The Select Society of Protectors

September 1, 2019September 3, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Sorry about the delay between posts—I’ve been under the weather lately.

I was recently reading a new “Sharing Knife” story by Lois McMaster Bujold, and it suddenly occurred to me that the relationship of Bujold’s Lakewalkers to Farmers is exactly that of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders to Holders.

But let me back up a bit.

The Sharing Knife

The world of Bujold’s Sharing Knife series is a difficult and dangerous one. Most people live in a basically agrarian culture, a sort of cross between the traditional medieval fantasy world and the Wild West. They fear the enigmatic “Lakewalkers,” men and women who wander about the countryside in “patrol” groups and are rumored to have magical powers. The Lakewalkers claim to be searching for what ordinary people call “blight bogles,” but some consider these to be a mere myth.

They’re not a myth, of course. In reality the Lakewalkers, who have the ability to use a kind of magic they call “groundwork” (an extremely interesting and well-developed idea in itself), are constantly on the watch to destroy “malices” as they arise. These malices are truly nasty beings that can mentally enthrall normal humans and mutate animals into humanoid minions. If the Lakewalkers weren’t killing them off (via the grim “sharing knife” methd of the title), the malices would overrun the whole world.

Many Lakewalkers tend to look down on the people they are defending, whom they refer to generally as “farmers.” Much of the interest of the story has to do with the prickly relationship between these two interdependent groups, explored through the romance between a farm girl, Fawn, and a Lakewalker patroller, Dag.

The Dragonriders of Pern

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern is a science fiction series that reads like fantasy. The planet Pern is protected by men and women riding flying dragons. The dragons breathe fire to destroy an alien organic “Thread” that falls from the sky and, if allowed to spread, would multiply to consume the planet. To qualify as a full-fledged dragonrider, one must have the potential for a certain kind of telepathy that allows rider and dragon to bond at the dragons’ birth.

One of the things that makes the Pern stories sound like fantasy is the quasi-medieval political structure. A “Lord Holder” resembles a feudal monarch ruling over a sizable population of farmer/serfs, crafters, and minor nobility. But here the dragonriders form a separate hierarchy. The riders’ internal pecking order is a combination of aristocracy and meritocracy: the rider of the senior gold (female) dragon is a kind of queen; the rider whose bronze dragon mates with the gold becomes leader of the entire group that constitutes a Weyr; and those who lack the telepathic talent are servitors (at the lowest level, “drudges”).

While the depiction of Pernese society mellowed a good bit over the course of the series—both holders and riders were pretty high-handed and violent at the beginning, less so later—one consistent theme is the uneasy relationship between the dragonriders and the common folk. Everyone knows (though they may forget in the generations between periodic Thread attacks) that the riders are essential to preserve the planet: “Worlds are lost or worlds are saved / From those dangers dragon-braved.” But the holders often resent the taxes imposed to support the Weyrs and the “searches” in which the dragonriders carry off likely young people to see if they can “impress” a dragon. Managing this tension consumes a good deal of the main characters’ time in the early books.

The Protectors and the Protected

Now I can make clear the analogy I noticed. In each case we have a relatively small society of people set apart from ordinary folks, in a good cause: they are dedicated to protecting the larger population. The select group of protectors are genuine heroes who possess special talents that fit them for the role. But the protectors are not stainless; they can abuse their powers. And the grateful population they defend aren’t always grateful; they may resent the special powers and privileges of the defenders, even aside from the possible abuse of those advantages.

It seems to be a fruitful trope for storytelling.

Rangers and Protectors

We can find a similar structure, though not so dominant, back in The Lord of the Rings. You’ll recall that Strider—Aragorn—is one of a mysterious group of wanderers who travel the countryside, the Dúnedain or Rangers. They are regarded with suspicion by the ordinary folks in Bree; Barliman Butterbur the innkeeper warns Frodo about the suspicious-looking stranger sitting in the corner. Yet all the time the Rangers are patrolling the borders of the peaceful lands of Bree and the Shire, fending off possible threats. Aragorn says at the Council of Elrond:

‘Strider’ I am to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. (Fellowship of the Ring, II.2, p. 261)

Aragorn’s fond, if slightly aggrieved, remark brings out a difference. Pern’s dragonriders are a public society of defenders; everyone knows of their special role. But Tolkien’s Dúnedain, like the Lakewalkers in Bujold’s more recent fantasy, play a less public role. They are set apart, but because their heroism is unrecognized, they are objects more of suspicion than of admiration.

Pak protector – illustration courtesy of Christopher Bretz (bretz@bretz.ca)

For a more science-fictional take, consider Larry Niven’s Protectors, which figure in the novel Protector (naturally) and in the Ringworld stories. Niven imagines that humanity is descended from a species called the Pak, which matures through three life stages: child, breeder, and protector. The transition from the not-very-bright breeder stage to the highly intelligent and formidable protector stage is triggered by eating a root the characters call “tree-of-life.” When a Pak colony arrived on Earth ages ago, however, the soil lacked a chemical necessary for the tree-of-life root to function. The “breeders” could not change into protectors; instead, they evolved on their own into modern-day humans. Niven’s intriguing conceit is what we see as symptoms of old age actually represent the incomplete transition to the gaunt, tough, hairless protector stage.

Niven depicts the protectors as genetically compelled to protect the members of their own family or clan—the ones who “smell right.” A functioning Pak colony wouldn’t be as much like a human society as on Pern or Middle-Earth or Bujold’s imaginary world: it would consist of carefree, barely-sentient breeders watched over by creatures ruthlessly dedicated to their preservation. Think of it as an extreme case of the separation of defenders from defended.

