Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Steven Erikson

  • Happy Lord of the Rings Day

    I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost as admirable allies navigating a middle-era Spain in which three powerful politico-religious factions are vying for greater power. The Lions is endlessly beautiful both for Kay’s writing and the stories he has decided to narrate as much as those he won’t. The time in which the book’s tales are set was no stranger to casual brutality, but The Lions rises above it by what women and men striving constantly to be their best selves are capable of even in the presence of profound injustice, and of course the price they must inevitably pay. But even so, The Lions makes for superb reading.

    A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂 As I’ve written in many past editions of posts marking this occasion, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series surpassed JRR Tolkien’s novels and stories of Middle Earth — which was until then the high-water mark of epic fantasy to my mind — when I started reading the former. However, the Malazan series also surpassed, in some cases by distances I’d never imagined possible, all other works of fantasy I’d read until then. I finished reading it just as I completed my engineering studies and shortly after began a career as a journalist. And just a couple more years on, I had a sobering epiphany: I seemed to have lost my book-reading habit. Of course I regularly read shorter written material, from brief news reports to extended essays, but somehow I wasn’t been able to bring myself to read books of fiction — even of epic fantasy fiction, a genre I love very much.

    The Lions broke this spell. I’d recently visited a close friend’s home and asked him to recommend a good book of fiction. I half-expected to be told there was nothing left to read or, should my friend somehow be able to recommend a book, fully expected to not read it all. After rapidly going through a list of books he’d liked and which I’d already read, he dove into his bookshelf for a minute and returned with The Lions. Both he and another close friend recommended it highly, which was something special because these two people have high standards of fiction — as they should — as well as are ravenous consumers of creative work produced by others and published authors themselves. So I decided I’d give The Lions more of a shot than I’d given other books of late, and boy was I glad.

    I don’t like the city of New Delhi in and of itself. But I have some great friends there and experiencing the city with them simply transforms the place. The world of The Lions is just like that: riven with the kind of cruelty and hardship that only small-minded, parochial power is capable of inflicting on those it deems lesser than themselves, yet brightened and enlivened by the story’s protagonists, the physician Jehane bet Ishak, the military leader Rodrigo Belmonte, and the counsellor of kings Ammar ibn Khairan. When I turn into a page that opens with even one of them, I become [gasp] hopeful. What a luxury!

    Whereas The Lord of the Rings is constantly pitching forward, The Lions allows the reader to rest and dwell every now and then — which is remarkable considering The Lions moves faster than the trilogy of books every does. Swept along, I started to wonder just as I crossed the book’s midpoint if I was beginning to recover my reading habit after more than a decade. As The Lions gently but surely built up to its crescendo, I even asked myself if the habit really went away or if I’d just been picking the ‘wrong’ books to read all this time. But just as I got within 150 pages of the book’s finish, I was brought to a crashing halt: I found myself having an increasingly tough time keeping on. I discovered a mind within my mind intent on keeping me from accessing my interest in reading the book. Its purpose seemed to be to have me stop reading right now, so that the people in The Lions could continue to remain where they were in the narrative without being consumed by the impending climax, where at least war — and the attendant prospect of death — lay, and still lies, in wait. But I know I must keep trying: Jehane, Rodrigo, and Ammar have already lived their lives and they would have continued to do so on their own exacting terms. If I am to claim to know them, I must not be afraid of following their lives to the end.

    Either it’s only a matter of time before fantasy fiction writers start featuring among the laureates of highfalutin literary awards or the literary world’s irrational prejudice towards stories of lived lives will continue to be laid bare for what it is. If only to me, The Lord of the Rings, the Malazan series, and The Lions of Al-Rassan are of a piece with any and all fiction, whether in prose or verse, in terms of humans or aliens, located somewhere or nowhere. There are differences, of course, but that is also a tautological statement. Differences abound between The Lions and The Lord of the Rings as much as they do between, say, Half of a Yellow Sun and Objects of Desire. Yet they all play on the same borderless field.

    Even magic needn’t make a difference. I used to think that it did when I first read The Lord of the Rings and realised how much better it was than anything else I’d read until then. But I’ve learnt that they’re not all that different, whether in kind or degree. Magic, if you’ve read the Malazan series but also if you’ve dabbled in the Elden Ring lore or played a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or two, can be found to be a thing of the world, this material world, occupying the space between you and me as surely as sunlight and birdsong. This is ultimately why I keep returning to The Lord of the Rings at least once a year, and why I find echoes of stories imagined much later by authors from different worlds in its old, familiar pages. Casting a spell to harm someone is no different from hitting them with a stick or bullying them when they’re helpless. Just as well, choosing not to do any of these things even when the incentive presents itself is equally virtuous.

    The Lord of the Rings first brought me to this borderless field: even if I’m not frolicking yet, I’m not going to leave either. Now, back to The Lions…

    Previous editions: 2024, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.

