Time Signature: Writing in a Shared World

May 9, 2021 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

My science fiction romantic comedy novella Time Signature debuts tomorrow, May 10, available wherever fine ebooks are sold. In honor of the occasion, I’m going to say a few words about one of the interesting aspects of writing this piece—the challenge of building a story in a world someone else has created.

Origin Story

The Wild Rose Press likes to develop series of books based on a common setting or theme. The common element is announced, and authors are invited to submit stories to fit. The stories may be of different kinds: contemporary romance, historical romance, romantic suspense, paranormal romance, and so forth. But the common thread ties them together.

A couple of years ago, TWRP announced the Deerbourne Inn series. The creators placed a charming old inn in a small town in Vermont. They described the layout of the inn and the town, the surrounding landscape, a set of inhabitants, noteworthy events, and the like. Then they turned the writers loose. At this point, I count no fewer than twenty-six books set in the Deerbourne Inn locale. This small town, in other words, is crawling with lovers seeking their happy endings.

In a Wild Rose chat, I asked whether, among all these varieties, a science fiction (rather than fantasy) story might also fit. Sure, why not, was the response. And, having raised the question, I thought of an angle: a chance to play around with the classic time travel romance tropes and, perhaps, turn them around in unexpected ways. I ran the concept by Nikki Andrews, who was at that time my TWRP editor. She thought it might be fun. And thus Time Signature was born.

The Shared World

The idea of a shared world has a long history, especially in science fiction. Back in the 1980s, Harlan Ellison recruited a band of noted SF writers to place stories in a setting referred to as “Harlan’s World.” Later in the ’80s, Jerry Pournelle opened up a planet in his CoDominium future history to other authors under the series title “War World.” Larry Niven, a frequent collaborator with Pournelle, performed a similar evolution based on an event in his Known Space future history, the “Man-Kzin Wars.” More recently, Eric Flint’s 2000 novel 1632 has spawned an extensive cottage industry of alternate-history stories in the “Ring of Fire series.”

A storyline inhabited by different authors can also develop almost accidentally. I’ve remarked on the roles of different writers in stories about the “Fuzzies” created by H. Beam Piper. A set of follow-up books to James Schmitz’s classic The Witches of Karres brought three additional authors into play.

The advantage of spreading out the efforts of exotic worldbuilding make science fiction a natural venue for shared worlds. But even in more mundane settings, there are advantages to be gained. A standalone non-fantastic contemporary novel must still stand up a set of characters, places, companies, and the like to populate the story. A writer who’s invented such a panoply of features for a set of tales (like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County) has to put a lot of work into developing these details. Bringing in a whole corps of authors to help in that enterprise can create a richness of detail that would be hard for a single writer to achieve. (We can’t all be J.R.R. Tolkien.)

Thus, before I put electrons to screen in Time Signature, I already had a range of details to draw upon. The inn and its staff were “already there.” If my characters wanted to have dinner at a restaurant in town, I had a selection of eateries available. More important, my main character Trina Kellander, a musician, could perform in town at the “Mad River Garden Party,” a summertime event already defined in the Deerbourne Inn corpus.

The Joys and Tribulations of Consistency

The flip side of these advantages is the need for consistency. Nothing throws a reader out of a story faster than some blatant discrepancy in the details. If it takes 39 minutes to get from Willow Springs to Montpelier, it’s unlikely the return trip will take three hours—barring traffic jams, severe weather, or the like. (And if Trina makes the trip in fair weather, we can’t have another character suffering a torrential downpour in the same location at the same time.)

Achieving the consistency needed for a successful suspension of disbelief is hard enough for one author. For a whole herd of authors, it’s a major issue. How do we maintain the coherence that makes the shared world seem real?

Beth Overmyer’s recent guest post on writing a series mentioned the notion of a “bible”—reference notes that record details, from a character’s appearance to the theory of magic. The bible is essential to a shared universe. It’s the only way writers can stay consistent on key details without bogging down in endless inter-author consultations.

Great Eddy Covered Bridge in Waitsfield, VT, on the way from Willow Springs to Montpelier

The Deerbourne Inn bible establishes the location of the fictional town of Willow Springs (which actually coincides with a real small town on the Vermont map—allowing me to use Google Maps to determine the travel time to Montpelier). It lays out the structure of the inn, its history, the owner and staff, a bevy of secondary characters at the inn and in the town, the shops and facilities in Willow Springs (right down to the high school mascot), and special events. Characters introduced in the individual stories, up to the last update to the bible, are also listed. The bible is accompanied by a street map of the town, making it easier to visualize geographical relationships. (We’ve not yet progressed to the level of having a GIS layer for an electronic map. But that innovation’s probably not too far away.)

However, it’s impractical to include all possible details in the bible—especially when 26 different books are involved. This makes it harder to be sure whether a given fact has been established somewhere, or whether one is free to invent it. My ebook copies of the Deerbourne Inn stories I read while writing TS are festooned with blue highlights to indicate facts that I might have to take into account at some point. And still it’s not easy to tell.

Case in point: My characters take a hike up into the nearby hills, and stop to look back down at the inn. What color is the façade? I couldn’t find a reference on that particular point. If I were writing a standalone story, I would simply have made up a color on the spot (and, of course, carefully notated it back into my background notes for later reference). But I was reluctant to do that here; someone else might have made a passing reference to the color in a story I hadn’t read. I dodged the issue by simply not mentioning a color—often the simplest solution to a consistency problem.

At the same time, meshing your story smoothly into an existing framework has a joy of its own. I enjoyed doing my best to meld TS seamlessly into the continuity of the locale and the stories.