Counter-Examples

On the other hand, a number of stories depict defenders who are much more thoroughly integrated into their broader societies.

Young Wizards

In Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, youngsters with the potential for wizardry are called, not by receiving a letter from Hogwarts, but in more obscure ways—for example, running across a library book called So You Want To Be A Wizard. There are more wizards around than one might think, because on our planet they don’t advertise their powers: young wizards still go to school, grown-up wizards might be writers or sell advertising. (And not all of them are human; there are some very entertaining books about feline wizards.) But all of them are dedicated to the preservation and fostering of Life, by way of the Wizard’s Oath each must take. In this setup, there’s no resentment of the society of protectors because no one knows they exist; and abuse of wizardly powers is almost unheard-of, since violating the Oath tends to result in forgetting that wizardry even exists.

Kim Kinnison, Gray Lensman

By contrast, the elite corps of Lensmen in E.E. Smith’s famous series are publicly known and highly respected. They play the role of galactic policemen and secret agents, with particular attention to the mysterious pirates and drug-runners called “Boskone.” Like the Young Wizards, the Lensmen are (conveniently) incorruptible, being screened at the outset by the equally mysterious but benevolent Arisians. (This whole business of incorruptibility is something we need to examine more closely on another occasion.) But they don’t mind mixing in ordinary society—Gray Lensman includes a scene set at a formal ball—although their grave responsibilities often make them feel set apart in their lonely dedication.

Superheroes, as a class, may occupy the same position. They live as part of the general public, though their identities are usually secret. They tend to act as individuals rather than as a whole society, though they do come in small groups (and may occasionally take part in mega-battles that engage the whole range of heroes). But the modern superhero does show the ambivalence that often characterizes the select defender (Mr. Incredible’s remark that he sometimes wishes the world would just stay saved for a while). And some graphic novels take up the question of what it’s like for the ordinary person to live in a world full of superheroes—notably Kurt Busiek’s thoughtful Marvels (1994).

Narrative Tensions

The select society of protectors is a fine place for heroes. But it’s also dangerous. What if the protectors aren’t incorruptible, and turn bad? What if they become contemptuous of the people they protect, and come to think of themselves as better than the “rabble”? In many of the scenarios above, it takes special talents to qualify as one of the defenders. How likely is it that those who see themselves as specially qualified will end up thinking of themselves as superior? These questions form fertile ground for various plotlines.

The notion of the select (if not superior) set of defenders may even be seen as applying to a military organization, whose purpose is to protect the general public. “Citizen soldiers,” or draftees, may see themselves as primarily part of the overall society, temporarily detailed to do their civic duty; but a professional military, which can form its own tightly-knit society with its families and dependents, may be more easily tempted to think of itself as a group apart, with its own loyalties and camaraderie. In fiction, the entire genre of military SF borders the trope we’re examining here. In real life, the American military, at least, seems to have avoided that trap; we have not yet seen anything like a military coup.

Everyone Is a Tuvela

It’s interesting to contemplate the opposite trope: the citizen soldier model taken to its limit.

In James Schmitz’s 1968 novel The Demon Breed, a biochemist named Nile Etland on the human colony world Nandy-Cline discovers that independent researcher Ticos Cay has been captured by cruel and formidable aliens called the Parahuans. Ticos has played on the Parahuans’ own near-superstitious fears to convince them that Nile is a Tuvela, a member of a secret society of superhumans that are the real rulers of human civilization. All Nile has to do is convince the invaders that she is, in fact, a superior being it would be death to tangle with. And, with the help of Ticos, two mutant otters, and her own encyclopedic knowledge of the unique biology of Nandy-Cline, she does a marvelous job of pulling the wool over the Parahuans’ eyes and sending them fleeing back to their own worlds.

But there are no Tuvelas. Nile is a brilliantly resourceful and competent woman, but she’s not superhuman. Neither is Ticos, nor any of the other inhabitants who are involved at the end in dispersing the Parahuans. They’re simply ordinary humans. And there is no secret organization. Rather, Schmitz’s hypothesis is that a significant fraction of ordinary people (Ticos calls them “antipredators”) can take on that defensive role when extraordinary circumstances require them to do so. As one character remarks, the Parahuans would have run into “Tuvela” behavior no matter where they sought to attack.

The title The Demon Breed doesn’t refer to the Parahuans. It refers, from the unfortunate Parahuans’ point of view, to the uncannily resilient humans. Like the sturdy hobbits of the Shire, human beings are capable of rising to the occasion. At the end of the story, when the local Nandy-Cline military forces have mobilized to make sure the fleeing Parahuans don’t escape, Nile reflects: “The human demon was awake and snarling on Nandy-Cline” (ch. 9).

The select society of defenders is a potent storytelling trope; but so is the distributed resourcefulness of the ordinary person. And both may be useful to keep in mind as we act where we are needed.

The Animal Sidekick

April 14, 2019April 25, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

Introduction

The hero of a story is frequently attended by a loyal beast of some sort. Pirate captains have their parrots. Roy Rogers had his sturdy steed Trigger, and Zorro relies on his horse Tornado—a mount he went to some pains to acquire, for example, in The Mask of Zorro (1998). Ron Stoppable, sidekick to teenage hero Kim Possible, had his own companion in a naked mole-rat, Rufus. The Stark siblings in Game of Thrones (I finally got around to watching the first episode last week) each have a direwolf. For those who remember the 1950s TV series, we might also instance Timmy and Lassie (though in that case arguably Lassie was the lead and Timmy the accessory; she did get top billing).