  • The idea of doing right by the US

    After US troops withdrew from Afghanistan after two decades in 2021, the Taliban returned to power. In its oppressive regime many groups of people, but especially women, girls, and minorities, have lost most of their civil rights. In this time, Afghanistan has also suffered devastating floods and an ongoing famine, and has mounted tentative attempts at diplomacy with countries it could count on to be sympathetic to Afghanistan’s plight, if not the Taliban’s. Separate from other goals, it seemed like a bid by the Taliban to improve Afghanistan’s ability to survive future disasters.

    But New Delhi’s willingness to so much as engage with Taliban-appointed diplomats — even while declining to acknowledge the political legitimacy of the Taliban government — has elicited strong words of caution from former diplomats.

    Similarly, when the International Cricket Council (ICC) allowed the Afghanistan men’s team to participate in the Champions Trophy tournament despite a rule that it won’t recognise any country without both men’s and women’s teams, Afghan refugee and taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi accused the body of tolerating “gender apartheid”, which is also understandable.

    These attempts by Afghanistan are reminiscent of a particular passage in my favourite work of fantasy, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. [Spoiler alert] The Crippled God, a vile new deity in the books’ world, petitions vociferously to be included in the world’s pantheon, side by side with all the other gods. The Master of the Deck, the mortal tasked with this decision, initially believes the answer to be easy: to decline admission. But the thought of doing so weighs heavily on him, until one day, on a bloody battlefield, a weary soldier points him to an obvious answer of another variety: to admit the Crippled God in the pantheon only to force it to play by the same rules all the other gods play by. [end alert]

    There’s something to be said for doing right by a weakened people ruled by an unelected, oppressive, and insular government. The Taliban idea of human rights is subservient to the group’s hardline religious beliefs, and the country’s people didn’t sign up for it.

    No matter how much control the Taliban aspires to exert on the affairs of Afghanistan, it can’t restrict the effects of climate change to beyond its borders. This is why the UN allowed Afghanistan’s representatives to participate as observers at the COP29 climate talks in November 2024 in Azerbaijan, even though the UN doesn’t recognise the Taliban government and had prohibited its participation altogether for three years until then. It was progress of a sort.

    Similarly, New Delhi may seek to admit an Afghan diplomat by arguing the merits of having a finger on the button and the ICC may allow the men’s cricket team to play by claiming doing so allows the Afghan people something to cheer for. How meritorious their arguments are in the real world is a separate matter.

    But can we apply the same sort of thinking to the US under Donald Trump, Sr.? As soon as he took office in his second term, Trump relaunched the process to free the US of commitments made under the Paris Agreement and to the World Health Organisation, cut funding for research into various diseases, drugs, and vaccines, and nixed support for DEI efforts, trans people, and reproductive rights. He returned to power by winning 312 votes in the electoral college and 49.8% of the popular vote, or 77.3 million votes. Kamala Harris received 75 million votes (48.3%).

    As with Afghanistan, does the rest of the world have a responsibility to stand by the people who opposed Trump, as well as the rights of those who supported him but couldn’t have expected the consequences of his actions for themselves? Or is the US beyond concession?

    Trump isn’t a terrorist but his protectionist agenda, authoritarian stance, and inflammatory rhetoric also endanger lives and livelihoods and isolate his compatriots in the international area. In fact, the questions arise because Trump’s actions affect the whole world, not the US alone, thanks to ways in which his predecessors have already embedded the country in multilateral collaborations to fight climate change, the spread of communicable diseases, plastic pollution, etc.

  • Happy Lord of the Rings Day

    War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective responses – such as they are – to climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and water crises as wars. In every nationalist country, and there are more of them every year, the states have claimed they’re at war against “anti-national” forces within and without. War is everywhere. At this time, where does fantasy fiction stand, what can it do?

    First, the genre itself is often centred around military action as a means to challenge protagonists and resolve conflicts. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the skirmish on Weathertop showcases Aragorn’s leadership; the Battle of Helm’s Deep is where Théoden truly returns as the king of Rohan; the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is the stage on which Denethor fails, Faramir rises in his stead, Rohan’s crown effectively passes to Éowyn, and Aragorn does something only Gondor’s ruler can; the Battle of the Morannon is a test of every protagonist’s mettle as they distract Sauron and his armies in a doomed stand long enough for Sam, Frodo, and Gollum to destroy the ring; and the Battles of Isengard and Bywater are where the ents and hobbits, respectively, retake their lands from Saruman’s rule, unto the powerful wizard’s political and then mortal demise. Even outside the trilogy, war is never short of a great contest between good and evil.