Character Camaraderie

The greatest fun, however, came in the opportunity to integrate other authors’ characters and locales into the story as it developed.

My heroine Trina needed a best-friend-forever in town—someone she could talk to as the plot developed. It occurred to me that a secondary character in Amber Daulton’s Lyrical Embrace, the sister of her hero, would make a fine confidante. Like Trina, Ruby Haynes is a musician; that created a natural connection and explained a shared history. And Ruby’s breezy good cheer made her a perfect foil.

I had a great time consulting with Amber and making sure my portrayal of Ruby was consistent with the original. What kind of drinks would they share? What would Ruby name a baby? The circle was completed when the baby I’d named turned up again in Amber’s subsequent Deerbourne novel Harmony’s Embrace. Like a volley in tennis, passing these story elements back and forth is a satisfying experience.

In a similar way, I found a way to make use of a specific location created by Tena Stetler for her novel Mystic Maples. I checked with Tena to make sure my description meshed correctly with her conception of the locale, and wrote it into TS as part of the already-existing background.

The Draw of a Shared World

There’s a unique charm to finding connections and crossovers in the stories we like. As with Easter eggs in a movie or a game, we delight in discovering an unexpected convergence. Over and above the heightened realism of a universe in which consistent features recur, it’s just fun to see the web of connections grow. Time Signature gave me the opportunity to weave a new layer into the tapestry of the Deerbourne Inn world; I hope that will please readers as much as it does me.

The City as Character

February 14, 2021 / Rick Ellrod / 6 Comments

In some fantasy or science fiction stories, a city actually is a kind of character. The clearest example—as the title indicates—is N.K. Jemisin’s 2020 novel The City We Became. (Page references are to the hardcover edition, New York: Orbit, Hatchette Book Group, 2020.)

Since I need to discuss some details of the novel to make the necessary points, I’m flying a

However, I’ll try to keep actual story spoilers to a minimum.

The City We Became

Jemisin gives the premise, as quoted in a review: “The city of New York comes to life—literally, as in, the city has developed sentience and an ability to act on its own.” This quickening takes place through the medium of human avatars. The city chooses a human being to be “its . . . midwife. Champion.” (The City We Became, p. 304.) In the case of New York, there are actually six avatars: one for each borough, and one for the city as a whole. (305)

How does this happen? A “real city” will “make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality” (7). This metaphysical weight comes from the accumulated “strangeness” of the people who come there (8). A city’s unique load of strangeness—its identity—isn’t a pre-established thing; it develops over time.

[Cities are] organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart. (46)

This incorporation of newness is especially true of New York.

The city needs newcomers! He belongs here as much as anyone born and bred to its streets, because anyone who wants to be of New York can be! (47)

Even the legends and lies about the city contribute to its essence, its distinctive identity—what makes it a “real city.” (166)

The broader reality in which the weighty essence of a city tears a hole is an alternate-worlds multiverse (165-66). Not only are there many worlds: “Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there” (302)—a kind of World as Myth notion.

The tearing isn’t purely benign. The “hole” that “punches through” actually causes harm: “The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.” (306) In that somewhat curious postulate, the story reflects the popular contemporary focus on the destructiveness of progress or expansion.

The newborn New York has an Enemy: a type of city so alien as to be fundamentally at odds with human cities, which wants to invade our world. Several characters refer to the anti-city as an “eldritch abomination,” a term characteristic of H.P. Lovecraft and similar early twentieth-century horror writers. (16-17, 38, 167-68) But New York also has allies, elder siblings, such as São Paulo in Brazil, and Hong Kong. Apparently there’s even a community of cities (“the Summit”). (10, 21-22)

We will hear more about this: there’s going to be a series, in which this novel is billed as “Great Cities #1.” The novel itself was developed from Jemisin’s short story “The City Born Great,” a Hugo award winner for 2017, which constitutes the prologue to the novel. It’s “urban fantasy” in the strongest sense.

The aspect on which I want to focus is that distinctiveness, a civic “personality,” is what makes a city alive. Thus, in the opposite direction, the Enemy gains a foothold through the interpolation of chain businesses like Starbucks. “They’re destroying everything that makes New York what it is, replacing it with generic bullshit.” (357) The avatars constitute—or express—the “spirit of the place,” the genius loci.

The Personalized City

It’s not unheard of in F&SF to give a city consciousness, though seldom in so full-tilt a manner as Jemisin’s.

In James Blish’s Cities in Flight series, much of the action centers around the star-traveling city of New York. New York aloft has a perpetual Mayor, John Amalfi, and a City Manager, Mark Hazleton (in the last two books). But it also has a “server farm” of a hundred-odd computers which collectively make up “the City Fathers.” That term, generally applied to municipal officials of some venerable sort, indicates authority. But the balance of power among the Mayor, the City Manager, and the City Fathers is rather complicated. Amalfi generally gets his way, but sometimes this involves working around the City Fathers—on one occasion, turning them off completely for a period.

While the City Fathers might be considered an intelligence for the city as a whole, they’re not much of an intelligence by modern standards. Rather, they come across impersonally, a 1950s idea of what a giant computer would be like: a pure logic. Their dialogue is rendered in all capitals in the text. Blish lampshades this typographical indicator in A Life for the Stars (1962), where young Chris DeFord reflects on first acquaintance: “. . . he would never have mistaken it for a human voice. Whatever the difference was, he thought of it as though the device were speaking all in capital letters.”

