New Essay in Clarkesworld Magazine: “Frodo is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic”

I’ve said this before: magic should not be science. Magic can be systematic and internally consistent, but it shouldn’t be reduced to a human tool, like astronomy or chemistry. A lot of writers and worldbuilders don’t seem to understand the difference–didn’t Arthur C. Clarke famously say that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?”

But there is a difference. That’s what my new essay is about.

In this essay, titled “Frodo is Dead” I wanted to show how basing magic off of science, ration, and the Enlightenment philosophies that informed them inevitably leads to a breakdown of its fantasy world by turning it into a mirror of our world.

You can read the essay here on Clarkesworld!

September 11, 2016

THE OCCULT READING LIST VOL. 3: Three Body Problem, Language as Magic, and New Retro Wave

This is Vol. 3 of the Occult Reading list, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week.

Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.

Disclaimer: There’s no conspiracy between me and New Retro Wave–I just listen to their songs all the goddamn time. But if they want to talk sponsorship deals, I’m down to sell out and get some of that sweet 80’s merch.

Trevor Something, give me a call. We’ll work something out.

“It’s like people only do things because they get paid. And that’s just really sad.”

THE Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This is the Hugo Award-winning sci-fi book by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. It’s garnered some unreal praise, and I finally got around to reading it. So far, I’m 200 pages in and I’m not a fan. Putting aside the difficulties of translation, the plot and pacing are where the book comes up seriously short. So far, the plot has been a very choppy clockwork affair, with the main character essentially shuttling himself from place to place, listening to exposition, then periodically popping in to the VR world of Three Body. Every exposition scene happens almost back-to-back, with Wang Miao acting as a plot-automaton who decides, “hey, let’s give this person a call,” followed immediately by “let’s visit this person,” and then “they told me to visit this person, so let’s go here and speak to this person.” Rather than Jack Bauer in 24, who is propelled from place to place by desperation, gunfire, and a constant stream of new discoveries, the countdown Wang faces doesn’t drive the action, and the only thing Wang needs to do is go to places so people can talk at him. There’s no tension or challenge to ferreting out the information he needs, and the plot comes off as a series of mechanical scenes strung together without much attempt at subtlety or tension. The scene in which Wang discovers the murder of Shen Yufei and listens to the revelations of her husband are the worst perpetrators of this.

On top of the lackluster plotting, the video game world of Three Body ends up being a bizarre, pseudo-metaphorical dream sequence. Unlike Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse in Snow Crash or William Gibson’s Grid in Neuromancer, the rules and logic of the virtual world are opaque and confusing. Characters can randomly speed up the passage of time as it suits them, the logic and mechanics behind player dehydration are completely unexplained (do they go into spectator mode? Log out?), and it’s not even clear if the entities Wang is encountering are NPCs or players. The most baffling question is about advancement: the game revolves around trying to predict the movements of the sun, but a succession of players (if they’re indeed human players) seem to put forth antiquated versions of the solar system. No human player but the protagonist seems to contribute to the game or its advancement but the protagonist, who always arrives at exactly the right time to see the key developments.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but already I’m feeling like The Three Body Problem is going to be a monumental disappointment.

7 Different Ways Fantasy Has Used Language as Magic

This is a nice survey of how different fantasy series have used language as the basis for magic systems (a topic I’ve written about in relation to both binary and poetry). It deals with the big-name franchises, including LoTR and Harry Potter, but also The Spellwright Trilogy and video games like Skyrim and Treasure of the Rudras.

I still remember opening up a book in Morrowind after clearing out a den of necromancers and reading about the Nords shouting down their enemies’ walls with the magic of their voices, and how the most powerful had to be gagged to keep their voices from destroying everything around them. At the time, I thought “They could never turn that into a real magic system. It’s cool flavor, though.”

So it was an awe-inspiring bash to the head to find out that that little, innocuous passage from the early 2000s was kept in mind across the development of Oblivion and brought to glorious fruition in a fully realized magical language and system in Skyrim. Next, I want to see the snake people from that one hidden continent!

No Mother Tongue: Language in the world of Magic

This is a cool little post from V.E. Schwab, author of A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows, both of which I own (thanks, publishing friends!). Schwab touches on the difficulty of composing languages for a fantasy world, as well as the promise: she explains how the poetry and sound of language can reveal something about the nature of the world and its speakers, and how it can immerse a reader in the world of the story by forcing them “to learn as they go, just as travelers would, when passing through a foreign land.”

Schwab also touches on the dangers of fantasy languages: “Used poorly, fictional languages can feel like a wall, preventing all but the well-versed from feeling included in a world.” I’ve seen this pretty often, and it comes from the tricky management of a learning curve within the narrative, by which a reader learns about the world, the culture, and the events of the book. Introducing too much foreign information leads to alienation and frustration, like a mother spelling out words so she can speak over the head of a toddler. “Don’t you know what a ba’aleth is, reader? No? It’s very important.”