    There have been many flights of fancy that bear little resemblance to JRR Tolkien’s epic and its style, yet it’s just as true that every English attempt at epic fantasy since the trilogy has either basked in its shadow or tried to escape from it. Another way in which Tolkien foreshadowed the genre is in terms of its authors: predominantly cis-male and white. Despite the variety of factors at play that could influence who becomes an author of epic fantasy fiction, this is no coincidence, at least insofar as it determines who becomes a ‘successful’ author – and just as well, it’s not a coincidence that so much of modern fantasy is concerned with similar depictions of war.

    Bret Devereaux wrote in his popular blog that Amazon Primevideo’s Rings of Power fell so flat even though it had borrowed heavily as well as branched off from Lord of the Rings because, among other things, it failed to “maintain a believable sense of realism grounded in historical societies and technologies (something the Lord of the Rings, books and films, did very well)”, rendering it “impossible to invest in the stakes and consequences of a world that appears not to obey any perceptible rules”. Yet even with the ‘rules’, Tolkien’s narrative arcs within his books were modeled perceptibly on the Arthurian legends. A similar complaint can be foisted on other (esp. white male) works of epic fantasy fiction, which have been concerned on a metaphysical level at least with recasting the past in a different light, unto different ends.

    I admit I haven’t read enough of epic fantasy – all of Tolkien, a smattering of Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Peter David (Sir Apropos of Nothing), some of M. John Harrison’s short stories, Brandon Sanderson, Marlon James (BLRW), and George R.R. Martin – to be able to write with any kind of authority about the genre, but for this I blame partly myself and the rest Steven Erikson, whose Malazan Book of the Fallen series spoiled me for anything else. My own tendency to read the work of the cis-white men of fantasy is also to blame.

    However, Erikson, unlike any of the other writers I’d read until then, both within and beyond the genre, is also a white man yet his Malazan series treats war differently: its tragic toll is always in view thanks to Erikson’s decision to train the narrator’s focus on its smallest players, the soldiers, rather than on its kings and queens. This is how, for its well-earned reputation as a military epic bar none, the series itself recounts a tale of compassion.

    And having read and re-read the Malazan series for more than a decade (to the uninitiated: it’s possible to do this without getting bored because of its rich detailing and layered story-telling), war – including ones of annihilation, which can apparently be fought these days without the use of terrible weapons – is if nothing else the ultimate examination of purpose. It is brutal on people, the land, the cultures, and the planet for much longer after it ends, and it magnifies through these effects and the methods by which they are achieved the moral character of those conducting this violence.

    Like others I’m sure, I feel completely powerless against and often dispirited by Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza, Russia’s wanton destruction in Ukraine, and the systemic violence the Indian state continues to inflict on its poorest and most marginalised sections. The best tools of opposition available at my disposal are my words, my ideas, my morality, and, if a situation demands it, some spine – and all four good fantasy fiction can inspire in abundance.

    I remember reading a Roger Ebert review of a film sometime back (can’t remember its name now) in which he said good story-telling can inspire us to become our best versions of ourselves, that even should the film flop on other counts, it will have succeeded if it can do this. These words are applied easily to any form and mode of story-telling, including epic fantasy. Lord of the Rings is a tale of good versus evil but it’s also a tale of friendships and their survival through untold hardships, and while some may disagree it was good story-telling. In the end, whether or not it succeeded and also setting aside the moralities of the time in which it was written, it strove to inspire goodness.

    The Malazan series strives similarly (present-tense because Erikson is still building out its lore) and, to be fair, does it much better, directing its empathy at almost everyone who appears in the books (excluding – spoiler alert – the truly vile). In our present time of seemingly incessant conflict, it helps me look beyond the propaganda both noisy and subtle at the people who are suffering, and with its stories refill senses constantly on the verge of depletion. If we just let it, fantasy can step up where reality has failed us, alerting us to the infinite possibility of worlds within worlds, new and necessary forms of justice, and of course how and where we can begin to cope together.

    A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂

    Previous editions: 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

    Note: I chose to ignore sci-fi in this post. I suspect “sci-fi” and “fantasy” are at the end of the day labels invented to make marketing these books easier, but I also stuck to fantasy per se so I could finish writing this post in a finite amount of time.

  • Lord of the Rings Day

    Happy Lord of the Rings Day. 🙂

    About a week ago, I began rereading book 7 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. This followed my realisation earlier this year that I had somehow lost the ability to read fiction. I had neither the interest in the genre nor – unlike in the pre-pandemic era – the ability to force myself to read the first few pages of a book and automatically get into it.

    A friend had lent his copy of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium short-stories, a classic of the high-fantasy genre. Though I could appreciate the higher quality of writing and why Harrison’s style is so celebrated, the stories themselves didn’t take. When I returned it to my friend, I noticed his collection of the Malazan books (to which I’m proud to have introduced him many years past), and asked to borrow book 7 – considered by many to be the series’s best installment (and by me to be the second-best).

