In Brian Ruckley’s novels Winterbirth and Bloodheir, there exists something called the Shared.  In this Scottish influenced world of clans at war over a religious doctrine of determinism, the Shared exists as a magical layer upon which the world floats.  The world, in a sense, is a projection of the minds of those who exist in the Shared.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  Metaphysics tends to be nebulous like that.

Regardless, the only people who can access the Shared (thus doing cool wizard stuff, as in all good fantasy) are racial halfbreeds.  The children of two races are born sterile, but they have access to the Shared, perhaps because of their border-dweller status.

The neat thing about the Shared is this–everyone touches it at the same time.  It’s an ocean, and even if people are tiny ships, they still make wakes.  Need to talk to someone half a world away?  Do it in their dreams, across the Shared.

Why do I think this is so neat?  Because the idea of the Shared touches some very old beliefs about our connection to the world around us and those we share it with while also becoming a metaphor for modern social networking technologies, like Facebook and Twitter.  It reminds us that social networking may be using new technology, it has always been a part of our collective mythology.

So much for fantasy and science fiction being different beasts.  Speculative fiction is dead; long live speculative fiction.

A recent post on io9.com (well, it was recent when I wrote up the notes for this post) got me thinking about the relationship between science and magic in speculative fiction.  Traditionally, they’ve always been set up in opposition; this is often framed in a science fiction versus fantasy style debate.  I think that’s silly for a couple of reasons.

Except in the strangest of fantasies, the scientific method of gathering empirical evidence still applies.  Magical realism aside, most fantasies have repeatable, observable phenomenon.  The rules may be shifting, but even then the scientific method comes in handy, setting the boundaries of those rules.  The vast majority of epic fantasy fiction from the past 50 years or so is inherently scientific in its treatment of the magical.

Science is repeatable.  The ability to perform an experiment and get the same results from the same conditions is what leads to things like scientific laws.  The same can be applied to most magical systems in fantasy fiction.  In fact, if the term “system” can apply to the magic in a work of fiction, I don’t think you’re talking about the magical anymore.  It’s just an alternate set of metaphysics, different from our own in someway.  The scientific method still applies.

My own sense of the magical ties in to another dichotomy–objective versus subjective.  Science is objective.  Subjectivity is taken in to account, and through repeated testing using the scientific method, subjectivity is removed from the equation.  What’s left is science.  Magic is in the purely singular subjective experience.  I think the roots of fantastic fiction and the magic that defines it comes from singular phenomenon.  There’s just one Odin, one Merlin, one Minotaur in the labyrinth.  There’s no repetition, no copies.

This ties in to Ted Chiang’s argument, but from a slightly different angle:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it’s science, and if you can’t, it’s magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she’s made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it’s something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she’s a magician. And I don’t mean that she’s a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren’t dependent on a specific person.

Ted Chiang, from io9.com

His argument implies that because the scientific method doesn’t apply, it’s magic.  I think that line of reasoning unnecessarily privileges the scientific over the magical.  Even if only one person can repeat something, the scientific method still applies.  The scientific method doesn’t preclude a constant (for example, that combustion always involves oxygen and hydrogen creating water), although a constant as unusual as one particular person is unusual and certainly would raise questions in an academic setting.  But this is fiction.  Aside from the unusual circumstances, the scientific method still applies.

So where does that leave us when we go looking for that singular and subjective experience that we call magical?  I think we should look in the direction of our everyday (or night, as it happens) connection to the mystical–our dreams.

Last year, I read a fantastic (wink, nudge) book called Last Call by a fellow named Tim Powers.  I had never heard of him before, and my local Barnes and Noble didn’t have any of his other books ontheir shelves.  The book was full of things I loved (myth, tarot, Jungian archetypes, booze).

After finishing Last Call, I meant to to see if I could find another book by this fella.  This past winter I finally started taking my genre knowledge seriously.  It turns out Tim Powers is a World Fantasy Award winning author whoh has been publishing for almost 30 years.  I just finished his first book, The Drawing of the Dark, and I’m excited to work through the rest of his catalog.

Aside from a minor complaint (I felt there should have been a few more waves from a particular sequence at the end), The Drawing of the Dark was a fantastic book.  Powers’ blend of historical fact and primal myth is both entertaining and interesting.

It’s also exciting to find an author who inspires you to improve your own work.  It’s not everyday you find a role model.  If someone ever mentions Tim Powers in reference to my own work, I’m going to be tickled paisley.

It occurs to me that speculative fiction has always used a historical base before it spins away into speculation.  How is steampunk different from a vision of the future based on rockets or a vision of the past based on Rome?  There is a difference, but I’m not quite sure I have a grasp on it.  I think it centers around the Enlightenment and the rationalist view of the universe.

I’m currently reading Jay Lake’s Mainspring.  I expect I might have more intelligent things to say on the subject after I finish reading that.  I also have the Steampunk anthology, editted by Team VanderMeer on my bookshelf.  Hopefully I’ll have something intelligent to say (maybe even a thesis) by the time I’m finished reading those.