In fantasy and science fiction, however, such accompanying creatures often get a significant upgrade. A F&SF character’s animal assistant may be enough of an independent character to be a genuine companion, rather than merely a pet—occasionally rising almost to the level of the more familiar human sidekick.

Quasi-Intelligent Companions

Science fiction and fantasy elements allow for semi-sentient or semi-intelligent versions of what would otherwise be considered pets. They’re not equal to their human masters—at least not as a rule (see below)—but they’re not just brute animals either.

Andre Norton’s SF novel The Defiant Agents (1962) provides a good example. When a group of Native American colonists is sent to found a habitation on a far-off planet, with them is a pair of enhanced coyotes. Norton gives the backstory this way:

. . . The coyote had not only adapted to the country of the white sands; he had evolved into something which could not be dismissed as an animal, clever and cunning, but limited to beast range. Six cubs had been brought back on the first expedition, coyote in body, their developing minds different. The grandchildren of those cubs were now in the ship’s cages, their mutated senses alert . . . Sent to Topaz as eyes and ears for less keenly endowed humans, they were not completely under the domination of man. (ch. 2, p. 19)

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern give us perhaps the classic case. The planet Pern is protected by men and women riding flying dragons. The dragons breathe fire to destroy an alien organic “Thread” that falls from the sky and, if allowed to spread, would multiply to consume the planet. Moreover, the dragons can teleport from place to place by “going between.” (Despite the fantasy tropes, the Pern stories are actually science fiction.) Dragons and their human riders bond for life at the dragons’ birth and communicate telepathically; the bond is so complete that if one partner dies, the other is likely to die as well.

A crucial fact is that McCaffrey’s dragons talk. Speech is a key sign of intelligence. We might imagine getting an answer back when we speak to a beloved horse or dog; we might wish for such a relationship—but in F&SF that wish can be realized.

Nonetheless, even though it’s the dragons who do most of the work against Thread, they are the subordinate members of the pairings. They are immature compared to their humans—halfway to the unspeaking beast, as it were. One of the main characters reflects that “[d]ragon instinct was limited to here-and-now, with no ability to control or anticipate. Mankind existed in partnership with them to supply wisdom and order . . .” (Dragonflight (1968), part II, p. 133)

Nonetheless, speech isn’t always necessary to show that a creature is more than an animal. In particular, if we’re dealing with alien creatures whose thought processes are different from ours, it may be hard to tell how their degree of intelligence compares.

In Alan E. Nourse’s Star Surgeon (1959), the main character is Dal Timgar, an alien Garvian who has just graduated from medical school on Earth. Like all Garvians, Dal has a symbiotic partner, a fuzzy ball of mutable protoplasm referred to simply as “Fuzzy,” normally found sitting on Dal’s shoulder. The Garvians and their Fuzzies (not to be confused with H. Beam Piper’s Fuzzies) have the same kind of interdependence as McCaffrey’s dragonriders: they can’t live without each other. While Dal’s Fuzzy certainly seems to be a person of sorts, he doesn’t talk. His telepathic bond with Dal does not express itself in words. But that bond is a central part of the story.

The Tropes

The animal sidekick gives rise to a number of classifications on TV Tropes. The broadest is perhaps Loyal Animal Companion, which spans the range from mere pets to non-human peers. In this last group, where the two are essentially equals—the Non-Human Sidekick—the “Film–Animation” subgroup includes a list of the animal helpers found in most of the Disney fairy-tale films, such as the talking mice in Cinderella (1950). (Note, though, that in the more realistic 2015 live-action version, the mice don’t talk and are more like pets.)

The symbiotic relationships described above are captured under the title Bond Creatures, with a separate page devoted to dragon-riders generally—including Daenerys Targaryen of Game of Thrones. Witches’ or wizards’ familiars, like Svartalf in Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, appear under The Familiar.

There’s also a page for Mons, of which the famous Pokémon are probably the most widely-known. A human master may have many Pokémon, but Pikachu, for instance, does seem to be a boon companion and not just a fighting pet—although in the animated series his speech (like Groot’s) is limited to variations on his own name. Note that the upcoming movie version is quite different: in this movie Pikachu talks and is a complete person—even, apparently, the lead.

The Sidekick’s Contribution

Animal sidekicks can aid their principals in many ways. Some you can ride, like McCaffrey’s dragons or Gandalf’s steed Shadowfax; there’s yet another Tropes page for the Sapient Steed (including the robotic horse Fess in Christopher Stasheff’s Warlock of Gramarye series). Some act primarily as scouts, as noted for the Norton coyotes above; so also the Falcon’s avian companion Redwing in Marvel comics (sadly reduced to a robotic drone in the movies). The enhanced or mutated otters in James Schmitz’s The Demon Breed (1968) do some scouting, and can also carry bombs and perform other basic actions; they talk back to main character Nile Etland, though in a simplified way. Norton’s The Beast Master (1959) features a whole team of animals who assist main character Hosteen Storm, a Native American like The Defiant Agent’s Travis Fox.

The animal companion may also be able to fight alongside you, in ways a human could not match. We’ve already looked at the dragons of Pern; we should also mention the treecats of David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, who have averted at least one assassination by being unexpectedly formidable in an emergency. Owen Grady’s team of raptors in Jurassic World is equally capable.

Ascension of the Sidekick

Frequently, animal sidekicks tend to be a little childlike and essentially innocent. They’re depicted as simpler than their human sponsors. The nonhuman creature may be quite bloodthirsty or deadly, but it’s in an innocent way. We don’t hold animals responsible for being savage; that’s just the way they are. The more animal sidekicks lack the full intelligence and moral agency of a person, the more they get the benefit of animal innocence.