Fuck that noise.

Thoughts on Nomenclature in Fictional Worlds

This is just a couple thoughts from Eric Honour, who has a page on Medium. It’s mostly some criticism on the simplicity and lack of verisimilitude that characterizes language and naming in fantasy. One thing he touches on is how monolithic language and names become when the creator just sits down and pushes two words together like a caveman, like “Iron Walker” or (my personal pet peeve term from Dune) “lasgun”. But one particular insight from Eric struck me:

“This is something that turns me off about a lot of fantasy. It’s also something that I can see is difficult to navigate — having multiple names for things is more realistic, but also can feel like it’s overwhelming the reader. Real-life historical names are full of metonymy and misapplication and the shifting sands of living language, and that’s a level of complexity that might not even be advantageous to a fictional world. But not even making the attempt feels sort of lazy.”

Something that the articles from Tor and V.E. Schwab also touch on is that language shifts and changes to reflect its culture and its world. To create a language, or even naming conventions for armies, you have to think about how words and people use and abuse terminology. A great example is military slang and acronyms like FUBAR, SNAFU, BDU, and MOPP, or the backronyms of gang culture. There’s something more than the denotative meaning of words, a kind of vitality to them, and that’s what a lot of fantasy writers gloss over.

“Just Like You (Hazy Mountains Remix)” by Chromatics

One of my top three favorites from the world of New Retro Wave, Just Like You is one of those haunting love songs that evokes the kind of otherworldly, illusory lover that ELO sang about in Yours Truly, 2095, or even the twisted virtual love in Bad Religion’s I Love My Computer. It’s a song wrapped up in nostalgia and ethereal, lovesick illusions, and the reverb clings to your mind like cobwebs. Most disturbing (or enticing) of all is the idea of a doppleganger, a lover who “looks just like you/he even says the same things/he even wears the same clothes,” who ultimately “loves like you used to.”

“The Glory” by Reapers

The Glory is another of my top three favorites from the good folks over at New Retro Wave (THERE IS NO SPONSORSHIP DEAL), and one of my favorite songs, period. The contrast between the low, dirge-like like chanting and the full-throated, almost plaintive rock-and-roll yelling of the chorus gives the whole song a sense of loss and bitterness. The lyrics, which seem to be an ode to death, end up making it the perfect song for people interested in the dark side of the 80’s.

Like me.

hellraiserbox

December 20, 2015

Worldbuilding: Morrowind and Vvardenfell

Back in 2012, I was sitting with a group of fantasy writers at a conference in Seattle. Everyone had begun rolling off their favorite authors, and soon there were choruses of ah, yes and mmm. I just sat there silently with a glass of ice water. Most of my writing career had been a conscious detour around names like Robert Jordan, R.A. Salvatore, and Terry Brooks. But despite being the biggest cynic at any given table, I still love fantasy. So when everyone was finished gushing, I put in my two cents. And what I was saying, in effect, was “I don’t care where you get it. Get ‘Morrowind’ tattooed somewhere on your body.”

World-building is one of those things that set fantasy and sci-fi authors apart from any other writer: it asks for the skills of a cartographer, meteorologist, folklorist, geologist, linguist, political scientist, economist, and ecologist, then brings it all to bear on a story. Morrowind employed all of that to characterize the continent of Vvardenfell. And it’s one of the few pieces of fantasy I really believe in.

For those who haven’t heard of it, Morrowind was an award-winning, open-world fantasy game released in 2002 for PC and Xbox. There’s been a recent upsurge of people claiming that video games should be considered a form of art. I’m not here to argue for or against that. Over the course of my life, I’ve bought a little over a dozen video games, and I’ve only finished about three. But there’s a point where something brings so much to the table, so much imagination and depth, that it deserves to be studied. The greatest point in its favor, besides being a fully developed world, is that Morrowind avoids the conventions of the genre and reminds you that this is fantasy, where the horizons are endless. If you’re not a fan of video games, you don’t need to be. You just need a legal pad and a pen to take notes.

So let’s talk about world-building.

The geography of the continent of Vvardenfell is tremendously diverse, and right off the bat, that’s a good thing—mainstream fantasy is dominated by the shadow of medieval Europe: huge tracts of forest, grassy countryside, and snowy mountain ranges that conveniently divide kingdoms along their bases. The climate is almost always shades of England, except maybe an ‘exotic’ Caribbean tropic region or a ‘faraway’ Middle East or China analogue.

Vvardenfell, however, unifies a whole range of climates and landscapes into one cohesive setting. It’s a volcanic island with ash-blown badlands surrounding its mountain, wet jungles on the west coast, vast grazing lands in the northeast, and a fertile archipelago in the south. In each region, there’s a specific set of animals, landforms, and plants that characterize it, just like real biomes. In the Ascadian Isles archipelago, the tiny, scattered islands mean predatory, salmon-like slaughterfish and island-hopping, either by swimming or boat. In the long lava canyons around the titanic Red Mountain, ash storms can create white-out conditions, making it easy to get lost and even easier to be ambushed by the tribal Ashlanders (and the god-forsaken cliffracers).

