You may recall my story The Dissipation Club that was published in the collection "Dead but Dreaming 2" — I also submitted a story for a similar collection from Miskatonic River Press, "Horror for the Holidays", and it's currently looking as though that's been accepted. The story is "Season of Sacrifice and Resurrection" and is more canonically Lovecraftian, albeit without mentioning any Names. Fun stuff. "Horror for the Holidays" is currently down as "available soon".

I'm also having a story published in an Andy Remic–edited anthology under the title "Vivisepulture" — this will be available as an ebook, and the story is called Pipework, featuring an altogether nastier exploit of my supernatural detective Walther Cohen (star of The Dissipation Club and a few others that have yet to see the light of day.). Other authors in that collection include such august names as Neil Asher, Guy N. Smith, Ian Watson, Ian Whates, Gary McMahon and a number of other serious heavy-hitters from the fantasy/horror genre — including Andy himself. It's likely to be strong stuff.

Finally, and most peculiarly, I'm contributing to a collection of stories and articles that Storm Constantine is putting together on the theme of World of Warcraft, to be entitled "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been: Wilderness Survival Tips from the World of Warcraft (1)". I'm contributing an article about hunters (and the insects that love them), and also a piece of fiction, The Indecipherables in partnership with Justina Robson in which we mercilessly have a go at a considerable amount of WoW lore and intellectual property.

Finally — a reminder — signing in Oxford Saturday 19th November Waterstones, 12–2, Signing at Thought Bubble, Leeds, 1-2pm Sunday 20th. In between, much scurrying from place to place. Finally Friday 16th December 12–2 is the Leeds Waterstones.

(1) And even though I play the damn game I can't write, read or hear that without thinking of the South Park episode.

It ties in some ways with a future blog piece I intend to do some time, in which I track my dirty fantasy feet into the august halls of SF to talk about the current utopia/dystopia split in the sort of SF I'm reading, which I think has some interesting patterns. Now I've mentioned these intentions I fully expect to be silenced by fantasy's Big Brother for daring to open my vile elves-and-dragons-writing mouth about it . Perhaps the Clarke award will send "The Hunter" after me for my temerity…

However, there's SF and there's SF, and what I really have to say in this blog post is directed at the trailer for The Darkest Hour. And what I say to it is, "Really, Darkest Hour trailer, really? Because that's, like, the lamest alien invasion scheme since the Martians forgot to get their jabs, or maybe those other guys from that other film who were allergic to water, and came to one of the few places in the galaxy where it's at." (2)

Now bear in mind I'm working from the trailer only, here, so maybe the film makes sense of it. Many's the trailer that fails to represent the film it's publicising, although seldom does the trailer actually screw it over. So, what you're saying, Darkest Hour trailer, is that the aliens have a three stage plan: 1. Invade, check. 2. Eat all the electricity, check. 3. Kill all life.… er, what now? So, hold on, invisible alien menace, where do you think all that yummy electricity comes from? Have you heard the goose/golden egg saying? Isn't that like someone trying to secure a supply of hamburgers by wiping all cows from the face of the earth? Meh. Go back to your invisible spaceship and think it over. Just sign up with PowerGen or something.

And also — hold on, they eat electricity, but when they're around, they make electric-powered things work, like lightbulbs and car radios and, apparently, trams (2=3). OK, that does make for a really nice sort of horror thing, where you can have lightbulbs going on as the equivalent of T-Rex's ripples in the water, but isn't that like them vomiting up their dinner everywhere they go? What sort of crazy-ass inefficient metabolism do these invisible aliens have, exactly? Yeah, I totally had those human kids, but then I chucked up so hard I made a tram go, and they got away?

(1) Children of Men is in the same sort of category, and one of my favourite films ever. Also see Equilibrium which, while it didn't hit it off with me in the same way, has some really nice little touches exploring the whole "sensation" theme throughout the movie.

(2) I did not actually shout this out in the cinema, but I was thinking it pretty damn hard.

(3) Is this a spoiler? I don't think it's a spoiler if they put it in the trailer.

They're a staple of fantasy fiction that goes back to its most influential roots (1), and recently there's been a grand resurgence of books specifically showcasing thief leads.

(1) And I'm not qualified to go into the whole mythic archetype businss but, suffice to say, legendary tricksters and thieves show a basic character type that's probably as old as stories themselves.

Putting my RPG hat on for a moment, but let's make the grossly inaccurate simplification of three hero types — strength-based, wits-based and magic-based. Of these the warrior sorts are arguably the most prevalent and the most distinct from the other two. The warrior's first recourse is threat, direct confrontation and violence. That doesn't mean he doesn't have other strings to his enormously overpowered bow, but he meets trouble head on — look at the majority of David Gemmell heroes — or Conan, for example. Conan outwits or outmanoeuvres a lot of opponents, but generally when their particular abilities mean that he can't just stick a sword in their ear.

Magic heroes tend to shade somewhat into, usually, the thief part of the venn diagram. Magical heroes seldom resort to their magic in the first instance, and their magic is also generally less reliable than the warrior's brawn (it has all sorts of limits, or the story would be very short and quite dull). Magic heroes therefore tend to borrow heavily from the thieves in solving problems with their wits (Ged from Earthsea, Kvothe from Name of the Wind (2)) and/or their lore and acquired knowledge (which is where they start to deviate from the thieves who tend to be brick ignorant about most higher things). Some of them also fall back on the inner warrior, with Elric as a prime example — but the key thing about a magic hero is that it's the magic that defines him as a character. Whatever else he has, he is a wizard first and foremost, set apart from the host of muggles who, usually, regard him with suspicion. This archetype works perfectly well even if there is no magic at all — it's the perception of the wizard that makes it (Merlin in Cornwell's Arthurian series is a good one — is he magic, is he not, we just don't know). But I'm basically now writing the wrong blog entry. Thieves, then.

(2) A very thiefy magician.