But sometimes it turns out that the seeming animal is more than it appears. It may develop that the “sidekick” is really the equal of the human partner—in intelligence, in culture, in overall personhood. At that point, we pass from subordinate to peer, and the relationship may shift to something more like that of a buddy movie.

This is true of Weber’s treecats: as the series progressed, they were revealed to be about as intelligent as humans, though without advanced science. The Pernese dragons have also shifted gradually in that direction; in particular, Ruth, the eponymous character of The White Dragon (1978), is depicted as a “sport,” human-like in personality and mental capabilities.

Sticking with the dragonrider model, we see a similar progression in the How to Train Your Dragon movies. These dragons have always been pretty smart; but the third episode, released in the U.S. in February 2019, gives them a culture and even a governmental structure of their own.

Heinlein was fond of this twist. He used it in Red Planet (1949), where Willis the “Martian roundhead,” originally the main character’s pet, turns out to be an immature form of the regular civilized Martians and a particularly important individual. Similarly, in The Star Beast (1954), the main character’s monstrous “pet” Lummox turns out to be a very young royal child of the sophisticated and formidable Hroshii species.

James Schmitz’s first story about Telzey Amberdon, “Novice” (1962, appearing in The Universe Against Her and volume one of the Eric Flint Hub compilation), presents Telzey with a telepathic “pet” named Tick-Tock who is revealed to be one of the indigenous “crest cats”—predators so dangerous that, while humans have been hunting them, the crest cats view themselves as hunting the humans on an equal basis. (Since Telzey is a formidable character herself, even at age fifteen, the team-up really is a union of equals.)

Role in the Story

The animal sidekick’s unique abilities or powers, noted above, afford one explanation for its appearance in a story. Such a companion can allow characters to do things they couldn’t do on their own, whether it’s adding to their fighting strength, reading other characters’ minds, or teleporting to other places and times. The sidekick is a helper and an ally.

An animal companion provides such assistance in a different way than a human companion would. In creating a new separate species, a writer can establish limitations in intelligence or otherwise that place the sidekick firmly in a secondary role. We are rightly uncomfortable putting other humans in such a permanent sidekick position; it creates a fundamental tension with the fact of basic human equality. (It would take us too far afield here to go into the variations of human ancillary characters—the superhero’s assistant; the military servant or “batman,” as with Honor Harrington or James Christian Falkenberg or Jack Aubrey; Jeeves the “gentleman’s personal gentleman.”)

An animal ancillary character can provide companionship—empathy, psychological support—for the main character without invoking the kinds of interactions that are inevitable when other human beings are involved. Instead, the relationship between the principal and the sidekick can explore other kinds of interactions, more analogous to those of parent and child, or teacher and student, than those of peers.

In compiling this survey, I’ve noticed that a lot of the stories are older, often dating from the mid-twentieth century. It may be that this isn’t an accident. Contemporary thinking leans strongly toward an assumption of equality among all kinds of beings, reaching out to postulate humanlike rights for (e.g.) whales or chimpanzees. The whole notion of a permanently subordinate or secondary being may be particularly repugnant to many of today’s readers.

On the other hand, coming from the animal side rather than the human-surrogate side, there may be something to the simple wish to communicate on more of a mutual basis with the other creatures that share the world with us. Wouldn’t we all like to be able to talk to our horse, dog, cat?

In his essay On Fairy-Stories (1939), Tolkien points out that fantasy satisfies “the desire to converse with other living things. On this desire, as ancient as the Fall, is largely founded the talking of beasts and creatures in fairy-tales . . .” If we can’t talk with our actual dogs and cats, we can imagine similarly situated beings with whom we can. And if they include flying dragons and wily coyotes, so much the better.

A Place for Horror

October 28, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 3 Comments

The Question of Horror

I’ve never been fond of the horror genre. I just don’t see the point of being scared or (more often) disgusted or repelled by a story. As Randall Munroe of xkcd puts it: “I know everyone’s into what they’re into, but I have never understood horror movies.”

Approaching the genre as an outsider, then, my question is: why is there such a genre at all? Is it just the desire for a thrill? Or is the whole interest in horror merely morbid?

An interesting remark in a Diane Duane story recently gave me an inkling of what the function of horror stories might be. As we’re coming up to Hallowe’en, I thought the point might be worth examining this week.

Horror, and Genre Horror

To be sure, one sometimes bumps up against horror elements incidentally in the course of pursuing other types of stories. I did watch the movie Alien when it came out in 1979—but that was because it was science fiction, not because it was horror. It’s both—I recall coming out of the theatre literally shaking. But I don’t think I’ve watched it a second time.

In a similar way, there’s a good admixture of horror in Jurassic Park (I’m thinking mainly of the 1993 movie). Plenty of “jump scene” shock moments, and gore; and I have rewatched that one, but it’s for the other elements, most notably the sheer wonder of seeing the paleontologists encounter actual living dinosaurs. As the xkcd comic mouseover observes, I enjoy it because dinosaurs are cool. I’m willing to go through a good deal of bad stuff in a story if the good stuff makes it worthwhile.

Even a nice song can turn up unexpected horror elements. The title song from Carole King’s Tapestry album is a lovely meditative piece that begins “My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue . . .” Pleasant, yes? But the lyric gradually drifts into a dream, or maybe a nightmare: the end of the song gives us “. . . A figure, gray and ghostly, beneath a flowing beard / In times of deepest darkness, I’ve seen him dressed in black / Now my tapestry’s unraveling, he’s come to take me back . . .” That’s rather disturbing, though the song is so pretty that one hardly notices the rather dreadful image.