All of this demonstrates that it’s possible to create a varied, fascinating landscape for your stories, giving your reader more than just backdrop, but immersion. Travelling through Vvardenfell was one of the main attractions of the game, and crossing the continent was a story all in itself: walking under mushroom trees and through wastelands of standing stones made you feel as if you were on an adventure. There was a sense of Vvardenfell’s desolation, danger, and beauty, and a good portion of your time could be spent just appreciating it all. This kind of care put into a setting ignites a reverence for the world and an investment in the story.
Geography also enhanced Morrowind’s culture: instead of making different regions into cookie-cutter cultural blocs, giving the Ascadian Isles people one token set of beliefs, the Bitter Coast people a totally different set, and so on, the whole continent had a strong sense of identity. The Dunmer, the elven residents of Vvardenfell, are the same curt, xenophobic, tradition-focused race regardless of where they live. Cultural diversity is fantastic in a setting, but it’s also interesting to see a single race adapt their way of life to different lanscapes and still retain their customs and heritage; it gives them depth and durability.

That being said, Morrowind is spiderwebbed with deep divisions: there are three Great Houses in Vvardenfell, representing three very different sides of the Dunmer people. House Telvanni, which controls the northeast part of the continent, is almost a rogue state: it annexes territory secretly and often abandons treaties when it suits them. Most of the power in the House is held by wizard-lords, who live in elaborate mushroom towers and hold huge slave populations. House Redoran is built around preserving the ancient Dunmer heritage, and heavily resembles samurai in their devotion to honor, proper behavior, and adherence to a warrior code. They are also the most pious House, with a close partnership with the Dunmer religion, the Tribunal Temple. House Hlaalu is an interesting beast: made up of the merchant class, the House has embraced a more pragmatic and tolerant view of other cultures because of their trading practices, but their facade masks close connections with the criminal underworld and the highly racist Camonna Tong gang.

The Great Houses offer an alternative to the usual plots of political intrigue. Instead of fighting over an emperor’s throne, the Houses are in conflict with one another over territory and resources. They are not separate countries; on the surface, all of them are loyal to Vvardenfell’s godking, Vivec. Outright war is never declared, trade is never cut off, and members of different houses are free to move through one another’s territories, but everyone on the street knows that spying, closed-door negotiations, and even covert raids are taking place on a regular basis. Expansion is the prize.

If tensions rise too high, the Houses have a ritualized form of warfare: they call on an impartial organization of assassins, called the Morag Tong, to kill members of other Houses. The interesting thing is that this kind of murder is a legal and open practice. At the scene of an assassination, the Tong member can show an Honorable Writ to demonstrate that he is a legitimate combatant, and according to the rules of warfare, no one can punish or capture him.

What this adds up to is a highly diverse but coherent set of conflicts, contained within one continent and one people: the Dunmer have a shared history, a shared faith, and a shared homeland, but the Great Houses divide them along ideological, economic, and cultural lines. The best part is that the Houses are fighting for their constituents—it’s the common people’s interests and beliefs that drive them. The battles are over slavery, adherence to tradition, or settling new lands, so the politics and intrigue are more akin to a Malcolm X rally than a Richard the Third-style genealogy map.

Then there’s the economy. Economics is not money. It’s what people are eating, how people are employed, what people make their houses out of, who makes the boats, and who rises to power. It all depends on the flow of materials, educated craftsmen, and influence. Every reader of Dune knows the old saying about the spice and the universe.

The economy of Morrowind can be broken down to four things: kwama, saltrice, mining and smuggling. Kwama are like giant domesticated ants, which live in extended burrows and produce eggs, which are then harvested and sold as one of the main foodstuffs of the continent. Saltrice is a common crop raised by farmers, and serves a purpose similar to flour. Mining consists of ebony, precious gems, and volcanic glass, all of which come from the volcanism of Red Mountain. Smuggling is endemic throughout the island, with coasts dotted by caves and secret docks, and offers a way to transport goods at lower prices. With these four elements alone, you have a blueprint of Dunmer society.

People need saltrice and kwama to survive. “Miners” need to be employed to work in the kwama tunnels, and farmers need land to raise saltrice. So cities like Balmora grow up near the kwama mines, where many people are employed as miners. Slave plantations are created for saltrice, creating a whole tradition of slavery in the Dunmer culture. Beasts of burden, the dinosaur-like guar, become domesticated to transport these goods, which mean there are guar breeders and guar thieves. Meanwhile, the families who control the ebony mines are growing rich from exporting it, and with their money they’re funding their Houses, which use the money to arm their soldiers and improve their cities. Because of this, Houses become dependent on the expansion of their mines. At the same time, smugglers are importing and exporting goods underneath the nose of the government, creating a whole underground market of low-cost goods for the poorer villages and fostering criminal elements near the coasts. Anti-government sentiments are created, and the coast becomes an anarchical Wild West. Every world should have an economy this dynamic, this exciting. All it takes is some farmers, miners, and smugglers.

