Book review and writing tip - Mask of the Sorcerer: Too much wonder · 1:04am Jan 1st, 2013
I'm going to do something terrible. I'm going to "review" a book by a brilliant writer without finishing it, because I don't think I'll ever finish it. But my purpose isn't to review the book; it's to make a point about writing.
Darrell Schweitzer may be the smartest, most-creative person who's ever written fantasy. I see him as a tragic figure. I've watched him for many years, as he shows up at every science fiction convention on the east coast, aggressively selling books in the dealers' room and in the hallways. I'm his stalker. I'll spend an hour listening to him on one panel (where he will speak more than his "fair" share, which is fair, as he has more interesting things to say than anyone else). Then I'll follow him to another panel and listen to him for another hour, then follow him to the con suite and sit a little distance away in a chair and just listen as he goes on for another hour, pouring out facts and ideas about the Byzantine Empire, Aboriginal petroglyphs, or another funny but tragic story about Philip K. Dick, connecting them all together with reasoning as crazy and yet obvious in retrospect as a Tim Powers novel.
I may be the only person in the world who finds him so fascinating. The other people he talks with more often seem irritated at not being able to inject their ideas into the conversation in the face of Darrell running at full steam. I'm often the guy crowding other people out of the conversation, but Darrell is one of the few people who is so interesting that I'd almost always rather hear what he's going to say next than to speak my own thoughts.
He works so hard, and he loves fantasy and science fiction. He did many of the best interviews of all the grand masters of the past fifty years, and has collected them in a series of little books called "SF Voices" or "Speaking of the Fantastic", which you can buy from him in the dealers' room of any major science fiction convention between Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and Boston. I've been rooting for him for years, waiting for his breakthrough novel, for him to get the recognition he deserves, but just watching him get older and greyer.
Funny thing, though, is that I never read any of his novels. His short stories, his interviews, his essays, yes. Not his novels. I have a huge reading list, and I never read books unless they're strongly recommended by many people. No one ever recommended his books to me. He hasn't written many; if you search for his novels on Amazon you won't find them, because he's edited so many books--mostly collections of Lovecraft, horror, mystery, and pulp adventure that are not nearly as good as Darrell's own writing.
But when I realized, after posting some unsuccessful ponyfics, that I was an unpopular author because I tried to put too much abstract reasoning into my stories, I wondered if there might be a clue as to what I was doing wrong in Darryl's work. So I bought Mask of the Sorcerer, which he recommended as his best.
It's a little unfair to treat this as a novel, because the first 4 chapters were originally a short story. Those first 4 chapters are a complete story, meaning you have little motivation to continue on to chapter 5. But there's more to it than that.
The hero is the son of a magician. They live out over the water on the end of a great pier of an exotic city, which worships and fears the river gods, who are very real. The magician becomes a sorcerer, summoning the dead to mysterious rites in their house at night. He sends his son out into the river among the crocodiles and spirits at night to receive a great vision. The son receives the vision; he returns to find his mother has disappeared and his father will not say how. The sorcerer calls up a great storm which wrecks the city; he dies; the townsfolk burn the house; the boy seeks out the Sybil; the Sybil pronounces his fate; the boy returns home to see his sister stolen away by his father's spirit and to receive a threat from a zombie. The boy journeys down the river of the dead in search of his sister.
That's, like, the first two chapters.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. This book contains too much wonder. Almost every page introduces something new and wondrous and amazing, which recasts the underlying reality of the story world and your understanding of what is possible and what is good. Never at any point in the first four chapters did I have the slightest clue as to what might happen next. Darrell let loose and blasted me with a firehose of fantastic beings and events, and it was too much. Everyone the main character cared about was soon dead or worse, but it wasn't clear how much that even mattered in this world, or whether getting them back was possible or would be a good thing. I had no ground to stand on, no context to use to decide what I hoped would happen.
Ergo, I didn't care what happened next.
The book has wonderful things in it. The theme is something about destiny. The main character doesn't want to become a sorcerer, but can't escape his destiny, which seems to be to become horrible, inhuman, and god-like. But the only piece of firm ground to stand on was the main character's desire to throw off his destiny as as sorcerer and return to his teacher, to learn to copy and illuminate manuscripts. That dream is ripped to shreds in chapter 5. So you're left with a protagonist whose main goal is not do everything that he has to do, and with befuddlement over what you should be hoping for. And, perhaps most importantly, the suspicion that none of this is relevant to you, because the world and the main character's destiny are nothing like your own.