But what little I have seen of genre horror makes clear that it has its own conventions, its own tendencies and interests, that go beyond these occasional elements. I recognized this when I read Stephen King’s novel The Stand (1978). While the story is essentially a fantasy, it has a science-fictionish premise: an apocalyptic pandemic that wipes out most of humanity. So I approached it as an SF novel.

Some characters are escaping from New York City (if I recall correctly) through a tunnel jammed with stopped vehicles, which are occupied by the decomposing bodies of plague victims struck down at the wheel. Not a pleasant place for a trek. So they enter the tunnel, are appropriately horrified by this commuter charnel house. They continue on. And on. And on. And at some point I found myself wondering, why are we still in this tunnel? I get the point. Why aren’t we moving forward with the plot? And it dawned on me: that’s the SF reader’s reaction. But this is horror. The dreadful experience of going through the tunnel is the whole point for a horror reader.

Similarly, in Weird Tales-type stories like ”Shambleau” and others of C.L. Moore’s early work, it seems clear that the horror elements are the purpose of the story. And it’s a durable purpose. There’s still a thriving cottage industry of pastiches, games, and academic interest in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories, though Lovecraft has been dead since 1937. (At least, we think he’s dead . . .)

Science Fiction Monsters

On the other hand, compare this with an SF story that merely has horror elements. There’s a sizable subgenre of science fiction monster stories, even if we throw out the B-movies and Godzilla remakes. James H. Schmitz was particularly good at these. Take a look at his collection A Pride of Monsters: short stories like “The Winds of Time” (1962) and “Greenface” (1943) have structures very like traditional horror tales. And the excellent short novel The Demon Breed (1968) makes use of horror tropes in telling an intense adventure story.

But while “Greenface” may read as a horror story, Schmitz’s other monster tales don’t come across that way. There’s a difference in tone and mood. Even though there are fairly horrid suggestions in “The Winds of Time”—the (extremely intelligent) monster in that story “preferred . . . to have its snacks still wriggling-fresh as it started them down its gullet”—we don’t dwell on them. It reads to me more like an SF problem-story, where the characters must come up with inventive means to extricate themselves from a difficult situation.

Similar observations apply to, say, A.E. van Vogt’s assembly of monster-stories The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1938-1950)—or even van Vogt’s “Asylum” (1942), an early envisioning of science-fictional (as opposed to fantasy or religious) vampires. The tone and mood are different from those of a true horror tale; they’re appealing to a different audience.

The Appeal of Horror

Why do we include horror elements in a story?

The most obvious answer, from an F&SF perspective, is conflict. If we’re dealing with an epic or an adventure, we need to see that the evil our heroes are fighting against is, in fact, evil. And one easy way to do that is to show the bad guys doing horrible things. Maybe the threat is not merely death, but any of several Fates Worse Than Death. Not only bodily death, but the soul itself (the theology is a little murky here) is at stake. Not merely enslavement, but cannibalism. We accentuate the menace against which the main characters are striving by making it a “parade of horribles.”

More broadly, horror aids contrast. The good stands out better against a background of evil: we can more readily appreciate the good when it’s juxtaposed with the bad. When we return to the Shire, we appreciate it more than in the initial chapters, because we’ve seen far worse places. (Of course, Tolkien’s actual treatment of “The Scouring of the Shire” is more nuanced and complex than that simple contrast suggests—but the simple contrast still underlies the conclusion of the story.)

In this connection, Darrell Schweitzer notes that Tolkien has an unexpected knack for horror writing (The Fantastic Horizon, ch. 2). The central concept of the Ring itself is pretty darn creepy: an innocent-looking but almost-sentient magic item that gradually subverts the wearer’s will. The Black Riders pursuing the hobbits through a seemingly-idyllic Shire—the night attack on Weathertop—the attack of Shelob at Cirith Ungol—Tolkien knows how to invoke the awful as well as the awesome.

But while these uses explain some horror elements in other kinds of stories, they don’t fully account for the horror genre. If the horrible is not set up as opposition or contrast, but rather as the main preoccupation of the story, it must be there for some other reason.

Immunization

Diane Duane’s collection of three Young Wizards stories, Interim Errantry (2015) includes a 2011 Hallowe’en story, “Not In My Patch.” Early in the story, senior wizard Carl Romeo is talking to Nita, the main character, about the reason for elaborate Hallowe’en displays:

“But who doesn’t like being safely scared, occasionally? Pleasantly scared, by something that can’t really hurt you? . . . It starts getting you used to fear . . . so when you come up against something really scary, you can cope a little better.”

“Like being vaccinated,” Nita said. “The weakened bugs make you immune . . .”

This idea suggests a wholesome purpose even for stories that focus primarily on the horrible. The stories may not be quite as frivolous as the jack-o-lanterns and orange-and-black bunting that we see at this season. But we can still say to ourselves, “it’s just a story.” We expose ourselves to the scary or appalling in some degree without having to go through those experiences in real life. Because there are scary and appalling things in the world; and we don’t want to lead so sheltered a life that we’re wholly incapacitated or unmoored if we should meet them. As Nita says, it helps us develop an immunity.

We can go even further. If we learn to laugh at horror, we can to some degree deprive it of its self-importance, place ourselves beyond it. (In the passage excerpted above, Carl notes that the Lone Power “really, really hates not being taken seriously”—a sentiment echoed to good effect at the end of Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos.) Call it whistling in the dark—but this attitude may help prepare us, in some small way, for those times when we do encounter horror in real life. It may explain why our Hallowe’en decorations tend toward the ridiculous and cartoonish. “Here’s a witch no one could be afraid of.” (In this connection, I can’t resist citing to one of my favorite treatments of the Cthulhu Mythos.)

