Touching the Face of God: Part I

Like Edgar Allen Poe*, I pride myself on being able to describe anything via the written word. But my confidence in my descriptive powers is a little bit shaken as I put the fingers to the keyboard to recount my first experience hang-gliding.

I’ll make it easy for myself and do the nuts and bolts first. Three of us did it: my former life-partner Shirley, author of Eclipse Court, our 14-year-old son Tristan (hers biologically), and me, on July 9 of this year. We did a “low and slow” session for rank beginners at High Perspective, a hang-gliding school north of Pickering, Ontario, near Toronto. (Our 11-year-old son Raphael, mine biologically, we figured isn’t ready for low and slow yet.)

What exactly does this involve? Well, after you sign the waiver (which is a very heavy waiver, requiring many initials), first you strap on a hang-gliding harness, which is like a big apron with leg loops, a big metal bar with a metal catch at the front and various straps that attach to a big carabiner at the back. And of course you put on a helmet.


Me in helmet and harness (photo by Shirley)

Then you get a little training using simulator devices: first, a big tripod with a hook on it and a bar that you hang from by the carabiner, as if on a glider, gripping the bar; this is to learn the way to move your body so as to control the glider.


Tris on the simulator, with James instructing (photo by Shirley)


In case you don’t know, a hang-glider is controlled totally by shifting your weight in relation to the control bar, which is a triangle of aluminum attached to the wings, so that you are shifting your weight in relation to them, which changes their angles and so determines your glide speed and direction. Sound absurdly simple and ridiculously physical? It is, and I’ll come to the implications of that, which are many.

We then used a dummy control bar to practice carrying the glider on our shoulders, which you have to do before you take off, and switching your grip from the glider-carrying grip to the flying grip. It has to be very, very relaxed, James, our instructor, told us – just thumb and forefinger and so loose you can slide your hand up and down easily. I will come to the implications of that very loose grip later, too. It’s key.

Then we and James hauled out and assembled the “Condor”—a training glider that is designed not to go above 50 feet—and carried it to the take-off starting spot.

Everything became more surreal from this point.

Before I go on: I am a connoisseur of fear. By that I mean, I have studied it (amateurly) in its myriad faces and varieties, both in myself and others. I have felt it, and fought it, and lived its nuances, and become very self-aware about how it works in me. I don’t think I am a naturally-fearful person, based on my experiences taking karate; I saw what naturally-fearful people tended to do, and what I did, and I saw there was a difference. But I have lived with an underlying crippling fear that pervades every aspect of my life, for as far back as I remember, and was in denial about it until fairly recently, because it goes so far back that I just thought it was normal, at least for me. Essentially it’s an aspect of post-traumatic stress disorder, from a traumatic sexual-abuse experience when I was a toddler, which I experienced as life-threatening. I’ve come to know fear as a wall that seems absolutely impossible to break through, fear as a paralyzing state that can sap all strength out of the body, fear as a living death; I’ve also come to learn how, at the moment of success in the face of what is feared, fear can dissolve into absolutely nothing in an instant, as if the wall was never there and the paralysis never happened. More than anything, I am very aware of how fear can disguise itself as reality.

So, as we got closer to the moment, by days, then hours, then minutes, I was naturally asking myself how nervous I was, knowing that I can be nervous without admitting it to myself. As we placed the glider for launch, I was nervous, but it wasn’t sweaty-palms or heart-pounding severe. It certainly wasn’t going to make me chicken out, even when James declared that in honour of my being the weightiest of the three of us (I am not svelte as I was when I was, say, studying karate), I would go first.

But there was this very strong sense of ‘I can’t believe I’m going to do this,’ which was as much amazement as fear, I think, which Shirley had too, though she denied having any fear at all. The calmest of us was Tristan, who genuinely knows no fear. This is a boy who, when he was two, heaved himself off an eight-foot ledge with rocks under it purposely. (Fortunately, he was merely bruised.) Put him on anything fast and he just wants to go faster.