A thief's first resort is his stealth and/or wits. The tricky, slippery thief often ends up in a fight, but seldom by choice and only when all else fails. There are some obvious and much-loved examples, but I'll fling a couple of names out — Leiber's Gray Mouser (3) from Lankhmar, and Tolkien's Bilbo Baggins. Seriously — OK, his being labelled a 'thief' is some clumsy racial stereotyping from Gandalf that has tarred every diminutive fantasy character ever since (4) but Bilbo is a sneak and trickster born, and he deals with almost all of his problems by outthinking his opponents — trolls, Gollum — he even gets the dirt on Smaug.

(3) Yes, Mouser knows some magic, but it pretty much drops out of the books by the end of the first one.

(4) Yes, even Fly-kinden. But they're tricksy, you see. Can't trust them.

So, who are the new usual suspects? I have four of them to lead into the interview room in just a minute, but it's worth noting that the genre is stepping beyond the stereotypical cutpurse and second story man. Traditionally, thieves steal by the fairly direct means of taking things without consent — whether from rich merchant's houses or cursed temples (5). Where they are a supporting character, usually backing up the warrior, they provide lockpicking, comic relief and local knowledge, and occasionally death with pathos. Where they are the lead, generally, they defy vastly more powerful enemies and walk off with their loot. Finally, most fantasy thieves are urban — even if they leave their home city they are usually back.

(5) Possibly only once.

However: tonight on the couch with me and stealing my wallet are:

- Locke Lamora, from Scott Lynch's The Lies of, well, Locke Lamora;

- Easie Demasco, from David Tallerman's The Giant Thief;

- Drothe, from Douglas Hulick's Among Thieves; and

- Warden, from Daniel Polansky's The Straight Razor Cure.

All of these have the classic thief's arsenal — they get through life by their wits, they resort to violence as a last resort rather than a first, and they defeat their enemies by being smarter, instead of faster or stronger. However, they're all stepping away from the stock fantasy thief as seen in some earlier books, and a thousand D&D campaigns.

The first thing that really strikes me is that none of this new rogue's gallery is actually the traditional fantasy thief. Locke is a con artist gulling the wealthy of their money with fantastically elaborate schemes, Easie is a thief, but far more of a roving rural type — something like Autolycus rather than the Gray Mouser (6) (8), Drothe is a professional informant, and Warden is a drug dealer by current trade. They also interact with the rest of the underworld quite differently — the traditional fantasy thief tends to live in a world where there is a Thieves' Guild (and often just the one weirdly unified organisation — enough so that Pratchett has great fun with the idea in his earlier books) but is usually no friend of it, and tends to be a rogue thief (9), loner (or working with a single partner) and freelancer. Conversely, Locke has his own gang, and it meshes into an overall network of other gangs under a nominal leader, Easie's world has no more of a guild than thieves who know other thieves (or at least we don't see it), Drothe is an integral part of a large and organised gang, which is itself part of a complex and constantly shifting gang picture across his city. Warden is aggressively a freelancer, in a city where most vice is controlled by warring gangs.

(6) That's Autolycus from The Winter's Tale (7), not Xena.

(7) And that's Shakespeare, not Helprin.

(8) Which I am constantly typing "The Grey Mauser" for some reason.

(9) Honestly not sure about the phrase "rogue thief"

Aside from Easie, however, they all maintain the thief's traditional urban haunts, although the cities have moved on from the MGM Middle Ages that a lot of fantasy used to take place in  - Lynch and Hulick's cities have a definite rennaisance feel, and Polansky's setting feels like a weird fantasy version of the 20's/30's crime scene, with ethnic gangs and a Great War in the recent past. In fact, as Warden himself is the equivalent of an ex-cop, and his story plays out far more like that of a PI than an actual criminal, there is a very pulp detective feel to the endeavour.

The other thing that caught my attention was the view of magic — and I think this reflects the changing attitude to magic across fantasy writing in general at the moment. Lankhmar was so full of magic you couldn't lob a brick without hitting two gods and a dimension-travelling wizard, but there was more magic in the secondary world in those days, and we have entered an age where the mystical takes more of a back seat to the physical. Easie's world has the fantastic without necessarily having the magical — there's nothing overtly supernatural about the giant of the title for example. Magicians figure prominently in Locke's life, to his detriment, but they have been reduced to money-minded, vindictive hirelings, with obvious parallels between their guild and the organisations of the thieves themselves (save that the thieves are far more congenial company). In The Straight Razor Cure (10) there are some serious wizards, but as in Locke's world, magic does not command, but serves, and the plot includes references to a magician corps that acted as combined special forces/artillery during the war. Among Thieves has a slightly different angle — the world is more overtly magical, with an Empire run by an eternally reincarnating Emperor who's going off his rocker generation by generation, but that sort of magic is for the high-ups — Drothe himself is no magician, but he knows and makes use of practitioners in the same way as he would do any specialist expert. Magic intruding on his world (and it's a major plot point) is something he could live without.

(10) And frankly that is one of the best titles for a book I've seen in a long time.

Finally, there's morality. Everyone knows that fantasy thieves, after all, have hearts of gold, and that their larceny always ends up serving the greater good. But that kind of Dick Van Dyke cheeky chirpy thief (usually a sidekick too) has also gone the way of all stereotypical things, and (again a representation of the current mores of fantasy) we're left with a much more ambiguous tapestry. Locke is perhaps the closest — as a con man, after all, he robs from the rich (because there's no point enacting elaborate confidence tricks on the poor), and he has an intriguing religious angle as well that sets him apart. Easie, on the other hand, spends pretty much the whole book trying desperately not to do the right thing, and his struggle with his own self interest forms the core dynamic of the book. Conversely, as I've noted, although Warden is a drug pusher (and addict) — mostly to the rich and powerful it's true — he is also a man who can't ignore his moral compass — and interestingly he lives in a world where crime matters far more: however gritty his world, the abduction and death of a single child is a matter of public outcry and attention, whilst in many settings it would be lost in the background noise. Hence Warden spends more time playing thief-taker than actual thief.

