one, with a powerful theme of redemption. It would make a wonderful graphic novel, though the nudity would be a problem, given that its core natural audience consists mostly of Christians.

Lewis was quite explicit about crediting Macdonald as an influence, and I’m sure he read Lilith. The (legendary) Lilith gets a mention in The Magician’s Nephew, in fact, as an ancestor of Jadis, later the White Queen (one can see Hans Christian Anderson’s Snow Queen quite clearly in her literary ancestry as well; Lewis was nothing if not eclectic in his influences, something Tolkien apparently disliked about Narnia). Unlike Macdonald’s Lilith, Jadis doesn’t get a redemption arc; she is implacably an enemy, and perishes as such.

It was Lewis’s Narnia that really popularized the portal fantasy, just as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings popularized the secondary-world fantasy (though in Tolkien’s legendarium, Middle-Earth is not in fact another world, but an earlier version of ours, like the Hyborean Age of Robert E. Howard). Neither of them invented those subgenres, but they produced works that had such a powerful impact that many later writers either imitated them or took them as a point of departure.

Mostly, they imitated; the list of more-or-less straight knockoffs of Narnia and (even more so) Middle-Earth is too long to attempt to explore here. And mostly, with occasional exceptions, these imitiations didn’t engage with the source material of their source material (the Celtic Otherworld in the case of portal fantasy – though that has been done, notably by Steven Lawhead – and Northern European myths in Tolkien’s case). They turned what readers most enjoyed about those popular books into a set of largely unexamined tropes, much as we’ve seen recently with the rash of magic schools based, usually far too closely, on Hogwarts.

Those tropes include, for portal fantasy, the Chosen One(s) of prophecy, who comes from our familiar world (where he or she or they may be ordinary and little regarded, generally because of youthfulness), to become the only hope of saving the other world. This has inevitable colonial baggage, from a current perspective; it easily falls into the White Saviour trope, and declares pretty strongly that the other people over there can, at best, assist someone from our milieu in solving their problems. The strong presence of this theme may have been part of the cause for portal fantasy’s waning popularity in the last couple of decades, though I think it was more likely just the unaccountable shifts of fashion that subgenres naturally go through. And, indeed, portal fantasy has never completely gone away, though it’s more popular now than it’s been for a while.

Later developments did eventually question and revise and reimagine some of the core portal fantasy tropes. Starting in the late 70s (and finally finishing only recently), Stephen Donaldson’s long series about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever takes an adult into a portal fantasy, and has him make things immeasurably worse, partly because he doesn’t believe it’s real, but largely because he’s a mess of a human being. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series is explicitly a reaction to what the author hated about Narnia, especially the Christian elements. Foz Meadows’ recent Manifold Worlds series takes place in a portal-fantasy setting largely imagined when she was in her teens, and full of elements that represent wish fulfilment for a queer teenager; this inevitably makes it quite different in emphasis from Lewis and his imitators. Jo Walton’s short story “Relentlessly Mundane” (collected in Starlings) and Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series explore what happens to the children when they come back to our world, having experienced a very different life where they matter a great deal and are not ordinary, and attempt to explain themselves to the parents and other family members they’ve left behind.

And, as I realized this morning, Zelazny’s Amber is in the portal fantasy tradition too. It didn’t immediately jump out at me as a portal fantasy, because, in a bold Copernican move, our world is decentred; it’s only one of many “shadows” cast by the true world of Amber, and only as real-seeming as it is because Corwin, a Prince of Amber, has spent so long here. Zelazny takes up the multiversal idea that’s implied in portal fantasy, and occasionally made explicit – for example, in the Wood Between the Worlds in Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew – and puts it at the centre. (My only work of portal fantasy, the short story “Gatekeeper, What Toll?“, was directly inspired by Zelazny, and goes a step further, putting the portal itself, and not the multiverse, in the centre.)

There’s an obvious appeal for children and adults alike in the idea of a different and more wonderful world, where people like you or who you can identify with are more important and significant than you are, and have thrilling adventures. Really, a lot of genre fiction, portal fantasy or not, is working in the same emotional territory, but portal fantasy explicitly offers the chance that we might escape, even if only for a time, from our mundane lives and problems to somewhere more colourful and exciting (though also more dangerous). Some of the questions it helps us to answer are: Who else might I be or become? Can I be a leader, a hero, a worker of wonders? What kind of companions do I need to achieve that? And it takes us somewhere strange and wondrous, which is enjoyable in itself. And then it brings us back home, and sometimes it even asks: what now? What changes in our world because of what we’ve experienced elsewhere? How do I be, in my mundane life, the person I learned to be in the Otherworld?