May you all have a happy Hallowe’en, then, and may all your fears be as abstract and hypothetical as the Great Pumpkin. “Forth now, and fear no darkness.”

The Boot Camp Planet

June 3, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Training Worlds

Science fiction postulates lots of types of planets—although, for the convenience of humanoid characters, most of the ones shown end up being pretty Earthlike. (It sometimes seemed that original-series Star Trek planets could be divided into “piles of rocks” and “places exactly like Earth.” Much easier on the special-effects budget.) Here I’d like to look at one particular variety—the worlds that serve as training locales for tough guys.

If you want to develop an inhumanly formidable army, you can do it by administering a “super soldier serum,” as in the Marvel comics. You can do it by postulating a lifetime of intense training, as with Batman. Or you can do it by throwing your candidates into an environment so fierce that those who survive have to become impossibly “badass” just to live through it.

Dune

What TV Tropes calls the “Death World” plays a key role in the plot of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). One of the things that allows the galactic Emperor in Dune to stay on top in the civilization’s complex politics is his legion of crack troops. The “Sardaukar” are so formidable that even the highly-trained private armies of the feudal Houses are reluctant to face them.

It turns out that the Sardaukar are recruited from the Emperor’s prison planet, Salusa Secundus—a planet so hostile that only the strongest can live. “A man who survives Salusa Secundus starts out being tougher than most others. When you add the very best of military training—” (Thufir Hawat, p. 370).

But Arrakis, the planet called Dune, is harsher still. The “Fremen,” the Dune population, appear to be simple barbarian nomads. But the exigencies of survival in the Dune environment are so demanding that, as one character realizes, the Fremen are actually “an entire culture trained to military order” (283)—an invaluable resource for the main character, Paul Atreides, who needs such a cadre to recapture the holdings and status that the Emperor and Paul’s Harkonnen enemies have illegally taken away. The Fremen are so tough that even their civilians, “women and children and old men,” can beat full-fledged Sardaukar (454).

It’s suggested at one point that the Fremen come from the same stock as the original inhabitants of Salusa Secundus—transported there at a time when they had “grown soft with an easy planet” elsewhere (352). That stock may have been hardy to begin with, but it’s clear that the harsh environment is what made the difference. Part of Paul’s eventual plan to take over the Imperium himself is to neutralize the Emperor’s forces by making Salusa Secundus “a garden world, full of gentle things” (481)—a much pleasanter place for the former Emperor to retire in peace, but no longer a source of formidable warriors.

Arrakis, like Salusa Secundus, tests its people rigorously, winnowing out the weak, toughening up the strong.

Prison Planets and More

We wouldn’t choose to live in so taxing an environment—which is why the population is generally conceived as being there not entirely by their own choice.

Jerry Pournelle’s “CoDominium” future history postulates a future in which a number of worlds are settled by political prisoners and other riffraff who are sent there by the combined U.S.-Russian world government. Some of the toughest fighters come from Tanith, a demanding jungle planet that is, as Wikipedia puts it, an “infamous dumping ground for transportees.”

As a kid, I was fascinated by a Tom Godwin SF novel called The Survivors (1958; also known by the cheesier title Space Prison; reprinted in the 2003 collection The Cold Equations & Other Stories). A Terran colony ship is waylaid by the Nazi-like Gerns; the useful emigrants are taken as slaves, while the remainder (“Rejects”) are marooned on what the Gerns mockingly describe as an “Earth-type” planet—Ragnarok, with extreme climates, 1.5 times Earth’s gravity, and fantastically dangerous wildlife. Driven by the goal of avenging themselves and their people, the abandoned colony of “rejects” survives across the generations despite its hardships. When they finally encounter their nemeses again, the colonists’ descendants have become so formidable that they succeed in overrunning and capturing a Gern battleship.

In a smaller way, the colony planet of Grayson in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series reflects a similar situation. Grayson started out as a group of settlers seeking a far-off home for religious reasons. But their ideal planet turned out to have so high a concentration of heavy metals in the environment that indigenous life was poisonous and it was impossible even to live in the open air. The realities of interstellar travel in that period made it impractical for the settlers to simply abandon the colony; in effect they were stranded by their own incautious choice. While the Grayson people start out in the second Honor book as a cliché of religious intolerance, Weber’s perspective gradually shifts until they are regarded as tough, honest allies.

James H. Schmitz’s Federation of the Hub future history hints at the notion of an entire approach to human civilization based on a similar principle—especially in the 1968 novel The Demon Breed. But that’s a more involved topic for another day.

Herbert’s and Pournelle’s notion of “transportation” to inhospitable climes as a punishment, archaic as it may seem, harks back to actual British practices in the 17th through 19th centuries. The British colony of Australia, the destination of many a transportee, still retains (at least in American mythology) the air of a land where hardship breeds self-reliance & sturdy independence (“Where women glow and men plunder”), as both expressed and satirized in Crocodile Dundee. TV Tropes’ Death World page actually has a separate section for “Real Life: Australia.”

Real-Life Analogues

In the real world, we intentionally create harsh environments to toughen up specific groups.

Military “boot camp” is the most obvious example. I’ve never gone through armed forces training myself, so I can’t speak from personal experience. But it seems clear that basic training is made intentionally demanding so that the recruit becomes accustomed to hardship and hostility, able to function despite adverse conditions. We may not have a separate planet to host those conditions, but we can create a closed, artificial environment for the purpose.