    The Malazan series is epic fantasy – in my view the highest form of fiction simply by virtue of the amount of invention involved followed by the discipline required to rein it in and make it all make sense – and I didn’t expect to be able to read it, beyond snippets here and there. But in four days, I finished 588 consecutive pages. (I’m currently on a two-day break to read a shorter non-fiction book.) It has been a pleasant yet unrelenting surprise. It seems I can read fiction, yet the thought of reading some other work in the genre remains off-putting. Why?

    I have been thinking about this on and off, and today, I think I have the beginnings of a hypothesis. Epic fantasy fiction is one of the few things I truly love because it has fiction’s ability, through pure storytelling, to recapitulate a uniquely human experience of reality, or any particularly interesting part of it, as well as achieve that, and frequently expand it, to situate, deconstruct, and explore the human through different kinds of realities.

    (I’m speaking, of course, of good epic fantasy, which J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stories did in a limited yet genre-defining way in the early 20th century, and which to me today continues to be exemplified by the work of Steven Erikson.)

    To begin reading a book of fiction is to begin a journey of pure discovery; to begin reading epic fantasy should only be more so. And so: I believe I have lost, hopefully temporarily, the appetite for discovery ab initio. Perhaps I’m afraid of what I will find, but it’s almost certainly that increasingly grim sensation that it will just be more of the same, related through new turns of phrase, new dramatis loci, and new points of view. Nothing new.

    Non-fiction, in this regard, can be comforting because it helps to explain and de-threaten what is already known and has exhibited an unsettling tendency to repeat itself. (I particularly like monographs.) At this time, to me, the Malazan series is also practically non-fiction: less in the sense that I believe the series chronicles real events from an alternate reality and more that I read the books a decade ago, have vague memories of their various narrative arcs, and to reread them now is to not discover but rediscover.

    Rediscovery is not repeated discovery just the way multiplication is not repeated addition; it is a second-order thing, something greater than the sum of its parts, containing both the prospect of discovery and the memory, so precious as I become more cynical, of its effect on the mind. Yes: I suppose I am, or like to think that I am, rereading the Malazan series to relive this effect and beat back the dark clouds of nothing-new-is-possible. And so far, I think it is working.

    Perhaps once I (re)finish all the Malazan books, I can return to good old Tolkien himself…

  • The names of our dragons

    The first piece of very-popular epic fantasy fiction I read was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga, which, among many things, reminded me how much the American and British writers of ‘high fantasy’ owed the ancient mythologies of the people of Northern Europe and, to a lesser extent, east and central Asia. I read many other books of the same genre after until I was introduced to Steven Erikson’s grand Malazan Book of the Fallen series. The 10 books of the main series have hundreds of protagonists and more than a thousand named characters (including non-humanoid life-forms and excluding inanimate things like deserts and valleys) overall – and reading about them, I thought I had finally found one writer whose work allowed me to escape the mythological thrall of Norse and Asian mythologies.

    But it wasn’t to be. Many years after I’d finished the series (and declared it to be my new all-time favourite), I discovered that Babylonian mythology has a dragon goddess named Tiamat, a “deification of the primordial sea” (source). The Malazan series makes repeated references to an Elder goddess and the mother of all dragons named T’iam, and who, the series’s characters hint every now and then, came into their shared realm from a different, unknown one many eons ago. (A prequel trilogy, centered on the city of Kharkanas, also describes the formation of a “poisonous” sea called the ‘Vitr’, from which a new primordial being emerges; she is later named the ‘Queen of Dreams’.)

    To be sure, it is just a name, but only if you also ignored the economics of symbolism. The authors of the Malazan series, mainly Steven Erikson but with some help from his friend Ian C. Esslemont, went to great lengths to name an incredible array of characters. Every one of them is far from contrived, with close attention paid to the sounds and common arrangements of letters in other words of the same language the name-bearer’s people spoke. Tolkien did this also, by loading dwarven names with Ds, Gs, Rs and Ns, and elven names with Ls, Ss, Ns and Os. The point is – why to go so much trouble for so many names, but include T’iam ‘as is’, considering its nominal proximity to Tiamat?

    (By the way, Dungeons & Dragons lore has a big bad dragon named Tiamat, and Erikson and Esslemont both used the game to develop their books. If Erikson borrowed T’iam from D&D’s Tiamat – or if both share a common ancestor –, and not directly from ancient Babylonian mythology, the problem still stands. I’m only leading with Malazan here because I know more about it.)

    Second, if T’iam was rooted in Babylonian legends’ Tiamat, what else did Erikson and Esslemont borrow from this and other mythologies? (Note here that there can be no dispute for primacy between an author writing in the 20th or 21st centuries and those who wrote their stories thousands of years ago. Note also that wherever the Babylonians and the people of other civilisations adapted their symbols from, the emergence of written communication – including drawings and paintings – in their time precluded modern historians from deducing much about the people who lived earlier, except if their stories survived in written records of some sort.) The answer to what else the duo borrowed won’t change the fantastic stories of the Malazan series; instead, it would impinge on the genre more broadly. That is, it would ask: has any popular work of epic fantasy completely transcended the symbols first created by, and preserved in, people’s ancient tales?