But there’s something even more exciting: religion. Morrowind’s Tribunal Temple is a great model for a theocratic state and a living religion: Vvardenfell is ruled by the Tribunal, three earthly deities who have delivered the Dunmer people from demons, droughts, and invading races and live in giant palaces throughout the land. There’s a whole series of books and shrines inside the game that detail the chief god Vivec’s historic travels and saintly acts, which range from reviving the Dunmer with his tears after horrible ash storms to working as a beast of burden in a field to help a poor farmer. He and his Tribunal are living heroes to the Dunmer, and serve as the de facto rulers of the continent.

What makes this unique is that this religion lies at the heart of the Dunmer: their history is tied up in it, their heritage is tied up in it, and the rule of Vivec is an earthly one. Vvardenfell is, to the eyes of the Dunmer, the living kingdom of God. It’s also a land where the divine enemies of the Tribunal, collectively referred to as the House of Troubles, spawn monsters, summon earthquakes, and spread madness, so the Tribunal Temple is also a holy army and a bulwark against destruction and chaos. Religion in most fantasy settings is usually some reflection of the Christian religion: unseen divine powers surrounded by a far-off and highly elaborate Church. In the common lives of people in those settings, religion is either absent or an oddity that sets someone apart. In Vvardenfell, the Dunmer religion is woven into the communities and the daily life of its people, in the same ways that make religions like Islam or Buddhism so fascinating. It’s also part of a war for their survival, their lands, and their way of life, fought against demonic forces and foreign races.

But all of this barely scratches the surface. Morrowind had, by far, one of the most alien fantasy settings I’ve ever seen: giant, magical floating jellyfish were raised for leather, men riding twenty-foot-tall fleas ferried you around the continent, the Redoran capital was built inside the carapace of a huge, extinct species of crab, and the scattered, bizarre Daedric ruins were the epitome of H.P. Lovecraft’s vision of non-Euclidean architecture, complete with unpronounceable names like “Ashalmimilkala.” It was wildly imaginative, but all of it had such a strong internal logic that it made the mushroom trees and jellyfish leather seem natural. Everything was so tightly woven that you couldn’t help but believe in it. So, if you’re committed to building an engaging, unique world for your stories, look it up. The more you learn, the more you can hear it whispering “This is what you came for. This is fantasy.”

And that Morrowind tattoo starts making more and more sense.

June 20, 2015

High Resolution: Worldbuilding and the Small Details

I have a fascination with the metal buttons on pay phones, the pixels on old Zenith televisions, the writing on IV drip bags, and the lettering on manhole covers. I walk around New York with my hands running over metal railings and my eyes sweeping over the small details. Every stairway in the New York subway system has a letter and number designation written on a small plaque below one of the steps. Every restaurant in the city has a health rating in the window. And at the intersection of Madison and 30^th Street is a Toynbee Tile.

Sometimes I sit on the wooden benches in the subway and imagine being the last man on Earth, confined to the island of Manhattan. I imagine crawling over every inch of it, studying a single patch of street asphalt with the same intensity as the Mona Lisa. There’s that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where Cameron is looking at A Sunday Afternoon on La Grand Jatte, and he keeps looking closer and closer at the little girl, and the camera keeps zooming in on her face until it’s nothing but a bunch of colored dots.

Art has low resolution. Life, on the other hand, has infinite resolution.

There is a school of writing that says your job as a writer, first and foremost, is to notice things. This is what I was taught. It’s the same school of thought that stresses concrete details in every line of your writing, so that every dimension of your story is vivid, tactile, textured, and beautifully, truthfully rendered. All those candy wrappers and weeds poking through the sidewalk are your material as a writer, because they evoke the realness of everyday life. And that’s your job as a writer: to render life as realistically as possible. And you learn to do that by noticing the small details.

If you read American Psycho, 30% of the book is taken up in a meticulous catalogue of the colors, cuts, and brands of every character’s suit, tie, shoe, dress, cuff links and handkerchief. In fact, much of Patrick Bateman’s life seems to be taken up in the pursuit of an encyclopedic knowledge of style, fashion, and taste. This isn’t just because Patrick is a psychopath. It’s because all that matters in his social circles is the minutiae: the length of your coat sleeves, what you order at restaurants, and what kind of stereo you have. As you read, you begin to learn the language of affluence as if it’s a foreign culture, with Patrick as your guide. You get immersed in his world, his mindset, through the small details. So when the murders begin, they feel that much more surreal.