Law school provides a much less intense case. The first-year “acclimatization” to law school involves legendary stresses and challenges. Of course first-year law students are far better off than military recruits, and even the famous pressures of old-time curricula (as described in the 1971 novel and 1973 film The Paper Chase, or Scott Turow’s 1977 One L) had probably diminished by the mid-1980s, when I attended. But classroom interrogation by the “Socratic method” certainly seems to be designed, in some respects, to intimidate and unsettle the student.

There’s a reason for this. Most lawyers will find themselves in practices where they face strenuous and unfriendly opposition, whether in court or at the negotiating table. If you’re not used to that kind of situation, you’ll have a hard time holding your own. A lawyer has to learn to perform in the give and take of argument, without losing his cool. The classroom experience is simply the first step in learning how to do this: beginning to build up the calluses, so to speak, so we don’t crumple at the first sign of opposition.

I have a notion (again, without personal experience) that a doctor’s residency period may serve a somewhat similar purpose. Doctors in this stage of practice work traditionally long and stressful hours. It’s possible that this experience is itself a form of training for the emergency situations in which a physician may find herself, taking life-or-death steps under pressure.

Conclusion

In a much broader theological context, it’s sometimes been suggested—in what might be called a “forge of souls” theodicy—that evil in the world has the function of building character in a way that could not be otherwise achieved. In some sense, the universe as a whole may be a training camp of sorts.

While the “boot camp world” idea isn’t likely to deal with the problem of evil all by itself, it does provide science fiction writers with a way to push human beings to their maximum potential—creating the larger-than-life characters and institutions that make our fantastic stories so striking, even more than gee-whiz technology and exotic settings.

A Character By Any Other Name

April 10, 2018April 11, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

Last time we talked about the complications of naming babies. Of course, parents have only a few children. But writers have to name a lot of characters. Coming up with the right names is tricky; some writers are better at it than others. Let’s look at how they meet the challenge.

The Familiar

If you’re writing a contemporary story, you’re in much the same position as a proud parent—except that you know how the person turns out, and you can pick a name that carries the implications you want for the character. Dickens can name one pleasant pair the Cheeryble Brothers and a less prepossessing soul Scrooge to underline their personalities, in case the reader needs to be hit over the head with a sledgehammer to get the point. Not all authors have to be quite so explicit about it.

As we noted, there are plenty of books and pamphlets to suggest character names, as well as sites like Behind the Names, BabyNameWizard, or Nameberry. The pamphlets have become a bit more international over the years: today’s versions contain names from more countries and languages than they used to. This can help us avoid what you might call “WASP Name Syndrome,” in which all the names tend to be blandly Anglo-Saxon.

Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel

Consider, for example, early super-heroes, who tended to have white-bread names like Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Bruce Wayne, Barry Allen—not to mention the compulsively alliterative Marvel characters like Reed Richards, Peter Parker, Sue Storm, Bruce Banner… We see at least a little more cultural variety these days, even if it’s still hard to shake the alliteration, as with the current Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan.

We’re still in pretty familiar territory when we visit the realm of the historic, or faux-historic—legendary figures living in real or imagined ancient times. In the Arthurian tales we get ordinary-sounding names like, well, Arthur, as well as less common names (at least at this point in history) like Lancelot, Galahad, Tristan and Isolde, which may at least be familiar through repetition. An author who wants to be (perhaps) historically more accurate as well as exotic can go for Celtic-style spellings: Bedwyr instead of Bedivere, for example. I’ve seen such imaginative renditions of “Guinevere” that you can get halfway through the book before you realize who the author is talking about. (“Gwenhwyfar,” anyone?)

The Semi-Fantastic

We can do the same thing in F&SF—name our hero Luke, our wizard Ben, pedestrian names like that. We may want the effect of the plain, traditional name for a particular character—for example, to suggest homeliness or familiarity. (“His real name is Obi-Wan, but I know him as Ben.”) This is fine if the story is set, say, twenty years from now, when you’d expect names to be relatively unchanged. But it’s harder to justify—to make believable—if we’re thousands of years in the future, or in a completely separate alternate world, as with much heroic fantasy.

Note this can also be true in SF: Star Wars looks futuristic, but we’re clearly asked to dissociate ourselves from any specific connection to the present when we’re told, “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…” The curious reader is likely to wonder, how did these people happen to come up with exactly the same names we use, even without any common (recent) history or heritage?

In Zenna Henderson’s stories of The People, refugees from another planet come to Earth and struggle to fit in. The stories are excellent, but the names sometimes give me pause. In a story set on the home planet, before they’ve had any contact with Earth, the characters have names such as David, Eve, and Timmy—as well as the less familiar Lytha and ‘Chell (Michelle?). Why so similar to common Terrestrial names?

Or take the hobbits. Alongside Sam, Bob, and Rosie we have characters like Frodo, Bilbo, Meriadoc and Pippin. Tolkien, the master linguist, can explain this—exhaustively (see Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings). From a narrative point of view, the name-mixture gives us a sense of earthy rustic culture, but also of something a little different from Merrie Olde England. Tolkien succeeds by being both quaint and quirky.

I’m less sympathetic to George R.R. Martin, who seems determined to give his characters in A Song of Ice and Fire names that are mostly familiar, but misspelled. If we’re going to have people named Eddard, Catelyn, and Rickard, why not just call them Edward, Cathleen, and Richard—or are we expected to believe that languages in Westeros evolved in almost exact parallel to ours, but not quite? (I have the same problem with the pseudo-Latin spells in Harry Potter—if you’re going to use Latin, just do it, don’t fake it—though I recently read an article by someone who’s examined Rowling’s quasi-Latin more closely than I and is more forgiving.)