One way you could look at it is that fantastical literature is itself a portal to other worlds of adventure, in which we can explore other identities and roles for ourselves. And as more perspectives get admitted into the literature of the fantastic, so the places we can explore and the roles we take on only become more varied and interesting.

Nov 02

New Series: Realm Agents

Posted on by

Today I’m launching the first book of my new series, Realm Agents, set in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. (Amazon links in this post are affiliate links.)

I’ve decided to call it a new series, even though it features characters from earlier books and takes place in the same setting, mainly because it’s a genre shift. Really, what it is is intensifying a few elements that were already present; there have been action scenes, mysteries, and steampunk/magepunk technology in previous books, but I’m now moving them up front and calling the result a secondary-world fantasy steampunk techno-thriller.

Capital Crimes cover

In a techno-thriller, the technology itself plays a key role, and that’s definitely the case here. The first book, just released, is called Capital Crimes, and is set in the new, modern capital of Koslin: New Koslinmouth. Part of the “new series” aspect is choosing an area of the setting that I haven’t explored much before, though we did get a glimpse of it in Illustrated Gnome News. Part of the “techno-thriller” aspect is that it’s literally a new part of the setting, built with leading-edge technology as the planned capital of the newly united realm.

New Koslinmouth is home to semi-automated trams, freight pods running beneath the streets, a port for skyships using a magical navigation system, and, above all, the Realm Ledger – a huge primitive computer, running on punched cards, cogs, light, and magic, through which most of the realm’s business is transacted. (Rosie Printer comes up with the idea in the novella Hope Persists, available as a bonus to my mailing list.)

The thing about new technologies is that they can create losers as well as winners, and the losers created by the Realm Ledger – as a matter of quite deliberate policy – are the dwarves, who formerly were the people you had to deal with if you wanted to do anything related to finance, banking, or currency. Now that the realm of Koslin is in a low-key economic war with the dwarves, that couldn’t be allowed to stand. But that makes the Realm Ledger a huge target for those dwarves who are especially… direct in the way they conduct their business.

Standing against them are the courageous Realm Agents, including Agent Piston, who we first met as an eager youth in Illustrated Gnome News. Despite his gnomish heritage, he doesn’t know much about technology – that’s part of why he joined the agents – so when someone starts stealing from the freight tubes, he consults an old school friend, Precision, one of the first gnome women to become an engineer.

As the scope of the crimes they’re investigating escalates, they’re going to have to go where no gnome willingly ventures – into an unreformed dwarfhold, where gnomes are still effectively enslaved.

I believe I’ve increased the action and tension, compared with earlier books, while not losing the elements of character and setting that my current readers enjoy. I’ve also created an entry point for new readers; my new editor (who enjoyed it hugely) hadn’t read the previous Gryphon Clerks novels, but she found it easy to orient herself to the world. Think of it, if you like, as a standalone novel with bits of backstory that just happen to also be frontstory in other books.

I’ve very nearly finished the first draft of the sequel, Underground War, also set in New Koslinmouth and featuring Piston and Precision, along with other characters old and new. Briar Heathlake, my personal favourite of all the Gryphon Clerks characters, has a minor role; her gentleman-friend, Leading Agent Active, is more central. And I have reasonably well-developed ideas for a third book, this time taking place in the even higher-tech setting of the Research Institutes (established in Mister Bucket for Assembly). After that, plans are indefinite; it will partly depend on how popular the series is. I have fun writing them, and I think lots of people will have fun reading them if they find out about them – so tell your friends!

You can get Capital Crimes at Amazon; I’m putting it up initially at 99c for a short while, to get momentum at the launch. It will revert to the usual $2.99 after that, so get in quick.

Aug 04

Illustrated Gnome News is out!

Posted on by

Finally, after epic delays, Illustrated Gnome News is published.

I won’t go into the reasons why a book that involves publishing took so long to publish, except to say that some people were sick, and some people were busy, and in general it was one damn thing after another. But it’s out now.

It’s a big honking book; 115,000 words, or about 500 pages. That may have something to do with the fact that I ended up with five intermeshed plots: a romance, a mystery, saving the business, justice for the oppressed, and coming of age.