Perhaps most intriguing, from the morality point of view, is Drothe. We first see our hero having someone brutally tortured for information: he's not a nice man. However, he looks after his own, whether it's the people he lodges with, or his fellow Kin (thieves) — he has an extremely complex hierarchy of loyalties, but they make up a big part of his character and motivations, and in the end he is willing to take great personal risks to defend the Kin as a whole against threats from outside. This makes the relationships between thieves and gangs of thieves (and other organisations, such as the weird warrior order that Drothe's closest friend belongs to), their betrayals, shifting alliances and infighting, the focus of the book, all as seen through Drothe's eyes — at the same time cynical about it and inherently invested in it.

That, frankly, is far too long a post. Enough about thieves.

Varmen the Sentinel, of course, has his early history played out in Ironclads and The Last Ironclad.

Dal Arche and his little coterie of brigands first meet in An Old Man in a Harsh Season and another of their adventures is told in The Price of Salt.

Lowre Cean has a relatively small role in The Sun of the Morning, but his son, Lowre Darien, who gets some mention in Heirs, has his exploits told in The Prince.

Finally, the ghost story told by Avaris the Spider, towards the end of the book, can be found in its entirety here: The Dreams of Avaris

Enjoy!

However, I acquired some new reading material this Christmas, and I wanted to share a couple of quotes with you, one bizarre, one serious.

First off, I got hold of a copy of Jess Nevins' Impossible Territories. I've mentioned my love of Alan Moore, especially his and Kevin O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (4). Now, Messrs Moore and O'Neil have essentially ransacked the whole of human fiction for their alternate history, the major maxim of which is that anything fictional in our world is real in the world of the League. Hence the 19th century government secret agent super-team consists of Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, Quartermain, Mr Hyde and the Invisible Man, for instance — but that's barely scratching the surface as the graphic novels are vastly detailed, and have an even more elaborate backstory and history extending into classical myth and even further. Now, for one with something of a shotgun education (5), what one needs is some poor sap who's done the legwork of tracking down the legion of references, cameos, glimpses and inferences and laid them out in neat typeface: enter Jess Nevins, who has written just such a volume for each of the three League books to date. The books would be entirely readable, I should point out, if one had never read a word of Wells or Verne or what have you, but there are layers and layers of additional edification there to be had, and Mr Nevins is good enough to save someone like me (6) a great deal of work.

However, have you ever had one of those days when you just can't put your finger on the correct fact, and you leave it until later, just typing any old thing to keep the spacing right, and you know you'll come back to it later? It happened to British Rail years back, when train timetables were printed up including a linking service to Outer Mongolia, because someone was asleep at the lever when the final proofreading was done (7).

Well then, Mr Nevins (who I have a vast respect for, please note) was in the middle of annotating the League's history of Orlando, an immortal who has fought his/her way through most of recorded history (8). As Orlando stabs and seduces his/her way through classical times we have entries such as:

"According to Roman myths, Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the priestess Rhea, Silvia and the God Ares, were reared by a wolf…" because Mr Nevins diligently leaves no turnable stone unturned.

And so, when Orlando reports "...I moved on, fighting for Persia against Greece at Marathon…" Mr Nevins helpfully provides:

"The Battle of Marathon (490BCE) was a major victory for the Smurfs over the forces of Gargamel, and prevented him from conquering Oz and Wonderland."

Of course, I'm not as up on Smurf-lore as I might be (9), but I hadn't even realised that they were around in 490BC.

Or perhaps Mr N was just wondering how closely his readership scrutenised his references…

My second quote, now, comes from another seasonal acquisition, being George R.R. Martin's Dream Songs, a compilation of his short fiction which also provides a remarkable picture of the long and tangled career of one of fantasy's most versatile writers. I'd like to share from you a brief quotation that gives perfectly onto the life of a struggling writer trying to crack publication, and illustrates the maxim that you should take your triumphs where you can.

"Seldom has a writer been so thrilled by a rejection. A real editor had seen one of my stories, and liked it well enough to send a letter instead of a rejection slip."

 The Martin collection is well worth grabbing, not only for the stories themselves, but for the window it grants on Martin's early writing career (and pre-career).

As a final, final note, and back to the subject of the run-up to the release of Dragonfly Falling (and you'll have noticed the facelift the site has had), you could do worse than popping over to Fantasy Book Critic, where they have a giveaway of both Empire and Dragonfly just waiting for your entry.

And (finally finally) as Mihai notes below, there is a new and detailed interview up here at Darkwolf's Fantasy Reviews, which goes somewhat into the future of Shadows of the Apt.

(1) You will be unsurprised to learn that this means that I'm writing this blog entry later than I had intended. Really, I work better with deadlines. I'm magic with deadlines. It's all this free association stuff that's difficult (2).

(2) And the recent patchiness of entries has nothing whatsoever to do with the recent release of a certain expansion for a well-known online game.

(3) And by this I emphatically do not mean 'we'll see whether I end up regularly raiding Naxxramas'. Absolutely not.

(4) If you've only seen the film, for the lord's sake check out the original.

(5) As in patchy, not hillbilly.

(6) i.e. essentially lazy.

(7) A plague on the universality of the internet! I tried to track down the actual details to this story but google would only give me actual train timetables for Outer Mongolia.

(8) Based on an amalgam of Ariosto, Woolf, Borges and others, and having a distinctly Moorcock-Eternal Champion feel to him/her.

(9) They call it "Smurfology", but frankly the little blue buggers could mean anything when they say that.

Race and prejudice in the world of the insect-kinden? And the answer is Yes.

There are fantasy settings where everyone and everything is nice until the Dark Lord shows up. However, even in such settings you still tend to find plenty of social stratification and division of labour between classes, nations and races/species, but it passes without comment: the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, and it’s all perfectly lovely until those darned orcs (3) showed up rocking the boat, taking our jobs, leering at our women and wanting to live somewhere there wasn't a volcano.

Inequality and injustice amongst the insect-kinden, then, and by the bucket-load. The Emperor of the Wasps may not be Mother Theresa (4) but neither is he the be-all and end-all of evil. There’s plenty of evil to go around, large and small, overt and covert.