This kind of writing is based around the ideal of ‘verisimilitude,’ which is the appearance or quality of being real and believable. It’s what allows us to become immersed in a story, and, for a while, believe that it’s real. Many writers today do it by mining everyday life for those small, concrete details: smells, sights, textures. Those details immerse the reader in the story, and allow the illusion of fiction to happen.

So imagine you’re telling a story in a time, place, and universe that doesn’t exist. Imagine you’re writing second-world fantasy.

Maybe now you can understand how fucked you are. You don’t get to immediately pull from a shared pool of experiences. You don’t get to see your world laid out in front of you every waking minute, in all its minute detail. No, instead you have to steal, jury-rig, and cut from whole cloth the sights, sounds, and textures that will immerse your readers.

Watch a weather forecast, look at a street map of your town, or pick up an English-to-French Dictionary, and you’ll realize how hard it is to make up a world from scratch, down to the smallest details. But the real world is a good jumping off point. Learn about Zoroaster, the Zen poet Basho, and the economic collapse of Detroit. Then begin to work your way down to the feeling of varnished wood on your fingertips as you run your hand over the ribs of a suit of samurai armor, which is called the do. Find out what the little recycling number is on your box of cereal, and what that means about its composition. Stay up all night and watch the sunrise alone, and remember how it felt.

I think to make a good secondary world you have to be a whole universe boiled into one person, but if you do it right, you’ll never stop learning. About the stars, about music, about human history—fantasy is about bringing back stories from the bounds of imagination, and writing it is your excuse to explore it. What you’ll find, I think, is that you will begin noticing the small details around you, the pay phones and manhole covers, and admiring them as works of art, just as much as Beowulf is. There’s beauty in the small details.

And I think the advice given to writers, oftentimes, is the same advice given to those who want to make the most out of their life. Kafka wasn’t very upbeat, but he was always telling people to chase the sublime, to dive into what they feared the most in order to uncover what they needed to live. And there’s a quote by someone, maybe Picasso, that every piece of art is a self-portrait. I think that makes sense for writing fantasy, because if you’re going to write it well, it’s going to be ingrained in the way you live and the way you look at things.

Still, people will ask why you spend so much time building worlds, cultures, and metaphysics for worlds that don’t exist. What’s the use of these stories, or fantasy at all? There’s a scene in Wizard of Earthsea, when Ged picks up a plant called fourfoil, and asks the mage Ogion what its use is. Ogion replies,

“When you know the fourfoil in all its seasons root and leaf and flower, by sight and scent and seed then you may learn its true name, knowing its being; which is more than its use. What, after all, is the use of you? Or of myself? Is Gont Mountain useful, or the Open Sea?”

I imagine kneeling down on a sidewalk in New York and picking up a sprig of fourfoil growing out of the seam between the cement and a building. There is no use for fourfoil, but in that moment, with fifty-story buildings looming all around me and planes flying overhead and dozens of people walking by me to get to a bar or Grand Central, I see a spark of another time, another place in its tiny leaves.

If I can immerse people in a story, what is the use of reality?

June 7, 2015March 6, 2016

Worldbuilding: True Names, Binary, and Mathematics as Magic

This weekend, I decided to sit down and flesh out the notation and structure of magic in my world. One of the key problems I ran into is how to represent something’s ‘true name’. Ursula LeGuin and other fantasy writers have built magic systems based around invoking something’s ‘true name,’ which can be spoken aloud in order to gain power over the named thing. For example, Ged from Wizard of Earthsea learns the true name for ‘sparrowhawk’ and is subsequently able to call down a sparrowhawk from the sky by speaking its true name. During Ged’s time at Roke, the school for wizards, he meticulously learns thousands of true names, delving down into the names for the smallest thistles. Humans in Wizard of Earthsea also have true names, which they keep secret from all but their closest friends.

Looking at how true names work in Wizard of Earthsea, it seems like humans and animals follow different naming rules: there is only one person with the true name ‘Ged,’ but the true name for ‘thistle’ seems to apply to all thistles equally—they don’t get unique names. This issue comes up in Earthsea as well: when Ged learns the true name for ‘goat,’ he speaks it aloud and causes goats to gather around him. He gets scared and yells it again, trying to make the goats go away, but it causes the goats to crowd closer around him. How did Ged’s invocation of ‘goat’ affect several goats, while his later invocation of ‘sparrowhawk’ only called down the single sparrowhawk? How does a wizard narrow his invocation to a single target, or specific group of targets?

TAXONOMY, TRUE NAMES, and NAMING A THOUSAND THINGS

Think about it: giving each person a unique ‘true name’ is relatively simple, but giving every grain of sand and tree a unique ‘true name’ becomes overwhelming. If all discrete objects and people are supposed to have separate existences, everything must have a distinct metaphysical identifier, or ID. You couldn’t target a specific person or thing with a spell unless they had some kind of identifier that set them apart from all other possible targets. But with all the trees, rocks, oceans, and birds in existence, the names given to each discrete thing would become very long and complicated in order to ensure that they were unique. This is a problem of taxonomy.