Inventing Fantasy Names

If we’re going for traditional semi-medieval high fantasy, we may want names that are somewhat familiar, but have an antique ring to them. How do I come up with a fitting title for the mighty barbarian I just rolled up for Dungeons and Dragons? There are a number of tried-and-true approaches. As it turns out, TV Tropes has a gallery of naming tropes that cover much of the territory (there’s a list-of-lists at Naming Conventions).

A descriptive name picks out some distinguishing feature: Erik the Red, Catherine the Great. Or Charles the Bald, or Pepin the Short, if I’m aiming for humorous or mundane rather than grand and dramatic. If we don’t like “the,” we can fix on a name like Blackbeard. Or Bluebeard. (TV Tropes summarizes the pattern as Captain Colorbeard.)

Naming someone by place of origin (especially in place of a last name) also has a healthy yeomanlike sound to it. I fondly recall a sturdy D&D character I named John of Redcliff. A lot of ordinary last names, like Lake or Hill or Rivers, probably started out that way. If the background allows for it, we can vary the effect by using French (de) or German (von) or other languages’ equivalents.

Occupations also gave us a lot of familiar last names. “William the Farmer” (to distinguish him from the three other Williams in the village) easily becomes “William Farmer.” Some of these are less obvious than others: we may not recall that “sawyer” is what you call someone who wields a saw.

Names that indicate one’s parents—patronymics and matronymics—occur in many languages. The English have their Josephsons and Richardsons, the Russians their Petrovs and Ivanovnas.

Scorning these expedients, we can also strike off into the unknown by inventing a name purely from scratch, just for its sound. This can produce semi-random results—but not entirely random, since speakers of a given language will tend toward combinations of letters and sounds that “make sense” in their language. TV Tropes’ Law of Alien Names makes some interesting observations about how writers in different genres often approach name generation.

A doctor friend of mine, feeling he wasn’t up to the task of coining a lot of names, used a novel expedient in his D&D campaign: he used the names of drugs. This strategy works surprisingly well as long as you stick to obscure pharmaceuticals, which often seem to have been named by plucking letters out of the air (“erenumab”) or by phonetically respelling a chemical term (“Sudafed”). On the other hand, a fierce warrior character named “Xanax” is going to create some cognitive dissonance for those who know the term in question.

A Variety of Effects

Different writers take different approaches to naming, which contribute to the distinctiveness of their worlds.

At the extreme end of systematic invention stands Tolkien, who once said that he invented his stories and realms only as a place to put his invented languages. His names add noticeably to the integrity of his imagined world; they hold together so well because they really were derived from a number of separate, fully-developed languages. We have a pretty good idea whether a name is hobbitish, elven, or dwarven from the sound alone.

Or take Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom (Mars) stories. Martian heroes and heroines (especially the heroines) tend to have relatively graceful names: Dejah Thoris, Gahan of Gathol (a place-reference name), Carthoris, Llana. Male supporting characters and savage green Martians are tougher-sounding: Tars Tarkas, Mors Kajak, Kantos Kan, Xodar. Villains’ names are still less graceful: Phor Tak, Tul Axtar, Luud, U-Dor. There’s no clear linguistic background for the names, but there’s enough commonality to give us a sense that Barsoomian nomenclature does hold together on a cultural basis.

The far future of SF writer James Schmitz yields a completely different style of naming. Rather than being mellifluously Elvish, like Galadriel or Aragorn, or barbarically guttural, like Tars Tarkas, Schmitz’s names strike me as quintessentially American: with a contemporary English sound and a sort of casual feel—yet unfamiliar enough to remind us we’re not in Kansas any more. Recurring character Telzey Amberdon is a good example. “Telzey,” with the diminutive –ey ending, sounds like a nickname somebody today might bear, but as far as I know, no one actually does.

This laid-back style is characteristic of Schmitz’s Federation of the Hub. The names have a familiar contemporary sound, but they aren’t actually familiar. The first names also tend to give few gender clues—which might be related to the fact that Schmitz stories often featured strong female leads. Nile Etland and Heslet Quillan, along with the single-named Captain Pausert and Goth of The Witches of Karres or Iliff and Pagadan of Agent of Vega, all sound like people we might run into on any street—until we bypass the familiarity of sound and realize we’ve never heard these names before. The names give Schmitz’s stories a unique feel.

Consistency

We can see how the names help establish the mood and ambiance of a story. It says something about The Lord of the Rings that it contains both Gandalf the Grey and Freddy Bolger. As with other aspects of worldbuilding, the names contribute to the “willing suspension of disbelief” when they help us feel the believable solidity of a consistent background—even if it’s a consistency that includes species or cultural variation.

TV Tropes lists a number of ways anomalies can crop up. There’s “Aerith and Bob,” where familiar conventional names are mixed in unaccountably with unusual ones. If a particular character’s name is unlike any of the others, we have “Odd Name Out.” Using a mix of Earthly languages as sources for names gives us “Melting-Pot Nomenclature”—which may be justified if we envision a future in which today’s nations and ethnic groups have intermixed, as in H. Beam Piper’s future history.

The most thoroughgoing way of establishing a solid background for your names is Tolkien’s: invent your own languages. But few of us have the time, patience and talent for that kind of detail. In practice, we don’t need to go that far. It’s possible to do the same thing on a small scale by starting from the grass roots: come up with an interesting name or two and decide to emphasize certain sounds or forms for that language’s words, inventing the rules and common elements (like “de” or “von”) as we go along.

However writers may go about the business of naming, we can appreciate the distinctive flavor given to their stories by how they choose names for their “children”—and if we’re so inclined, we can try out that creative wordplay for ourselves.

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