Alison Sinclair

This is the first month’s anniversary of Darkborn’s publication, and last night I did my first Google search on the title and noted that a number of people have already reviewed it. I’d like to thank you all. Even if you didn’t care for it, I still very much appreciate the time and attention you put into reading it, thinking about it, and writing about it. And of course, if you did like it … well, I’m human (when not being something else for literary impersonation purposes), susceptible, and even more appreciative. 

I’m afraid I’ve been rather un-interactive; in fact, I more or less jumped in a hole and pulled it in after me. The first three novels I published were not only in the early days of the internet but stand-alones. By the time Legacies was published, I was deep in Blueheart. By the time Blueheart was published, I was trying to subdue Cavalcade. When I received reader and reviewer feedback, it was on a story that was completed in my mind and characters that had safely arrived, deservedly or undeservedly, at their destinies. Not on a story that was still working itself out and characters that were still developing. I had one critical comment pre-publication, quite offhand and definitely not intended to have the effect it did, that made me realize how easily my nerve could fail me in taking the trilogy where I want it to go. (I usually know where I want my characters to end up early in the writing, but the getting there is rather like the famous cartoon of the mathematical proof on the blackboard that has, in the middle, “And then a miracle occurs”.) So I’ve been – and continue to be – a bit skittish. Particularly since, instead of establishing the trajectory for Shadowborn over the summer, I’m in the midst of what has turned out to be a complex and substantial rewrite of Lightborn.

But it’s time to bunt myself out of the hole. Start Twittering again (I’m alixsinc – note the c – on Twitter and alixsin on identi.ca). Turn comments back on. Post photographs. Tidy up the blog. Finish posts and book-notes that are cluttering up my hard drive. Get over to tor.com and chip in my 2-bits-worth on some of their fascinating articles. Get the website upgrade done, which involves making a final decision on Dreamweaver (if it will condescend to accept my license key), Dokuwiki, or WordPress as the publication engine. So many more options since I first learned basic HTML. Can’t promise much over the next month, alas. Aside from Lightborn, I’ve summer courses in pharmacoepidemiology and Bayesian statistics. And I mean to get myself into a kayak at least once a week, before the water freezes once more. And since I’m in Montréal, I have a natural deadline to climb out of my hole: Worldcon 2009, Anticipation. Going to be fun!

The official publication date for Darkborn is tomorrow, and I have finally got the page on line at my website, although the complete redesign I had been working on is still … being worked on. My love of bold design is at war with a cautious austerity born of knowledge of my own artistic limitations. Plus, after some two years of writing from the perspective of characters who do not see as we do, and therefore obliged to forego my usual repertoire of colour-words and visual references, I find cycling through Xaos fractals and tiling background patterns quite hypnotic.

And the website redesign – with transfer to a more modern CMS (probably WordPress) – is competing with revisions to Lightborn, incubation of Shadowborn, revisions to a technical document, and readings in Bayesian analysis. Plus the random sleet of particles of inspiration that seem to be particularly intense when I have things I must get on with … and the fact that spring has finally arrived, and the waters have thawed.

When, back in the winter of 1999/2000, I received the letter telling me that my publisher was declining the option of my next novel, I set it down on the kitchen table and headed off for another 28 or so hours in ICU. The devouring intensity of my daily work immured me against any sense of disappointment or panic. I certainly didn’t imagine it would be nearly a decade before I would publish another solo novel. But to my delight, last month Anne Sowards at ROC took on my first fantasy novel, Darkborn, and its sequels, Lightborn and Shadowborn (see SF Canada news).

Getting a novel (a trilogy!) accepted is as much a kick as it was the first time around, when Deborah Beale bought Legacies and the as yet unconceived and unnamed Blueheart. When I think about it, even after 6.5 SF novels, I shouldn’t be surprised to be writing fantasy, given that I’ve been reading it as long as I’ve been reading SF. Possibly longer: though I’m not sure it counts being assigned to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Grade V, thereby successfully immunizing me against any interest in the series until, as a teenage skeptic, I greeted the ending with a resounding ‘ick!’. Around the time I was rejecting Narnia, I was loving Le Guin’s classic Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, full of lucid language and many-levelled subtleties, and Patricia McKillip’s wonderful The Riddle-Master of Hed. McKillip’s characters were the kind to walk around in one’s mind, not just Morgan and Raederle and Deth, but all the supporting characters: Mathin, Reed, the Morgol, Lyra,  … even those whose names I can’t remember. The year I read it, too, I was intensely homesick; Morgan’s loss of the land-rule of Hed, the sense of every root, twig and farmer, was more than a plot point to me.

Then there was Tolkein. My local bookshop in Edinburgh – I think it was Munroes of Morningside – had a copy of The Hobbit, puffin edition, with a sepia wash line drawing of a dragon on the cover. I am now enlightened enough to know the drawing was the author’s own, but then I mentally catalogued it as one of ‘their books’ – dull, worthy books that adults thought children ought to read. It was Ursula Le Guin’s essay "The Staring Eye" that hooked me on the Lord of the Rings in my last year in undergrad. I recall meeting Faramir over a venerable NMR machine with a taped sign "Wipe sample before inserting"; I was a less than diligent chemistry student that week. The ‘looks dull’ stigma also attached itself to Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword – it was a Newbury winner, after all – and delayed my finding my way into the fascinating land of Damar. One of the attractions that fantasy has always had for me is the importance of place; the setting, the land, as a character in the story.