What all these plots have in common, though, is the theme of conformity and safety versus risk and authenticity. The gnomes have spent hundreds of years as essentially slaves to the dwarves, and that’s developed a powerful habit of going along and keeping your head down and not being seen to make trouble or stand out from the crowd. But the gnomes are free now, and there’s a new generation who are starting to challenge that habit, to ask why they can’t do things, why they can’t be who they know themselves to be.

Powerful forces want to put the gnomes back in their box, and reset everything back to where they were in control. Standing up to those forces – and to the expectations and prejudices of their own people – takes courage, risk, and sacrifice, and the young gnome women at the centre of Illustrated Gnome News have to fight hard for what they believe in.

I think it ends up making a compelling story. It also sets things up for the next few books, which will feature the Realm Agents, an FBI equivalent charged with protecting the realm and its people. The first, Capital Crimes, is basically finished, and I hope to bring it out before the end of 2019. I’m working on the second, Underground War, and already noodling ideas for a third, which at the moment is titled Institute Spies.

Right now, though, if you want to pick up Illustrated Gnome News, it’s exclusively available on Amazon as an ebook. (There may eventually be a paperback, though given how large it is that paperback may be a bit pricey.)

Enjoy!

(Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links.)

Jun 29

Genre Through the Lens of Agency

Posted on by

At the end of my previous post, I recommended Jack M. Bickham’s book Scene and Structure to anyone who wants to write in what we might call the “heroic protagonist” mode. In my review of that book on Goodreads, I mention that the closer your story is to being an action thriller, the more applicable his advice will be.

I say this because different modes and genres of fiction deal differently with character agency. I think it’s worthwhile taking a post to think that over, since if you’re not writing the kind of story where your main character shows a lot of agency – a “heroic protagonist” story – a lot of the failure modes I talked about in the previous post are not as applicable. Also, this is a lead-in to the next post, in which I’ll consider how a diversity of voices changes how agency is represented in fiction.

First, let’s talk “literary” vs “genre”. This is a pairing that has some problems, not least that there is a genre often referred to as “literary” as well as a style that is “literary”, and it can also be an evaluative term. When I think of literary-as-genre, I think of a set of expectations and conventions, like the ones we have in other genres, and one of the characteristics that stands out to me is a difference in typical levels of protagonism between a literary-genre story and a heroic-protagonist story.

To generalise wildly, most literary-genre stories I have read – even the ones with fantastical elements – feature main characters who are not protagonists (that is, they are not struggling towards a goal, which is what “protagonist” means). Instead, their typical arc is through helplessness to hopelessness. Their relationships fall apart, their careers are revealed as hollow, they become alienated from society and its expectations, and they do little or nothing to remedy any of this. It’s as if, in Literary World, the truth is that everyone in the world is rather pathetic and doomed to unhappiness, and the story that gets told over and over is of someone realising that truth, or (if they never consciously acknowledge it) at least becoming victims of that truth.

The literary genre is a genre often seen as belonging to the elites, and other genres are seen as “popular”, of the masses. I invite you to reflect on the implications of the literature of the elites being about the hollowness of all striving, while the literature of the masses perpetuates a narrative of personal choice and agency.

Having been, no doubt, grossly unfair to many writers who I haven’t read (since I avoid the literary genre exactly because so much of it is so passive and hopeless), let’s move on to genres where I can speak from a much wider sample of texts: science fiction and fantasy (SFF). First, though, let’s take a detour into romance.

There was a brief period when I thought about writing romance; I still need to write the post about why I decided not to, but part of it involved the very strong genre conventions, some of which I didn’t think I could bind myself to. Although romance, like any genre of its vast size and popularity, has a good deal of diversity in it these days, there are still some powerful expectations. One is the Happily Ever After (so expected that it’s been abbreviated as HEA); whatever the couple’s struggles along the way, you can be confident going into a romance that they are going to end up together, basically from the moment of the Meet Cute, however unattractive either or both may seem as people and however poorly suited they appear. (And however much our real-life experience may suggest that many relationships do not, in fact, work out; though there is a nod to this in the HFN ending, Happy For Now.)

This fatedness reminds me of the Hero’s Journey. Going into any heroic story that we have no reason to suspect is a tragedy, we carry the expectation that right will triumph, that the apparently unworthy, unskilled, and unsuitable person we’re introduced to early on will somehow become an epic hero, and the seemingly powerful villain will be defeated. These strong expectations impose certain limits on agency. No matter how much the romance hero/heroine or the heroic protagonist screws up, refuses to learn, treats people around them badly, falls back into old habits, or is just unpleasant and unworthy in general, the result is still inevitable: HEA in the romance, victory in the heroic story. In unskillful hands, it becomes a flaw.