With Empire and its sequels I want to dig deep into that particular vein. It’s a topic that fantasy fiction is particularly well-placed to examine, after all: invent the world and you invent the rules, and so you can explore real-world issues with greater freedom than a book set in the actual real world. Fantasy has always been one of the traditional refuges of satirists – Gulliver’s Travels, for example, or Erewhon.

Social injustice (see the Steampunk diatribe here) is one thing, and for that it doesn’t matter if your Empire is Wasp, Roman or British. The Beetle-kinden are arguably the most enlightened kinden by our standards – after all they have humanitarianism, democracy, scholarships for the poor – surely they’re the touchstone for virtue? But in the interactions between the Collegium masters and magnates, and much more so when you get to the grime of Helleron, it’s easy to see that the Beetle-kinden have a far from perfect society – their elected Assembly is crammed with merchants and the idle rich (5), and haven’t you noticed, in a world which is by no means male-dominated, how many of the leading Beetles seem to be men… Perhaps the best that can be said for Stenwold’s kin is that they’re working on it.

Beyond their ivory towers, plenty of the other races indulge in the most open form of social injustice, slavery. Because of the focus of Empire the Wasps are the most obvious offenders, with their subject nations drafted to serve their war effort. It’s plain, however, that their slaver society is not purely fuelled by foreign import, as the case of the unhappy Hreya shows, sold to pay her family's debts. Alongside that, there is sufficient mention of “good family” to show that the Empire, whilst young, is already developing the hereditary divisions between “those who rule” and “those who obey”.

And of course there are other slavers: most of the Ant-cities, and of course the Spider-kinden, and there are other divisions as well. In Dragonfly Falling a little more light is shed on the Spider-kinden, the enormous divide of wealth and power between their Aristoi and their Hoi Polloi. However…

The division of the kinden themselves cuts deeper lines into the landscape, and (as Nic points out) this is another kind of social divison – the kinden are all human, after all, (for a given value of human, as Pratchett might say). Their adherence to their various totems has drawn each kinden away from the others, until each is far more distinct from each other than neighbouring tribes, or even nations, but the differences in physiology are exaggerated, in their minds, by the perceived differences in culture and character. Each kinden stereotypes the others (6), and yet I’ve done my best to clutter the books with individuals who are clearly far from the supposed benchmark, and who suffer under the prejudice of those around them: everyone knows that Spiders are deceitful (7), that Wasps are aggressive, and that Flies are shiftless, larcenous cowards. Except that there are honest Spiders, kindly Wasps, courageous Flies even (8)(9). Except that the greatest divisions between the kinden, the ones wars are made of, are carried on now solely because they’re there, just like so many cultural divisions in the real world. The Ant-kinden city-states are enemies because, after so long being enemies, each cannot risk proffering the hand of friendship for fear of being taken advantage of, and so they live swords-drawn, skirmish after futile skirmish, because it’s easier than trusting. The Mantids hate the Spiders because… well, do they even know? Is there anywhere, outside of the oldest scrolls of the Moth-kinden, that records why they hate them so? And would it even matter? Even if the reason was a good one two thousand years ago, wouldn’t it be stale by now? And yet Tisamon’s people hate, and hate and hate, because to be seen to be not hating, to be (spirits forfend) fraternising, would be the great betrayal, attracting the loathing of your kin, exile from your home. And then there are the Beetle-kinden and the Moths, whose enmity doesn’t perhaps run quite to plan, because the Moths (of Tharn anyway) hate the Beetle-kinden for what was taken from them, their great dominion of the Days of Lore stripped from them like a robe. The Beetles, on the other hand (and with the exception of certain Helleron mine-owners), in spite of a millennium of slavery when the Moths were their overlords, view their former masters with a certain bemusement. If they would only come down from the mountains and just take part, then surely everyone would be happy, no?

But of course they can’t, and here we get onto what the posts identify. The Aptitude gap.

It’s not unique in fantasy to have races that can, and that can’t. Often there is a mystic race with a magic power that the plot focuses around, and the bulk of the book’s population will lack that power, and be hostile and unpleasant about it, despite the fact that the power is the only thing that can possible defeat the Bigbad. There will be a race that is the sole custodian of the Old Magic. Or maybe there will be a bloodline, royal or otherwise, that is the only heritage that can awaken the Runespork and defeat the DragonGripe Doomlord. Perhaps one individual prince has a destiny, and if he doesn’t do it, nobody can. Is it any less inequitable when it’s not a race but a family, a blue bloodline? I’d say the fascism, the chosen-race-ness of it all, is the same either way. Of course, as the prince/family/last scion of the elder race is usually the focus of the book, and a terribly decent chap/gal to boot, one never quite sees the inequality, because we’re on the inside looking out. What about all those poor bastards who did their level best to defeat the Gripelord of Wunderbrar, and had absolutely everything going for them except a Destiny? Why then it’s just like Young Siward bearding Macbeth on the battlefield, after all: “Are ye born of woman, laddie?” “Er, yes, why do you ask…?” HACK!

And so (by a rather circuitous route) to Aptitude, the Big Division. Because there are kinden that Can, and kinden that Can’t (and depending on what you’re taking about it will determine which kinden line up on the Can side of the barrier). The Apt kinden are on the up, the Inapt kinden are declining, but’s that’s okay, because they have their spirituality, so that’s all right then.

Except it’s not all right. Of course it isn’t. Even without the Empire it’s plain that at some point the mining barons of Helleron are going to decide that it’s more cost effective to deal with their Inapt neighbours by force, and at the rate the artificers are changing the face of warfare, how long before even the Mantis-kinden find that they’re set to go the way that the flower of chivalry of the Commonweal went, when the Wasps brought their flying machines and automotives against them.

So, is it down to this? Even though there are many kinden lined up at either end of the pitch, has it come down to “white men can’t jump?”

Now I’m going to answer this in two opposite ways, so witness the equivocational gymnastics carefully (10).

