Category Archives: Manifesto-esque Rantings

Jul 28

What if I respected this character?

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Concluding (I think) my blog posts reflecting on my recently completed Auckland Allies series (see earlier entries here and here), I want to discuss something I learned about writing characters who aren’t my usual.

I don’t know why a portion of my brain is dedicated to emulating a competent, capable, pragmatic mid-twenties woman, but those are the protagonists I tend to default to writing (despite being a man in my mid-fifties). They’re also the protagonists I most enjoy reading about, by no coincidence. Still, if you can only write one way, it’s probably time to do a writing exercise, unless you’re selling a ton of books by writing that one way. Maybe even then.

I didn’t straight-up set out to do a writing exercise when I introduced some non-typical (for me) characters into Auckland Allies, though. They just kind of turned up, and then I asked myself a key question about them, which made all the difference: What if I respected this character?

I’m thinking specifically of two characters: Kat, the middle-aged owner of the New Age shop, and Chelsea, the non-genre-savvy young woman (mid-twenties, yes) who finds herself in an urban fantasy she is poorly equipped to navigate when she’s bitten by a werewolf.

Kat has been around since the first book. I believe she’s in the first chapter, though without a speaking part at that point. The New Age shop she owns has offices over it, which two of the characters rent from her. It’s based on an organic shop in the suburb of Grey Lynn where I sublet offices briefly when I practiced hypnotherapy; there was a group of natural-health practitioners who worked out of the space above the shop. Initially, Kat was a bit of a caricature, or rather a highly recognisable type if you’ve spent much time around New Agey people. Somewhat vague, relentlessly positive, always speaking in a specific jargon that reinforces her own view of the world and excludes any other, and (as one of the characters puts it) capable of believing anything, as long as there’s no evidence.

In the final book, though, Kat – or rather, the way the characters see Kat – undergoes a transformation. Avoiding spoilers: she stands up to someone, in her own calm, sweet way, but firmly defining her boundaries, and it also becomes clear that her many years of New Age practice were developing something powerful in her all along.

Chelsea appears, unnamed and with no lines, in the fourth book, and in the fifth and final book becomes an initially unlikely addition to the cast. Her parents are doctors, they live in Remuera (one of Auckland’s more expensive suburbs, which has a lot of doctors in it), she went to a private school, and she works in nearby Newmarket, where she sells clothes to other “Remuera girls” (her words). She reads little beyond magazines, preferring to spend her leisure time watching the kind of reality shows that are optimized for interpersonal drama; she has never watched even the most popular science fiction and fantasy franchises (LOTR, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Marvel movies, Star Trek, Star Wars). Tara, always ready with the snark, observes that she spends too much time on hair, clothes, and makeup to try to distract attention from the fact that she has an ordinary face. She isn’t particularly quick on the uptake, either.

It would be all too easy to drop in a character like Chelsea and make her the butt of jokes, or dismiss her as superficial and worthless. Instead, I wondered: what if I respected her? And what if a couple of my characters – the brilliant Lynn and the uber-geeky Mark – respected her too, against the odds?

Well, as it turns out, what happens is that Chelsea turns out to be brave, good-hearted, loyal, and emotionally intelligent, and discovers that her lifelong goal of fitting in somewhere may be fulfilled by a highly unlikely crew of people with whom you’d think she had nothing in common. Because characters have layers.

I enjoy putting a bit of comedy into my writing, so I’ve made a bit of a project lately of reading “classic” comic novels. A lot of them show us shallow, self-important people with small lives and invite us to laugh at them. But one of my great role models for comic writing (and writing in general), Terry Pratchett, didn’t do that, at least not after his early books. He showed us people with small lives who longed for them to be larger, and who we loved watching as they fought and struggled and often pratfell their way towards that goal, and the goal of making the world a better place for everyone.

“Diversity” has become trendy in SFF lately, to the point that more than a few books seem to be giving lip service to it by throwing in a few protagonists who aren’t the old default (white, straight, male) and then carrying on to tell the same story they would have told in any case. Which is one way to assert that “normal” and “unremarkable” include a lot more identities than they used to, for sure. But in a world where Twitter and Facebook try to sort us into islands for the convenience of their advertisers, and then encourage us to fight with the people on the other islands, what I think is that we need a few more books in which we see characters who are not like us – the authors or the readers – in many different ways. Not just the usual identity labels, but other ways too. Characters who we nevertheless begin by treating with respect, and see where that gets us.

I think it will get us to some interesting and worthwhile places.

Apr 11

A Cozy Manifesto

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I recently attended a virtual panel about “cozy fiction” at Flights of Foundry, an online SFFH (science fiction, fantasy and horror) conference. (I’m going to use the American spelling “cozy” here, even though I usually spell it “cosy”.)

Cozy isn’t just for mysteries anymore. The same kind of gentle, positive tone, and the same focus on characters and relationships, are starting to become a thing in other genres, including SFFH. (Yes, apparently you can have cozy horror.)

The session provoked a number of thoughts for me, and since I call this category of my blog “manifesto-esque rantings” I thought I would, somewhat tongue in cheek, propose a “cozy manifesto,” as follows.