This is the first problem: coming up with a naming system that has the potential to offer everything in existence a unique identifier. The second problem is notation: how does a magician represent these names? What kind of notation would allow those complex names to be compressed into something manageable when trying to write or speak them?

These questions made me look into binary notation—computers can create symbols, images, and sounds based on binary instructions of 1’s and 0’s. Everything in the universe, except for irrational shit like pi, has the potential to be represented in binary. You could say the universe itself is made up of opposites, like Leibniz claimed. The same idea is represented in the I-Ching, which uses binary in a form of divination. So binary will be the metaphysical basis for representing my universe numerically and alphabetically. But binary numbers are extremely long because they only use two bits of information, so there has to be a way to compress them. The answer, I decided, is hexadecimal and octal numbers (octal because the I-Ching uses an octal structure, and I’d like to incorporate it into my magic system at some point), as well as ASCII to translate the binary into letters.

But how would magicians themselves translate the ASCII-like binary numbers into letters or sounds? I decided to draw on Vocaloids, which have specific encodings for each phoneme, or distinct sound, in their language. Using the Vocaloids as a template, magicians could become text-to-speech translators, converting ASCII binary representations of true names into alphabetical, spoken, and written versions of the names. All true names, then, would have a numerical significance to them as well as a linguistic significance.

THE SOLUTION: 40-BIT NAMES and Data Compression

This is my idea: I would like to use an eight-letter “functional name” that uses 8 of 40 possible letters for everything in my world. The functional name is the true name of a person or thing, expressible in writing or speech. Each of the 40 possible letters used to create that name, however, can be represented as an eight-digit binary number, just like ASCII. This means that each eight-letter name would be represented as a 64-digit binary number.

Now, I want my names to be compatible with the I-Ching, which uses octal notation, and I want to know the maximum number of digits in the octal number used to represent an 8-letter name that uses 40 possible letters. Using all 27 of the lowercase ASCII designations of the alphabet and 13 of the uppercase, I found that the octal number for any name using eight letters would have 21 digits max, and the hexadecimal number for the name would have 16 digits max. This helps me convert names into a format that the I-Ching can translate into bagua.

Here’s a summary of the different numerical and alphabetical representations of a true name:

Binary representation of true name:
01100001 01101011 01110101 01110010 01100001 01101110 01100010 01101111

Octal representation of true name:
605533527114133462000

Hexadecimal representation of true name:
616B7572616E6400

Functional name:
Akuranbo

Each of these conversions, from binary to octal to hex to the eight-letter name, represents a sort of data compression. The next step, which will take a lot more thought, is how the functional name “Akuranbo” can be translated into a single, compact symbol by translating its syllables into strokes or shapes.

Binary and magic: “All I see is blonde, redhead, brunette…”

The next question is whether magicians are really seeing 1’s and 0’s when they discover someone’s true name, like Neo in the Matrix. The answer would be no. In a metaphysical sense, everything can be expressed as binary, but there are hundreds of ways to express something or someone’s true name in my system, which is still under construction. These include expressing something’s name as a song (which expresses those 1’s and 0’s in rhythm and pitch, tempo and frequencies), expressing something’s name as movement (expressing the information in body motions, like a dance or the hand signs in Naruto). There is an almost infinite number of ways to analyze and represent someone’s true name, all of which are based on information that can be expressed in binary.

At the same time, I’m thinking that wizards and magicians in my world can immerse themselves in esoteric mathematics, discovering magical patterns using theory, similar to how astronomers can discover black holes using gravity and mass calculations. Considering how everything, from chemistry to music, can be expressed in mathematical terms, there will be mathematics woven into every aspect of my magic (like how geometry is woven into spell maps). One of the tools I’m looking forward to implementing in my world is the I-Ching, which turns a random binary system (flipping coins, essentially) into groupings of six bits (hexagrams), which can be translated into a table that converts hexagrams into one of 64 meanings. Imagine a magician taking stock of the state of world using an I-Ching-like system, predicting weather or earthquakes, or even human actions based off of things like the butterfly effect.

Even more interesting, imagine being a wizard who is trying to discover the true name of an enemy. When their very essence is contained in everything they do, every drop of blood and spit, you could take someone’s blood and begin to decode it, like finding DNA. You could begin to learn their essence through their speech, their movements, and begin to mimic them until you started to see their behavior consolidate into patterns that can expressed in graphs or functions, then dig into those numbers until you start finding the numbers that make up their name. This is all extremely high-level stuff for a wizard, near-impossible to master, but for the right kind of magician, the right kind of mind, approaching reality as a giant, dynamic math equation could yield tremendous insight…or absolute insanity.

