Diagramming Babel (Part 18)

Diagram 18. Will's first date with Alcyone! Sort of. It doesn't end well, of course. But look how clean the diagram is! This section is coming together fast. From bottom to top:

Emphatically Spring

Fata I.

Dwarf

look @ the party in R & J

(poulette)

A

F

(Ring)

"You don't want to

Ring

Ring

He's like Antaeus; in the air,
off of Babel, he shows fear
& nervous reaction

She screws him so there will be no unpaid debts

She tells him she's notfor him

Alcyone ( ) is to be
extraordinary, to be her
own person, to be
a swashbuckler

ALCYONE: Act like somebody real!

Will was trying to listen.

Annotations:

W is again Will, A is Alcyone, and I think I'll hold off on revealing who F is.

It's spring, and Will is crashing a masked ball. After two quick encounters with "Fata I." (the name was later tweaked) and her dwarf, Will has a more prolonged and involved encounter with a poulette. As he much earlier mused, "Witches were the self-appointed legislators of the world. They were forever sticking their long noses into other people’s business, demanding that a rosebush be replanted, or a child renamed, or a petty criminal taken down from the gallows half-choked but still breathing. It was next to impossible to be born, to lose one’s virginity, to plot a murder, to die, or to be reborn, without one or more popping up and uttering gnostic solemnities." I almost threw "fall in love" in there, since the passage was meant to be, if not foreshadowing, at least prescient. But Will had already fallen in love with Alcyone in the Hanging Gardens, and there was no room for a witch in that scene.

I'd guess that R&J refers to Romeo and Juliet. As it happened, I went to War and Peace for inspiration instead.

It's a little hard on Alcyone to write that she "screws" Will, or to imply that in so doing she's simply balancing the books -- though that's what she thinks she's doing, and how it feels to Will. But these diagrams are cartoons, and the most subtle interpersonal relationships are rendered as "He liked her" or "She put a fork through his hand."

"Act like somebody real!" is good advice. Will is still growing, still learning, remember. He's not yet worthy of a woman like Alcyone. Though he's getting close.

The Ineluctable Jason Van Hollander

(First of all, my apologies for missing last Friday's blog. I was laid flat by a cold. This is the downside of running a one-man business. The upside? No problems with the union.)

Jason Van Hollander, with his usual modesty, wishes I wouldn't mention him in this blog so often. He's afraid it makes me look like I don't have many other friends. Well, I do my best. But when he pulls something like the above picture on me (detail below), what can I do but brag?

The picture in question appears on the black cover of A Vintage from Atlantis, volume 3 of the collected fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger. Night Shade Books is engaged in the comendable project of assembling the definitive texts of CAS's fantasy, science fiction, and horror in a uniform five-volume set. All of them (or at least the three to date) with covers by Jason Van Hollander. And, as you can see, Jason slipped in a portrait of me.

Not a very flattering portrait of me. But still.

For those unfamiliar with the works of Clark Ashton Smith . . . Imagine lapidarian prose harnessed to an imagination somewhat darker than Ambrose Bierce's. Imagine dark glimmery beauty in the borderlands of fantasy and horror. Imagine a body of work which inspired Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, which in turn inspired Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. It's not to everyone's taste -- the prose style can be as intense as maple sugar, though in no way sticky -- but if you have a liking for this sort of thing, I fail to see where else you're going to find it.

If you're a Clark Ashton Smith fan already, you want these books. If not, why not check him out? Night Shade Books, incidentally, has got a truly astonishing lineup of authors. So they're worth checking out as well.

Finally, in the interests of keeping the man happy by limiting the frequency of posts about him, I'll mention here and now that Jason Van Hollander has a blog. Astonishing but true. It's called The Jolly Corner and subtitled The Illustration Journal of Jason Van Hollander. Mostly, it's about his book covers. (Jason is an extrarodinary designer, in addition to being an World Fantasy Award winning illustrator.) But the very first entry was penned by Yours Truly, last October, when I showed him how to set up the blog. I thought you should know that, lest you think Jason was being surly.

Diagramming Babel (Part 17)

Diagram 17: Oh, we're cooking now! You can practically smell the brain-grease sizzle. The section that became "A Small Room in Koboldtown" came on hard and fast. On the left-hand page of my notebook are my diagrams. On the right-hand page (not pictured) are plot notes. I'll transcribe them below, after my annotations.

From top to bottom:

Salem Will Ghostface

The suspect is set up because they're easy to frame

like OJ, guilty and framed

Suspect -- Will -- Ghostface

Ghostface -- Salem -- Will

Race -- Money -- Sex

"Koschei" -- girlfriend -- suspect

mention the arched streets, vaulted where the bldgs meet overhead

pixie dust?

K -- Suspect -- Ghostface

Annotations:

Salem Toussaint's name and a great deal of his character came from Salem Flack, the last of the old-time lawyers in Washington County, Pennsylvania. My late father-in-law, William Christian Porter vividly remembered Salem Flack getting down on his knees before a jury, clasping his hands, gazing up toward the ceiling, and praying to an Almighty God to forgive the lying, perjuring witnesses who had testified against his client.

Ghostface's name (and his brother Ice's) were taken from hip-hop culture because although Pan-African folklore is as rich as Pan-European folklore, it's not as widely distributed in our society. And I needed that vague sense of familiarity for the names to work.