1. Comedy is as worthy as tragedy

I typed that phrase into the panel’s chat at one point, when one of the panelists was talking about how cozy fiction isn’t taken as seriously as, say, grimdark, and it seemed to resonate with other attendees.

My thought as I made that point was of Shakespeare, whose comedies are comedies in the traditional dramatic sense (they end with lovers united, rather than with widespread death and destruction driven by the faults of the protagonist(s)), though they are also funny; nobody that I’m aware of argues that they’re not worth studying or performing, even though he was also a master of tragedy. I was also thinking, though, of writers like Terry Pratchett or P.G. Wodehouse, whose work is comedic but extraordinarily well written. And, in Pratchett’s case, also with some depth and dramatic heft to it, especially in his middle period.

Death definitely can be present in a cozy story; after all, cozy mysteries are almost always murder mysteries, and Pratchett’s character Death appears in every one of his Discworld books. But a cozy story is not primarily about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to other unpleasant people, even if that does occur as an element sometimes. They can be funny, or charming, and they can be about relationships (good, stable, positive relationships, even, that work out well in the end), and that shouldn’t be grounds to look down on them.

2. The lives of ordinary people are a fit subject for fiction

Cozy mysteries generally take place in small towns or out in the country, among middle-class or even working-class people of no particular distinction, rather than in the courts of kings or the boardrooms of great corporations. Cozy fiction is OK with being small-scale, with its characters having limited power in the world, with the setting being their ordinary lives where they just try to get on with keeping things running. I bang on about this constantly on this blog, so I won’t say any more here, except to quote Middlemarch:

…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

3. Objectively small stakes can still be subjectively compelling

Going along with the previous point: cozy stories can be about stakes significantly smaller than saving the world. That doesn’t mean they’re not compelling. Compelling stakes are stakes that are compelling for a character we identify with.

Wodehouse is the all-time master of making objectively small stakes (like social embarrassment) completely compelling for the reader.

World-saving can be going on in the background, maybe even close to the foreground, of a cozy story, but it doesn’t have to be what the story is about. Consider T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Grace. A god has died, and severed heads keep turning up, and there’s a nasty cult looking for excuses to burn people as witches, but what the story is about is a romance between a paladin of the dead god and a master perfumer. The other elements are mainly there to drive the romance.

4. There’s a place for a literature of hope, joy, and kindness

As a minor exponent of the noblebright fantasy subgenre, I’ve believed this for a long time. Noblebright isn’t the only hopeful subgenre; there’s hopepunk (which is different from noblebright, but I believe the two can get along together, because of course I do), solarpunk, and a few others. They have a clear overlap with the cozy approach to writing. (Cozy is more of a manner than a genre.)

Part of what makes a story cozy is what could be loosely described as a “happy ending,” or at least an ending that satisfies our sense of things being how they ought to be: lovers are united, villains are punished, justice is done. It doesn’t need to be set in a just, peaceful, kind or happy society for this to be the case, though it can be. The contrast of localized justice or kindness, at the level of the story, against a darker background can work well, in fact. Hope can have different scales: personal, interpersonal, societal.

The work of Becky Chambers, for example, is often mentioned as “positive SF,” and would qualify as cozy, but the background of her stories is often a large-scale tragedy that has overtaken the earth and driven people forth as refugees, or stranded them in space with nowhere to go home to. She’s very much what I think of as a “zeitgeist writer,” and the zeitgeist she’s working in tends to have not much hope for society in the large, but allows for islands of hope among “found families” of people of goodwill. This is, broadly speaking, hopepunk; noblebright, by contrast, can believe in the possibility of societal improvement to a greater degree.

Anyway, that’s a digression; the point is that having characters who have ideals, who have hope, who strive for the good of others at their own cost, who are kind, who believe in a better future, is a feasible way to write today; that cynicism and darkness don’t need to be the defining qualities of good literature, or important literature, or serious literature. And you can write funny books, and books with everyday characters who live small lives on a limited stage, and whose stakes are objectively small, and who care for each other and do their best, and this can be good and worthy and important.

And honestly, right now (or at any moment in history, really), don’t we need more hope and joy and kindness in the world?

Mar 10

Nuffin’s Tougher than a Hufflepuffer

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Hufflepuffs can be hard to write.

Witness what happened to Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which, though not written by J.K. Rowling, did involve her. While not going into spoilers, let’s say that he ends up acting very out of character with how he’s portrayed in Goblet of Fire, for what seemed to me inadequate cause.

Let’s take a step back, though, and ask: what do the four Hogwarts houses represent, anyway? People who take the online Sorting Hat test often seem to think that they are human archetypes, like Myers-Briggs types, the Ennead, the Four Humours (and its variations), star signs, or any other made-up way of describing human difference. None of those things have much psychological rigour, if any at all, though they do correspond to some realities of the way human characteristics clump together.

I’d maintain that, although there’s an aspect of truth to the “human archetypes” idea, the houses are also story archetypes. Very broadly, Slitherin is the antagonist (scheming and ambitious); Ravenclaw the advisor (eccentric and knowledgeable); Griffindor of course the hero (courageous and of good intent); and Hufflepuff the sidekick (reliable and honest).