This is all part of an effort to get a better grasp on the speculative fiction field.  I figured if I’m going to avoid writing crap, I should be able to recognize what is not crap.  Just a theory.

Let me clarify–I like steampunk.  I do.  I enjoy reading it.  I love the design aesthetic.  I just don’t think it’s for me.  I’m not passionate about it.

There are lots of overlap with things I do love though: the weird, the sense of adventure, the examination of science and the Enlightenment in a world that isn’t as stable and rational as we pretend it is.  These are all things I want to explore in my own fiction.  There is one apect of steampunk that I enjoy, from an intellectual standpoint, that doesn’t seem to ring with my style though–class.

The rigid class structure of the Victorian era seems too rigid to really allow exploration of identity (except, of course, the interplay of those rigid class dynamics).  Or maybe I just don’t like Dickens.  Hard to say.

I think my own particular aesthetic would be better suited by a steampunk that is more informed by the Age of Exploration and the Salem Witch Trials than the sooty London and Charles Babbage.  On the upside, I think this means I won’t end up aping an existing genre.  I’d much rather branch out and be a part of something new that is inspired by something cool like steampunk.

I ordered a trio of books off of Amazon a few weeks ago, and now that I’m (almost) done with all three, I thought I’d post some quick comments.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch, was a nice little caper book with a fantasy jacket on.  I found the setting, the city of Camorra, engaging.  The city is probably the strongest character the book has actually.  The book is, without a doubt, a heist novel though.  The fantasy elements are present, but never feel like anything more than window dressing.  An entertaining read, but I don’t feel compelled to pick up the next in the series, Red Seas, Red Skies.  The sample chapter offered at the end was very bleh, and while it might work as the beginning of a new novel, it was a horrid way to get me interested after coming down from the conclusion of the first.

The Black Company, by Glenn Cook, was a bit of a unusual since I hadn’t read any 19080s fantasy in quite some time.  Stylistically, it held dated.  I mean that in an agnostic way though–I could just tell it was from the 1980s because it didn’t use many of the current fantasy tropes floaitng around.  It was both refreshing and a little jarring.  The dead affect of the first person narrator bothered me so much that I almost didn’t get through the first two chapters, but after getting a glimpse of the world in which he lived, it began to make a horrifying sense.  Not my everyday cup of tea, but good for a change of pace.  I can definitely see its influence on more recent work (Martin, Erickson, and Bakker especially).

The Gardens of the Moon, by Steven Erickson.  I enjoyed Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy and occasionally enjoy Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, so I thought I’d give the Malazan Book of the Fallen a shot.  There are definite comparisons to be made (if this were a full review I’d probably make them).  I haven’t finished it yet, but I feel like I’ve been reading a thousand pages and I’m only halfway through.  This novel is very heavy on plot and a little light on character and exposition.  BAM BAM BAM–things happens, but aside from the first few pages of each chapter (which are purple beyond belief) characters and scenes seem to suffer from the same deadness that bothered me in Cook’s Black Company.  Unlike Cook’s work, however, this doesn’t feel like a nod to the voice of the narrator.  There’s just too much shit happening all the time to slow down and relax.  A particular scene, in which several characters have a politically nuanced dinner, epitomizes the problem.  The conversation and dialog is thick with plot and conspiracy, but it’s all tell and no show.  The same can be said for most of the novel.  Don’t tell me a wave of sorcery cut a man in half.  Show me how a man reacts to being cut in half by a mystical force.  That said, the plotting is effective and well-crafted.  I could see myself continuing to read this, especially if characters survive long enough to get fleshed out.  I won’t be savoring any particularly phrases though; I’ll be reading for the plot.

The placeholder website I threw together last night is up.  It’s horrible, and the only thing I don’t hate about it is the font.  Better than a 404 though.

Lunchtime, and time to write something.  Lunchtime fiction writing is going to be my new hobby.

Twitter continues to amuse, although I imagine it would be quite a bit better if I knew more people who were using it.  Or just knew more people.

So, I decided to give Twitter a Twhirl (the Adobe AIR based client I decided to use).  Not surprisingly, my username is matthewdyer.

I managed to get some decent research in over lunch today and feel like the postmodern swords & sorcery with a healthy dose of The Weird is coming together more.  I’m not sure it’s the short story serial I originally imagined, but it’s something worth pursuing I think.  It’s original enough while still having a place in the “dark fantasy” market that seems to be doing pretty well at the moment.

In the meantime, I need to finish up  a short story or two.  I’m going to focus on one in paritcular now with the intent to have it in saleable shape by the end of the month.  Maybe a new system of lunchtime fiction writing is in order.  Something to think about.

The web site is still non-existant.  I’m going to slop something simple together  this weekend to act as a place holder.  I’m dogsitting by my lonesome, so aside from walking for miles and miles I won’t have much else to do.

http://gizmodo.com/358636/stairs-bookcase-actually-makes-me-want-to-move-to-london This is probably one of the coolest bookcases I have ever seen.  I now hate my $30 Target pressboard crap bookcases. (Link stolen from The Editorial Ass.)