In historical romance, we get an extra level of constraints. Consider the Regency romance, for example. The woman is generally expected to be innocent and virginal, and her powerful imperative is to marry well, because her economic security depends on her ability to attract a wealthy and powerful man, however repellant. The man is generally expected, with some exceptions, to be sexually experienced, and to have the wealth and power that the woman needs her mate to have, and the arrogance that goes along with it; but he, too, is constrained, if to a much lesser extent, by the powerful expectations and conventions of society. At worst, these conventions become a cattle-chute directing them to their fate; at best, they kick against them a little, but somehow manage to end up in a happy situation within their society. Their choices are severely constrained, and part of the joy of a good Regency romance for me is seeing how the characters still look for and find agency within, or even outside, those constraints.

Turning, then, to SFF, where I am much more widely read in both classic and contemporary texts than in the genres I’ve just been discussing with an assumed air of authority: within this sprawling and diverse landscape, we inevitably find differences in agency. Some SFF stories show us people with enhanced levels of agency – wizards, for example, or supers – and must then give them challenges that are equally heightened to prevent their victory from being too easy. But there are parts of SFF that don’t give their main characters much agency at all. Many (not all) hard SF stories, for example, give us characters who are little more than cameras, witnessing wonders that they are too small and insignificant to affect. Much of Arthur C. Clarke’s work falls into this category.

I haven’t read much Mythos, and hardly any horror, but my impression is that Mythos, like hard SF, often (not always) confronts the characters with something so vast and implacable that the idea that they might have agency is almost ridiculous. The smallness and insignificance of humanity is part of the point. Mythos is one of the ancestors of modern horror, and (again, this is an impression, since I don’t enjoy horror and have read very little), often in horror the characters struggle futilely against the monster that will inevitably kill them. Again, the helplessness is part of what the author is going for.

One aspect of agency, which I’ve touched on when discussing the Regency romance, is: how powerful is the system? How much intertia does society have against change? And are the characters on the side of change, or the side of preservation of the status quo?

In many traditional heroic or “high” fantasy stories, the preservation or restoration of the status quo is a key, and unexamined, goal: the return of the king, the defeat of the Dark Lord who would bring change to everything, the defence of the empire (with all its faults) against the barbarians. Many military space operas share this stance. It’s one we also see in a lot of thrillers, where the protagonists are fighting against international criminals or terrorists who are out to destroy the stability of the system. And – unfortunately, in my view – it seems to be an unexamined assumption in a lot of steampunk, despite that genre’s vast and usually untapped potential to show us the kind of social change that technology brought about in the real 19th century, and is still bringing about today.

In sword-and-sorcery and its SF equivalent, which doesn’t have a name that I’m aware of but tends to feature a ragtag spaceship crew on the outskirts of society and the law, we see the opposite. The ultimate triumph of the system is seen as a negative, though usually still inevitable. The crew win what victories they can on the fringes, while the overall system mostly remains intact. The crew, indeed, are rarely even trying to change the system; that’s too large a goal for the level of agency they possess. Instead, they work around it or outside it as best they can. But there’s a sub-sub-genre in which this ragtag band, or perhaps an individual thief, used to having almost no agency and barely getting by, obtains something that puts them into an unaccustomed position of power and responsibility, and they must cope with the challenge of doing the right thing (and figuring out what that is). This is the opposite of the also popular “riches to rags to riches” structure, where someone who is used to a life of privilege and power has a fall – which sometimes is their fault, but usually is not – and their struggle is to regain control over their life.

There are stories about revolution and rebellion from the point of view of the rebels, too, scattered through the SFF landscape. Star Wars is an obvious example. In many technothrillers, most cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk stories, and a few fantasy and steampunk works, the protagonists struggle against The Man, the corrupt and cruel system that’s keeping people down, or trying to suppress the spread of some technology that could benefit society, or to prevent knowledge of something that could challenge the status quo from getting out. The ultimate example here is, of course, dystopian fiction such as The Hunger Games (which, I might add, does a better job than most of showing how the rebellion itself can be corrupted by the ambition of the powerful). Early dystopias like Brave New World and 1984 are tragedies of a sort, in which the failure of the protagonists is not a consequence of their personal tragic flaw but of the enormous power and momentum of the system; recent dystopias, particularly YA dystopias, more often feature a successful revolution. There are even a few elements of dystopia in Harry Potter, where Harry and his friends, low-status by reason of their age, are right when the Ministry is wrong, although the resolution to that is that they eventually end up in power within the system, not that the system is overthrown.