Hufflepuffs can be hard to write, or at least, hard to write interestingly. They’re even harder to write as the protagonist, because we’ve been conditioned to think of our protagonists as flashy, dramatic, angsty. It’s as if you tried to write Lord of the Rings with Sam in the Frodo role.

At the same time, the more I see of the world, the more I’m convinced that without Hufflepuffs we’d be in a lot more trouble than we are. They’re the people who just turn up and do their job right, whether anyone’s watching and applauding or not (and usually they’re not).

Again: hard to write that interestingly. But it can be done, and I’m committed to doing it.

One of the ways in which it can most easily be done is in a romance. There are a number of different types of romantic hero, but one of them is the Reliable Guy. Romance is largely (certainly not entirely) written by and for women, and the Reliable Guy appeals to many women who’ve been disappointed by men–often men of other romance hero types, like the Ambitious Bastard (Slytherin), the Impractical Self-Absorbed Loser (Ravenclaw), or the Flashy, Angsty Dude Who Thinks It’s All About Him (Griffindor). The only downside to the Reliable Guy is that he’s not very exciting, and if you can overcome that issue, he’s romance dynamite.

One good way to overcome the not-exciting issue is to make the Reliable Guy a competent protector against an external threat. I’ve just been reading a couple of books by T. Kingfisher, Swordheart and Paladin’s Grace, both of which feature romance heroes who are Reliable Guys with a military background who can, and do, physically protect the heroines (women who have previously had unsatisfactory relationships with a Vague Loser and an Ambitious Bastard respectively). Both books are primarily romance, with a sword-and-sorcery B plot providing the complications so necessary to a good romance. But also, both go beneath the surface of the Reliable Guy to show that he does, in fact, have a good deal of angst and trauma going on, he just doesn’t let it keep him from doing his job. This is a remarkably effective approach to the Reliable Guy.

I’ve written a couple of Reliable Guys myself. Patient, the romance hero in Hope and the Patient Man, is a craftsman who takes pride in his work, and just the kind of gentle, kind, persevering Reliable Guy the brilliant and capable, but haunted, heroine Hope needs to get her through her issues. Perse (short for Perseverance; people in my setting are largely named for admirable qualities, and the naming is often, though not always, accurate) in Underground War is also a craftsman of a sort, a baker, and is, again, just the kind of solid anchor that the brilliant and capable Precision needs in order to overcome her trauma. Both of them have their own issues: Patient has a simmering anger that, in a later book, bursts out unexpectedly, and Perse has experienced rejection within his family and his culture over his choices, something that Precision can also relate to. They’re not simple beasts of burden (as the Rolling Stones might put it). There’s conflict and struggle going on under the placid exterior.

And this, I think, is a significant part of the secret to pulling off a Hufflepuff hero. He has layers. He’s no longer just a sidekick, uncomplainingly backing up the hero like the bass player in a band that’s named after the lead singer. He’s now in the centre of the narrative, and as such, he needs–and can easily have–a backstory and some struggles and losses. What makes him the Hufflepuff is that he’s never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never going to run around and desert you. What makes him the hero, though, is that the author is going to pound on that quiet determination as hard as they can, taking special care to hit the spot where he was wounded.

I’ve been talking as if women can’t be Hufflepuffs, which is obviously not true. I personally gravitate to both reading and writing about competent, pragmatic women who will just get on with things with a minimum of outward drama; I can’t be having with princesses. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have plenty of internal drama, imposter syndrome, worry that the Reliable Guy won’t respect you if you show him your vulnerable side, doubt that he could possibly like you (especially if he finds out the ways in which previous men have told you you’re inadequate and don’t matter and you somehow believe them despite knowing that they’re lying bastards…) A question that seems to come up a lot for Hufflepuff women is “What if I disappoint people? That will be terrible!”

It also comes up for men, though in a slightly different formulation. The hero of Paladin’s Grace says at one point: “She can’t rely on me, all right? And being reliable is all I’m good for.”

The big fear for a Hufflepuff is falling apart, failing to do your duty because of your issues. This makes them emotionally guarded. They come across as unemotional, because if they let themselves show emotion they might not be able to stop, and then who would keep the important wheels turning?

But if they’re a protagonist, if you get inside their heads, you see that vulnerability alongside the toughness. And it’s this play back and forth between the inward chaos and the outward order, along with that order being slowly imposed on external threats, that makes a Hufflepuff interesting.

Griffindors are easy to make interesting, because they’re interesting on the outside. You don’t even need to go below the surface. They’re the kind of people that everyone looks at when they walk into the room, and they expect to be looked at. That can be a trap for authors, who think that casting a Griffindor (handsome, athletic, courageous, charming, and probably wealthy) as the hero is as much work as they need to do, that character development is unnecessary because they’re pretty to look at, and that readers will easily forgive them being self-absorbed, high-handed and willing to let the costs of their bad decisions fall on other people. Or that casting a Griffindor princess (beautiful, intelligent–or so we’re told, though very seldom shown–dramatic, and special) is likewise adequate, without giving the reader any other reason to like or respect her, such as having her make good decisions or treat other people with consideration. For me, as a reader, seeing characters like this in the lead roles of a romance is a guaranteed fail.