Thus Blish’s City Fathers are almost the polar opposite of Jemisin’s cities: impersonal and generic rather than distinctive. In a similar way, while Blish gives some details about the flying city of New York—naming subway stops and the like—he never makes the city “come alive” even in the merely literary sense, to my mind. The focus is all on the human characters; the city is simply part of the landscape.

An entirely different tack is taken by Anne McCaffrey and S.M. Stirling in The City Who Fought (1993). This novel belongs to McCaffrey’s “shellperson” or “Brain & Brawn Ship” series, which originated with the stories collected in The Ship Who Sang (1969). Here, infants with severe physical disabilities but competent brains may become

an encapsulated ‘brain,’ a guiding mechanism in any one of a number of curious professions. As such, [they] would suffer no pain, live a comfortable existence in a metal shell for several centuries, performing unusual service to Central Worlds. (The Ship Who Sang, first page)

Most of the Brain & Brawn stories are about shellpeople who are the animating controllers of spacecraft. In The City Who Fought, however, we see a case of a “brain” partner who inhabits a space station, rather than a ship. In that sense, Simeon, the hero of the novel, can be seen as the persona or “soul” of a spaceborne city. But since the shellpeople are in fact normal human beings, in terms of their minds and personalities, the unique character of the city reduces to the uniqueness of any human being.

Presence

A city can also have a presence, a kind of personality, without actual consciousness.

In Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be a Wizard (1983, rev. ed. 2012), the heroes are translated from their familiar New York City to an alternate, darker New York: “a shadowed island prisoned between chill rivers and studded with sharp spikes of iron and cold stone” (ch. 2, p. 65). In this dark-side version, machines like taxicabs are sentient (and vicious); even common objects like fire hydrants are alive. The character of alternate-NYC is evident from its dramatic contrast against the everyday version in which the rest of the story takes place. The characters can feel the foreboding threat of the place even before they begin to run into hostile beings.

Charles Williams employs a similarly alternative London in All Hallows Eve (1945). Here, however, the effect is the reverse of Duane’s. The main character, a young woman who has recently died, finds herself in an uninhabited alternate London redolent of peace and a mysterious overawing holiness. Meanwhile, ordinary London, including her friend and widowed husband, is threatened by a black magician.

In Williams’ presentation, the city does exert a kind of agency: the last chapter is titled “The Acts of the City.” Here, though, the city acts rather as a conduit for the divine than through a consciousness of its own. Its specific order has numinous importance.

This was a regular theme in Williams. His friend C.S. Lewis observed:

Williams was a Londoner of the Londoners; Johnson or Chesterton never exulted more than he in their citizenship. On many of us the prevailing impression made by the London streets is one of chaos; but Williams, looking on the same spectacle, saw chiefly an image—an imperfect, pathetic, heroic, and majestic image—of Order. (C.S. Lewis, “Williams and the Arthuriad,” in Taliesin Through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, Arthurian Torso (1974), p. 289)

The City as Background

In most stories, a city is not so literally personified as in the above examples. Normally its “personality” merely serves as a colorful background setting, giving a story or series a distinctive flavor based on the milieu.

G.K. Chesterton observes somewhere that in Charles Dickens’ novels, London is practically a character in itself. It’s not that London is somehow animated or ensouled; it’s that the locale is described with such well-observed detail that it plays as central a role in the story as the actual characters do. As Lewis noted above, a number of Chesterton’s own stories evoke a similarly distinctive London. While Chesterton does not provide the wealth of detail Dickens does, the same affectionate appreciation for the city is expressed in a more impressionistic fashion.

Rex Stout’s numerous Nero Wolfe detective stories perform the same service for New York. Narrator Archie Goodwin is constantly running around the city, intimately familiar with its nooks and crannies, and as we follow him, it begins to seem a familiar place to us too. Well-known landmarks, both real and fictional, help give the place a sense of concreteness and aid our suspension of disbelief.

More recently, in the Netflix movie To All the Boys: Always and Forever (2021), high school senior Lara Jean Covey “falls in love” with New York on a school trip. Her attraction to the place is strong enough to lead her to change her college plans and throw her romance into disarray.

Interestingly, in the book, it was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that attracted Lara Jean’s attention. UNC-CH also has a nice campus, but the screenwriters seem to have felt that New York would be a more obvious candidate—and we can see why. Some cities are famous for having more “pull” (or, as Jemisin put it, “weight”) than others. I recall that, when I was going to law school in Cambridge, two friends were talking about going down to “the city,” and I was puzzled why they’d make such a big deal out of running across the river to Boston. But that wasn’t the city they meant. They were New Yorkers; even if you’re next door to another big city, “THE City” is NYC.

Of course, it needn’t always be New York. Most of Andrew Greeley’s novels are set in Chicago; and by the time you’re read a dozen or so, Greeley’s particular version of Chicago has “come alive” as much as New York. I have a notion that The Black God’s Drums (2018), by P. Djèlí Clark, was aiming to do something similar for New Orleans, although one can’t go as far in a single novella as one can in a whole series of novels.

The Small Town

If big, brawling cities like New York or Chicago or New Orleans can become characters in their own right, what about small towns? Certainly a story often invites us to become attached to a small town in the same way that we are to these big cities. The question, I think, is whether we can find the same sort of distinctiveness in a habitation built on a smaller scale.

In Hallmark romances, we are constantly being introduced to a cozy, adorable small town, usually the site of a struggling local business. We’re meant to find this municipality lovable and charming. In most cases, though, the locations seem to be too generic to attract our interest. The bakeries and bookstores and Christmas tree lightings all seem to blur together after a while. True, these short films don’t have much time to develop an elaborate background identity. But that’s not the only factor—because some two-hour films do manage to make a small town real.