I don’t usually read “antihero” stories, but I should say something about them. The antihero is still a protagonist, still struggling for a goal, and this is what makes us want to follow them and even see them succeed, despite the fact that they are not, in many ways, admirable people, and their goals may not be admirable goals.

Taking this to a further extreme, grimdark fantasy (and SF) shows us unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to other unpleasant people in pursuit of mostly selfish and destructive goals. In grimdark, however much agency they may possess, nobody can escape the grim darkness of the world – and few even attempt to. It’s not so much the system itself, but the corrupt and hopeless nature of the system and indeed reality, that acts as a binding constraint. Interestingly, given that this is similar (at least in my eyes) to the nihilistic worldview of a lot of literary-genre stories, grimdark is often written in beautiful prose.

I’m part of the noblebright fantasy movement, formed as an explicit reaction to grimdark, so I’m hardly a neutral observer. In noblebright, the world is often dark, but we can and must struggle against it, and bring at least some light in the darkness. Noblebright celebrates everyone’s agency to oppose evil, which is probably why I like it, and why I’m sitting here writing a blog series about agency.

Let’s bring this to a conclusion. In our tour of various genres, we’ve seen different levels and types of agency. The kinds of questions to ask, when going into these genres, are:

  • Do the main characters have a lot of agency, or only a little?
  • Is there an expectation in the genre that they will (ultimately) be worthy and admirable people?
  • What kind of goals are available to them in this genre?
  • How much do they struggle for their goals, and how successful are they?
  • How likely/expected is it that they will achieve those goals?
  • What constraints are placed on them by the system in which they find themselves?
  • What’s the disparity between their level of agency and the system’s inertia, and has the story been precipitated by a big change in that disparity (in either direction)?
  • Are they fighting for the system, against the system, within the system, or around the system? Or is the system very much in the background?
  • Is the system good, bad, or a mixture?
  • Is the system expected or likely to change? Is that part of the characters’ goals?
  • How much do you want to mess with the usual expectations of the genre?

I’ll go a little further into the idea of the system as constraint in my next post, the last in this series, where I look at diverse voices and what they’re doing to shift expectations about agency in fiction.

Jun 24

Failure Modes of Fiction Through the Lens of Agency

Posted on by

In my introductory post to this series, I talked about the common Western template for a heroic story: a motivated protagonist faces a dynamic situation that will turn for the worse unless they struggle against fit opposition to bring about their preferred resolution, bringing all their resources and courage to bear on the problem, and paying a high price for victory.

As someone who reads and reviews a lot of books, I’ve come across a few failure modes of this popular template.

The Spoiled Protagonist

The Spoiled Protagonist has too much agency, and those around her too little. I say “her,” because although spoiled protagonists can certainly be men, the majority I’ve encountered have been women. To be fair, this is quite likely to be sample bias, since I prefer to read books with female protagonists and avoid the ones that are most likely to have male spoiled protagonists.

The term “Mary Sue” gets bandied about a lot these days, often merely indicating a woman who has agency among people who disapprove of that. The original Mary Sue, though, was the author-insert character in a piece of Star Trek fanfiction, who was better at everything than anyone else and who everyone, despite this, instantly loved and wanted to help in every way they could. This is more or less what I mean by the Spoiled Protagonist, but the emphasis isn’t necessarily on her ability so much as on the fact that everyone treats her as the promised Chosen One, even when she isn’t actually explicitly a promised Chosen One in the world of the story.

Characters who ought to make her follow the rules and wait her turn and prove herself like anyone else seem to lose all ability to do so; they become her obedient lackeys, sometimes at the risk of their jobs or their lives, or shower her with gifts, for no real reason except that the Spoiled Protagonist is the author’s darling and every other character exists only to serve her (except the villain, who exists so she’ll have someone to defeat quite easily). This is generally dull to read, and also annoying.

The Spoiled Protagonist is such a wish-fulfillment fantasy of agency that she distorts the entire plot and the behaviour of everyone around her, making her also a form of the Plot Black Hole.