But give me a good pair of Hufflepuffs mortally afraid of disappointing each other, and we’re off to the races. Lindsay Buroker is good at them, too (particularly in the Emperor’s Edge novels, but really in all her work); so is Lois McMaster Bujold, on occasion. For me, it’s a winning formula, and one I want to explore more in my own work.

Jan 25

Do we still need villains?

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My wife and I just watched the movie Cruella, and it struck me that it’s the latest of several retellings in which classic villains – all of them women – are retconned out of villainy. Maleficent was another; Wicked was perhaps the first, or the first well-known, example, and provided the template.

What also struck me, though, was that Cruella moved the villainy just one step back, giving us a different female villain, a new character, who was pretty similar to how Cruella was originally portrayed. Maleficent straightforwardly makes the male hero of the original story into the villain. Wicked (which, let’s remember, is not a Disney movie like the other two) relocates the villainy in a somewhat more complicated way, to the Wizard (who was, if not an outright villain, at least a dubious character and a fraud in the original Oz story) and, to a lesser extent, other collaborators in the Wizard’s dystopic rule, some of whom are women. All three movies still have villains; they’re just not the same people who were the villains in the original stories. Elphaba in Wicked is not simply a hero, either, though she is a protagonist.

We’re currently seeing a redefinition of heroes and villains in history as well as in classic children’s stories. Statues set up to celebrate people (usually men) of an earlier age are being targeted for removal, based on the actions and attitudes displayed by those men during their lifetime. Other people you haven’t heard of before (usually women) are being newly celebrated. To be clear, I’m not saying that this reassessment is a bad thing, though I do think it gets carried too far by some of its proponents in a few cases.

There’s a certain mindset that always looks for heroes and villains in life, as in art. It simplifies the moral landscape, and lets us know whether we should be supporting or opposing someone. The problem is, following this mindset makes it too easy for us to support actions by our heroes that, if they were done by someone else, would strike us as villainous, and vice versa.

And it’s easy (though similarly reductive) to blame art for this. If the fiction we consume is always divided clearly into black and white hats, how can we break out of that mindset when thinking about real people? But there’s also the argument that the reason this is so prevalent in art is that it’s so prevalent in how people think in real life; it’s how we want to believe the world works. Probably cause and effect go both ways. Limited plaudits go to the writers of the movies mentioned above for calling into question exactly who is a hero and who is a villain, though the plaudits are limited because they still retain the hero-villain divide clearly and strongly; they’re not breaking down the divide, just moving people from one side of it to the other.

But do we need to have villains at all? Tina Turner memorably told us that we don’t need another hero; do we need another villain?

Now, I’m as guilty as anyone of putting straightforward heroes and villains into my art, though I hope that in recent years, at least, I’ve started giving at least the heroes more nuance, showing more of their flaws. They still choose to do the right thing, or what they believe to be the right thing, most of the time, but sometimes they’re tempted not to, and sometimes they yield to that temptation in a moment of weakness, and sometimes along the way they make an honest mistake that they and other people end up paying for.

My villains are less nuanced, in part because they’re usually off screen and never (as far as I can recall) get to be viewpoint characters. It’s something I’m aware of as a weakness in my writing.

I’m put in mind here of the brilliant YouTube comedian Ryan George’s “Pitch Meeting” videos:

“And what’s this character’s deal?”

“Oh, he’s evil.”

Hollywood (which is what George is satirizing) doesn’t need to dig any deeper than that. But what if we did?

It’s quite possible to have an antagonist without having a villain, especially if you show their point of view. I recently read an excellent book which goes some way towards this: The Mask of Mirrors, by M.A. Carrick. At least initially, the viewpoint characters all have agendas which are at cross purposes, and they are, at least partially, each other’s antagonists as a result, though none of them is unequivocally a villain; because we get their viewpoint, we see why they are doing things that we might not completely approve of. (At the same time, there are a couple of unequivocal villains in the book, and the viewpoint characters eventually unite to take them on.)

You don’t even necessarily need a personal antagonist to tell a good story, though it helps. We’re currently in the midst of collectively striving against a natural phenomenon, and that’s a powerful story, though somehow we manage to fight among ourselves about that as well.

The question I’m groping towards is: can we (can I) tell stories that show us a more three-dimensional set of characters, driven by personal flaws and incorrect beliefs as much as by their ideals, clashing in complicated ways? And can we (can I) do that without simply declaring morality illusory and writing an entire cast of grimdark alienated bastards?

While I’m at it, can it be funny? I’ve been reading a lot of early P.G. Wodehouse lately (not all of which was comedic), and appreciating his comic gift, and reflecting that I don’t necessarily want to write something dead serious just because we’ve always been told that serious books are more worthy. I don’t get paid much to write, so I ought to at least have fun doing it.