My favorite example is Doc Hollywood (1991), in which Michael J. Fox, a newly-minted doctor on his way to a high-paying plastic surgery job in L.A., gets stranded in Grady, South Carolina. The whole story is about whether Fox’s character Ben Stone will shake the dust of Grady off his feet as soon as possible and decamp to the big city, or decide he likes it where he is. For this to work, the town has to be vividly realized. The actors, director, writers, and composer do a nice job of showing us enough quirky characters and local traditions to convince us that Stone’s inevitable decision makes sense. Other rom-coms like Murphy’s Romance (1985) and Coffee Shop (2014), in my view, pull off the same trick.

For a more bookish example, we can look at Jan Karon’s long-running Mitford series (1994-present). The dozen or more stories set in the village of Mitford, North Carolina (the first of which is tellingly titled At Home in Mitford), afford plenty of scope to develop the landscape, landmarks, quirky characters, and history of this hill-country locale to the point where it becomes a familiar retreat one can revisit at will. As in Jemisin’s New York, it’s primarily the people who make the town what it is.

Conclusion

It appears that both big cities and small towns can become distinctive enough to rise to the level of being a quasi-character (or sometimes an actual character) in a story. But the end results are different. The big city tends to be distinctive by being roaring and stimulating; the small town, by being homelike and comforting. It would be interesting to see if those characteristics could be reversed: a cozy metropolis, an exciting village. But those two types of place may be inherently linked to the number of citizens. We can think of the reversal as a challenge for future writers.

Portraying the Transhuman Character

March 22, 2020 / Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

More Than Human

Kevin Wade Johnson’s comments on my recent post about The Good Place raised a couple of issues worth a closer look. Here’s one:

Lots of science fiction, and some fantasy, deals with characters who are greater, or more intelligent, or more gifted in some way, than mere humans. But we the authors and readers are mere humans. How do we go about showing a character who’s supposed to be more sublime than we can imagine?

It’s one thing to have characters whose capabilities are beyond us. Superman can leap tall buildings with a single bound; I can’t. But I can easily comprehend Superman’s doing so. (I can even see it at the movies.) On the other hand, if a character is supposed to be so intelligent I can’t grasp their reasoning, or has types of knowledge that are beyond me, that’s harder to represent. I can simply say so: “Thorson had an intelligence far beyond that of ordinary men.” But how can I show it?

Long-Lived Experience

There are a number of ways this can come up. For example, if a character lived a very long time, would their accumulated experience allow for capabilities, or logical leaps in thinking, beyond what we can learn in our short lives?

I’m thinking of a Larry Niven story—I’m blanking on the name: maybe one of the “Gil the Arm” stories?—in which a character who appears to be a young woman turns out to be centuries old, and when she drops the deception, she moves with uncanny grace—she doesn’t bump into anything or trip over her own feet, because she’s had that long to train herself in how to move (without the limitations imposed by our bodies’ degeneration from aging).

Of course, a story about long-lived people doesn’t have to take long-lived learning into account. The depiction of the “Howard Families” in Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough for Love almost seem dedicated to the opposite proposition, that no matter how long we live, we’re basically the same kinds of personalities; we don’t learn much.

In a similar way, Tolkien’s immortal elves may seem ineffably glorious to us, but their behavior often seems all too human—especially if you read The Silmarillion, where elves make mistakes, engage in treachery, and allow overweening pride to dictate their actions in ways that may surprise those of us familiar only with LotR. On the other hand, the books and movies do succeed in convincing us that characters like Galadriel and Gandalf are of a stature that exceeds human possibility.

Logic and Language

There are other ways to have transhuman abilities. As Kevin observes, Niven’s “Protectors” fit the description. Niven imagines a further stage of human development—something that comes after childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—that we’ve never seen, because when our remote ancestors arrived on Earth from elsewhere, they lacked the plants hosting the symbiotic virus necessary for transition to that final stage. The “trans-adult” Protectors are stronger, faster, and more durable than ordinary humans. They also think faster. Thus Niven shows them as following out a chain of logic with blinding speed to its conclusion, allowing them to act long before regular humans could figure out what to do. Because this is a matter of speed, not incomprehensible thinking, Niven can depict a Protector as acting in ways that are faster than normal, but are explainable once we sit down and work out the reasoning.

A visual analogue is used in the 2009 and 2011 Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey, Jr. Unlike most other treatments of the character, Guy Ritchie’s version supposes that Holmes’ incredible intelligence can be used not only for logical deduction, but to predict with lightning speed how a hand-to-hand combat may develop. Holmes thus becomes a ninja-like melee fighter, so effective as to confound all opponents. The movie shows us this by slowing down the process that to Holmes is instantaneous: we see a very short montage of positions and moves as they would occur, or could occur, before we see Holmes carry out the final “conclusion” of his martial reasoning. This allows us to appreciate what the quasi-superhuman character is doing and why, without actually having to execute the same process ourselves.

Preternatural intelligence may be more subtle in its effects. Such a person may, for example, be able to understand things fully from what, to us, would be mere hints and implications. So, for example, when Isaac Asimov introduces the members of the Second Foundation in his Foundation series, he tells us that their tremendous psychological training allows them to talk among themselves in a manner so concise and compressed that entire paragraphs require only a few words.

Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line—even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice. (Second Foundation, end of chapter 1, “First Interlude,” p. 16)

Breaking the fourth wall, Asimov warns us that his account is “about as far as I can go in explaining color to a blind man—with myself as blind as the audience.” (same page) He then adroitly avoids showing us any of the actual conversation; instead, he says he’s “freely translating” it into our ordinary language. This move illustrates one of the classic ways of presenting the incomprehensible in a story: point out its incomprehensibility and “translate” into something we can understand. (Note that this is much more easily done in writing than in a visual medium such as TV or the movies.)

A similar technique is used by Poul Anderson in his 1953 novel Brain Wave, which starts with the interesting premise that in certain regions of space, neurons function faster than in others. When Earth’s natural rotation around the center of the galaxy brings it into a “faster” area, the brains of every creature with a central nervous system speed up, and human beings (as well as other animals) all become proportionately smarter. Anderson notes that the speech of the transformed humans would be incomprehensible to us and, like Asimov, “translates” it for our convenience. When a couple of the characters, in a newly invented faster-than-light spaceship, accidentally cross the border back into the “slow zone,” they are unable to understand the controls they themselves designed until the ship’s travel brings them out and lets their intelligence return to its new normal. (Anderson’s concept may have been the inspiration for the “Zones of Thought” universe later developed in several fascinating stories by Vernor Vinge.)

Showing and Telling

We can glean some general principles from these examples. If the extraordinary acts don’t actually have to be shown in the medium I’m using, I can simply point to them and tell the reader they’re there. In a written story, I can say my main character is a world-class violinist without having to demonstrate that level of ability myself. (Although if I have some experience in that particular art, I’ll be able to provide some realistic details, to help make my claim sound plausible.) But if the supernormal achievement is something that can be shown in our chosen medium, we have to be able to demonstrate it: a movie about the great violinist will have to exhibit some pretty masterful violin-playing, or those in the audience who know something about the art will laugh themselves silly.

We should note that there are good and bad ways of telling the audience about a character’s superiority. In the unforgettable short story “Flowers for Algernon,” which consists entirely of diary entries by Charlie Gordon, the main character, the text vividly shows us the effects of an intelligence-raising treatment on a man of initially lower-than-normal intelligence. The entries improve so radically in writing competence and understanding that when Charlie describes how his brainpower is beginning to exceed that of ordinary humans, we believe him, because we’re already riding on the curve of rising ability up to our own level that is apparent in the text—a true tour de force of writing. On the other hand, in the drastically worse movie version, Charly (1968), the screenwriters are reduced to having Charly stand in front of an audience of experts and scornfully dismiss the greatest intellectual achievements from human history—a weak and ineffective technique at best for conveying superiority.

Summary

This quick review of the problem turns up several methods for handling supernormal abilities in a story.

If the superior ability is intelligible to us ordinary people in the audience—maybe it’s just doing normal things faster—we can have the wiser or super-enabled person explain it to someone less wise: our last post’s Ignorant Interlocutor.
If the advantage is mainly a matter of speed, we can slow it down to a speed at which regular people can follow the action.
If we can get away without actually showing the ability in question, we may be able to point toward it, or “translate” it into something we can understand, and convincingly tell the audience about it—if we can achieve the necessary suspension of disbelief.
If a character is supposed to be, let us say, preternaturally wise, and there’s simply no way to avoid showing that in the dialogue, the best we can do is to evoke the best we can do—have the character be as wise as possible—and imply ‘like this, only more so.’ This method—like “projecting” a line or a curve—is the method of “supereminence,” which is sometimes employed in theological talk about things that are inherently beyond our full understanding.

Kicking around this question makes us aware that portraying the more-than-human character is only a special case of a more general problem. When our stories try to incorporate anything that’s indescribable, incomprehensible, how do we handle that? Our F&SF stories frequently want to reach out beyond the boundaries of human experience, yet in a tale written for ordinary humans. We’ll talk about the more general question next time.

Temporary Death

May 7, 2019May 8, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Back from the Dead

Bringing back the dead is a tricky business, story-wise. For a major character to die adds gravitas. It gains our sympathy; it makes us take the story more seriously.

But in adventure stories, characters who die have a pretty good chance of turning up again later. This has become such a convention that we are often adjured not to assume someone’s dead unless you actually see the body.

There’s a strong temptation for a writer to save a beloved (and sometimes lucrative) character; yet the return undermines the impact of the death. Are there ways to manage that dilemma?

The White Rider

The theme of one who was dead who turns up alive has a very long history—as we may note particularly in this Easter season. For the literary trope, however, I think of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings as the the ur-example. Gandalf’s loss is appalling for the reader, and his reappearance is a classic example of the sudden turn beyond hope that Tolkien called “eucatastrophe.”

LotR comes early enough in the history of modern high fantasy that it may have been unexpected, at that time, for a character to really die and then come back. Merely apparent death is much more common—even in LotR. An article I read once observed how frequently someone is thought to be dead in the course of the story. For example, Aragorn thinks Frodo has been killed by an orc-spear in the Mines of Moria (Book II, Ch. 5). Sam assumes Shelob has killed Frodo, when in fact the spider has merely put him into a coma (Book IV, Ch. 10). Éomer believes Éowyn is dead, but when she’s borne back to the city she is found to be alive (Book V, Ch. 6). Et cetera.

Gandalf, on the other hand, really does die at the end of his extensive combat with the Balrog. But this isn’t as fatal as it seems. Gandalf is a semi-divine spirit, one of the Maiar, and his mission in Middle-Earth is not yet complete. He says: “Naked I was sent back—for a brief time, until my task is done” (Book III, ch. 5). The “naked” is not simply a bodily description. In passing “through fire and deep water,” he has given up his old self, Gandalf the Grey, and become an elevated version, Gandalf 2.0, the White Rider.