    Whatever the answer isn’t, it can’t be Marvel Comics either, which coopted Thor, Odin, Freyja, Loki and a host of other Nordic characters and Americanised them. More fundamentally, and perhaps also more forgivably, while the writers and illustrators of Marvel produced big hits with the mass market, I doubt they set out to redefine the elements of epic fantasy through their work for this production house, and in hindsight may have contributed more towards justifying the US’s socio-cultural pursuits in each era, as exemplified by the rise of ‘Captain America’ in the post-war period. (This is speculation; I could be horribly wrong, and also beside the point.)

    The Marvel Cinematic Universe has further entrenched this process of Americanisation, including through its latest offering: The Eternals, which features a supreme antagonist, from the PoV of the film’s narrative, named Tiamut the Communicator. In Marvel’s canon, Tiamut is known as the ‘Dreaming Celestial’, a being of extreme power and, later, thoughtfulness, which starts off with a mandate to annihilate Earth. (Its title is reminiscent of Erikson’s ‘Queen of Dreams’, which suggests a deeper connection with ‘dreaming’ in Babylonian lore.) American comic-book artist Jack Kirby first introduced Tiamut in 1977 (Tiamut’s last appearance, so far, was in 2013).

    As with ‘T’iam’ in the Malazan series (and ‘Eru Iluvatar’, etc. in The Silmarillion versus Odin All-father, etc. in Norse mythology), is the act of reusing a name, with some modifications trivial enough to maintain the similarity, a tribute? Tiamut in the comics bore no other similarity to Tiamat – although Tiamut goes from being an antagonist of sorts to a protagonist whereas Tiamat in Babylonian lore goes from being creator to destroyer. Or is it an admission that the writer is adapting an old trope in order to stave off ridicule; an attempt to evoke preconceived impressions of dragon-like power; or, ultimately, a complete failure of the imagination?

  • Lord of the Rings Day

    A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! (Previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014)

    Every year I pen a commemorative piece about Lord of the Rings, and share something about the books and films that I think about nearly every day week. This year, I don’t have the strength, thanks to the workload due to the coronavirus pandemic, to say anything more than that you should take advantage of the lockdown – and the commute time it has likely saved you – to read more works of fantasy fiction.

    It remains the single most rewarding thing in my life, even more than my blog, because fantasy as I’ve said before in quite clumsy terms is fractal. It recapitulates itself, especially its careful – or deliberately and absurdly careless – inventiveness, demanding more answers of the writer than any other form of fiction ever could simply because fantasy brings together three infinities: both what is and what isn’t that are the general attributes of all fiction plus the preserve of ‘are you frigging kidding me’. Reading good fantasy is sure to give you ideas of your own, to push towards (or away from) new worlds and new world-visions.

    Fantasy is to my mind ergodic: riding its coattails, I get to visit all possibilities available to visit in the possibility-space of my mind; if I keep reading, I get to solipsistically encompass the worlds and world-visions of my fellow creators as well. Fantasy to me is newness, an endless font of it, in a world that has only been becoming more and more predictable; it is a secret place where goodness still lives, and on occasion even reaches a hand out and nudges me towards the right thing.

    If I had been in Faramir’s shoes and stood before Denethor, bearing the full brunt of my father’s derision and being told he’d rather I had been killed instead of my brother, I would have done to him what he did to himself later: set him on fire. But Faramir rode out into a battle that he knew full well he was going to lose. Nothing about it was fair – just as nothing was fair about Anomander Rake’s tortuous, tortuous penance. Ours is a nasty world, and right and wrong aren’t always clear just as they might not have been to Faramir and Rake in moments of profound distress. In fact, the distinction is sometimes so blurry it might as well not be there.

    When I’m lost for ideas, when I really don’t know what to do, when I would really like to just be told what I should do instead of having to think it up myself, I often turn to fantasy’s ideas about right and wrong, about what Faramir or Rake might have done, because fantasy is fundamentally empathetic in its alienness: its creations are often apart from this world – just as I feel sometimes, and you probably do too. It’s a place “infused with bright hope now so scarce in the realm of the real,” as a friend put it – a place to go when you don’t like this one (and from there to other places, picking and choosing what you like), and it’s a place that will let you go when you’d like to return, all in peace. The faith it demands is only the faith you’d like to give. What more could one want?