Wodehouse’s characters are often at odds, too, not because some of them are morally evil but because all of them are human. Also, in his later and better-known works, Wodehouse often pulled off the startling feat of making objectively very low social stakes among a privileged elite matter to the reader, but in at least some of his early work, there were characters who, by chance or even because of moral principle, found themselves in economically difficult straits and had to deal with that, and the unfair nature of the world, as best they were able.

I’m left wondering if I can create a fictional world where things matter, and where people clash, but nobody is unequivocally evilbadwrong and most people have a sense of humour about things, and maybe when the mix-up is sorted out we can all have a laugh together.

Nov 16

Letting Characters Be Themselves

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My wife and I have been watching the ITV Sherlock Holmes adaptations that were made between 1984 and 1994. We’ve watched them slightly out of order, because a few of them are longer and we left those to the weekends, so the last one for us was the final episode of the 1993 series. They didn’t end up adapting all of the stories; Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, unfortunately died in 1994. But towards the end, the “adaptations” became less and less faithful to the originals, with more and more interpolated new material created by the writers from whole cloth.

I’m not sure why writers do this. It seldom works, because apparently it’s extraordinarily difficult for a writer to add to another writer’s work without distorting it out of all recognition (looking at you, Peter Jackson). In the case of the episode we watched at the weekend, “The Eligible Bachelor,” it was based on two different (unrelated) Holmes stories, but more than half of it was completely new material. That new material gave Holmes mystical theories; actual premonitory dreams; a scene where he put his arms around a woman to comfort her with no evidence of awkwardness; and a mention by Watson that Holmes very much admired the same woman’s mental abilities. It also had Watson betraying his Hippocratic oath (leaving an injured man, albeit a villain who Watson himself had injured while rescuing a lady, to be killed by a leopard). And it gave the rescued lady a cliched too-stupid-to-live scene where she went alone to confront a man who she knew had killed at least one woman before, without having told anyone – including her highly capable husband – where she was going, for no good in-story reason.

Holmes fanfic is the oldest fanfic, or so I’ve heard, and there’s a lot of it. A surprising amount of it – and I include the often enjoyable but occasionally clunky series Elementary in this – gives us an out-of-character Holmes of one kind or another. He’s kinder, more empathetic, more humane, romantically involved (often with Watson, fanfic being what it is), emotionally vulnerable… all the things that classic Holmes, Conan Doyle’s Holmes, is not.

I recently read not quite half of Dave Eggers’ The Every. I stopped because the humour, while well done, was too dark for me, and the story both dystopian (which is never to my taste) and deeply pessimistic about both technology and humanity (which is very much not where I am philosophically). One minor scene in the book, which is set in a successor to the current tech giants which has implausibly gained a monopoly over social media, search, e-commerce, publishing, the making of smart devices and basically everything else, involves a project in which people rewrite (by committee) classic novels. Research has shown the instigator of this terrible idea that there are certain spots where a lot of people stop reading these novels, often because they don’t like something a character does. So the characters are rewritten to be more likeable, more in line with current social mores. Less problematic.

In an atmosphere where it sometimes seems that anybody not conforming exactly to whatever this week’s orthodoxy is will be torn apart by a mob on Twitter, I can see how an author would fear this as an outcome. But the impulse, as the Sherlock Holmes episode from 1993 shows, is not new. We’re always inclined to want to revise characters to either be less flawed or else flawed in a way that’s more congenial, or at least understandable, to us. The Holmes of Elementary, for example, is a recovering drug addict (picking up on mentions in the original Doyle stories of Holmes’ use of heroin and cocaine while bored from having no good cases), has superficial sexual relationships, doesn’t get on with his father or his brother, and occasionally screws over his friends because he thinks he knows better than them. Modern audiences, especially American audiences (the show is set mostly in present-day New York, though Holmes is still English) presumably find this more relatable than the emotionally distant, erratically brilliant, relentlessly analytical Holmes of Doyle. The British modernization, Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, is closer to that Holmes, giving us a Holmes who is, probably, non-neurotypical.

Elementary also gives us a Watson very different from the original, and I don’t mean because she’s an Asian woman; that’s a much less significant change than making Watson a competent detective, Holmes’ equal partner in most ways, rather than his loyal muscle and occasional conscience.

Now, far be it from me to speak against fanfiction of any kind, including the kind that people get paid for. These characters belong to humankind now, and what you choose to do with them is entirely your own affair. But I am raising the question about why we have the impulse to remake iconic characters in a more relatable mould, to make them easier to understand, to make their choices more like what we would choose, even if, because of these changes, there’s a strong sense in which they are no longer that character.

When I’m writing original characters, that same impulse is there, and I have to say I yield to it a lot (I’m criticizing myself here too). I think I’m most successful when I manage to resist it, at least to a degree. I’ve recently finished drafting the last of the Auckland Allies series. The character Tara, initially prickly, angry, and rude, has an arc through the series towards liking and respecting her colleagues more and acknowledging this to them, but her inner monologue doesn’t cease to include snarky digs at them. She just doesn’t let them come out of her mouth quite so much. Sparx still fails to land his pop-culture jokes most of the time, but he’s still trying (sometimes very trying). Dan, if anything, ends the series less admirable to the reader than he was when first introduced, because we get to see some of the compromises and flaws that lurk under his white-knight persona.