How a low-and-slow lesson at High Perspective works is that you get a tow from the winch, a machine that’s basically an industrial-strength motorized kite-string. Michael Robertson, the owner of the school and a kind of zen master of hang-gliding—he’s been doing it for 40 years—is operating the winch, in one corner of this huge mowed field; you are in the middle of the field, several hundred yards away from him. The end of the cable is attached to the metal bar on the harness—to you, that is, not to the glider—and it basically pulls you forward and up into the air, exactly the same as a kite when a kid runs into the wind with it.

James hooked up my harness onto the glider, and had me do a “hang check”—he lifted the nose of the glider and I let my weight hang in the harness—to make sure everything was connected properly, which is done every time you hook in. Then he got me to lift the glider—the only thing that big I’ve ever been able to lift, with a wingspan of something like 25 feet—up onto my shoulders. Via radio he asked Michael to put tension on the line, while he had me stand still, resisting it. After asking me if I was ready, to which I answered the confidence-radiating “Uhh, I think so,” James radioed Michael, “Clear and launch, clear and launch.”

So there I was, looking through this triangle of wires at this long path across this field and this very distant machine (though Michael’s voice was loud and clear on a radio attached to the glider), with this cable attached to me and this thing on my shoulders that was, at least theoretically, going to lift me into the air. On retrospect, I was still really disbelieving it at this point, which I guess was at least part of the problem. I think also I was excited/nervous enough that my mind wasn’t all there, so I wasn’t listening to instructions as well as I would otherwise. And so began my pain and frustration.

It’s one of these things that you just can’t do until you get the feel of it, and you can’t get the feel of it until you do it. The cable pulled hard on me, and I ran, and what seemed to happen is that it outran me, and I ended up crashing to the ground without having got off. James told me that what I’d done wrong was held the bar too tightly. I hadn’t noticed how tightly or loosely I was holding; I wasn’t even really aware of my hands at all, just the running, and the emotion, mostly fear and futility. This happened about three or four more times, up the length of the field, and then I was too close to the winch and had to give up and let the next person, who was Shirley, have a turn.

She didn’t manage to get up on the first pull, but she did the second, and I asked James, “What did she do right that I didn’t?” He just answered, “Let herself relax.” No surprise, Tris had the easiest time of all of us. For our bird-boy’s last flight, Michael didn’t even have to say a word of instruction to him, he did it so perfectly. “Kids haven’t learned yet that they can’t fly,” he said to us afterwards, possibly explaining why Tris heaved himself off that ledge as a toddler. “But we adults have, so we have to unlearn it.”

My second try, I was truly scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it, not now or ever, and at the same time determined. Determined is the wrong attitude, of course, because it makes you tense, and I knew that. Still, the whole thing was more familiar now, and I’d seen both Shirley and Tris get into the air.

Oh, the worlds of frustration. First time I tripped and crashed… second time I just crashed because I felt I was being pulled too fast, same as the first times. “You’re still holding on too hard!” James kept telling me. It didn’t seem like I could control my hands at all. I started to feel, I’ll never get it; I’ll blow it, like everything else in my life.

I actually have not blown everything in my life, not even everything physical; I have a black belt in karate, for instance. But I blew everything physical as a child, because I was always more afraid than the other kids, and that habit of thought sticks. I didn’t understand the fear back then, and simply hated myself for it. Now I understand it, from understanding how huge the effects can be of a very early trauma.

Was I in tears? No, but I knew very well if I thought much more about it, I would be. I have been down this road so many times. I am in tears as I write.

But Michael and James have tricks up their sleeves, for getting recalcitrant newbies into the air. “She wants to let go, but her body’s not letting her do it,” Michael radioed James. I think if he knew about incest survivors, he’d have figured out that I am one (yes, that too—different series of incidents.) I have never met an incest survivor who wasn’t a control freak in one way or another, over-compensating for the ultimate helplessness. For all I know, he did figure it out. “No-hands launch,” he instructed. They’d mentioned this already—that sometimes, when people hang on too hard, they’ll get them to launch without holding on at all.