    [Takes a break from the typing frenzy]

    At least, good fantasy is all I want. And this Lord of the Rings Day, I invite you to take a short dip into a fantastic realm of your choice. If you’d like recommendations, I highly recommend starting with Lord of the Rings itself; if you’ve read that and want to try something more ambitious, try the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson or Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. If you’d like something that won’t consume the next three to five years of your life, I recommend Exhalation, a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang that I’m currently reading, or all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

    If you’d like even more recommendations – or titles more gender-balanced, say – I also recommend recommendations by the following souls (all on Twitter):

    • @srividyatadpole
    • @thebekku
    • @dpanjana
    • @chitralekha_tcc
    • @notrueindian
    • @supriyan

    There are many, many others, of course, but these people came immediately to mind.

    I really need to get back to work now.

  • The calculus of creative discipline

    Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World-building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism.

    Once I’m awake and have had my mug of tea, and once I’m done checking Twitter, I can quote these words of M. John Harrison from memory: not because they’re true – I don’t believe they are – but because they rankle. I haven’t read any writing of Harrison’s, I can’t remember the names of any of his books. Sometimes I don’t remember his name even, only that there was this man who uttered these words. Perhaps it is to Harrison’s credit that he’s clearly touched a nerve but I’m reluctant to concede anymore than this.

    His (partial) quote reflects a narrow view of a wider world, and it bothers me because I remain unable to extend the conviction that he’s seeing only a part of the picture to the conclusion that he lacks imagination; as a writer of not inconsiderable repute, at least according to Wikipedia, I doubt he has any trouble imagining things.

    I’ve written about the virtues of world-building before (notably here), and I intend to make another attempt in this post; I should mention what both attempts, both defences, have in common is that they’re not prescriptive. They’re not recommendations to others, they’re non-generalisable. They’re my personal reasons to champion the act, even art, of world-building; my specific loci of resistance to Harrison’s contention. But at the same time, I don’t view them – and neither should you – as inviolable or as immune to criticism, although I suspect this display of a willingness to reason may not go far in terms of eliminating subjective positions from this exercise, so make of it what you will.

    There’s an idea in mathematical analysis called smoothness. Let’s say you’ve got a curve drawn on a graph, between the x- and y-axes, shaped like the letter ‘S’. Let’s say you’ve got another curve drawn on a second graph, shaped like the letter ‘Z’. According to one definition, the S-curve is smoother than the Z-curve because it has fewer sharp edges. A diligent high-schooler might take recourse through differential calculus to explain the idea. Say the Z-curve on the graph is the result of a function Z(x) = y. If you differentiate Z(x) where ‘x’ is the point on the x-axis where the Z-curve makes a sharp turn, the derivative Z'(x) has a value of zero. Such points are called critical points. The S-curve doesn’t have any critical points (except at the ends, but let’s ignore them); L-, and T-curves have one critical point each; P- and D-curves have two critical points each; and an E-curve has three critical points.

    With the help of a loose analogy, you could say a well-written story is smooth à la an S-curve (excluding the terminal points): it it has an unambiguous beginning and an ending, and it flows smoothly in between the two. While I admire Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series for many reasons, its first instalment is like a T-curve, where three broad plot-lines abruptly end at a point in the climax that the reader has been given no reason to expect. The curves of the first three books of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series resemble the tangent function (from trigonometry: tan(x) = sin(x)/cosine(x)): they’re individually somewhat self-consistent but the reader is resigned to the hope that their beginnings and endings must be connected at infinity.

    You could even say Donald Trump’s presidency hasn’t been smooth at all because there have been so many critical points.

    Where world-building “literalises the urge to invent” to Harrison, it spatialises the narrative to me, and automatically spotlights the importance of the narrative smoothness it harbours. World-building can be just as susceptible to non-sequiturs and deus ex machinae as writing itself, all the way to the hubris Harrison noticed, of assuming it gives the reader anything to do, even enjoy themselves. Where he sees the “clomping foot of nerdism”, I see critical points in a curve some clumsy world-builder invented as they went along. World-building can be “dull” – or it can choose to reveal the hand-prints of a cave-dwelling people preserved for thousands of years, and the now-dry channels of once-heaving rivers that nurtured an ancient civilisation.

    My principal objection to Harrison’s view is directed at the false dichotomy of writing and world-building, and which he seems to want to impose instead of the more fundamental and more consequential need for creative discipline. Let me borrow here from philosophy of science 101, specifically of the particular importance of contending with contradictory experimental results. You’ve probably heard of the replication crisis: when researchers tried to reproduce the results of older psychology studies, their efforts came a cropper. Many – if not most – studies didn’t replicate, and scientists are currently grappling with the consequences of overturning decades’ worth of research and research practices.

    This is on the face of it an important reality check but to a philosopher with a deeper view of the history of science, the replication crisis also recalls the different ways in which the practitioners of science have responded to evidence their theories aren’t prepared to accommodate. The stories of Niels Bohr v. classical mechanics, Dan Shechtman v. Linus Pauling and the EPR paradox come first to mind. Heck, the philosophers Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend are known for their criticisms of each other’s ideas on different ways to rationalise the transition from one moment containing multiple answers to the moment where one emerges as the favourite.