Iconic characters often become iconic because they’re out of the ordinary, not just in their abilities, but because they fail to fit with the world around them in some way. It’s worth considering why our impulse is to sand the rough edges off them, to make them more acceptable (whatever that may currently mean).

Oct 07

Why straight white guy stories are losing my interest

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Let’s start out without any misunderstandings: I am a straight white guy. But stories about straight white guys are getting less and less interesting to me these days. My annual best-books-I-read-this-year posts show the trend; more and more, the books I enjoy the most feature female protagonists (often, though by no means always, written by female authors). I’m also reading more stories with queer or non-white protagonists, and often those too are among the ones that make it to Best of the Year.

Why is this? I’ve been wondering that myself.

My conclusion is that the kind of stories that tend to get told about straight white guys are a lot more limited than the ones about other kinds of protagonists. The archetypal straight white guy story is “I pass a test to come into my birthright of power, respect, and the love of women”; the archetypal story for someone who isn’t a straight white guy is more “I battle to make a place for myself in a world that doesn’t want to fit me.”

Thing is, a lot of the time the test the SWG passes to come into his (supposed) birthright is pretty simple. Sometimes the payoff is almost handed to him as a participation trophy, just for turning up and being a SWG; other times, he only has to hit a few simple plot points. He can be reluctant, he can be foolish, he can be incompetent, he can be lazy, he can even screw up majorly with dire consequences for others, and still receive the prize. And often, other characters in the story – notably the woman whose love he receives as part of his payoff – are more interesting, competent, capable, and motivated than he is, and I wish I was getting their story instead. I believe the term “Trinity effect” (referring to the Matrix movies) is relevant here; I’ve also referred to it as the Wyldstyle effect, referencing The Lego Movie.

Let’s divert for a moment and talk about that whole “birthright” thing. If you’ve read much of my musings, you’ll be aware that I’m allergic to Chosen Ones, and part of the reason is that the Chosen One often doesn’t have to work that hard or exhibit much agency in order to achieve their plot goals. They can drag their feet, they can not put in the practice or listen to their mentor or even follow basic common sense, and the universe will distort itself around them to hand them unearned victory. This is what I call the Spoiled Protagonist. I say in the post I’ve just linked that the Spoiled Protagonist is often female, and I have read plenty of female examples; but the straight white guy is the spoiled protagonist that I sometimes don’t even notice, because there’s such a powerful cultural norm of SWGs getting handed things they haven’t truly earned.

Another big reason for my aversion to Chosen Ones, though, is that I don’t believe in the myth of the divine right of kings. Unfortunately, a lot of fiction does still act as if this myth is true, as if your ancestry grants you some kind of destiny. At one point in The Dresden Files (a series I love, by the way, despite its straight-white-guy protagonist) someone, I forget exactly who, traces the ancestry of Michael Carpenter, one of the wielders of the holy swords, to Charlemagne, and this is presented as part of what qualifies him to wield the sword. His character by itself is apparently not enough.

The thing is, Charlemagne died in the year 814 and had 18 children. Actually, the number of children is irrelevant; even if he’d only had one child, if anyone alive today was his descendant (which we know to be the case), then, statistically, everyone of European descent alive today is his descendant. This is because, according to statistician Joseph Chang, any person who lived long enough ago and who is anyone’s ancestor is eventually everyone’s ancestor. So of course Michael Carpenter, who has European ancestry, is descended from Charlemagne. So am I.

Likewise, when a 12-year-old girl traced the ancestry of all but one of the US presidents to the English king John Lackland (the exception being Martin Van Buren, who was Dutch), it was reported as if some sort of genetic destiny brought them to their leadership positions. But again, John died in 1216, more than 800 years ago. Everyone with any English or Scottish ancestry from before the 20th century – including me, and including most if not all of the people who stood for the office of US president and didn’t win – is descended from him by this point. It means nothing. (I say “from before the 20th century” because there are English and Scottish people whose ancestors all immigrated to those countries within the last 100 years.)

And, of course, if you go back far enough – and “far enough” may not actually be all that far – we all have common ancestors. If you want your cultural assumptions about how much “race” means challenged (even if you’re fairly liberal in your ideas), I highly recommend Angela Saini’s book Superior (link is to my Goodreads review).

So the idea that your ancestry, including your white ancestry, conveys any sort of superiority or qualifies you for anything at all is not only erroneous but, I believe, toxic. Likewise with male gender; read Saini’s earlier book Inferior for more on that. And if, at this point of the 21st century, you still believe that people who aren’t straight are somehow lesser because of that, I’m not going to waste my time arguing with you.

So the straight white guy is not in any objective way superior, but all too often gets treated as if he is. Not only in fiction, but in real life too. Let’s stick with fiction, though, for the moment, since that’s what I’m talking about.

The problem with the usual SWG protagonist is that, just because of who he is, he doesn’t face as many challenges, and a protagonist who succeeds without much effort is simply not as interesting to me. He doesn’t need to be capable to become a respected ruler, or attractive to gain the love of a woman who is, frankly, better than he is, or work hard to achieve his plot goal or defeat the antagonist. It’s his Destiny.