“Hook your thumbs in your harness,” James commanded me. “When we are no longer beside you”—it was him and another instructor’s helper, Clifton, who’d be running on either side of me—“grab onto the bar.” Clifton didn’t hear that, being busy, I think with the ATV that he was using to give us and the glider rides back to the starting point, because I remember him saying, “Um… she’s got to grab on sometime.” I told him not to worry, I would. Grabbing on wasn’t the problem. Letting go was.

I hooked my thumbs in my harness. If these guys knew this would work, I was willing to trust them. And I ran, and then it seemed I was crashing to the ground again, having lost my feet again.

But then, like a miracle… the glider and I were going upwards, with no effort on my part at all, no hands, no tension, no struggle. It just happened. Everything went smooth, and the ground fell away. I was flying.


This is the part that I have doubts about my ability to describe. There is simply nothing like it, at least not that I’ve experienced. I will never be the same person again; that’s how it feels. My life has become three-dimensional. Hang-gliding is transformative. (And it’s not just me, because Shirley said the same thing, and Michael knows all about it.)



If you are in an airplane, you feel like you are in a big metal container that is flying. Hang-gliding, it’s like you are flying. Because you are controlling the glider with your body—because the action is so absurdly simple and ridiculously physical—the glider feels like it’s part of you. (I did take hold of the bar at the right time, and controlling the glider by shifting my weight, I found easy.)

Once you are in the air, you don’t feel any danger at all; at least that was my experience. You never feel like you’re going to fall, perhaps because the sensory feedback of the glider is so immediate; you feel like it’s a pair of wings, and they’re yours. You feel in total control, because it does exactly what you want depending on how you make the smallest of weight shifts.

And yet my mouth was dry when I came down. Pure excitement? A bodily fear? Did I feel I had succeeded at something that was better than I, who always failed everything, deserved to? Or was it simply that I had really not believed I could do it, or survive it (Michael’s theory) until I did? I’m in tears again as I write—but very different tears.

Damn it, words simply cannot do it justice. Hang-gliding is spiritual. The title of this post comes from the poem High Flight, written in 1941 by Royal Canadian Air Force pilot John McGee, Jr., inspired by a flight to 33,000 feet in a Spitfire, but which applies at least as well to hang-gliding. (Incidentally, he was 19 when he wrote it, and was killed four months later in a mid-air collision, still 19.)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

I didn’t get to such an altitude, but the feeling of something divine, I did. The Christian worldview sees the sky as Heaven; I wonder, however, if what makes hang-gliding feel as it does is that it is so similar to the flight of the disembodied soul in the Eternal Return, between lives—the ultimate freedom that, at some level, we all remember. I know that when I want to describe hang-gliding to someone I ask them if they've ever had flying dreams, because I have, and hang-gliding is the closest you can come in real life to what a flying dream feels like.

Hang-gliding is a metaphor for life, at least mine—but then maybe I am not so alone as I have sometimes felt, and this is true for everyone. If you can let go of fear, let go of over-control, let go of self-doubt and negativity and pessimism, and simply trust that what you are doing will carry you… you will fly. Hang-gliding teaches you that in place where you learn things most deeply and indelibly: your body.

I am working on figuring out how to hook my thumbs in my harness in other aspects of my life.

We had time for one more flight each, and this time I managed a take-off with my hands on the bar, a nice high flight (for a noob), and a landing that was not that far off landing on my feet.



I was getting the feel of it, and we had to quit, as the sun had set. I can’t begin to tell you how desperate I was—am—to do it again. I really, really did not want to stop. And yet part of me still can’t believe I did do it. Shirley, same.

And I am already thinking about how to apply what I’ve learned to the writing. Shirley and I will be doing an IM role-playing/writing demonstration at Six Degrees Muskoka on July 18—the computer screen gets projected big out the store window so passersby can read as we go—and our plan is to RP and then write the first time Chevenga tries flying, me from his point of view, Shirley from that of Niku, who teaches him. (If you’re in Bracebridge, Ontario between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. EDT that day, check it out.)