Firstly, and why not vive la difference? If tribes and nations cannot have distinct traits and capabilities in fantasy, then where? Fantasy fiction has giants and orcs and elves and dwarves and dragons, and surely they don’t have to all be the same under the skin? If that’s the criterion then I’m royally screwed already because the Flies fly and the Ants don’t. The kinden are divided and defined by their Art – but they’re all human nonetheless, no more or less human for their spines or their claws or their ability to manifest wings.

But that’s not (I hope that’s not) the point being made. Aptitude, as opposed to the variegations of the Art, is a mental division, and those are the harsh ones, because you can’t see the difference, or lack of same, and therefore it’s open to that eternal hobgoblin, interpretation. Lord knows there has been some extremely disreputable psychological research into the “intelligence” of real world ethnic groups. This is (as goes without saying, one hopes) not the sort of thing I'm trying to pull. I have no ethnic axe to grind.

But the Apt/Inapt division is there, and it's real, and it's a large part of what the book, and more particularly the wider series, is about. The broadest way to characterise it is to say that the world of the supernatural is closed to the Apt, whereas the world of the mechanical is unknowable to the Inapt, but there are dozens of other, less obvious ways in which the two sides of the insect soul fail to meet.

Therefore, emo ergo ego, the division is real, and where does that leave us?

Well, the series is called “Shadows of the Apt” for a reason. Aptitude is important, to the plot and to the world. It's a multi-faceted two-way mirror with hidden depths (11) and you can be sure I’ll take my own sweet time about explaining why.

So much for firstly, so, secondly:

Just how immutable is Aptitude? After all, all Moths are Inapt, yes? And every Beetle is Apt, and never the twain shall meet? And what about Fly-kinden, so often overlooked? Apt, or Inapt? Because matters are neither as simple or immutable as they might seem. How impossible is it for that comprehension to come, of gears or of geases?

So, to round off, and inspired by the Alexandrian review structure, some quotes. The first is from Empire in Black and Gold:

‘There were a few exceptions, as always… itinerant Beetle scholars going native deep in the forests of the Mantids, propitiating spirits and painting their faces, and fifty years ago there had even been a Moth artificer at Collegium, brilliant and half-mad.’

but for the second I’ll allow myself the smallest spoiler, because it’s important: a tiny excerpt from Dragonfly on the subject of Aptitude:

‘“Magic, Gjegevey?”

            “Ah, well, my own people have uncommon views,” he told her… “You did not know, I believe, that many of my kinden are Apt. We study mechanics and the physical principles of the world, although in truth we build little, and that must be from wood in the main, metal being hard to come by in our homeland.”

            “I did not know that,” she admitted. “And so, I would guess, that you cannot help me.”

            “Ah,” he said, pedantic as a librarian. “Ah, but yet many of my kinden are not Apt and have no gift for machines, and yet follow other paths, the physical principles of the world and so forth and so on, that some might call magic. And so you see, we are in something of a unique position, my kinden. For we are not surging forwards into the, progress of the world of artifice, nor are we clinging grimly to the darkness of the Days of Lore. We are… in balance, I suppose one might say. And these two halves of our culture, they are not two halves at all, for each tries to share its insights with the other, and just occasionally some gifted man or woman of our kind can understand the both…”’

(1)   Originally written “baggling”. I have no idea what “baggling” might be (2) but it must mean something.

(2)   Having never baggled.

(3)   I always wondered if the Oxbridge Mr T's root of ‘orc’ wasn’t ‘oik’…

(4)   Still the touchstone of virtue apparently, or at least the cliché I always seem to fall back on when needing to contrast with someone nasty. One of these days the nasty is going to be Mother Theresa, and then you’ll be sorry.

(5)   And Stenwold Maker himself seems to have a ready supply of money, does he not?

(6)   And stereotypes itself as well, of course. How else to impose internal conformity? Mantis-kinden are especially guilty of this.

(7)   And yet they’re so damned charming that you never think about it when they talk to you.

(8)   Achilles, if I remember this correctly, asked to be given the courage of a fly, on the basis, I think, that a fly (one assumes the biting variety) takes on an enemy vastly greater than itself without hesitation.

(9)   And the Wasps see things differently, of course. They have their own stereotypes, and it’s worth noting that there are only two other kinden in the Empire that have any kind of civic rights or prospects, and Flies are one. To the Lowlanders, Fly-kinden are an underclass, useful for cleaning chimneys or reaching into the grinding works of machinery. To the savage, oppressive Empire, they’re useful and productive members of society.

(10) Definitely should be the new Olympic sport in 2012. That or Olympic Stadium Finishing.

(11) And mixed metaphors. 

There are lots of punk genres, but the original is the cyperpunk — a genre defined by obsessive technology combined with a dystopian, even nihilistic attitude: Gibson, Sterling, Bethke (who coined the phrase). I'm not going to reel out a brief history of cyberpunk here, but the two points above are very much the poles that the genre's washing ishung from. The technology is key — notwithstanding strong storylines and strong characters (and I've eulogised Gibson, particularly, before), the stories are generally about the technology — take the tech away and the story can't work. The grimness of the world supporting such technology is generally one of corruption, crime and corporations. There are few absolutes, few genuine heroes, few nice guys. Film has tried the genre with differing success. Blade Runner is a good example (3). Interestingly, although the textbook cyberpunk is set (a) on Earth and (b) in the relatively near future, it's entirely possible to have a far-future hard sci-fi cyberpunk — Morgan does it with Altered Carbon, for example, and a lot of Neil Asher has that kind of feel as well.

But what if you want the punk without the cyber?