Wonder vs. reductionism: Magic is not chemistry

One last thing. When anyone builds a magic system, there’s the tendency to treat it like a science. That makes sense, since you’re trying to create a system, which means there have to be solid rules and limits, and science is a collection of rules that describe the functioning of nature. Within a story, however, magic has to become more than just dry chemistry or physics—magic, I think, should reflect the nature and truths of your world, and the themes that appear in your stories. There’s a great scene in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett where Death gives Susan the ultimate challenge:

TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY.

What Death is trying to say is that there is no meaning in the universe if we look at it from a purely logical, scientific point of view. But worldbuilding and fantasy have the ability to turn the very structure of the universe into a grand tapestry of meaning. What does it mean that magic in Wizard of Earthsea is based on names? To me, it means that humans in Earthsea are trying to catalog and control the world around them by turning the unknown into the known, which means that encounters with the unclassifiable and unknown, like the Nameless Gods of The Tombs of Atuan and the gibbeth in Wizard or Earthsea, are loaded with dread and meaning—these are things that are outside the bounds of magical naming and human understanding.

All of the rules and laws in a magic system don’t have to be explained, as long as they remain consistent behind the scenes. At the same time, having that ‘back-end’ of a complex, fleshed-out magic system allows your reader to start figuring out the limits and possibilities of magic, which creates a sense of realism and immersion. It also gives you limits to explore, test, and exploit, just as your characters would do—and that’s exciting.

Just don’t fuck with this guy.

Click the circular button below to Share.

June 1, 2015

Don Quixote and Evan Puschak’s “Middle Earth and the Perils of Worldbuilding”

Hail. I am I, Don Quixote.

The meaning of the story of Don Quixote changes depending on the teller, but it begins with Alonso Quixano, an old man who reads so many stories about knights and dragons that he loses his ability to distinguish between fiction and reality. In his delirium, he sets out as Don Quixote, knight-errant.

There are some windmills in there, too.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Don Quixote, upon its publication, signaled the death of the chivalric romance, the same books that told tales of knights and magicians, giants, chivalry, and virtue. Don Quixote was a clever, vicious satire in addition to being one of the greatest novels of all time, and its rise put the chivalric romance out of fashion. It also started a debate: what effect do books have on people’s minds?

I was watching a video by Evan Puschak about worldbuilding in fantasy yesterday. In it, he makes a couple of suggestions about the nature of fantasy novels, world-building, and the relationship between authors and readers. These, I think, were his main points:

Reading is not the author telling the reader a story—reading is a game in which the author makes implications and the reader uses their interpretive toolbox to create their own interpretation of the story.
Worldbuilding in fantasy novels today is largely based on a passive mindset within the reader because the reader is dependent on the author for the truth about their world.
Fantasy readers’ intense desire to learn about an author’s fantasy world is dangerous because that obsession acclimates readers to passively accepting other forms of ‘worldbuilding,’ including political ideologies.
Fantasy novels like Viriconium that challenge readers’ assumptions and make them question their preconceptions about literature and the world are valuable because they cause readers to abandon a passive mindset.

Evan’s video ends on the note that we should seek out impish, challenging books that don’t conform to our ideas about fantasy and make us question our relationship to the novel.

I agree with some of Evan’s points and I disagree with most, but it’s not really the points Evan makes in the video that I want to talk about. I want to talk about the ideas that lie beneath them, because those are the ideas that I really disagree with.

Running underneath Evan’s suggestions are concepts like the death of the author, Sausserean theories of symbol and language, sociology, Marxist literary criticism, and the Hegelian idea of the dialectic. I want to explain what these are, and what they mean to me when it comes to fantasy and writing.

YOU ARE ALONSO QUIXANO

When Evan says worldbuilding is dangerous, he uses a line of thought that’s influenced by sociology and Marxist literary criticism, which views humans as objects that are primarily shaped by their society and culture, constantly subject to different ‘ideologies.’ Ideologies are sets of ideas meant to manipulate people into certain behaviors, and are generated by those in power to control the populace. Evan compares George R.R. Martin’s worldbuilding to the commercial and political ‘worldbuilding’ of L’oreal and Fox News, and claims that if you readily accept the former kind, it’s easy to accept the latter.

The main idea of the video, which is subtitled the ‘perils of worldbuilding,’ isn’t about whether or not fantasy worldbuilding is the same as the commercials and commentary of shampoo companies and news networks—it’s about the Marxist idea that you, as a person, are solely the product of your society and culture, and that you are so vulnerable to be conditioned to accept certain ideas that worldbuilding in fantasy novels is dangerous to you. The books you read are acting on your subconscious, constantly rewriting your thoughts without your knowledge and guiding your decision-making in the future. Before you entertain the ideas in the video, you have to accept that premise.