And it will be beautiful, because now I know how it will feel for him to get hooked on… to do a hang-check… to be standing with this thing on his shoulders, looking through a triangle of wires and thinking, am I really going to do this? Difference being that he didn’t even think flying of any sort was possible for human beings, until he watched Niku do a low test-flight just a moment before.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we’ll be doing it again, but this time it’ll be tandem flights: going up along with an expert pilot. Michael & Co. do them right in our area, Muskoka, on the lakes; the glider has pontoons and you get towed up behind a motorboat. (See video here.) You go as high as 1,000 feet. This time it will be all four of us, and Raphi will have his first hang-gliding experience.

Best part: if you’ve done a low and slow lesson, you get to take the bar for a lot of the flight. That means learning a lot more. I will post Part II tomorrow later as I have time.

--

*“I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it.”

-Marginalia Part V, re “A Dream Within a Dream”

--

UPDATE: If a novelist is somewhere between a journalist and a poet, then I lean more towards the journalistic side, and Shirley more toward the poetic. See her blog post on the hang-gliding evening, complete with video and a very beautiful poem, here.

Psychological post-apocalyptic

Back to the joy of genre I guess... while figuring out how to promote my online works online (and elsewhere) I've had to sweat how to describe my writing. And I don't think I've figured out a good way yet. It's partly my own insecurities, which inhibit me always in describing what I do, but it's also that the Chevenga books were marketed as fantasy, but (as I wrote elsewhere) they aren't really, and they aren't typical of science fiction either. I suffer the curse of writing something unlabelable by the usual bookstore genre categories. Readers have been trained to seek out reading material by those categories and so they have certain expectations when they come to a work that bills itself as fantasy or science fiction, or whatever genre, and I worry that I disappoint those expectations.

An extreme example: years ago, I was sitting behind a table at a science fiction convention in some midwestern US city selling/signing copies of my books when a gentleman came up who had the sort of geekish, spacey, obsessive look you often see among male sff fans. I was getting ready to chat him up in a bookselling sort of way when he got straight to the point. "Do your books have any BEMs in them?"

"Umm," I said, not wanting to disappoint and also embarrassed to show my ignorance, "What're BEMs?"

"Bug-eyed monsters."

"Ah. Umm... well... no, not really." [Fast-forward to my adding woolly mammoths into the Lakan War the other day, and my description of one 'mamoka's' eyes: "black and oddly thoughtful, even wise..." Sorry, pal.]

Turning away brusquely without a further word, he strode purposefully to the next table, and the next author, leaving me with the lesson: some readers are really specific in their tastes.

Now the Fifth Millennium world does have some weird critters, another staple of fantasy, such as four-legged turkeys of the type we served up at this past Ad Astra, the dreaded giant cormorant of the eastern Miyatara, and the wing-cat, the most pre-eminent individual of which species would be Fish-hook, who, despite his innate feline indifference, serves a vital role in the plot of Shadow's Son. For those who haven't figured it out, they were gene-modified creations from before the Fire that managed to survive by going feral.

The idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth was prompted by the success of two teams of scientists in decoding mammoth DNA, nuclear in one case and mitochondrial in the other, in late 2008. It seems only a matter of time before cloning them becomes an option. Might we have pre-Fire scientists manage to revive dinosaurs also, a la Jurassic Park? We're not sure -- it's been done in such a big way -- but... well, you never know.

I particularly worry that I'll disappoint those who come to fantasy to read about magic, because I just don't do that much of it. I don't actually like to have something happen in my plots that I don't believe possible, either currently or in the future with further advances in technology along the lines of ones already happening -- the resurrection of the mammoth being the perfect example. It makes me feel like I'm trying to con my readers, feed them a line, and I'm not comfortable with that.

This is actually something of a bone of contention between Shirley and me; she likes much more free-wheeling magic and direct intervention by divine beings than I do, as witness her character Megan Whitlock and her Zak people of the northern end of the navigable length of the Brezhan river, who have been breeding for telekinesis, clairvoyance, prescience and other psychic abilities for centuries, call themselves witches and wizards, and in fact were themselves the result of genetic experimentation for the same abilities. We've both made compromises to meld our stories.