The name, once tapped on the anvil and found to be pure (4), has spawned numerous spin-offs, and indeed there is a tendancy to coin a new subgenre for any given book: pick a concept and add "punk". Certainly, there should be a word for Mary Gentle's historical-magical Rats and Gargoyles, which is set several hundred years too early for Steampunk, but definitely has a lot of the punk to it (5). Thaumatopunk, perhaps? The possibilities are endless. One of my favourites is "Mannerpunk", used bizarrely to desribe the sort of social-interaction fantasy that is set in an imaginary world but frequently lacks even a mention of magic. The key example of this is Gormenghast, although what Peake would have thought of the word I have no idea. Still, the little thread of a genre keeps going. Hardinge's Fly-by-Night is more of a Mannerpunk than anything else, and I'd even make a case for Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell even though that has magic to spare. But then we're starting to talk about alternative histories…

So, Steampunk, then, surely the most influential and prevalent of the post-cyber punks. Also maddeningly difficult to actually pin down. As Empire in Black and Gold and the rest of the Shadows of the Apt sequence have distinct Steampunk features, I should really be able to say what makes a punk steam (6). Bafflingly, the term was invented by KW Jeter to describe the sort of work that he, Blaylock and Tim Powers were producing, in the latter's case specifically The Anubis Gates. Now I'm a great advocate of Powers, and yet nothing in The Anubis Gates or much of the rest of his work is anything like the steampunk genre that most people would actually recognise. Having made this bold statement, what would I put forward as the basic axioms?

- airships! lots and lots of lovely airships!

- Victoriana — whether it be the actual British Empire, Gawd bless 'er, or some surrogate: imperial expansion, a golden age of peace, prosperity and ruthless exploitation, workhouses, Dickens, the East India company, the rich/poor divide, all that stuff.

- a 19th century-styled technology far beyond the actual, and yet stylistically based on it: steam, gaslamps and clockwork can accomplish anything, up to and including the conquest of interstellar space.

- an abiding interest in inequality, deprivation, poverty, racism, greed and social injustice — the punk to the above-mentioned steam.

- usually, although not always, an urban setting.

Powers, for example writes in a real-world historical setting. Steampunk, as commonly understood now, is at the least altnerative-history, and often complete fantasy. The technology, especially, is almost-uniformly (7) impossible, often ill-defined or muddied-over by invented concepts like Cavorite or Phlogiston that perform whatever feats are requested without ever having to explain themselves. As long as it sounds as though Verne or Wells would have come up with it, that's fine.

However, this vaguary of technology has an unusual and beneficial spin-off. The writer knows it wouldn't work. The reader knows it wouldn't work. Therefore the steam is not the focus of the story in the way that the cyber is of cyberpunk. There's no point having a plot turn on some technical nicety of your machine, when the machine itself is held together purely by fudge and good will. But this has become, I'd argue, a strength of the genre.

Steampunk, then, gives a setting, and not a focus, and so the stories get a great deal of freedom within that setting. As for the setting itself, there is something irresistable (to me, anyway, and evidently many others), about the whole decayed victoriana, the empire propped up by fantastical mechanism, the ennui of the rich, the  nigh-slavery of the poor, the graceful bulk of an airship, the clean turn of the gears, the hiss of the boiler: Stephenson's Rocket become a world-striding behemoth. All this is dressing, though, to decorate the plot. The plot is whatever you want it to be

To name a few: Northern Lights has Pullman's other-Oxford, his demons, his church and inquisition, his soul-dividing machines. Foglio's Girl Genius is tremendous fun, classic extreme Steampunk with giant robots, mad scientists and other-worldly alien invaders. Alan Campbell's Scar Night (and recent sequel, Iron Angel) match up the genre with gothic horror, another (particuarly nasty) inquisition and one of fantasy's most insane cities, and unlike the two aforementioned is entirely within a seconary world, rather than an alternate one. The same also goes for Calenture by Storm Constantive, hosting several strong contenders for the all-comers maddest city championship, which by some lights at least is a steampunk. Oh and I could go on — Reeve's Mortal Engines, perhaps, and I've surely already rhapsodised about Perdido Street Station and its sequels, Mieville's tour de force of high fantasy social satire — but also arguably a steampunk masterpiece. The genre is extremely elastic, in a way that cyberpunk is not, and it all stems from the fact that, at heart, nobody's pretending that any of it could work.

And so, with steam power comes a freedom that the nanomachines and wired reflexes of cyberpunk deny us, and this freedom is almost always used to focus on the punk end of the equation: the unjust society. Whether it's the Magesterium of Dark Materials, Mieville's hideously venal New Crobuzon government, the religious tyranny that dominates Campbell's city of chains or, dare I submit, the wretched factory workers of Helleron in Empire, Steampunk settings seem to be an unparalleled opportunity to explore social wrongs.

Why? We ourselves live in a world that grew from seeds set down in the industrial revolution and ardently watered during the 19th century, whether those seeds are the locomotive or the spinning jenny or the limited liability company. If. at some point between that revolution and the Great War, the author inserts a key into time and unlocks the entire course of history from that point, then whilst technology may reach some never-never golden age of steam, we seem to find that society remains dragged down by its woes, that the bad gets worse, and the good attenuates — and this is just as true for a secondary as an alternate world: the phenomena is keyed to the sort of society required to support that level of technology. Freeing history that late in the day precludes utopias, and so the writer has the double-benefit of being able to build any manner of fantastic world out of the meccano of pistons and gears, whilst retaining that most elusive element of fantasy fiction: relevance.

(1) Reminiscent of Withnail & I, "They're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths." Not that, outside of the Young Ones, hippies and punks would have had much to say to one another, but both went the same way into the gullet of capitalism.

(2) This paragraph brought to you in as high-falutin' a manner as possible, for your reading pleasure.

(3) Some people would claim The Matrix but I'd argue against it being  cyberpunk at all. The cyber is there, but the punk went down the drain with the rest of human civilisation, and what's left is something more like "cyber-survivalist", a splinter genre that would neatly fit Terminator as well.

(4) An ideal metaphor when talking about cybertechnology, I thought.

(5) And the third novel of the series, Left to His Own Devices, is genuine cyberpunk.

(6) Stamp on his toe.

(7) almost-uniformly? What cop out is this? And yet if I said "uniformly" there would surely be some scientifically-realised steampunk setting out there sending clockwork spaceships to the canals of Mars based on absolute and indefatiguable logic, so I'll cover myself.

