Black Gate

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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So, I decided to write a serial-killer book. All my friends were.

Perhaps I should explain. A lot of my friends are crime and mystery writers, and with them, after a few glasses of wine, the talk always seems to turn to serial-killer books. Who’s writing one. Who wants to. Who’s never gonna, no matter what. How publishers always push for one. It’s like serial killers are the new black.

Inevitably someone turns to me and says “Well, you don’t have to worry, Violette. It’s not like you could write a serial-killer fantasy novel.” Well, as you can imagine, I regarded those as fighting words – and now you know the origin of my novel, Path of the Sun.

Of course, that friend was echoing the John W. Campbell opinion on science-fiction mysteries that I mentioned a few weeks ago. According to Campbell, it couldn’t be done. Here in the community, experience has shown us that Campbell was wrong. But the attitude among non-fantasy or SF readers is still pretty much the same as his.

The trick, as most of you know, is to solve the crime – sometimes after figuring out how to commit the crime – within the parameters of our created worlds. Sometimes, we can even create crimes our pure-mystery-loving friends have never even thought of. Any common thief can steal money, the Fantasy or SF thief can steal your soul. Or a few hours of time out of your life. Or, perhaps, the best time of your life.

But let me get back to my serial killer.

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Last week I started talking about how we put the sorcery into sword and sorcery novels. People who don’t read fantasy are often mistaken about how its supernatural tropes actually work. In part, they feel that you can’t have any real tension or conflict because there’s magic and magic solves everything. You know, you just wave the magic wand and the problem goes away.* To which I say, “Tell that to the wicked Witch of the West.” Or Harry Potter. Or Gandalf.

I know that this kind of thinking is a lot less prevalent since the success of the LOTR movies, to say nothing of Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones; but it hasn’t gone away completely. And let’s not forget, strange as it may appear to us, there are still more people who haven’t seen these movies (or read the books) than there are people who have.

Before I start talking about plot devices, I would like to address something. Fantasy and SF are frequently described as “plot-driven” as opposed to “character-driven” – where the former means “not-so-good” and latter means “much-much-better.” Sure, there are some badly written books for which that kind of distinction can be made, but in any well-written book, of any genre, character drives plot. Your characters are certain kinds of people. Because they are who and what they are, they make certain kinds of decisions when faced with problems. Those decisions determine what happens next.

Yes, every writer is occasionally faced with the situation where a character simply won’t do what the writer “needs” them to do next. A good writer sits back and figures out a way to deal with that situation – a poor writer “makes” the character act in the needed way.  Hmm. Maybe it’s the writer that’s plot-driven.

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A while ago, when I started writing these posts, I talked about how to put the sword in Sword and Sorcery, and while doing my latest posts on the Fantasy and SF hero, it struck me that, in a way, I was still really talking about the sword. Maybe it’s time to talk about the sorcery.

This is not to say that our heroes can’t be wielding some kind of magic at the same time they’re wielding swords – but that’s not the way things started out. Most of the early heroes of the genre that we’re familiar with, Conan, for example, and yes, even Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, weren’t magic users. In fact, many of these early heroes were fighting against those who were. Sorcerers were often seen as the enemy, or, at best, as very gingerly tolerated allies.

Along came some notable exceptions to this idea, particularly Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, and, someone I mentioned last week, Roger Zelazny’s Dilvish the Damned. But these two, we might argue, are representatives of the “New Wave” in Fantasy, which in part introduced the concept of the more complex, multidimensional, anti-hero. They also fall into a special category of sorcerer, in that they’re at least partially magical beings, not humans. Which brings us to the first major subdivision of sorcery or magic that any writer in our genre has to consider: Is the magic internal, or external? Does it come from within, or without?

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I’ve got a friend I’ve known since we were nine years old who often says that we weren’t really brought up by our parents (neither his nor mine), but by the books we read. I’m not sure if we were lucky or unlucky, but those books were full of, well, heroes. The first book I ever read, by the way, was Treasure Island – I think having seen the movie helped me with the hard parts.

Aside: my parents didn’t come from cultures in which picture books were the norm, so we weren’t allowed to read them, nor comic books. Some illustration could be tolerated, but books with pictures on every page were for illiterate people.

Then my brother recommended The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was the first fantasy book I ever read. Almost immediately after that I read Have Space Suit-Will Travel, my first SF book.

Not very long after these came Lord of the Rings – and every other Fantasy and SF book I could put my hands on. These were the books that raised me.

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Let me get one thing out of the way immediately: It’s my belief that the increase in the numbers of female protagonists in the last thirty years (yes, it’s been that long) is directly related to the increase in the numbers of female authors (yes, it’s that simple). Female readers have been here all along. You can trust me on that one.

Last week I was talking about dual heroes, when is a pair a true pairing, and when a hero/sidekick combo? I mentioned Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, for me the original hero pair, and some of their literary descendants. But I left it until this week to talk about a much more recent phenomenon, the female/male hero pair.

Now, just to be clear, I don’t mean a book with a male protagonist, and his female companion – until recently known as a “regular book.” Nor do I mean a book with a female protagonist and a male second lead – until recently known as a “romance novel.” What I mean is the same kind of dual hero I talked about before, where both main characters are equally important to the story, but where one happens to be a woman, and one happens to be a man.

Having established the usefulness of a pair of protagonists (each brings a unique perspective and different skills to the problem-solving; the presence of a “friend” establishes the emotional accessibility of both characters; the chance to reveal character through conversation [thanks to Alex Bledsoe for some of these ideas], and, especially, the usefulness of a country/city pair) does having a female/male pair do anything in particular for us?

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