The Plot Black Hole

A plot hole is a logical issue with the plot, something that wouldn’t really happen, but has been stuck in and glossed over so that the plot will unfold according to the author’s desires.

A plot black hole is my term for when a plot hole grows so large that everyone’s behaviour is gravitationally distorted around it. All the characters are puppets of the author’s predetermined plot, and will behave in the most ridiculous fashion to bring it about. As an example, in a book I read which I am contractually prevented from naming, someone who eventually turns out to be the villain’s minion releases the protagonist from prison, which she could not otherwise have escaped, and where she was waiting to be probably executed; reunites her with the only weapons that can stop the villain; and takes her to where the villain is, all (apparently) so that the villain can have a good gloat and a shock reveal, and then escape. (To be pursued, of course, by the protagonist and soundly defeated.)

The Plot Back Hole not only distorts the actions of the characters; it distorts the laws of probability, and sometimes physics. Hence the next failure mode: the Convenient Coincidence.

The Convenient Coincidence

Something has been concealed in an obscure location for a century. Just as the villain is about to finally retrieve it (with no particular obvious reason for having waited so long), the protagonists happen by and discover it – just a few hours ahead of his arrival. The timing is a complete, convenient, and thoroughly unlikely coincidence.

This actual example from a book I read recently is one of the more glaring uses of the Convenient Coincidence (and not the only one in that book, either). The Convenient Coincidence is the opposite of character agency. It’s a forcing of fate, which drops the characters into a situation, or helps them resolve it, with no effort or even intent on their part.

Sometimes, as with my opening example above, we don’t find out until later that the Convenient Coincidence was a Convenient Coincidence; perhaps the author is hoping we won’t notice. I notice.

There are a couple of sub-categories of Convenient Coincidence as a failure of agency, which I call the Convenient Eavesdrop and the Cavalry Rescue.

The Convenient Eavesdrop

The Convenient Eavesdrop is a plot device, a way to work around limitations of point of view and character knowledge. It’s generally a clumsy way, and a failure of character agency. If you’ve ever seen the British spoof of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, Five Go Mad in Dorset, you may remember how the writers mocked the frequent use of the Convenient Eavesdrop in not only Blyton’s books, but books for young people in general. The villains are overheard saying, “Rhubarb, rhubarb, secret plans, rhubarb, rhubarb…”

The thing about being young is that nobody tells you anything. If you’re to find out much about what’s going on among the adults, you pretty much have to overhear them talking, unless they’re very modern adults who believe in discussing things with kids. But the thing about the Convenient Eavesdrop is that it happens, not because the character has set out deliberately to find out the information, but by complete accident. The protagonist is in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to overhear the precise conversation that will advance the plot, however unlikely that may be. J.K. Rowling is guilty of the Convenient Eavesdrop, for example, when Harry and his friends are teleporting randomly around Britain during Deathly Hallows, and just happen to be exactly where they can overhear some people they know talking about events in the wizarding world that they have no other way of finding out about, but that they must know in order for the plot to progress. They weren’t trying to find this out; they were just handed the information as a gift from above.

This, authors, is why I will never not call you out for a Convenient Eavesdrop. It’s deprotagonizing. If you absolutely must have the characters find out some information through eavesdropping, make them work for it. Make them go looking for the information; have them hide in wait for the villain to have a conversation they know or hope is coming, at risk of being discovered. Make the information they get ambiguous, so they have to keep working to confirm it, or act on less-than-adequate knowledge. Or flip the trope, and have the villain maneuver them into something that seems like it’s a Convenient Eavesdrop, but the villain is fully aware of their presence and takes the opportunity to misinform or mislead them. Don’t just give them the information on a plate with parsley round it because they happened to take a walk one night.

The Cavalry Rescue

The Cavalry Rescue is, of course, a staple of fiction. All seems lost, and then the other character(s) who went off to do something else – possibly abandoning the main characters in a fit of pique (looking at you, Ron Weasley), possibly with another assignment, possibly having been feared lost – suddenly turn up in the nick of time and rescue Our Heroes. There are ways to make it work, and there are ways to have it be a failure of protagonism.

When Gandalf turns up at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, it’s a Cavalry Rescue that’s been set up in advance. He’s told the other characters to expect him at a certain time. The challenge in this kind of scenario is for the main group to hold out long enough to be relieved, and you can get some good tension out of the question of whether they will manage this.