OJ was guilty. The cops framed him. Once you assume both premises are true, everything falls into place.

Those of my former students who wonder whether my notion of relationship triangles really is of any potential application should go over this section of the novel when it comes out and look for the triangles -- they're all there. Which is not to say that they'll work for everyone. "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays -- and every single one of them is right," as Uncle Rudy was fond of saying. Writers are a varied lot.

I'm not sure I ever found the opportunity to mention the buildings arching over the streets. And I have no idea what that rough hourglass of a building is supposed to be about!

The facing page:

3/2/06

3/7/06
Novel -- Ball
-- Locked room
-- arrival:
racial tensions

Will could go to Nat for help. (But would he?)

Cheap midnight diners -- "most magical place in the world," he said.

S. T. encouraged rumors that he had owned yachts, estates, a ruby the size of a simurgh's egg, though there was no honest way he could have amassed such wealth. "Better a crook than a pauper," he'd say with a smile and a wink.

Fennel -- he's the janitor. The doorman takes the fennel down to let him in and out.

-- A Bag of powder -- superhuman strength & immunity f/pain.

"No money." The cops obviously believe they're right -- they're not threatened.

Annotations:

Not a lot needs to be said here. I don't think I used the diner comment but, boy howdy, is it evocative! Nor the riff about Salem Toussaint's (nonexistent -- he is, in his way, perfectly honest) riches. It's like the vaulted roofs -- a lot more ideation goes into creating a fantasy than can be crammed into the novel.

The fennel was borrowed from Hope Mirrlees's masterwork, Lud-in-the-Mist. Some (the estimable Julia Briggs for one) would argue that it was Paris: A Poem which was her chef d'oeuvre. Either way, she has my admiration.

A Bit of Self-Indulgence

Did you know that there are many, many South Park character generators out there on the Web? So many of them that I can't find which one I used to to make a SP version of me.

I came across the link at Narbonic (which is the other Female Mad Scientist comic -- the one that's not Girl Genius), and made this little guy to amuse my family. And now you.

More serious stuff soon, I promise.

A Publicity Mailing

I had clever things in mind for today's post. But I got caught up in working on a pamphlet to send out at Christmas and, well . . .

But I promised to post three times weekly, and so here's the publicity mailing that Tor sent out when The Dragons of Babel got a starred review in Publishers Weekly. They take PW starred reviews as serious as serious, out there in publishing land. (Those little paragraph dingbats to either side of "starred review" are supposed to be stars. Ah, the mysteries of Web publishing!)

THE DRAGONS OF BABEL

By Michael Swanwick

A Tor Hardcover

ISBN: 0-765-31950-0

$25 .95 / 320 pages

On-sale date: January 8, 2008

Publicity News Flash Michael Swanwick's THE DRAGONS OF BABEL receives a ¶starred review¶ in Publishers Weekly. *** Publishers Weekly calls Dragons of Babel “modern fantasy at its finest." "Swanwick introduces us to a wide range of marvelous conceits, fascinating digressions and sparkling characters ... should hold great appeal for fans of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys or China Mieville's novels."

The Dragons of Babel Swanwick, Michael (Author) ISBN: 0765319500 Tor Books Published 2008-01 Hardcover, $25.95 (320p) Fiction | Fantasy - General

In this triumphant return to the universe of The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1994), Hugo-winner Swanwick introduces Will le Fey, an orphan of uncertain parentage. After defeating an evil mechanical war dragon who has enslaved him and his village, Will finds himself displaced by war, first imprisoned in an internment camp and then transported to the many-miles-high city of Babel. On the way, he falls in with Esme, an immortal child with no memory, and Nat Whilk, a donkey- eared confidence man of superhuman abilities. Fusing high technology seamlessly with magic, Swanwick introduces us to a wide range of marvelous conceits, fascinating digressions and sparkling characters. His language bounces effortlessly back and forth between the high diction of elfland and thieves' argot to create a heady literary stew. This is modern fantasy at its finest and should hold great appeal for fans of Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys or China Miéville's novels. (Jan.)

Diagramming Babel (Part 16)

Diagram 16. We have reached the end of Will’s adventures underground. Once again (though, uncharacteristically, Will himself does not recognize the pattern) all others are scattered and he goes on alone.

From top to bottom:

All is panic & rout

10

E

Hjördis

g

LE

Annotations:

Of “All is panic and rout,” I can only say: Truer words were never spoken.

The “10 ”at the top refers to Chapter 10, from which all the people and events in Chapter 11 come pouring out, like a train from a tunnel.

Hjördis is of course Hjördis, and “LE” is almost certainly an earlier iteration of Lord Weary. But I have no idea who E and g are. Perhaps they represent earlier names for the characters who became Tatterwag and Jenny Jumpup. Perhaps not.

A Brief and Self-Indulgent Post

My apologies for not posting this hours earlier. I spent all the day working on the Zeppelin story I'm writing with American literary cult hero, Eileen Gunn. Self-indulgent, I know, but loads of fun.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about me -- and if you know enough to be reading this blog, why should you? -- you can check out Heidi's Pick Six at http://ambasadora.livejournal.com/156060.html. In the course of which I told, perhaps, more than I should have. Enjoy!