Guest Post: “The Beretta 9mm” by J.B. Turner

May 1, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Exhibit A

Here’s the thing.

If you’ve read an American thriller, there’s a fair chance the protagonist will use a gun. There’s no way to sugarcoat that. Read any James Lee Burke and you’ll see either Dave Robicheaux or Clete Purcell pressing a gun to some bad guy’s head in the swamps of south Louisiana. Same with the great Richard Stark’s ‘Parker’ character in The Hunter, which became a film with Lee Marvin or later, Mel Gibson’s Payback.

Guns, some people think, go to the heart of what it means to be an American. It’s even written into the constitution, the right to bear arms.

My protagonist in the conspiracy thriller Hard Road Jon Reznick, an ex-Special Forces operative, is assigned a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic pistol – amongst a host of other gadgets and hardware including electronic jamming equipment – to carry out an assassination of a government scientist.

So what’s the thing with the Beretta – an Italian gun manufacturer – becoming among the most popular guns in America?

Beretta use a Teflon-based pain finish, referred to as Bruniton. Whilst blueing or Parkerizing is only a surface-modification on other pistols, Bruniton, by contrast, is a coating. The end result is a finished pistol which is ‘flat-black’ with little glare. The pistol coating is also very durable.

But aesthetics didn’t make its name in recent years. So what did?

The Beretta 9mm, the M9, was adopted by the American military in 1985. It won a competition to select the primary sidearm of the U.S. military. It was selected over the Sig Sauer P226 which later become the “issue pistol” of the Navy SEALs after a series of exhaustive tested using a battery of sand, mud, salt spray, rust, ice and drop testing.

But there were a handful of incidents of slide fractures. This caused the rear of the slid to separate from the pistol on recoil, injuring military personnel.

This prompted a redesign to stop such failures.

However, the Beretta has now been a staple of the American military for more than 20 years, aligning them with their NATO allies who use the gun. Combined with the “relative ease” of normal field stripped, and it’s easy to see what makes it such a hugely popular gun.

The US Army and US Air Force even have a General Officer’s Model, which began being issued in 1986. The serial numbers for this model of the Beretta M9 – Semi-automatic Pistol start with ‘G’ and comes with a gold metal belt buckle for Army generals and a silver metal belt buckle for Air Force generals.

But despite everything, it is not universally loved in the US military.

It is heavy, compared to the Glock 17, which is 10 ounces lighter due to a plastic frame. It also doesn’t have the stopping power of a .45. Some want a ‘one-shot-stop-knock-down-hand-cannon’. However, other say that proficiency with the weapon and in particular, shot placement are crucial, not the caliber of the weapon. Other critics say there are problems with lubrication, parts breakages and the use of sub-contracted non-Beretta magazines to save money. It is said that there is a sub-standard interior finish and poor springs, and therefore not as reliable.

Nevertheless, Beretta USA revealed in late-2011 that the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Sales program purchased an additional 15,000 9mm Bistols for the Afghan military and other U.S. allies. And in 2012, Beretta USA revealed that the the U.S. Army had bought 100,000 M9 pistols and would “remain their sidearms for the next five years.”

The Beretta 9mm is here to stay, whether you like it or not… just like Jon Reznick.

***

J.B. Turner’s Hard Road was published by Exhibit A Books in August 2013. The sequel, Hard Kill, is due out in July 2014.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Duncan Jepson

April 8, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Article, China, Duncan Jepson, East-West Relations, Emperors Once More, Influences and Inspirations, International Relations, Politics, Quercus, Thriller

During the last 150 years, China and the West have collided many times, virtually always on Chinese soil, and their relationship is heavily coloured by this history. Many in Asia are choosing and building their futures motivated by their own and their family’s experiences, ambitions and histories, much of it unclear and unknown to most in the West. The relationship between China and West is set to become more intense and complicated and we have to hope these two sides will work together rather than tear the world apart.

The story of Emperors Once More is about the collision of these different motivations and forces in China and among Chinese people, set against their position on the world stage. On a national level, the government is tasked with maintaining a union of a billion plus people so it does not crumble into chaos again, fighting the very human feeling of humiliation from centuries of defeat, both personal and national, the need to re-establish respect on the world stage, the clashes that will arise from the very practical need to obtain vital resources for the future and China’s new role in the global order. The story is also about those very personal experiences such as migration, subservience, colonialism, aspiration, ideology, revolution and tradition.

