Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (12 page)

Since we have by now established a setting and given him a name, the reader can be trusted to fill in the details of some sort of stereotypical Oxfordian professor, perhaps a blustery, bossy or jolly type. It is important to trust the reader (because you have no choice not to) to fill in lifelike details. The bit of business of stealing a drink establishes that the two characters are friends. The use of the word “lad” and other clues show that the professor is either the older or the superior of the viewpoint character.

Please note that the technique for establishing character is the same as the technique used for establishing setting.

The paragraph does NOT say, “MacNab and I are old friends, despite that he is my mentor, and we were at ease with each other, even during desperate and dangerous situations. He helped himself to my drink without asking while my hands were full, which I thought was annoying, but forgivable. We share things like friends, but sometimes he shares more of my things than I do of his.”

What the paragraph does instead is put on clues that are unique to relationships of that kind, so that the reader deduces, rather than is told, that the relationship is one of that kind, a close but unequal one.

Again, having MacNab steal the drink but then complain about it, is meant to be funny, or at least ironic. Since MacNab makes several comments about drinking, the reader fills in the blank that he is a hard drinking man, who has (or who imagines he has) a discriminating taste in alcohol.

Notice the difference a small change in one of these clues can have. Had MacNab taken the drink, but instead of calling it bathtub swill, sighed and said, “Sorry to nick your drink, Old Man, but running is thirsty work! I’ve seen things this night—well, never mind what I have seen. Fear can dry your mouth out, that’s all. And too much fear—damn, I am parched, that’s all.”

This would have been of a different tone, but still setting out hooks and lures. The speaker interrupts himself, and does not say of what he is afraid, or from whom he was running, and this provokes reader curiosity again. It also would set a slightly more serious and menacing tone than the tone I selected. Selecting tone is a matter of judgment. The only general rule is that the tone should reinforce the general tone of the story. Don’t start a horror story with a joke; don’t start a joking story with a horror.

There is a certain delicate judgment involved in character development, since the selfsame words which strike one reader as funny will strike another as repellent. The only solution there is to be careful about first impressions, and to keep a certain consistency to re-enforce the impression you want to persuade the reader to create in his imagination.

This, by the way, is why writers use stereotypes. Far from being the evil thing all the rest of the world regards them as being, writers cannot write without stereotypes of people, places and things, and this is because our entire art consists of creating the illusion of a complete picture or a complete world out of a splinter or fragment of description, with the reader’s imagination filling in the majority of the details. One cannot do this without knowing what pictures the reader is likely to have in his imagination beforehand.

What the reader wants not to do is to find himself being asked to use the stereotype in his head in a tired, trite, shopworn, or expected way, because then the reader notices, and is rightly put off by the trick being pulled on him.

The defining characteristic of stereotypes is that they are unadmitted, unthinking, unconscious and unselfconscious, and using a stereotype in an expected way brings to the reader’s attention that he has these stereotypical sets of assumptions floating around in the back of his mind — and many a reader (especially a reader who thinks of himself as thoughtful) is a little miffed to discover that these unthinking assumptions are there, or are being played upon.

A reader whose stereotype assumptions differ from your own is even more aware. I recall reading a short story where, for example, nothing was described of the character aside from that he was a CIA agent. The writer expected me to fill in the details, so I (who come from a military background) filled in the details of a stalwart and patriotic member of the intelligence community. The writer (who must have come from a different background) told the story as if the character’s sinister and malign nature had been established—because, to him, the stereotype of the CIA agent is sinister and malign. And for me the spell was broken.

One way to avoid that error is to make sure that you use at least two stereotypes, preferably two stereotypes that contradict each other when describing any one character. In Tolkien, for example, Bilbo Baggins of Bag End is both a dragon-hunting adventurer friendly to elves and wizards and also an overweight avuncular old bachelor who complains about guests hanging on the doorbell all day. Kal-El of Krypton is both a heroic Herculean strongman and also a mild-mannered reporter. Fu Manchu of the Si Fan is both a criminal conspirator and also a dignified Mandarin too proud to break his word, and a scientific genius. Note that each of these qualities could be described (or, better yet, adumbrated) in a sentence or two, but that the character also possesses an opposite quality.

While Bilbo, Superman, and Fu Manchu at one time or another, have been denounced as being stereotypes, note their enduring popularity; and compare them to the relatively flat and uninteresting versions of their less famous imitators, Curzad Ohmsford of Shady Vale, Marvelman, and the Mysterious Wu Fang. If you said “Who?” at these names, my point is made.

What makes Bilbo different from every other knight errant is that he is a short little stay-at-home squire. What makes Superman different from other vigilante supermen is that he is a hick farmboy trying to make good in the Big City. What makes Fu Manchu different from other crime lords is his code of impeccable honor. The first two are heroes you can feel sorry for; and the last is a villain you can admire.

The next paragraph is the first satisfaction of the curiosity provoked in the first paragraph. The thing that is not the corpse of a child and not a human being is described. The details are meant to fit in to some sort of picture the reader is forming in his mind, but not fit nicely or precisely, so that the reader can sort of tell what is going on (we do not want the reader totally lost at sea, lest he put the book down) but not allowing the reader to see all that is going on.

The reason for this is allure: it is like the striptease mentioned above. When the nubile young doxy pushes the loop of fabric off her shoulder, and turns away, and looks back over her shoulder with half-lidded eyes, it is meant to allure the filthy old voyeurs in the audience into seeing the beginning of the curvaceous delight of the bosom exposed, but not all, not quite, not yet. A young woman taking off her bra when no one is looking does so in a more businesslike way, and the allure is minimal.