Because you've got to have orcs, right? Or insert your alternative — urgles(1) or cultists or zombies, demons, in short — minions. Dread legions of mindless (and most often useless) minions, so that your heroes can be greatly outnumbered without being overly menaced. And the minions, as well as being faceless and mindless and pointless, must also be evil. No, they must be Evil. They must be Evil not only in being followers of Evil, but Evil in themselves, by word, by deed, and of their very essence. That way nobody has to feel bad about them. Right?

I suppose the archetypal faceless stormtroopers are, well, the faceless stormtroopers of that other Empire. During the cold war, when other films were busy shooting commies (or nazis depending) it was all right to shoot the faceless stormtroopers, even though the assumption was generally that they were human under the shell. Interestingly, the clone theory was kicking about even then, to account for the stormtroopers, on the back of Alec Guinness' single offhand mention of "the clone wars." And of course, you have to feel even less guilty if you're mowing down faceless clone stormtroopers. I mean, there are always more clones, eh? Yeah, those clones, coming in here, stealing our jobs, all look the same dontcherknow. I bet even they can't tell the difference…

But come prequel territory, in allegedly more enlightened times, and even the faceless stormtroopers were too human to be mown down without a thought, and so we get battle droids, which are surely the ultimate footsoldier for the disposable age. Most of them are even remote controlled, for the lord's sake (2). Faceless robot stormtroopers are surely the ultimate morally justifiable kill (3).

Of course, and to your author's enduring disgruntlement, film 2 gives us the Geonosians (spelling? Can't be bothered to look it up), who are insects. Insects, in the world of Star Wars, are also morally justifiable kills, it turns out. Even civilian insects without weapons. Well hell, they're jedi, right? They're like paladins. If they killed it, it must have been bad…

And then we have orcs, fantasy's faceless stormtroopers, except that Tolkien gives us several little vignettes of orc small talk, and whilst they're Evil, by way of their very existence, they are as much victims of Sauron as anyone else — more so, surely. For all that Tolkien's characterisation can come under fire, he takes a few brief moments to let us know that there's more going on in Mordor than Aragorn or any of the rest of the righteous bunch (4) ever guess at.

But on the whole fantasy gives us hordes of faceless stormtroopers, and the soldiers of the evil empire/religion/demon lord/necromancer are Evil and Wrong and deserve nothing but an en passant death as the hero closes in on the villain. Right?

Well, I do occasionally listen to what people say about their preferences in fiction. Every so often something sinks in. A friend of mine in the army gets very het up about the whole faceless stormtroopering business, mostly because it tends to assume that every soldier not following the guy on the white horse with the crown (5) is Evil and Wrong. Which is why the Wasp-kinden in Shadows of the Apt are not faceless stormtroopers. Oh the Empire's a nasty piece of work, and lord knows, when you meet the Emperor in book 2 (6) you'll see that he's not exactly Mother Theresa either (7), but there are decent men amongst the Wasps, and there are pretty despicable examples amongst the other kinden too: greedy Beetles and deceitful Spiders, and the Mantids, don't get me started on the Mantis-kinden… But if the Wasps collectively are bad, then it is because the structure of their Empire is bad (8), and if so many individual Wasps are bad, it is because a totalitarian society run by generals and a secret police will forever attempt to mould its people in its own image, in order to justify its very existence.

And of course the Wasps don't think they're bad. They think they have a destiny. They're all about bringing order and unity to a divided world of inferior races that are just crying out for a little discipline, if only they knew it.

Similarly, writers like Erikson and Gemmell, who like to look at life from the eyeline of a soldier, are also sympathetic, and very keen to assign the blame squarely up the ranks of the Evil hegemony, rather than loading each individual footsoldier with malice aforethought. When it comes to the "only obeying orders" defence, they take each one as it comes — just because soldiers don't have to be evil, doesn't mean that some of them aren't, but it's a case by case basis. For all the soldiers intent on child-murder and rape, there are yet some who will turn aside from the act, finding room for mercy between the words of their orders. Erikson even mentions, in Toll the Hounds, soldiers on campaign who would, on finding the defenceless little peasant village, rather than loot it and raze it, take time to give the local badman a kicking and marginally improve the lives of those they left behind. Mary Gentle takes it all rather further with Grunts, in which the orcs very definitively get it their own way (9).

Because at the end of the day, faceless stormtroopers are a get-out clause. They allow the loutish hero free reign to kill and maim, to exercise his mighty thews, to pose (with scantily-clad maiden clinging) upon a pile of the dead, and feel no guilt. Dehumanising the enemy, after all, is one of the first rules of wartime propaganda. If the hero, after scything down a pack of faceless stormtroopers, had found in one's front pocket a picture of Mrs stormtrooper and all the little stormtroopers, well, then the big sword-wielding lump might actually feel bad about it. Just for a moment.

(1) Courtesy of Eragon, or at least the film. I get the impression that the wretched urgles were supposed to be, well, orcs, basically. However the film budget was apparently blown on the dragon, which meant that the poor urgles turned out to be fat, dirty men with bad teeth. The film's one redeeming feature was the way that the periodic shout of "urgles!" would go up, sounding less like the name of the bad guys and more like an alternative to "cripes!" or "criminy!" One can imagine Boris Johnson crying out "urgles!" if he fell off his bicycle.

(2) And just as well, because an army without an off-switch is a little bit more than your average nine-year-old space pilot can deal with by way of accidental damage.

(3) …er… and yet two of the main SW characters are droids, and even the poor battle droids get some (frankly woefully misplaced) dialogue that suggests that they have something more than a radio receiver in there. So, as they march to their inevitable doom, do they have dreams? Do they fear? Is their stand against the all-conquering jedi not mindless slavery but a strange courage?

(4) Boromir was always my favourite from the fellowship. Flaws maketh the man.

(5) The guy has the crown, not the horse. Or at least, if the horse does then I've not read that one.

(6) Spoilers, spoilers!

(7) Because that would be weird.

(8) And even that's subjective — let the Wasps win, let them overrun the Lowlands and establish their  Empire. Let's see whether later historians think they're bad, or whether they're lauded as the great civilising and unifying force, and mourned after their fall. The idea that the Romans might not have been such a great thing after all seems to be fairly new to orthodox historians, ditto Alexander the Great or any other successful conqueror. If Napoleon had won Trafalgar we'd all be singing his praises in French by now, you mark my words. What separates history's heroes and villains is not morality but success.