Now, to those who scoff at my claiming realism because, say, I portray the healing effects of whack-weed coming so fast [Note, Sept 11/09: the scene at this link no longer portrays this due to a revision, but I'll show it elsewhere] they are apparently magical, or it seems implausible that Chevenga could begin a defense to an attack before his opponent begins the attack, these two particular things along many other 'out-there' phenomena I included, I not only believe are possible but know are, based on personal experience. But hey... let the skeptics just think I'm writing magic.

Which leads nicely into my other reason for wanting to stick to what I believe possible; in my opinion, anyway, reality is vastly more amazing and wonderful and awe-inspiring than fantasy, anyway. Things happen in reality that are just way too weird for anyone ever to make up. In a way my stories are like my computer-art images: they're collages of snippets of reality that I've put together to create my own effects, much as the images are built out of net-garnered photographs conjoined.

Anyway, with respect to my internal struggle over how to describe my writing, the phrase 'psychological post-apocalyptic' came to mind today, and -- for today at least -- it's the reining favourite. 'Post-apocalyptic' applies to the whole series, of course, and 'psychological' is particularly apt for asa kraiya, which is essentially the story of a guy doing therapy, but with more sword-fights.

Oooh... the edges of the boxes are chafing me again... from distantly above, in my mind, the School-Marm of Genre is scolding, 'fantasy novels do not have Senate investigative committees in them! Bad and wrong! Bad and wrong! Bad and wrong!'

But psychological post-apocalyptic novels do...

I guess I'll see how the phrase sounds to me tomorrow, I guess, before I use it in any ads.

Yes, I revise things

I'm that kind of writer. I can't look at something I've written, even five minutes ago, and not find something I want to change. You might say therefore I'm not suited to writing an online serial novel; and yet you might say I am. Because, on the Internet, revising the published (i.e. posted) version is not only possible but quick and easy. I love that.

So don't be surprised if something has changed a bit when you reread a post. Or if you spot a typo but then go back again and it's gone.

I just did a big revision in post 20 of the revised Chevenga books, "Manacles with invisible chains," adding about a thousand words that I had written years ago, meaning to add if there was ever another published version, but forgot to include when I first posted the post.

What do I mean by 'fantasy fiction for Dems'

Posted on Daily Kos, 11:00:24 AM EDT April 17 2009

As a Kossack since 2003 or so and an online novelist for about a month, I naturally had Kos come immediately to mind when I was thinking about how to promote my work. The catch-sig-line "Fantasy fiction for Dems" popped into my head immediately.

I know intuitively what that means to me, but it occurred to me an explanation might be in order in case the line looks too much like pandering to the Kossack masses. So here it is.

First off, it certainly doesn't mean that Republicans aren't allowed to or shouldn't read my work. It's bipartisan in the sense that, in its world, there is no Repub or Dem party (it takes place in the fifth millennium A.D.) and Repubs of a thoughtful and non-utterly-wingnutty frame of mind might well enjoy it.

What I mean is that my personal values play out in my writing. (That's true of all writers; whatever your values are, they will come shining -- or oozing -- through in your work, whether you mean them to or not, and whether you are aware of it or not.) And they are "Dem" in an abstract way, meaning that many Democratic voters would hold them, with a leaning to the more progressive side. Egalitarianism, democracy, the recognition that power and responsibility are one and the same, tolerance for other cultures, sexual freedom, open-mindedness and a rationalism that doesn't preclude spirituality, especially the spirituality of personal experience (which is really the only valid spirituality to my mind), and probably more that I will think of later and add in a diary edit, are what I write about. (Tell the truth I'm finding it quite difficult to just declare them like this... I'm squirming.)