This is also personal to me. As a Eurasian, I have often found myself stuck awkwardly in geography, sometimes feeling at home in no place in particular but persistently trying to be comfortable in both East and West. I have watched the older generation in Hong Kong, those having lived and grown up under colonial rule, feel the weight of a heavy glass ceiling whether due to limited education, lack of understanding of the governing culture or, at times, simply by race. To some there is a deep frustration and resentment to having been treated as what they feel is a foreigner in their own home. Thankfully the world has moved on and a young generation of Chinese don’t see themselves this way – many are now of a new global generation.

The premise of Emperors Once More is that, in 2017, China has bailed out the West, but the West has defaulted on its debt. For many Chinese, this has the same strong sense of bitterness as the humiliations of the Opium War, Rape of Nanjing and Boxer Rebellion. One man in Hong Kong, deeply affected by colonialism, wants to use this new collective anger and indignation to push Chinese to demand China use its global power to reclaim its rightful place in the world order. To achieve these ends, he will draw on both ancient rites and modern technology to commit a series of killings and provoke national rage.

I wanted a criminal with a purpose and an anger that is rooted deep in history and personal experiences, believing there are wrongs to be righted, and a hero who is of a new different world who sees a better future that does not have to pay for the past. I hope that this story pulls the reader into a full-bloodied crime tale while drawing on Chinese history, culture and mysticism.

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Duncan Jepson is the award-winning director, producer and writer of five feature films. He also produced documentaries for Discovery Channel Asia and National Geographic Channel. He was the editor of the Asia-based fashion magazine West East and a founder and managing editor of Asia Literary Review. He is a social commentator on Asia and regularly writes for The New York Times, Publishing Perspectives and South China Morning Post. A lawyer by profession, he lives in Hong Kong.

Jepson’s Emperors Once More is out now, published in the UK by Quercus Books. Jepson is also the author of All the Flowers in Shanghai. Be sure to follow Duncan on Twitter and Goodreads.

Guest Post: “Fantasy – It’s Not a Choice, it’s a Way of Life!” by Debbie Johnson

April 4, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Dark Vision, Debbie Johnson, Del Rey UK, Urban Fantasy

I was recently asked by a journalist why I felt ‘compelled’ to write fantasy. It’s probably very telling that my first frame of reference for that questions was ‘Compelled? Like, by a vampire or a mystical creature with mind control tricks?’

As I forced variations of ‘these aren’t the ‘droids you’re looking for’ from my brain, I tried to give a coherent answer – but it’s a very difficult affinity to explain to someone who’s not inclined that way. It stems from so many childhood memories – reading The Hobbit, getting bitten by the David Eddings bug as a teenager, watching Labyrinth 10,000 times when I worked as a cinema usherette in the 80s. All of this and more contributed to the kind of brain that sees things a little bit differently than other people.

By the time I was in my late teens, it had become serious. If my mother had known that I was involved in a penpal circle where we all pretended to be fictional characters from Pern, she’d probably have called in the trick cyclist.

Now, as an alleged adult and mother of three myself, I have all the trappings of maturity – a car, a mortgage, even a stately Golden Retriever. But I still see things a little bit differently. That’s part of how my first book, Dark Vision, came to life. I live in Liverpool – a vast, complex multi-cultural city. That alone is interesting enough – but what about if you add the little extra touches? Like a fairy mound in the Wirral, or a magic portal in Sefton Park, or a raging Celtic battleground along the banks of the Mersey? What if the Liver Birds didn’t just look amazing up there, perched and glinting – what if they could come alive and take a creaking, mechanical flight over the city?

What if a normal Liverpool girl – one who’d also always seen things a little bit differently – was caught up in the middle of it all, fighting for a sense of identity and sanity in an existence spiralling out of her control?

It’s not difficult to spot the wish fulfilment there. And surely that’s one of the reasons fantasy appeals so much: often revolving around taking a ‘normal’ human being and plunging them into totally alien and mind-expanding situations. From Bilbo onwards, that’s what’s drawn us in – it might be an alternate reality, but it’s populated by People Like Us.

Most of us lead pleasingly dull, mundane lives. There is nothing wrong with that – it’s a lot better than displeasingly exciting. But fantasy allows us to spread our wings (sometimes literally) and fly around the ever-changing landscapes of the mind. Alll fiction does that to some extent – but with fantasy, it’s a whole different level. With urban fantasy – which I unashamedly love – it’s even easier: see that bloke over there, outside Costco? Yeah, that’s him, the security guard. He’s actually a werewolf assassin in disguise!

All of this makes reading a marvellous adventure – and makes writing an absolute joy. It does, however, make trips to Costco ever-so-slightly tense.