FRODO LIVES, BUT GOD IS DEAD

Evan also shifts the definition of how a novel works in his video, claiming that a story is created through a reader’s interpretation of the author’s writing. This is different from what we usually expect the relationship between reader and author to be: the author comes up with an idea for a story and tries to convey it as best they can to the reader. Evan is substituting a model of reading that stems from a concept called “the death of the author,” in which the reader, not the author, is the person who decides the meaning of the story. The reader does this by looking at the story through any number of different lenses—these can be socio-political, religious, economic, or racial.

What Evan is finding problems with specifically, however, is worldbuilding within fantasy. It’s a corruption of the relationship between reader and text, he claims, to have a dimension of the story that is not up for interpretation—in this case, the geography, history, and magic of the fantasy world, which is all understood and explained solely by the author. That, to Evan and his theoretical background, is a problem.

This is because Evan’s body of literary theory, called critical theory, is also influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, an existentialist philosopher who rejected any philosophies that claimed to have a monopoly on truth and morality, and instead claimed that we all must find own definition of morality and our own way to live our lives. One of Nietzsche’s famous claims was that God was dead, meaning that in this new, modern era, appeals to universal truths, like religion or Kant’s philosophy of deontology, had proven to be irreparable failures, and that we had entered a new era of unparalleled freedom, unbeholden to any external authorities.

This comes all the way back to authors being the source of truth about their own books. Evan and critical theory reject authors as being the final authority on their own works, because in their view, there is no such thing as ‘truth,’ only interpretations.

THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

Finally, Evan’s encouragement to seek out books that make us question our assumptions about fantasy and novels themselves (as well as his championing of Viriconium) comes from an idea called ‘the dialectic.’

The dialectic is a way to chart the growth and development of ideas, and begins with a thesis, or the proposal of an idea. Then a negative reaction comes, called the antithesis, which disagrees with the first idea. The two come into conflict, and create a synthesis, from which a new idea is taken. Then the process starts all over again. The dialectic, according to critical theory, should be a model for the way we live and think: everything we accept should be treated as a thesis to be questioned, negated, deconstructed, and rebuilt anew.

The directive to constantly challenge yourself and your preconceptions, to unsettle or overturn the established order, and especially to pursue books that do not conform to the usual structure of a novel comes from the idea of the dialectic. On the surface, this seems to be the essence of open-mindedness and the progressive ideal—question, debate, discover!—but the problem is that there is no goal or ideal that the dialectic is striving for. Every thesis must be attacked simply for being a thesis. More than that, we should not strive to find something true and eternal and constant—we should pursue constant change, never allowing ourselves to build a dogma. The dialectic is change for change’s sake–there is no utopia it’s trying to achieve, no final goal.

What is the goal of writing and reading, then? To deconstruct and question the definition of reading and writing, and build a new model. The cycle will then begin again. Like the dialectic itself, books and reading are not avenues to truth, catharsis, understanding, or meaning–they’re ends in themselves, to be explored, destroyed, and reconstructed.

In the mindset of the dialectic, it’s quixotic to believe in any kind of truth or any purpose to reading and writing beyond being an exercise in thesis and antithesis: everything is just grist for the mills.

MADDEST OF ALL

I wrote a manifesto for why I write a while ago. It starts like this:

“I don’t know if it’s a characteristic of this age or a sign that we’ve come to a fuller understanding of life, but nothing seems certain today. The more you pull the string of who you are, who you love, what you should do and why, the more string keeps coming. There has to be something solid to hold onto, something that’s undeniably true. And what I inevitably come back to is the knowledge that if we are all lost, we are lost together. Writing is a way to bring people solace by showing them that, ‘in the face of all aridity and disenchantment’, there is solace in each other and wonder in being alive.”

And it ends like this:

“I want my [stories] to soak into their mind until little black drops of it start dripping onto their soul. There’s too much in our hearts that never gets to see the light of day: terror, sorrow, joy, desperation, and wonder. When a story begins to awaken these feelings, it reminds the reader that, dear God, life has some sort of power running underneath all these crosswalks and Wednesdays and rent payments. It’s like waking up from a dream and seeing the world for the first time, unfurling in all its terrible and asymmetric beauty.”

Writing, to me, is about creating something that illuminates people’s lives. That comes from my belief that there are truths that can unite people, and some human condition that we share, and that I, as a person, can create stories that evoke that human condition. This belief stands in opposition to the philosophy that drives Evan’s assertions about fantasy writing and worldbuilding, and it goes against many of the critics who are trickling into the sci-fi and fantasy genre, many of whom are influenced in some way or another by critical theory.

This, for me, isn’t just a conversation about literary theory; this is a discussion about how we view the world and what guides our lives. That’s why I care. I’ve told my side, now it’s up to you to go out, read some more, think some more, and decide what you believe in.

I’ll end with a clip from Man of La Mancha, a movie that shows another side of Don Quixote, the novel that killed knights and magic. This scene shows a fictional Miguel Cervantes and his answer to why he writes.

Click the circular button below to Share this post.