So if you're looking just for sweaty-thewed barbarians bashing each other over the head with swords (or "thud and blunder" as it's sometimes referred to in the sff world)... intrigues in which everyone's quest for power is mindless, vicious and unquestioning, in a dog-eat-dog world where everyone assumes that's as good as human nature allows... or freewheeling magical power without consideration as to what that would really imply... you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for a story that vindicates a belief in might-makes-right, as all too much sff work does, look elsewhere. I hate that shit. When I was much younger, I looked for an oasis of practical idealism in the tide of cynicism and indifference that dominated sff political discourse, and found it in a few works such as those of Ursula K. LeGuin and Joanna Russ... but there wasn't a big enough oasis, so I wrote more of it.

I am not cynical, and I try to make my work ultimately life-affirming and positive: about human nature, about the power of collaboration, community and love, and particularly about free will, emphasizing the power of choice.

So I've got things like a nation that runs by direct democracy, kind of like Switzerland... going through a soul-searching discourse when the possibility of conquering a slave-holding, tyrannical empire becomes real. Or a warrior-king trying (vainly so far) to put together a low-tech version of the United Nations. Or the female side of the spiritual culture of an oppressively-patriarchal society asserting itself the moment it becomes free to, and undertaking to rewrite that society's definitions of good and evil, and pain and pleasure.

My main character is a politician, and in the past few years my writing about him has been informed by things about politics that I've learned right here on Daily Kos... I can't help it. I am inspired, and heartened, always, by the intelligence mixed with compassion that I see in the discourse here, and I take that inspiration right back into my work.

So that's what I mean... I'm not sure the explanation does it justice, so I might come back and edit in the future.

Splash site for my online work here.

Everything I need to know I'm learning in Analytics

Google Analytics really is the most amazing service. Shirley and I have found it necessary to become a two-person support group re the googleanalyticoholism problem that we're both experiencing. The urge to go on and see how many hits we got today is irresistible. So is the urge, for me at least, to allow my mood to directly correlate with the ups and downs on those little graphs.

Analytics' stock-in-trade, of course, is not just to show you how many, but all sorts of other things about the visitors. The idea is to use this information to tweak your content and your promotional efforts. We're starting to learn that, and I for one have already made some decisions based on it.

Things I know about our readers:

• They are only a few at the moment, but only a month into blogging it's still very early.
• I have readers in Canada and the USA, no surprise, but also in Peru, Belarus, the Czech Republic and Australia.
  
• The geographical profiles of Shirley's and my visits are very similar, meaning a lot of the same people read both our blogs. This means that the crosslinks and cross-promotions are working -- which way, I'm not sure, but suspect it's both. It also means that each of us can more or less cut in half the resources needed for promotion, because anything either of us does will drive traffic to both of us.
• Promoting on Daily Kos works for us. My sigline, when I comment on Kos, is "Fantasy Fiction for Dems" and it links to chevenga.com. I did a snarky photoshop in a front-page comment section the other day, resulting in 15 recommendations for the pic -- but also a little spike in visits to my site for that day, mostly from Democratic-leaning states in the USA.
• After I SEO'd www.chevenga.com a couple of weeks ago, we're just starting to get search engine traffic. Getting search engine traffic for an online novel isn't easy because there isn't an agreed-upon term for the concept ("blook" also refers to dead-tree books based on blogs)... but then I already knew that.

More to come.

The joy of genre

When people ask me what kind of books I've published, I generally tell them 'fantasy,' toeing the party line of the marketing classification they were given by my publisher (and, not to single out Baen, probably would have been given by any publisher). But I often go on to explain that they aren't really fantasy, but science fiction, which no doubt leaves the impression that they're a sort of hybrid between two apparently inimical things, being as science fiction tends to be rationalistic and aimed at the left brain, and fantasy more symbol-oriented, allegorical and spiritual, aimed at the right.

I wouldn't call it a false dichotomy, but I would say that we all have both a left brain and a right. I will also say that anything that seems to transcend the divide I find totally fascinating, which is one reason I got into homeopathy, which is a whole other story I'll get into some other time. But let me give the definition I use to differentiate science fiction and fantasy. Since, as Arthur C. Clarke famously said, any sufficiently-advanced technology appears to be magic, and technology is advancing all the time so that yesterday's magic is today's routine use, the boundary isn't so clear. It can come down simply to what you think is possible or impossible, and that is an unsolvable and potentially extremely nasty argument (consider whether you think the existence of one or more spiritual beings is possible or not). You can read intelligent discussions by Lawrence Watt-Evans here and by Sally O. Odgers here.

