Black Gate

I was reading Martha Wells’ excellent The Cloud Roads the other day and I was struck, as I often am when reading something very well written, by how few explanations there were. One of the most difficult things writers of Fantasy or SF face in creating a new world, and alien beings, is to find a way to give their readers necessary information seamlessly, and Wells has done a great job here. There are plenty of things about the world of the Raksura I still don’t know and plenty that I had to figure out for myself. I know there are some readers who don’t want to do any work when they’re reading, but it’s a fact that you value and remember the information you had to work out for yourself a lot more than stuff that was just handed to you.

Yes, I’m talking about that old writing class cliché, “show, don’t tell.” And as important as that advice is when we’re creating sequences involving action and emotion, it’s doubly important when we’re handing out explanations.

Explanations have a bad rep, and justifiably. There’s the ever unpopular info-dump where all forward motion grinds to a halt and the author tells you everything you need to know – ever – about anything – or so it feels like. There’s the equally unpleasant and not-as-rare-as-you-might-hope “As you know Bob,” a dialogue oopsy, more cleverly disguised on TV than on the page. Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered why all those CSI guys tell each other what they’re doing all the time when they must already know. I know you have. But that’s the classic “As you know, Bob.”

There are situations (crime shows being one of them) where readers and audiences are becoming more knowledgeable about certain basics, to the point that explanations are no longer needed. But the unfortunate truth is that some of these back-handed ways of doing things still turn up from time to time, usually in the hands of amateurs in the field. The problem is that there are certain things the readers simply have to know and our jobs as writers is to find a way to tell them, without stopping the forward flow of the narrative and without having characters explain things to each other that they already know perfectly well.

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One of the most common questions I hear from readers and non-writers is Where do you get your ideas? A lot of writers I know have a glib answer like: my cat, my muse (often the same critter), my subconscious (but in other words, we don’t know), or my favorite: a P.O. Box in Spokane.

But sometimes, authors — and I think especially SFF authors — will say a book idea came from two or three separate things considered at once. When they’re brought together, sparks fly and an idea flames up. This happened to me with my latest novel.

It began with serendipity: the discovery of two endlessly fascinating nonfiction books I found on my husband’s book shelf. One was about the British Natural History Museum and the other was a history of the British Raj in India.

I started one, which was a little slow, and while I tried to decide whether to plod on, I began the other book. Then the first book picked up speed and sank its hooks.

I jumped from one to the other so I could keep reading them both. In one, I was reading about the part of natural history museums you don’t realize are there (the research offices and store rooms). There were these eccentric scientists with nicknames like “trilobite man” and “beetle man.” If women had been more welcome in those rarified offices, I might have read about bird woman, or more likely, gopher girl.

In the other book, I found out how the British established an empire in that unlikely place, India, and the stunning arrogance of the Raj. Although colonialism’s stain spread widely on the continent, I was surprised to learn that even as late as the early 20th century, there were people in villages in India who had never heard of the Raj or Queen Victoria. India is a big place.

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The idea of genre in literature is relatively recent, if you take as your time span the history of the written word. Why, I remember a time when there were only two genres, Poetry and Prose. Or, as we call them nowadays, Fiction and Non-fiction. Things have gotten more complicated since Sir Philip Sydney wrote “A Defense of Poetry,” however, as I’m sure a glance over any of our own bookshelves would tell us.

Last week, in discussing my serial-killer fantasy, Path of the Sun, I started talking about cross-genre writing. I was writing a high fantasy crime novel, but most examples of the crime/fantasy cross are urban fantasies, set in an alternate reality.

The first of these to cross my path was Robert Heinlein’s “Magic Inc” (1940). Technically, it’s an amateur sleuth mystery – the main character isn’t a professional detective of any kind – Archie Fraser lives in a world where magic is a routine service you rent or purchase, like the expertise of a plumber or a musician. When he’s threatened by the equivalent of the mob, asking him to pay “insurance” for his business and threatening him with magical reprisals, he finds an unusual ally in the shape of a very powerful, and very old, witch.

In 1987/88, Glen Cook published the three novels that make up the Garrett Files: Sweet Silver Blues, Bitter Gold Hearts, and Cold Copper Tears. (Fans of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books will recognize MacDonald’s method of keeping his books straight by using a different colour in each title.)

Cook’s Garrett is a human private investigator with supernatural allies, but he sets the stage for the more recent Dresden Files, now in, I think, its fourteenth or fifteen volume. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden is himself a magician, part Sam Spade and part Merlin, living in an alternate version of Chicago.

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