    In much the same way, the disciplined writer should challenge themself instead of presuming the liberty to totter over the landscape of possibilities, zig-zagging between one critical point and the next until they topple over the edge. And if they can’t, they should – like the practitioners of good science – ask for help from others, pressing the conflict between competing results into the service of scouring the rust away to expose the metal.

    For example, since June this year, I’ve been participating on my friend Thomas Manuel’s initiative in his effort to compose an underwater ‘monsters’ manual’. It’s effectively a collaborative world-building exercise where we take turns to populate different parts of a large planet with sizeable oceans, seas, lakes and numerous rivers with creatures, habitats and ecosystems. We broadly follow the same laws of physics and harbour substantially overlapping views of magic, but we enjoy the things we invent because they’re forced through the grinding wheels of each other’s doubts and curiosities, and the implicit expectation of one creator to make adequate room for the creations of the other.

    I see it as the intersection of two functions: at first, their curves will criss-cross at a point, and the writers must then fashion a blending curve so a particle moving along one can switch to the other without any abruptness, without any of the tired melodrama often used to mask criticality. So the Kularu people are reminded by their oral traditions to fight for their rivers, so the archaeologists see through the invading Gezmin’s benevolence and into the heart of their imperialist ambitions.

  • Happy Lord of the Rings Day!

    The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out of reading the series feeling like nothing could surprise me anymore except some other Erikson fare. The man himself might not be appreciative of this outcome; the 10-book series was, and is, more like a drug to me than anything else.

    At the start of any book you implicitly enter into a covenant with the author that you’ll the read the book in return for being allowed to expect that it will entertain you. This is because books are not allowed to disappoint you – an expectation that’s actually true of every form of art that’s produced for public consumption. The experience of disappointment, even though it’s a common emotion, is not an aspiration. There’s no market nor the (mainstream) aesthetic for it.

    At some level, what Erikson ruined for me was the ability to expect to be surprised or entertained by whatever was coming. This is a remarkable thing for the consumption of fantasy to achieve because fantasy is an evacuation from our reality unto a different one more suited to making the author’s point while also not being too contrived (although that’s a hyper-reductive definition). And for millions of people around the world, including myself, the doorway to realising how good fantasy could be was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

    Lord of the Rings didn’t succeed by being too whimsical – a trait many simpleminded folk conflate with the fantasy genre – but in fact the opposite. It was tightly knit, gorgeously situated, described and narrated, in a world somewhat different from our own. Its success lay in its storytelling as much as in its seminal nature: Lord of the Rings, for many of us, was the first. It has had and will continue to have a certain quality of primacy associated with readers’ memories of it.

    It set many readers’ expectations in terms of what they could expect from the fantasy genre: not frolicking cartoons for children but goddamned epics. The Malazan series took this premise and bled it to death in a beautiful, beautiful way. If Lord of the Rings was the gateway drug for realising, and acknowledging, the potential of fantasy to be assessed in the same league as mainstream literature, the Malazan series is the Manitoba shlimbo.

    I’m sure you recognise this post has been a roundabout way of saying Malazan ruined me for other books, and you’re probably wondering, “What a hubristic schmuck.” What a hubristic schmuck indeed. One of the more amazing components of the reading experience that regular book-readers take for granted is the ability to clench your teeth and grind through the more boring parts of a book – a sort of restrained deferment to the idea that though the book may not be entertaining now, entertainment remains in the offing. That’s what I miss being able to do, and that’s the whole difference between plodding slowly through a book and giving up at p. 15 and throwing it away.

    Yes, we’re allowed to stop reading books that are boring, but we, especially I, get bored very easily – and I’m almost proud of it because it’s a skill I’ve honed to allow me to quickly spot, and correct, dull news reports. I also need to relearn what it means to make a small cluster of points over 250 pages or more. Reacquiring a habit like reading isn’t easy, particularly if you lost it for the reasons specified above. So to make it easier for me to get back on that wagon, I’m going to start with obviously popular books – often written by white men; first on the list is The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

    So far so good.

    Happy Lord of the Rings Day! Quoting verbatim from last year’s post on the same date:

    March 25 every year is Lord of the Rings Day – a.k.a. Tolkien Day and Lord of the Rings Reading Day – because, in the books, that’s the day on which the One Ring is taken into the fires of Orodruin (or Mount Doom or Amon Amarth) by Gollum/Smeagol from the finger of Frodo Baggins. It was the year 3019 of the Third Age and augured the end of the War of the Ring.

    Watch the films, read the books, talk about it, read about it, write about it. Do whatever it takes you to remember the potential of fantasy fiction to be a legitimate way to survive and cherish our realities.

    Featured image credit: aitoff/pixabay.