But some writer, and I can't remember or find who else I'd quote and link, came up with a definition that I embrace, perhaps due to the elegance of its simplicity. It's this: science fiction rigorously postulates a chronological and causal connection to the real, existing world as we know it, extending into the future (extending into the past is the territory of historical fiction). Fantasy doesn't. That's it.

That means that not only is Lord of the Rings fantasy, since 'Middle-Earth' is deemed to be in the distant past but where and when exactly is vague, but so is Star Wars, set "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away."

Thus, the Chevenga books are science fiction. asa kraiya takes place in A.D. 4980, and there are some characters who actually know it's taking place in A.D. 4980 because one society has managed to keep the same calendar. Relics of the ancient technology are all over the place, from the Imperial Book to the moyawa, literal translation 'single wing', recognizable translation 'hang glider,' and legends and garbled memories abound.

However, that's a logical definition. The marketing definition, based on the projected tastes of readers, goes more like this: 'If the tech level is pre-gun so characters are running around with swords, and there are psi-powers, it's fantasy.' So that's the section of the bookstore Chevenga ended up in, for good or ill.

When it comes down to it, though, what fascinates me most is that which bridges the divide. So I am the sort of writer who, if I want to describe moonlight shining on the night of April 11, 4980, will check to see what the phase the moon actually will be in on that day (there's a website) and write accordingly; and I'm also the sort of writer who will go into altered states of consciousness (and not by taking anything), have spiritual experiences and bring the knowledge of "the other world" so gained into my work.

Considering how many other writers write both science fiction and fantasy, I don't think I'm alone in feeling that without both sides of the divide, we are incomplete.

Part of me, disillusioned with genre divisions entirely -- when it comes down to it, what culture other than the western, English-speaking one, draws a firm line between 'fiction' and 'fantasy'? ALL fiction is fantasy! -- just wants to make fun of it all, and perhaps leap on reigning genre trends for promotional reasons.

Fact is, Fifth Millennium is steampunk. Notice those goggles Chevenga's wearing in the pic, so as to protect his eyes from exploding laptop bits? More often he wears them while flying via moyawa. The mad scientist's cart of the inventor Diyadesai, the hand-cranked DC-generator the Haians use, the Great Press of Arko -- oh, the Great Press of Arko! Sneak preview description:

In a cavern in the cliff wall of Arko, by a rivulet that runs down through the rock and turns a huge wheel as in a mill, sits the great press of Arko, the first of all of them after the Fire, the only one for centuries. I have been there a few times, felt the sweltering heat, smelled the metallic air and the tang of ink, heard the booming and clicking and pinging of its works in rhythm more perfect than any human drummer can make. In the office where the scribes work, it is a deep thrumming that you feel through your feet more than hear, day and night, as if the Earthsphere itself had a racing heartbeat.

C'mon... how steampunk can you get?

Legal matters

It was a coincidence, I guess, one of those confluences that nature furnishes unawares, tempting us to see it as replete with meaning, that both of yesterday's posts were about specific pieces of legislation posing Chevenga problems.

[Disclaimer: IANALBIWOIAPLNS (I am not a lawyer but I was one in a past life, nuff said).]

I won't say I wasn't fascinated in my earlier writing days by things legal; it was yet another thing I didn't feel I was really up to writing about, and on retrospect I might have been right. At that age I didn't yet understand that a jurisdiction's legislation is actually a system, a big verbal machine with parts that connect and fit into each other and, one hopes, make sense, and which is constantly being revised and added to, like full-featured software. On good days it runs as if it's well-oiled; on bad days it clunks and sputters and makes ugly mistakes that ruin lives. It is both conceived and operated by those most imperfect of creatures, human beings, and so is at times necessarily, as the saying goes, an ass.