This is perhaps one clue as to what makes a return from death succeed, in a narrative sense. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t trivial. Gandalf’s being “sent back” is extraordinary, and it changes him in deep ways. To my mind, this death-and-reversal add to the depth and power of the story.

The Descent into Routine

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. If the return is taken for granted, then we aren’t moved or edified by the dying. We don’t believe it in the first place. In fact, reading or watching a death we know is reversible tends to make us cynical. The writers are playing on our emotions, and we feel manipulated rather than moved.

In the 2016 movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Superman dies at the end. Did anyone believe for a minute this death would last? No one is going to kill off such an iconic character. If nothing else (here’s the cynical part), the future income stream from Superman stories is an irresistible lure. Just as with the comic-book “Death of Superman” sequence from which the idea was taken, I suspect my reaction was shared by many: here’s a cheap trick to get our attention.

To be sure, there are some affecting moments in the transition from BvS to Justice League (2017), in which Superman is revived—partly because reviving him is arduous and difficult, as further discussed below. But those moments are not easily attained. The artifice is too transparent.

I have somewhat the same reaction, for a different reason, to The Princess Bride—one of the flaws in that admirable tale. Goldman’s narrator makes a great deal out of telling his son (in the movie, grandson) that Westley dies (ch. 6). Really. He’s not faking. And naturally, the boy is outraged. The hero isn’t supposed to die! Yet he did. —But no, the author has tricked us. Westley isn’t really dead. Miracle Max tells us, “there’s different kinds of dead: there’s sort of dead, mostly dead, and all dead. This fella here, he’s only sort of dead . . .” (ch. 7).

That’s cheating. We may be willing to accept the trick in The Princess Bride because it’s already such a roaring stream of clichés, so enthusiastically devised and appreciated that we never do take the story quite seriously. But we aren’t really moved. Our appreciation is of a different order: we’re laughing fondly at the author’s willingness to indulge with such unreserved gusto in the most absurd fairy-tale stereotypes and gimmicks.

If we’re commenting on Batman v. Superman, we really ought to say something about Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame. But it’s too soon—too many spoilers. Maybe another time.

Variations

Incidentally, the routine return can apply to villains as well as heroes. A hero’s recurring nemesis may also be an iconic character, and the fact that the nemesis keeps coming back is a convention we rather enjoy. TV Tropes refers to it as “Joker Immunity.” Superman’s Lex Luthor, Spider-Man’s Green Goblin, the Fantastic Four’s Doctor Doom: if any of them appear to be dead in the comic books, we can be pretty sure they’ll be back. On the other hand, movie series don’t run on forever in the same way that comics series do. The screen adapters of Spider-Man can thus afford to “expend” the Goblin, or Dr. Octopus, because they’re only going to make three or four films in a given series. There isn’t time for repeated recurrences of an arch-enemy.

On the other hand, it’s notorious that we hear Emperor Palpatine’s sinister laughter at the end of the most recent Star Wars IX trailer (4/12/2019). immediately following Luke’s voiceover line, “No one’s ever really gone.” Some movie series do go on that long . . .

Once revival has become routine, it’s a noteworthy exception when an author is willing to let a main character go permanently (Killed Off For Real; see a list of film examples, and also the trope Deader Than Dead). J.K. Rowling, for example, killed off Albus Dumbledore for good, well before the end of the Harry Potter saga. Veronica Roth’s Divergent series allows the heroine herself to die at the end, though this seems to have been omitted from the corresponding movie.

In Star Wars, the regular appearance of “Force ghosts” provides a sort of compromise. The fallen heroes don’t come back to life, but they do hang around to provide advice, commentary, and snarky explanations.

The Search for Spock

Let’s return to an instance where a temporary death does work to see if we can determine what makes that possible.

Along with LotR, my other go-to example is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Wrath is generally considered to be among the best of the Trek movies (for example, here, here, and here), and a sizable part of its draw is the death of the beloved Spock. Like Gandalf, Spock perishes heroically, subjecting himself to a fatal overdose of radiation to make a crucial repair that saves everyone else on the Enterprise. And his loss is fully realized by his long-time friends, along with the new characters we’ve just gotten to know. Maybe I’m sentimental, but Kirk’s eulogy at Spock’s funeral has always struck me as a genuinely moving moment.

At the same time, there was no doubt in my mind when I first saw the film that Spock would be back. The whole atmosphere of the final scenes in Wrath—hopefulness so intense you can almost taste it—lent itself to anticipating eucatastrophe rather than a final end. The shiny “casket,” nestled in the burgeoning growth of the Genesis planet, seemed to promise some kind of resurrection. What made us feel Spock’s death so effectively, even though we were morally certain we’d see him again?

Part of it is that these characters had had such a long history together. We’d seen their relationship grow over three TV seasons, and we’d been recently reminded of that history in the first Star Trek movie, flop though it was. To the numerous loyal Trek fans, at least, these were truly iconic characters, and we were emotionally invested in them. The history had built up a kind of emotional potential that the death sequence could draw upon.

Even more important, the other characters were visibly affected. They didn’t know Spock would be back. We grieved for Spock through his friends. The screenwriter and director wisely gave us enough time, in the final sequences, to absorb and appreciate that grief with the other characters. I suspect this, more than anything, is what makes a provisional death effective: a powerful portrayal of other people’s response to the loss.