  • Happy Lord of the Rings Day

    Just been having a bad day today – and from the midst of it all, almost forgot to blog about Lord of the Rings Day. I do this every year on the blog (I think), recalling two things: how great Lord of the Rings was, and how even better something else is. Last year, and I’m making no effort to check, it had to have been one of Steven Erikson’s books, possibly from the Malazan series. I’ve got nothing else to add this year. The Malazan series is still the best in my books, and if you’re into epic fantasy fiction and haven’t read it yet: boo. I would also highly recommend the Warcraft lore.

    Customary recap: March 25 every year is Lord of the Rings Day – a.k.a. Tolkien Day and Lord of the Rings Reading Day – because, in the books, that’s the day on which the One Ring is taken into the fires of Orodruin (or Mount Doom or Amon Amarth) by Gollum/Smeagol from the finger of Frodo Baggins. It was the year 3019 of the Third Age and augured the end of the War of the Ring. On this day, let’s read a chapter or two from the trilogy and remember what an enlightening experience reading the books was.

    Featured image credit: kewl/pixabay

  • Some notes and updates

    Four years of the Higgs boson

    Missed this didn’t I. On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced that the Large Hadron Collider had found a Higgs-boson-like particle. Though the confirmation would only come in January 2013 (that it was the Higgs boson and not any other particle), July 4 is the celebrated date. I don’t exactly mark the occasion every year except to recap on whatever’s been happening in particle physics. And this year: everyone’s still looking for supersymmetry; there was widespread excitement about a possible new fundamental particle weighing about 750 GeV when data-taking began at the LHC in late May but strong rumours from within CERN have it that such a particle probably doesn’t exist (i.e. it’s vanishing in the new data-sets). Pity. The favoured way to anticipate what might come to be well before the final announcements are made in August is to keep an eye out for conference announcements in mid-July. If they’re made, it’s a strong giveaway that something’s been found.

    Live-tweeting and timezones

    I’ve a shitty internet connection at home in Delhi which means I couldn’t get to see the live-stream NASA put out of its control room or whatever as Juno executed its orbital insertion manoeuvre this morning. Fortunately, Twitter came to the rescue; NASA’s social media team had done such a great job of hyping up the insertion (deservingly so) that it seemed as if all the 480 accounts I followed were tweeting about it. I don’t believe I missed anything at all, except perhaps the sounds of applause. Twitter’s awesome that way, and I’ll say that even if it means I’m stating the obvious. One thing did strike me: all times (of the various events in the timeline) were published in UTC and EDT. This makes sense because converting from UTC to a local timezone is easy (IST = UTC + 5.30) while EDT corresponds to the US east cost. However, the thing about IST being UTC + 5.30 isn’t immediately apparent to everyone (at least not to me), and every so often I wish an account tweeting from India, such as a news agency’s, uses IST. I do it every time.

    New music

    I don’t know why I hadn’t found Yat-kha earlier considering I listen to Huun Huur Tu so much, and Yat-kha is almost always among the recommendations (all bands specialising in throat-singing). And while Huun Huur Tu likes to keep their music traditional and true to its original compositional style, Yat-kha takes it a step further, banding its sound up with rock, and this tastes much better to me. With a voice like Albert Kuvezin’s, keeping things traditional can be a little disappointing – you can hear why in the song above. It’s called Kaa-khem; the same song by Huun Huur Tu is called Mezhegei. Bass evokes megalomania in me, and it’s all the more sensual when its rendition is accomplished with human voice, rising and falling. Another example of what I’m talking about is called Yenisei punk. Finally, this is where I’d suggest you stop if you’re looking for throat-singing made to sound more belligerent: I stumbled upon War horse by Tengger Cavalry, classified as nomadic folk metal. It’s terrible.

    Fall of Light, a part 2

    In fantasy trilogies, the first part benefits from establishing the premise and the third, from the denouement. If the second part has to benefit from anything at all, then it is the story itself, not the intensity of the stakes within its narrative. At least, that’s my takeaway from Fall of Light, the second book of Steven Erikson’s Kharkanas trilogy. Its predecessor, Forge of Darkness, established the kingdom of Kurald Galain and the various forces that shape its peoples and policies. Because the trilogy has been described as being a prequel (note: not the prequel) to Erikson’s epic Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and because of what we know about Kurald Galain in the series, the last book of the trilogy has its work cut out for it. But in the meantime, Fall of Light was an unexpectedly monotonous affair – and that was awesome. As a friend of mine has been wont to describe the Malazan series: Erikson is a master of raising the stakes. He does that in all of his books (including the Korbal Broach short-stories) and he does it really well. However, Fall of Light rode with the stakes as they were laid down at the end of the first book, through a plot that maintained the tension at all times. It’s neither eager to shed its burden nor is it eager to take on new ones. If you’ve read the Malazan series, I’d say he’s written another Deadhouse Gates, but better.

    Oh, and this completes one of my bigger goals for 2016.