Fantasy can't exist without the mundane. All wonder and no normality is like all Pinkie Pie and no Applejack. Er. Or something.
ADDED:
It seems I've given several people the impression that I'm talking a problem with pacing or the rate of escalation of the hero's problems. I'm not talking about that. I'm saying that the hero's problems, and the solutions to them, are mostly bizarre, spirit-world problems that I couldn't have anticipated a page ahead because I didn't know they existed or were possible in that world. The hero is surrounded by crocodile spirits, threatened by zombies, stranded in the middle of a spirit lake, forced to choose between three doors signifying three equally-unknown fates, searching for his father whom he killed, suddenly possessed by two different sorcerers, and so on. He isn't faced with many issues that I understand and can start worrying on.
Darrell does try to set up a few mundane problems: The hero loses his father (who turns evil), his mother (who is sacrificed by his father), and his sister (also stolen by his father for ritual magic). The book is driven, initially, by three goals of the hero: To save his sister from his dead father; to decide whether he loves his father or work out some other father issue (I'm a little fuzzy about that), and to free himself from his destiny as a sorcerer. The first two are mundane enough that we can understand them. Unfortunately, we see too little of his mother and sister to take his love for them seriously, and it's not clear why he should work things out with his father instead of blasting his undead body with a flamethrower.
What about Alice in Wonderland?
Alice in Wonderland is all wonder and no boundaries or sense. It exemplifies the kind of writing I'm complaining about. Yet a lot of people think it's pretty good.
I'm ambivalent about Alice in Wonderland, personally. When I read it as a kid, I felt cheated, because there was no story; everything fell apart at the end with no resolution. But it was fun to read. I don't know why Alice works. Thoughts?
This is not a paid advertisement. This is Clarion! Darrell Schweitzer and Bad Horse both went to Clarion. Maybe you should, too!
So something like this
craftingfiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/story-arc-1.png
I understand the Pinkie Pie point.
I mean I like Pinkie, I really do. Hell I'd watch the show if it was just MLP:Pinkie Pie, but without normal characters (to a given value of normal) to be her foil, she would lose what makes her so entertaining.
Hence why it's so satisfying to see the infrastructure of a mysterious group introduced in the first few chapters of a story.
This is one of the most important blog posts about writing and I'm glad someone finally said it. I've been saying this for a while irl but was never able to really express the idea well because the only concrete example I knew was the harry potter movies. Once they're not attending hogwarts and camping in a tent not talking about the things that are bothering them, I really don't care about what's going to happen because the only answer's going to be: "Whatever the author feels like". It's good that you realize that the of themes and the facets of worldbuilding must build with one another and that it's not something you will compromise on.
Jack Chalker books could do that to me. You feel like you're drowning at times, like he was reaching the end of a series and had X number of plot points he still needed to cram in.
667172 That's part of it, but it's also the content that makes up that graph. Even if the plot is introduced gradually, it's still a problem if it's all strange and new and you don't know what to expect.
Why are you all reading my blog on New Year's Eve? I have an excuse; my party was cancelled at the last minute. I want to see some suitably drunk comments!
667379
Your blog is a convenient distraction.
I'm all alone, slaving over a hot stove.
Great post!
When you say, "Fantasy can't exist without the mundane," you're pointing out one aspect of an absolute necessity in artwork: Contrast. You can't have engaging action without respite, the best horror contains humor, and the best world-building is dull without a story woven into or out of it.
My wife tells me that each plot point must have a plot leg that is equal in length to the importance of the event. In other words, a heavy meal requires longer to digest. From your review, it sounds like Mr. Schweitzer is an excellent chef who doesn't know how to pace his courses.
667574 The pacing was okay. The problem was not knowing the boundaries of the world--what was possible, what was the worst that could happen, what was the best that could happen. I think that was deliberate, to show the confusion of the child thrown into the world of sorcery against his will and without a guide. It just didn't work for me.
Now where on Earth am I supposed to find his books? Because, clearly, now I have to. I've checked the Kindle store and the book you mentioned isn't there. Gods! I'm in goddamn Eastern Europe. When I needed "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" for a course I was taking it took six bloody months to get here. And it cost an arm and a leg when it did.
It sounds fascinating, if impenetrable. I'd love to be able to read it if only so I could hazard a guess at what the problem is with his writing. From your description he seems like quite the interesting fellow, and, hell, anyone capable of spellbinding you sounds like somebody I'd quite like to meet, albeit through his words.