Finally, the heroism of Spock’s final acts, and the overwhelming sense of something wonderful that’s been achieved on the Genesis planet at the end, lend depth and further feeling to the event. We respect his sacrifice, and it means something. The hope for new life doesn’t necessarily erode the gravity of the death.

Moreover, the sequels navigated the difficulty pretty well. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock did unavoidably undercut the resolution of Wrath a bit. The Genesis planet is unstable; it isn’t quite as wonderful as we thought. The adversaries in Search are much more mundane than Khan (who had his own history with the Enterprise crew). And the death isn’t permanent.

Yet the complex, gradual, effortful reconstitution of Spock manages to become something wonderful in itself, rather than just a reversal of the loss. The notion that Spock’s katra or spirit survives adds an element of the mystical or sublime to the science-fiction texture of the series. The notion that it survived in McCoy’s head gave the situation humor and irony. The unconventional expedients the Enterprise crew must use to get McCoy back to Genesis provide both adventure and a maverick sense of, well, enterprise. Meanwhile, the scenes of Spock’s body re-growing from childhood to adulthood as accelerated by the Genesis effect have their own sense of wonder.

When the Vulcan ceremony of reintegration rejoins Spock’s spirit with his body, the impact of the result is heightened by the fact that Spock is clearly changed by his passage through death. (The final film of the trilogy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, continues this theme by showing Spock visibly struggling to get used to life again.) The return, which takes two whole movies to complete—a quest in itself—is far more than a handwave. It’s an achievement.

Conclusions

From these examples I think we can pick out some factors that help a story to make good use of a temporary death, as opposed to a routine we-know-they’ll-be-back.

The death is heroic; it means something.
We care about the lost person—and so do the other people in the story.
The other characters experience the death fully, even if the reader or viewer knows that it won’t be permanent.
The deceased character is absent long enough to let the loss sink in.
The deceased character earns the return. It doesn’t come easy.
The returned character is transformed in some way by the experience.

When an author can incorporate these elements, we the audience can extend our “willing suspension of disbelief” to sympathize with the rest of the cast in their loss, even when we are aware in propria persona that the beloved dead aren’t gone for good.

Romance and the Big Lie

May 20, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Often a story is built around an elaborate deception. It may be a caper or heist story, like the Ocean’s Eleven series. It may be a spy story or thriller. But there’s more at stake when the Big Lie is central to the main characters’ relationship. Million-dollar prizes or secret papers are small potatoes; love is serious business.

Let’s look at cases where a romance is founded on a Big Lie. Resolving that discontinuity—bringing the relationship safely onto a firmer footing—tends to become the main issue of the storyline. And because at least some of the characters are mistaken about what’s going on, incongruities abound, and the natural home of such stories is romantic comedy.

Dramatic Deceptions

A Big Lie imperils a romance in the most challenging way is if the lie is about the relationship itself. We can be confused about a potential lover’s name, or status, or identity: consider all those songs that say ‘I don’t care who you are, only that you love me.’ But if the love itself is false—based on ulterior motives—we’ve got trouble.

The high-school rom-com 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, is a simple example. Sophomore Bianca’s overcautious dad won’t let her date unless her older sister, the prickly and unsociable Kat, does too. Bianca and an admirer arrange for “bad boy” Patrick Verona to be paid to date Kat. Naturally, Patrick has a hard time convincing Kat he’s really interested in her; but by the time we reach the climactic prom, he actually is. Naturally, that’s when the secret about the bribe is revealed, leading Kat to reject Pat and storm out. When she realizes she’s fallen for him, and that he really does care, we arrive at the happy ending.

If A starts out pursuing B for base motives in a comedy, we’re almost bound to be riding the trope where an attachment that starts out fake becomes real. It may be a cliché, but the pattern has everything going for it: at least one of the lovers experiences a reluctant or unexpected change, providing a character development arc; the secret creates tension; the inevitable reveal produces emotional drama; and the shift from cynical motives to genuine affection pleases those of us who aren’t already too cynical to be convinced. TV Tropes locates this plotline at the intersection of the tropes “Was It All A Lie“ and “Becoming the Mask.”

For a grown-up example, try 27 Dresses (2008), with Katherine Heigl and James Marsden. The unholy motivation here isn’t money, but ambition. Newspaperman Kevin Doyle (Marsden) wants to shift from writing fluffy wedding reviews to serious investigative journalism. When he realizes that always-a-bridesmaid Jane Nichols has been in no fewer than 27 of her friends’ weddings, he figures that writing an exposé article about her is his ticket to making the transition to Real Journalist. But as he gets to know her, he finds she’s not as shallow as he thought. His attraction becomes genuine just at the point where the unexpected publication of his exposé reveals that he’s been using her for professional advancement. Because there are other character issues in play, a good deal of further action is needed before Jane recognizes that Kevin’s the one for her.

The Big Lie’s Challenges

A plot built around the Big Lie carries with it some difficulties, which any such story will have to face (or dodge).

One is plausibility. The bigger the fake, the more unlikely it may seem that someone could pull it off. On the other hand, the more entertainingly appalling the secret is, the more likely we are to let it ride, just for the fun of it. This critical leniency is what TV Tropes calls the Rule of Funny (“The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its funniness”). We can be similarly willing to bend plausibility on such grounds as the Rule of Romantic, Rule of Sexy, Rule of Cute, and of course the Rule of Cool.

More important, we may lose sympathy for the character who conducts such a deception. A lot depends on the original motivation: is it understandable, forgivable? A journalist, for example, can legitimately pursue a story. The strain occurs when the relationship becomes personal enough that the reporter’s aloof interest in a source begins to seem discordant, or when it becomes evident that the article will be taking advantage of the source’s vulnerabilities or weaknesses. If the deceiver’s uneasiness grows in proportion to those considerations, we can continue to sympathize.