(9) And are still Evil and Wrong, and you love them for it.

However, whilst out trawling the net (2) I came across this very informative little piece by James Long of Speculative Horizons. Fantasy authors who don't read fantasy. What is one to think?

Now, as I hope that I've made clear by my constant name-dropping, I do, I really do read other fantasy authors. Why should this be taboo? Why should this be something that fantasy authors refuse to admit to?

Well, there may be good reasons out there. For example, Neil Gaiman, by his own admission, doesn't read anything that might relate to something he's planning on writing, in case it influences him. Well and good — however after he's finished a project, he goes right back to the bookshelf and tucks in (3) (4). But, nonetheless, even if dust lies on the bookshelf for years and yet more years, the leaves never cut, perhaps we'll allow that as a good reason to avoid fantasy: to avoid being influenced. The implication is still that you read it first, which is how you got where you are.

That's getting towards the end of good reasons. A mediocre reason might be wanting to avoid plagiarism lawsuits. As your legal advisor I can neither confirm nor deny its utility, suffice to say that I've obviously waived my entitlement to it.

A genuine ignorance of the genre is possible. If you simply don't read it, fine. However if you claim that, and then write this, people may ask how come, since you reinvented the wheel, all those spokes, the hub and the rim were just sitting about ready-made in your store-room. There are books that cross into the fantasy genre from outside, because genre boundaries are artificial and (yada yada yada see previous posts tagged fiction) (6). On the other hand, most fantasy books have strong and clear antecedents within the genre. You wouldn't write a haiku without knowing how many beats to the bar, after all (7). As a good example of this, David Gemmell wasn't a fantasy reader. However, he was a Westerns reader, another marginalised genre, and one can see the Westerns influence in his work.

So, what else? There is always literary pretensions to consider, which means that the writer is embarassed about writing fantasy, and would far rather win literary prizes for something about [1] being made miserable in 70's Liverpool [2] making yourself miserable in modern day New York, or [3] making other people miserable in nineteenth century colonial Madagascar, all ideally with a lot of sex, which strangely only serves to increase whatever flavour of misery is being experienced. This isn't a new thing. Ian Fleming, one of the most enduring writers of last century, was said to have looked down on his spy fiction as barely worth mentioning.

There are two things wrong with this stance, one overt and one covert.

Overtly, what the hell is wrong with writing genre fiction? Yes, there is a slough of bad fantasy out there. So is there a slough of bad anything else, including mainstream misery fiction. The only reason fantasy is marginalised so much is for thevery reason under scruteny - prejudice tarring every book with a brush dipped deep into (name of popular fantasy author deleted pursuant to legal advice), People who actually write the stuff, provided they aren't (same name deleted) should surely take a more enlightened view of the genre (or else, they surely implicitly say, "I am a literary figure, all you other fantasy hacks are a bunch of wierdos")

Covertly, then, and this is James Long's very well made point, if you do down the genre that is, let's face it, your bread and butter, then you slap your fanbase in the face. You as much as tell them that they're all the more fool for buying your books and lowering themselves to the level of your writing, and why aren't they out there ploughing through War and Peace (8) like self-respecting literati. Nobody wins, from that argument.

This was supposed to be a brief post. That presumably means the next one will be enormous.

(1) Actually I may never have threatened that, or at least I may only have threatened that to myself.

(2) And a thousand fishermen throw their hands up in horror. "Trawling the net? Trawling the net? Yarrr, what be he thinkin' with this outlandish mode o'speech?"

(3) So, for example, once he'd got shot of American Gods (one of those genuine must-read books) he allowed himself to go back to Wotan (John James, and also worth a read if you can find it) (5)

(4) Yes, Neil Gaiman eats books, you heard it here first.

(5) If you're wondering how I'm such bosom buddies with Mr G, he tells all in Adventures in the Dream Trade.

(6) I've never had cause to write "yada" before. It puts me in mind either of a particularly verbose Jedi master or a vocal equivalent of dadaism.

(7) In fact, whilst writing most forms of poetry without any knowledge of the form may yield at least some kind of modernist verse, an uninformed haiku would just be Some Words.

(8) Still haven't read it. It's on my "to do" list. And thereby hangs a postscript purely for those who bother with the annotations. Just Because You Read Fantasy Fiction doesn't mean that it has to be All You Read.

I'd like to thank (1) everyone who turned up at the booksigning in Reading. I hear we shifted a goodly number of books and the shop is extremely keen to repeat the experiment come book 2. For those that are already looking ahead, by the way, Dragonfly Falling (2), Shadows of the Apt 2, should be hitting the shelves around February next year — rumours of November 08 that I myself may have peddled look to have been somewhat exaggerated. The third volume, currently entitled Blood of the Mantis (3) (4) will hopefully be around July-August 2009 therefore.

There has been some critique already. Some kind readers have reviewed Empire for Amazon (5), and there is a very detailed piece on Fantasy Book Critic here which takes advantage of a medium where a reviewer can take his time. On paper, both SFX and Death Ray have also taken a look at it for their book review pages, and there's a little SFX interview here in which certain dark secrets are revealed.

Don't forget, for anyone within reach of the Leeds area, I'll be doing some manner of reading and/or talk and a signing at Garforth library around 10.30am Saturday the 12th in aid of the local independent bookshop.

(1) In fact it's my blog so I will thank them.

(2) As one reader of book 1 pointed out, when they heard the title, "Well things aren't looking good for him then…"

(3) Or him, for that matter…

(4) Former working title Mantis Shadows but that went out of the window when the series was rechristened Shadows of the Apt. You can have too many shadows.

(5) It's a testament to the ubiquity of the online bookseller site that I can just say "Amazon" and everybody knows what I mean. The possibility that missionaries might even now be sculling down the river, preaching Empire in Black and Gold to tribes never before encountered by the corruptions of our civilisation doesn't feature into it, which is a shame.