So what about the unusual SWG protagonist? Can he still be interesting to me? He can, though it takes a bit more work from him and from his author.

A kind and considerate protagonist is interesting. Straight white guys don’t, traditionally, have to be kind and considerate to get what’s coming to them, but if they are, that makes them more interesting to me. Bill, the protagonist of the early P.G. Wodehouse book Uneasy Money, is such a man, and it instantly made me like him. In my own work, Patient from Hope and the Patient Man is kind, considerate, and supportive of his beloved. When I’m looking for a romance hero, that’s what I look for, because their winning of their love feels earned.

It helps that Patient is also disabled. A straight white guy who has some genuine obstacle to overcome is interesting, as long as he doesn’t overcome it too easily. Part of the traditional SWG story is rags-to-riches, but it’s often because he’s the hidden prince or some such divine-right-of-kings nonsense, so he doesn’t need to work for his elevation. (Satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, where a captain and a foremast hand are discovered to have been switched as children and are therefore given each other’s positions.)

A protagonist of goodwill who is willing to sacrifice for others is interesting. Someone like the protagonist of Tim Pratt’s Doors of Sleep, for example (though he wins love too easily), or Tom Miller’s excellent The Philosopher’s Flight and The Philosopher’s War (which also put the male protagonist in the position of being the odd one out in a female-dominated profession). The sacrifice needs to be of genuine value, though, or it’s just condescension.

A male cotagonist with an equally capable, equally central female partner (romantic or otherwise) who he respects is interesting, as in the Magebreakers series by Ben S. Dobson.

And finally, writing with genuine depth of characterization or insight into humanity will always be interesting, regardless of who the protagonist is. What I really object to in straight white guy stories is not the straightness, the whiteness, or the guyness, but the fact that those identities often belong to characters who cruise through life too easily and, as a consequence, never develop any complexity. Writing an underdog character who has to struggle for a place to fit into the world and stand up for who they are is a lot more likely, all else (like the author’s skill, for example) being equal, to produce a story that’s interesting to me.

Authors, feel free to consider this a challenge.

Feb 22

Where Next for Mike’s Writing?

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I’ve been in a writing slump lately.

Health issues starting in November have put me out of the habit of regular writing, and I’ve not made much progress on the books I was working on. Auckland Allies 4 still needs a polish-up before it’s ready to be published, and although I’m 20,000 words into the first book in my new Arcanists setting, it’s tough going, and I’m not really feeling it. I think I’ve taken the wrong direction with it somewhere.

I’ve been questioning where my writing is going in general, in fact. I celebrated a million words of published long-form fiction last year, and just as we often reassess our lives around milestone birthdays, I feel that a milestone like that calls for some reflection.

I recently read a book on Roger Zelazny (link is to my review on Goodreads; it won’t be published until May) that got me thinking. Zelazny is one of my favourite authors, and a direct inspiration for some of my own fiction, including several short stories that are among my most successful and that I’m most proud of. The book outlines how he had a brilliant, award-winning early career and was hailed (rightly) as an exciting and surprising new author with great potential, and then, once he became a full-time writer, was accused of having become “too commercial” and knocking out books with not enough development to explore his ideas to the full.

That’s not how he saw it, by the way. One reason, I think, that his books are so compact is that he decided early on that he wouldn’t overwrite or overexplain, that once he’d shown the reader something he wouldn’t go on talking about it but would move on to the next thing. To me, that makes his books concentrated, rich despite their typically short length. He also talks, in an interview included in the book, about how each book he wrote experimented with something that he considered a weakness, but that he tried to put in enough of what he knew he did well that even if the experiment failed, the book itself should still be able to succeed.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about what I want to achieve with my writing. I’ve always wanted to produce something – whether books or otherwise – that will be of lasting value. A lot of the work I do in my day job is with technology that will be replaced within a few years; it’s likely, if I live a decent length of time after I retire, that none of the work I did in IT will survive me. I’ve come to terms with that recently, and decided that it can still be the case that things are worth doing even if they don’t last and aren’t remembered; they had worth at the time. (The fact that I’ve got into cooking, which is inherently short-term in its usefulness but is definitely useful while it lasts, has a lot to do with this shift in philosophy.) Nevertheless, I would like to write books that aren’t just things of the moment, that people will still be reading after I’m gone.

Now, there are a couple of different kinds of books that are “of the moment” but don’t last. One is purely commercial, what I sometimes refer to as “extruded fiction product”; produced to meet a market demand, just like thousands of other books, with nothing about it that distinguishes it or gives it longevity. The other is the kind of book that wins acclaim and awards at the time it’s published, because it captures the zeitgeist so well; but because it captures the zeitgeist so well, if it doesn’t have anything else going for it, it dates rapidly and falls out of fashion.