And yet, generally speaking, people see law as necessary to facilitate that most human thing of getting along. Given their choice and a sense of ownership over the result, they'll enact laws and more laws. For those of a libertarian bent who think of laws as inimical to true human nature, individual or social, so that regular folks would choose to throw them all off if permitted by their oppressors, I rebut by giving you: Switzerland. This is a nation of direct democracy, a system in which citizens get to vote on proposed laws by regular, frequent, mail-in referenda (or so it was when I learned about it; if I were them now I'd do it online, and it looks like they're starting to). The result: such a massive, detailed, ornate plethora of laws that it's hard, if not impossible, to emigrate there. If you weren't born there, you just aren't going to learn what is and isn't legal well enough.

(And yes, in case you're wondering, I did steal ideas from the Swiss political system in creating the Yeoli political system. Just wait until the Yeolis log on to the Fifth Mill version of the Internet...)

Anyway, in the intervening time between publishing my dead-tree works and now, I've done such things as researched articles on legal questions, involved myself in the regulation of a health profession in the province of Ontario, and even been involved in three lawsuits and a criminal proceeding. And darned if I didn't find myself fascinated (at least when the clouds of the emotional horror of injustice, in some cases, cleared). Law is all words, of course, so that an exploration of law is an exploration of language and meaning... and I'm a writer. But it's also language that has to work, like computer code, because it's going to be used. The precision of legal language, and the questions of interpretation that come up when it isn't entirely precise -- because of course it can never be perfectly precise -- I find totally intriguing.

To go even deeper into my own motivation, I think I also find understanding the law of a society that upholds democratic and egalitarian principles an empowering relief from the arbitrary capriciousness I was raised in in my thoroughly-dysfunctional family. When you grow up in a weird cross between anarchy and dictatorship, a working system in which everyone, just for the fact of being human, has rights, feels a bit like Nirvana.

So I was much less bored at the dronings of Sichera-e than young teen Chevenga is, and I realized a while back while doing preparatory work for ak that by the time he's semanakraseye, he's a legal geek, and then, aspiring to be Imperator of Arko, he becomes a policy wonk as well. I was at one time unaware that pride in a legal system was an option, since I'm Canadian -- ours just hums along quietly, for the most part, and we take it for granted -- until I happened onto Daily Kos and found Americans who were noisily proud of their system. And while it's not Chevenga's style to be noisily proud, he naturally feels that the Yeoli system is far and away better than anything else in the world, would love to export it if he could, and prides himself on having geekishly mastered its intricacies.

It also occurred to me that fantasy literature, for the most part, is missing that legal aspect. Sophisticated, complex, literate civilizations are postulated without any apparent written laws, and legal questions don't come into plots. From Hammurabi to Egypt to Greece to the medieval Church to China to the USA to the International Criminal Court, you can't have civilization without laws. Some might argue, law is civilization. In fact human society occurs nowhere without law. Stone-age tribes are not anarchistic; their laws are expressed orally rather than recorded in writing, but their purpose is the same -- facilitating everyone getting along -- and they have jurisdiction as strict as any silicon-wired empire's.

So, in the new work, I've allowed legal matters to take their proper place in the action. Chevenga's youthful agonizing over whether to reveal his secret is going to be more... organized... and questions of law will produce some interesting plot twists, particularly in asa kraiya. Two of my favourite new ak characters are kick-ass legal types who both give new and different meanings, at least in the fantasy genre, to the term "strong female character." Oh, are they going to have fun with Chevenga (no, not that kind... get your mind out of the gutter.)

Final note: I quote a line that my eleven-year-old son Raphi has been singing a lot lately, penned by that modern icon of astute cultural observation, Weird Al Yankovic, in his song "Jurassic Park" (to the tune of "MacArthur Park"): "A huge tyrannosaurus ate our lawyer; well, I suppose that proves that they're really not all bad." The question -- does it mean tyrannosauri aren't all bad because they eat lawyers, or lawyers aren't all bad because they taste good? -- is one of interpretation, it seems. The jury is out.