The paragraphs after each serve two purposes at once. Each one is supposed to answer, or partly answer, the readers’ question about what is going on, but then also to raise a new question or new twist on an old question. Pacing is the art of placing the questions and answers not too close together and not too far apart to keep the reader turning pages.

You tell the reader the corpse is not a human being. This raises the question of what it is. Then you mention German agents to make the reader raise the question of what the Germans are up to. Then you tell the reader what the corpse is: a short humanoid dressed in green and yellow. You mention what slew the corpse, something called the Great Fear. This raises the question of who or what is the Great Fear. Then you tell the reader what the German agents were up to, trying to smuggle the hobbit down the Thames. Then you mention Darker Powers. This raises the question of what are the Darker Powers and what kind of dread and hellish thing do you use a crucifix rather than a Tommygun to face? Then mention that they may be coming here. Then say there is a knock at the door.

It is a simple pattern with many variations: question, distraction, second question, first answer, second distraction, third question, second answer, and repeat. The longer the pause between question and answer, the longer the reader is kept lost at sea.

The biggest question,
will the hero slay the villain and get the girl?
has to be introduced in the first chapter and kept until the last chapter to answer. So you either have to introduce the villain, or the clue leading to the henchmen leading to the villain, in the first chapter, or you have to introduce the girl and make her seem lovely to the reader. If your hero is a Hobbit rather than a Frenchman, you are allowed to introduce a lovely bit of home and hearth and beloved countryside rather than a lovely girl.

The villain can be anything (animal, vegetable or mineral) that the hero hates or fears or needs to overcome.

The clue that starts the thread that leads to the villain can be a very small thread indeed. Consider the following opening of two paragraphs, eight lines in total:

“When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

“Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return. The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure. And if that was not enough for fame, there was also his prolonged vigour to marvel at. Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins. At ninety he was much the same as at fifty. At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved; but unchanged would have been nearer the mark. There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth.”

The thin thread here is that, of course, it is too much of a good thing that anyone should possess perpetual youth and inexhaustible wealth. That thread leads step by darker step to a magic ring, which turns out to be a cursed magic ring, and the curse is from the darkest of Dark Lands itself. Mr. Bilbo’s perpetual youth is not just unnatural, it is a gift from the pit of Hell, and the Witch King on a black steed is already being drawn and lured toward peaceful Hobbiton by the dread ring, the Ruling Ring, the One. The Witch King is but a lesser shadow of the Great Shadow. And the gold band on the stubby hand of the silly little hobbit man is the power that can enslave the will, darken minds, corrupt souls, and ruin the world. The thread leads all the way to the Cracks of Doom.

Tolkien knew what he was doing; for he actually introduces his villain in the second paragraph of page one. The reader wonders at the long life of the harmless country squire, and may perk up his ears, but he is not yet to suspect the chain leading back link by link to the Dark Tower. The question of “Why is Bilbo so lucky?” leads, question by question, to the question, “Now that Frodo is broken by the Ring, and put it on his finger while standing in the very Cracks of Doom in the center of the Dark Land, how can the world be saved when destruction seems certain? And where did that wretched Gollum go?”

Just as the villain does not need to be a villain, so too the girl does not need to be a girl, or even a human being, or even a physical thing, she only needs to be something, anything, precious to the hero that he seeks and follows and vows to win. She can also be at the end of a very long thread with many twists and turns, but the beginning of the thread has to be in chapter one.

All the little questions follow smaller arcs within the chapters.

Please note the difference between a science fiction reader and a normal reader or “muggle” at this point. A muggle has a very low tolerance to no tolerance for being lost at sea when it comes to matters of unearthly or extraterrestrial props, setting, events. If the scene is too strange to him, he will not make the imaginative leap to fill in the details, his mind will be blank of images, and the strangeness will repel rather than allure. He will say, “but that is not real!” and the hypnotic spell will break, and he will close the book.

Science fiction readers are the opposite. They like the sensation of being lost at sea and not knowing what is going on, and will wait with the patience of Job to be allowed to figure out the unreal reality, provided, of course, that you play fair with them, and actually have a real unreal reality to figure out.

Let me emphasize two points:

Point one: first, this willingness to be lost tends not to work across genre boundaries. The reason why a collective groan of disbelief rose up to heaven from the massed fans of
Star Wars
was because of one line in one scene in
The Phantom Menace
, when the Jedi says Jedi powers are based, not on a mystical energy field binding the galaxy together, but due to microscopic bodies in the bloodstream. The groan was because the genre boundary had been crossed.

A mystic energy field is something everyone sort of recognizes from New Age ideas, or Theosophy, or Oriental humbug. It is a simple and clear idea, and it is a mythic idea, from a fantasy story or a fairy tale, including fairy tales taking place “Once upon a time long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The mystic energy field fits the mood and fits the tone because it fits the genre of the fairy tale.

Microscopic psionic organisms are a “nuts-and-bolts SF” sort of idea, not from fairy tales but from “hard” SF, the sort of thing Larry Niven might invent to explain the esper powers of Gil Hammond or of the Thrint Slavers, but not the sort of thing found in the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. It was tin-eared on the part of George Lucas, it broke the mood and thus broke the hypnotic spell of the story, and that is why every fan groaned. It violated the boundary between fairy tale conventions and Hard SF conventions.