What makes this kind of plot development understandable is that it reflects a natural progression. Our love for someone grows (sometimes, at least) as we get to know them better. So the idea that characters initially brought together for baser motives can eventually fall in love has a built-in plausibility. It also makes the deceiver’s change of heart more excusable.

Variations

There are enough different ways to run this plotline to keep the Cauldron of Story boiling.

In How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), both characters are initially acting from unromantic motives. Andie Anderson, like Kevin Doyle, is a journalist who wants to get more serious assignments. She decides to start dating a man and drive him away using classic mistakes women make. Ben Barry, for business-related reasons, makes a bet that he can get any woman to fall for him. The fact that each of them is in an equally compromised position helps take the sting out of the deceptions.

You’ve Got Mail (1998) develops into the Big Lie after Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) finds out that his intimate online friend is really Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), the same woman he’s skirmishing with about business matters—and he doesn’t tell her. From that point on, his actions are informed by something she doesn’t know. But the characters already have a nascent affection—he’s simply grappling with what to do about it without giving her an equal opportunity, which is not as bad.

The Lie is averted in Runaway Bride (1999). Ike Graham (Richard Gere) is trying to get to know Maggie Carpenter (Julia Roberts) better in order to write a detailed exposé and redeem his journalistic reputation. But in this case, she’s perfectly well aware that he’s stalking her for discreditable motives, and is willing to use that for her own purposes (and to mess with his mind). The plot develops in a different direction. (There seems to be something about this trope that attracts reporter characters.)

These stories, on the whole, are comedies. But the romantic deception makes up the serious part of the plot engine. It really is a genuine issue between the characters. The serious/comic combination isn’t really a paradox: a comedy of this sort needs a “heart.” Even a light comedy has to have some gravity, something we care about, at the core; pure fluff doesn’t hold our attention for long. Even a fluffy soufflé has to be made out of real eggs. (And that’s no yolking matter.)

Comedies of Errors

We do, however, also have a class of romantic comedies in which the deception is the comic element and not fundamental to the relationship. Typically this involves something minor that snowballs to absurd proportions, for comic effect. The deception isn’t about the romantic interest per se, but about something else. As a result, the people involved come across as kinder, and the issue of character and trust isn’t quite as grave.

A character might, for example, fall into a Big Lie by accident, and then (more or less plausibly) be unable to retrieve it. While You Were Sleeping (1995) is a favorite example of mine. Lonely Lucy Moderatz (Sandra Bullock) admires Peter Callaghan, a handsome commuter on the subway line where she’s a token collector, but she has never actually spoken to him. When he’s mugged and falls onto the rail tracks, she saves him, though he falls into a coma. A chance utterance from her convinces first the hospital staff, and then the unconscious man’s family, that she is actually his fiancée.

The writers go to considerable trouble to maintain that error while keeping Lucy’s motives innocent. By the time she has a chance to correct the mistaken impression, she’s concerned that revealing the truth might be a shock to Peter’s grandmother, who has a weak heart. When Peter’s godfather learns the truth, he encourages Lucy’s deception—because he likes Lucy and feels that she’s as good for the family as the lively, boisterous family is for her. In the meantime, Lucy develops a true and reciprocal affection not for the unconscious Peter, but for Peter’s brother Jack (Bill Pullman).

A relatively innocent deception might also be carried out for good motives. Georgette Heyer’s False Colours involves the Fancot twins, a responsible diplomat (Kit) and his rackety brother (Evelyn, which is in this case a male name). Kit arrives home to find Evelyn has disappeared just when he’s supposed to meet the family of Cressy Stavely, the young lady to whom Evelyn has proposed a marriage of convenience. Their flighty mother talks Kit into impersonating Evelyn, just for this one occasion, to save the pending marriage. Of course circumstances conspire to require Kit to keep up the imposture a good deal longer—much to careful Kit’s dismay.

Heyer is a master at making plausible what at first seems entirely unlikely. We hear that Kit and Evelyn used to pretend to be each other frequently when they were young. Kit’s real affection for his brother is the foundation on which his mother cajoles him into the charade. Moreover, no emotional damage is done, so Kit’s character is not impugned. When Kit falls in love with Cressy himself (she’s a much better match for him than for Evelyn), it’s not too long before he finds that Cressy has actually figured out the imposture some time since—and is much fonder of him than of Evelyn. Moreover, when Evelyn finally shows up (with a good excuse), it turns out he’s fallen in love with a different girl. So no harm comes of the innocent deception, and we can simply enjoy the ingenious maneuvers by which Kit manages to extricate everyone from the results of sailing under “false colours.”

Conclusion

The Big Lie is an inherently tricky device, and requires some care for an author to pull off without irretrievably damaging the character of the deceiving lover. Deception undermines trust—and the lover must be seen to be trustworthy if the romance is to succeed at all. Lois McMaster Bujold captured the point in a recent response to a reader:

The question a romance plot must pose, and answer (showing one’s work!) is not “Do these two people get together?” but rather “Can I trust you?” Which is most certainly not a trivial problem, in art or in life.

But if the writer is adroit enough, the Big Lie does afford opportunities for high (and low) comedy, and it can be managed to a satisfying conclusion.

Good intentions may pave the road to Hell; but on the other hand, dubious motives can be redeemed—if both parties are ultimately willing to deal with the truth. Since we belong to a species whose motives are seldom wholly pure, there’s a certain reassurance in that.

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