Some years later, I couldn’t pass by a book that started, "The worst thing about knowing Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work." Thus I discovered Barbara Hambly. I found myself in Philadelphia and Darwath at the same time, and Gil’s deductive reasoning to the heart of the mystery around the Dark delights the scientist in me. But my favourite Hambly bit still has to be this piece of build-up-and-twist, from Dog Wizard:

A thing loomed suddenly from the darkness, a huge shape stooping under the seven-foot arch of the ceiling. Even the pallid light shed by the nodule that dangled, like a third eye, from the front of the platycephalic skull threw no more than a firefly sheen on the stretched, squamous green of its hide. Spider, dragon, and eldritch nightmare; chisel teeth glistened on the lipless muzzle; four long arms, four massive hands thick with claws between which writhed clusters of wriggling tentacles. Those hands, Antryg knew well, could crush a man’s skull. It raised one as it stepped forward.    

"Do you have any idea," Antryg gasped, leaning against the wall for support, "what the hell is going on?"   

"Not the slightest," the monster replied.   

There are more books, many more books; I could reminisce for at least another two or three hours, but shouldn’t, not at this hour. First thing tomorrow I have a date with some imaginary people expecting me to get them out of the various fixes I’ve landed them in.

I’ve been looking for a word to describe the particular narrative flavor of MK Wren’s trilogy The Phoenix Legacy (Sword of the Lamb, Shadow of the Swan, and House of the Wolf, all first published 1981), and failed to find it, though I’m sure it exists. I’m sure there’s a dance in which the stances are as important as the movement, and in these novels, the moments of reflection are as important, if not more so, than the action that – often off-stage – precedes them.

MK Wren has described the trilogy as an historical novel set in the future. The dominant political entity is the Concord, a neo-feudal political entity spread across multiple planets, in which a small Elite rule over the Fesh (professionals) and even more numerous Bonds (serfs).  The trilogy is primarily the story of Alexand DeKoven Woolf, grandson of the Chairman of the Concord, and son and heir to one of its leading families. An educated, thoughtful young man, Alexand is unable to remain oblivious to the instability and fear that is eroding the Concord, with recurrent Bond uprisings met by increasingly brutal repression. Through his scholarly, sensitive brother, Richard, he becomes aware of the Society of the Phoenix, founded a generation ago by the leader of the defeated Peladeen Republic and a group of primarily Fesh revolutionaries dedicated to bringing about an evolution of their society. Richard, already mortally ill, is convicted of treason for his membership and submits to a martyr’s death in an attempt to offer a model of submission to the Bonds. When their father rejects Richard’s sacrifice, Alexand realizes his own political impotence as mere heir, stages his own death and assumes the identity of Commander Alex Ransom of the Phoenix’ military arm. In joining them, he offers the Phoenix an eventual entry into the Elite, provided he survives, and provided he can be restored to his former status. The remaining two books depict the working out of Alexand’s destiny, with repeated betrayals of Alexand and the Phoenix from within that lead him eventually to the same execution platform that his brother died on, years before.

The story and characters are engaging, though perhaps too black and white. The good are fundamentally good and the evil fundamentally evil. Good people may oppose each other – as Alexand’s father does Alexand – but ultimately make the right choice. Love offers salvation, for both Alexand and the assassin Bruno Hawkwood. The patriarchal, feudal society leaves too little latitude for Alexand’s brave and clear-eyed beloved, Adrien Eliseer, to act, so her part of the story is somewhat unsatisfying, though the more egalitarian Society of the Phoenix produces physician Erica Radek and young radical Val Severin. In her flaws and fallibility, Val is one of the most interesting characters: manipulated to betray Alexand, she then strives to redeem herself in her own and his eyes.

I mentioned the distinctive narrative strategy. SF novels commonly use quotes and excerpts from documents that belong to their fictional worlds, though I’ve seldom seen it done so intensively as here. There main story is interspersed with numerous interpolations of personal, historical and sociological documents, mainly as written by Richard’s various aliases, historian, sociologist and Phoenix agent. They fill in some fifteen centuries of back-story, but also introduce several key historical figures, the most important being Lionor Mankeen, who fought a failed war of liberation against the Concord, and Elor Peladeen, founder of the conquered Peladeen republic, whose stories are set against Alexand’s as alternative destinies.

And I mentioned the rhythm of the narrative as being like a mannerly dance, in which the stances are as important as the motions. Each chapter is a single scene, encompassing a relatively brief interval in time, and that moment is often as not the moment of reflection after a revelation or an action, rather than the revelation or action itself: the death of Ivanoi and his family, the death of Elise Galinin Woolfe, the capture of Andreas and Alexand, the meeting in which Adrien pleads with his father for Alexand’s life – all are described in retrospect, as the viewpoint character grapples with the emotional and political implications. We are given only a brief, intense glimpse of a terrified Rich in hiding during a Bond uprising, which proves seminal in his determination to enter the Phoenix – though a longer, first-person description is provided in the very first pages of the book, through one of the interpolated documents. The Phoenix’ brief war with the Concord is depicted entirely from the perspective of a non-combatant, Predis Ussher, traitor and usurper. Two purposes are achieved: a unity in the account, and an inside look at the destruction of the dream of conquest. It’s a distinctive approach that emphasizes interior experience over physical events. It gives the novels a romantic intensity, but also a sometimes offbalanced stillness that is certainly contrary to current fashion, and may not be to everyone’s taste. I like it, though.

Last month, I “did Nano”, and to my mild surprise, wrote a little over 50 000 words in 30 days. This month, I am cutting 50 000 words out of a novel. The things one does to avoid sweeping up plot bunnies.