But when a Cavalry Rescue comes thundering in at the exact right time and there’s been no pre-planning, and the rescuers just happened to turn up at this moment for no particular reason except that it saved the author’s plot, that’s a failure in my eyes. A failure of agency, specifically, like any fortunate coincidence.

The Penelope Pitstop

Speaking of rescues, there’s another failure mode of agency that I call the Penelope Pitstop, which dates me. The original Hanna Barbera Wacky Races cartoon from the 1960s, which I watched as a child in the 70s, featured exactly one woman, who was thrown in at the last minute and constructed entirely out of stereotypes (as was the style at the time). Penelope Pitstop, while clever and resourceful in many ways, as soon as she fell into the clutches of the villain (which happened with monotonous regularity) would go completely passive, cry “Hayulp! Hayulp!” in her southern belle accent, and wait to be rescued, which she inevitably would be. I understand things are not as dire in the more recent remake.

The Penelope Pitstop is a pattern I see over and over in fiction, particularly, for some reason, fiction set in the 19th century – whether it’s the more adventurous type of Regency romance; steampunk; or gaslight fantasy. The typical way it plays out is that we’re told the heroine is brilliant and self-reliant, but what we’re shown is that she makes one stupid, reckless decision after another, from each of which she has to be rescued by a man. In particular, she falls into the clutches of the villain, almost always because she’s gone off by herself with no backup and without telling anyone where she’s going, and he threatens her with author’s choice of terrible fate, only to have the hero burst in at the critical moment and prevent his dastardly plan.

An associated trope is Reeves-McMillan’s Shiv, which I’ve taken the liberty of naming after myself (in imitation of Chekov’s Gun). This is where the captured heroine does something, such as fashioning a shiv from a bit of broken glass, that promises us that she’s going to take some kind of decisive and effective action – but she signally fails to shank the villain with it, and it’s all a bit of a let-down.

I’d love to see the Penelope Pitstop (and Reeves-McMillan’s Shiv) retired, and replaced with heroines who, if they are captured (through no fault of their own), are quite capable of facing down the villain and engineering their own escape – or, better yet, rescuing the hero. Things can certainly be a bit scary while they’re working towards that end, of course, as long as it doesn’t just become a Gunboat.

The Gunboat

The Gunboat is what I call the pattern of bombarding the character with adversity, and then allowing them a relatively easy, linear win. It is not the same as showing them struggling against fit opposition, certainly not through the lens of agency; they’re helpless for a while, and then get offered an easy escape that they don’t have to work for much.

I understand where it comes from: the adversity bombardment, with no apparent options, is a common real-life experience, and if that’s the end of the story it’s unsatisfying. There must be an escape if the ending is not to be simply depressing. I’m also a tender-hearted author, and a professional problem-solver, and I’ve been known to give in to the period of suffering followed by an escape – “earned” not by the character’s efforts, but by their simple endurance – rather than put in the extra effort to turn it into a conflict. 

And I do suspect that there’s a way to do the Gunboat right, because endurance of suffering is something that deserves a more important place in fiction. I’ll discuss this more in my final post in this series, when I talk about diverse experiences of agency. I’m not sure what the Gunboat done right exactly looks like, though. Is it “I’m not going to take this anymore”, a change from passive to active? Perhaps. Is it looking for escape over and over, not finding it, giving up, and then being offered one risky opportunity and deciding to take it? Perhaps. I’m reasonably sure, though, that “character suffers… suffers… suffers… suffers… suffers… escapes by being handed a solution” isn’t how to do it right.

What all of these failure modes of agency in fiction have in common is that the character gets a result that they didn’t work for; the author just gave it to them in order to move things along. If you’re going to follow the Western template of an active protagonist, in my view the protagonism needs to be constant. The protagonist definitely shouldn’t succeed all the time, but they should strive all the time, and any progress they make should be through striving – not through an unlikely coincidence arranged by the author, or another character offering them help for no reason, or getting rescued while helpless and passive. There are other modes of fiction, of course, and in my next post I’ll discuss the different approaches to agency in different genres and subgenres; but if your chosen mode is the motivated character in a dynamic situation striving for a goal against fit opposition, write that, and not the story of a series of lucky accidents.

If you struggle to do so, by the way, I found Jack M. Bickham’s book Scene and Structure enormously useful in helping me write stories that flowed naturally from a character’s pursuit of a goal.

Not every story, of course, needs to be written that way. In the next post, we’ll look at genre expectations about agency.