It sounds like a story that needed to be edited for length. Normally, stories are edited for brevity. Somehow, most authors seem to produce stories that are too long for what they're presenting. I've seen a rare few people who tend to produce stories that are far too short. I think they're the ones who end up suffering viewpoint toxicity. They're clever and have great ideas, but don't see why those ideas have to be contrasted against mundane scenes. They don't even see why their ideas need to be shown in story. They want to imply something vast, and to accomplish that end, they end up writing something small.
Brevity in writing is the art of saying much with little. Blathering is the art of saying little with much. More authors blather than brieve. This results in brevity getting an unfair amount of good press.
It just sounds like the book needed to be better integrated. Things in the first few chapters needed to be deliberately antiresolved by the author to open up plot points stretching back to the times when life was normal. Things in the later chapters need to be drawn down and detensioned so that it's not such a portrait of insanity. Mundanity amidst wonder and callbacks to the normal world would do much to improve that story. This is a character who needs to eat, sleep, and if all else fails, be reminded of his bladder.
You describe this author as having grand ideas and no end of them. Perhaps that is the problem with his story. He doesn't understand what will and won't be understood by the reader any more than he understands what will and won't be understood by people he talks to in person.
Why does Alice work?
Because of Alice. Alice is the mundane, to the point of being bland and boring. But Alice is your entry into Wonderland, and she asks the questions you're asking, or is at least normal enough that you can care about what happens to her. Without Alice, wonderland wouldn't work, for all the reasons you described in your review of that book.
668818
Agreed. Alice is willing to go along with things most of the time, asking questions along the way, but will stop everything to call bullshit when it gets too nuts.
Alice in Wonderland works because all the weirdo stuff is in the foreground, not the background. The plot is 'Alice looks at all this wacky stuff that happens'; it doesn't take the wacky stuff as background and try to build a narrative on top of that.
I'm sorry, this is ludicrously tangential, but I have to ask: when you say (paraphrasing here) that you've written ponyfics that were unpopular due to having high levels of abstract reasoning, which fics exactly are you referring to?
I ask because, speaking personally, I found at least some of your weirder abstract fics to be quite good. Upsetting, but really really good.
668818 668924 Those both sound right, and helpful. I started writing an "Alice"-inspired story called "The Friendship Store", but stopped when Chessie said my protagonist was very bland. I wanted the world of strangeness, but I wanted my protagonist to be active in changing it, not just a foil, so the approach I was taking probably wouldn't have worked.
669127 The early versions of "Mortality Report," and two very talky stories, "Moving On" (Celestia has taken on a new student and has no time for Twilight) and "The Real Reason" (the real reason Celestia exiled Luna to the moon was that Luna was forcing Celestia, against her nature, into being a dominatrix; the real corruption was not of Nightmare Moon, but what this did to Celestia; the story ends implying that Celestia is about to enslave Equestria and has special plans for Twilight). "The Real Reason" had 3000 words of Celestia explaining to Twilight that every pony is by nature suited to either Christianity (Equestrian-style), Buddhism, or Nietzsche's ideas, with references to Heidegger, control theory, and evolutionary psychology. At that point I realized it wasn't a story, it was an essay.
669547
Well, if you think about it, Alice herself actually is pretty bland, isn't she? I suspect another reason why AiW and TtLG work is because tastes in stories were different back then, and by the time they changed, the books had become Classic Literature.
669547
In that case, your story doesn't need Alice, it needs Gulliver.
Hey, thank you for writing this. I think you are absolutely right about needing the mundane as part of a fantasy story. One of the most brilliant decisions that J.K. Rowling made in her Harry Potter novels was to leave Harry witht the Dursley's every Summer. That way every single book could start in the mundane world and springboard into the fantastic one. It's why, even in purely fantastic worlds like Middle Earth and the world of Star Wars, the heroes come from kind of boring places.
I only read the Alice books as an adult, and I loved them. (I'm a fan of puns and language humor.) They actually do have brief scene of the mundane to ground the story, but I hate the It Was All A Dream plot twist...
Last semester I had to read Haroun and the Sea of Stories for an English class. Great book, but it was all a bit too fantastical for me. There was just so much crazy stuff being thrown at me as a reader that I disconnected from the story.
I have a theory that this is why people love Human in Equestria stories. Even though the characters in the show are so human that it seems unneccessary to write stories where humans come to Equestria, these stories keep getting read/written. I suppose that for many people, it's not enough to have this amazing magical world, they need our own "real" world to ground the story and make all the magical stuff a little more real to them.
Anyway, thanks again. I really appreciate your analysis. Now I have to check out Darrell Schweitzer, who I had never heard of before.