You only have to look at old bestseller lists and awards lists to encounter dozens of both types. I personally feel that a lot of books that are winning awards at the moment are of the second type. People are tremendously excited about them because they fit so absolutely perfectly into this moment’s (particularly US) political landscape, but when that landscape inevitably shifts, there won’t be much else to keep them in favour. It’s like what I often say about books that are marketed as humourous: if the joke falls flat, you still need to be telling a good story with well-rounded characters, not just ringmastering a trope parade with a bunch of silly names. So, for example, I think Ann Leckie’s work will endure, because even though it does mesh so strongly into current politics, it also tells a powerful story and tells it in excellent prose. Other books, which I’ll refrain from calling out by name, will be forgotten as quickly as they became celebrated, because really the only thing they have going for them is that people see themselves in them who are not used to seeing themselves in books. And, I sincerely hope, they will go on to see themselves in plenty more books that also have a lot more than that going for them, and then they’ll look back on these ones with a nostalgic pang but see, in retrospect, that they were hollow chocolate bunnies.

I’m self-published. I’m not selling a lot of books, because honestly I’m terrible at marketing and I don’t enjoy it (plus what I write is in neither the current commercial mainstream nor the current critical mainstream); but that means that I can do anything I like, pretty much. I don’t have a publishing house to tell me I can’t, and I don’t have a big, vocal fanbase demanding that I produce a specific type of book or be lambasted. That kind of freedom is dangerous – I could easily fall into self-indulgent tripe that only I like – but it’s also powerful. I can experiment. I can try new things that I might fail at. If I realize that I’ve failed, I don’t need to release it; it’s not under contract, and I won’t drop off the Amazon charts and lose a huge income if I don’t constantly release books. I don’t make my living from writing.

So I can write something I care about, something that’s difficult for me, something that resonates with universals of humanity, something that is like the books I most like myself: a propulsive plot, characters with depth who are doing the right thing against the odds, some reflection to provoke thought (without preaching), a fresh and fascinating setting.

That’s inherently hard to do. I know that not only because I’m a writer and know how hard different writing things are, but also because I’m a reviewer, and of the many books I see, only a few of them manage it. I think it’s a goal worth reaching for, though.

What I need is to figure out exactly how to do it and then execute it.

I’ve done project work of various kinds for nearly 30 years; I’m used to figuring out how to do hard things and then executing them. The trick will be to find something that draws me in enough that I’ll stick with it through the difficult parts, because, as already noted, I don’t have to do this. Nobody’s making me.

So, concretely: I’m very close to finished with Auckland Allies 4, and I feel like it’s sound. I plan to polish that up and release it during the first half of this year.

Next after that could well be Auckland Allies 5, which will finish the series. I think I can keep up the momentum and do that; I have an ending in mind, and it’s a heist story, which I love. The characters are already full of useful complications and have clear, distinctive voices.

After that? I don’t know. I may take a different tack and tell small, intimate, psychological stories for a while. I still feel that Hope and the Patient Man is one of my best books, if not the best, even though I wrote it years ago; it’s primarily a love story, with engineering and politics going on mostly in the background. Despite my love of ensemble casts, it may be time to focus on one or two protagonists striving for something they really care about.

It’s time, in fact, for me to be a protagonist, striving against the odds for something I care about: writing good books that mean something.

I hope I can.

Feb 22

Quidditch as a Metaphor for the Chosen One

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It occurred to me yesterday that the game of Quidditch in the Harry Potter books/films is a telling (and probably unintended) metaphor for the problem of the Chosen One.

A team of people work hard to score goals with the Quaffle, avoiding the Bludgers and redirecting them against their opponents. One by one, little by little, they make progress, building up their score.

And then some little snot catches the Snitch and all of that effort (usually) means nothing. Whether the rest of the team were winning or losing, unless they’ve done a truly amazing job, the catching of the Snitch is going to be what decides the outcome. Their painstakingly assembled score is a footnote.

This is why I can’t stand Chosen Ones (I make a reluctant exception for Harry because of other factors, but his Chosen One status is still an annoyance to me). The message is that the Chosen One is the only person whose actions matter. The work and sacrifice of everyone else is background; what truly won the day was the Chosen One doing one special thing.

This is not how The Lord of the Rings works, by the way, to take an example from an equally popular franchise. Frodo, of course, isn’t a Chosen One. There’s no prophecy about him. He is, in many ways, just an ordinary person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; what’s extraordinary about him is that he steps up to do what needs doing. The rest of the cast know that their role is to support him, but what they do still matters (and not always just to his mission, either). They’re as indispensable as Frodo is, each in their own way.

To be fair, that’s true of HP as well, mostly, but it’s still infested with a Chosen One, and Quidditch is still a miniature of how the whole series and the individual books tend to play out. It’s the Great Man theory of history, in which only a few people’s decisions truly matter, and everyone else’s striving is merely background.

If you know my work, you know that I lean towards ensemble casts, and ordinary people with extraordinary commitment (though I do sometimes have exceptional protagonists; it’s difficult to avoid the temptation, because I admire competence so much). I do this as an overt and deliberate rejection of the trope of the Chosen One. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, because as genre readers, we do like to identify with one powerful protagonist whose actions are the key to the whole plot.

For philosophical reasons, though, I’m going to continue to make the effort.

Aug 14

More on Portal Fantasy

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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

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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.