I suppose I could try and stop thinking like this. Apart from the fact that I’m simply compelled…

***

Dark Vision by Debbie Johnson is published by Del Rey UK.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Stephanie Saulter

March 24, 2014April 20, 2015 Civilian Reader Guest Post Binary, Gemsigns, Influences and Inspirations, Jo Fletcher Books, Revolution, Sci-Fi, Stephanie Saulter

I had, by any definition, an unusual childhood – I grew up in what was then a fairly remote corner of rural Jamaica, beautiful but quite isolated, in a resolutely free-thinking, non-conformist family. I have seven siblings so I wasn’t exactly lonely; but being the eldest, a voracious reader and not particularly gregarious, I never really felt I fitted in to the neighbourhood. Books were my escape hatch, my window into different times and places and worlds. They were how I worked out who I was, what I was interested in, what lay beyond the horizon.

The power of story to capture your imagination and alter your thinking and take you somewhere else had a profound effect on who I grew up to be, long before I became a writer of stories myself. And because so many stories celebrate the outsider, the loner, the person who is always second to the right of everyone else, I think they helped to reassure me that being a bit odd and a bit different was okay. You can be the hero of your own life, and it doesn’t have to be like anyone else’s life. I learned that early, and I learned it from books. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Pantheon Inspirations” by James Lovegrove

March 18, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Age of Aztec, Age of Godpunk, Age of Odin, Age of Ra, Age of Shiva, Age of Voodoo, Influences and Inspirations, James Lovegrove, Pantheon Series, Solaris

So far my Pantheon series extends to six novels and three novellas. What is it about these military-SF tales of gods and men that I seem to find so fascinating? Why do I keep coming back time and time again to this well of inspiration?

Partly it’s because the ideas embedded in polytheistic religious mythologies are so wonderfully rich and exploitable, like countless mines yielding up different seams of precious ore. I myself do not believe in deities of any kind, but the stories that others have came up with about them over the centuries are pleasingly intricate and complex, full of incident and nuance. Every Pantheon strikes me as being like a dysfunctional family. Their conflicts and passions echo those of their worshippers. Even though they’re gods, they’re eminently relatable. They banter and squabble, have affairs, plays tricks on one another, lose their temper, just as humans do. The aloof, monotheistic gods whose faiths prevail in the world today aren’t anywhere near as interesting. Those guys are like grumpy father figures you can’t get on with and have to tread carefully around but are still supposed to admire. Where’s the fun in that?

I didn’t set out to write a series. When Solaris, my publisher, commissioned Age Of Ra from me, I thought it would be a one-off, a slice of alternate history with a bit of Ancient Egyptian mythology thrown in to add savour. I certainly didn’t anticipate that I’d still be writing in the same subgenre seven years later, or even that that subgenre would have gained its own name, godpunk. But that’s me. I never plan things. Foresight is not my middle name.

The great thing about the Pantheon novels, as far as writing them goes, is that the tone of each is set by the individual tone of the myths which I’m dealing with. Age Of Odin, for instance, could only have taken place in a world caught in the grip of the Fimbulwinter, the three years of constant ice and snow that presage Ragnarok, and the bad guy could only have been Loki, the trickster, pitting himself against the other residents of Asgard as he does in the Sagas and the Skaldic poems. Likewise, Age Of Aztec just had to be about a high-tech, quasi-Aztec culture, full of human sacrifice, ziggurat temples, and flying saucers in the tradition of Chariots Of The Gods. Once I’ve started researching each book, the plot begins to suggest itself, arising organically from the background material. In a way, I have to do only half the work I otherwise might – half the backstory creation, half the worldbuilding. The other half has already been done for me by the people who dreamed up the original stories. You could even call this cheating.

The latest volume in the series, Age Of Shiva, came about largely because I’ve long had a hankering to write a superhero tale, being the massive comics fan than I am. I perceived that the Hindu pantheon is, in many ways, a set of super-powered beings who battle demons, vampires and other monsters. They’re good guys with a clearly delineated set of bad guys ranged against them. That is, of course, a very reductive view of Hinduism, which is a great deal more complicated and beautifully arabesque and nowhere near as trivial as I’m making it sound. On the surface, however, at a purely primal level of storytelling, that is where it’s at. I thought to myself, “I could have some fun extrapolating a superhero story out of this mythology,” and so, as it proved, I did.

The plot focuses on a comic book artist who is employed by a multinational consortium to help on a secret project to create a real-live superhero team. Ten super-powered characters, based on the Ten Avatars of Vishnu, emerge into the glare of the media spotlight, and rapidly make a name for themselves, saving civilians from snake-men, sewer-dwelling vampires and the like. Things, however, get gnarlier and more complicated from there, and it isn’t long before the world’s balance of military power is destabilised and the threat of nuclear Armageddon looms.

That may all sound very serious, but as with the other Pantheon novels, Shiva is all about the action and the fun. The violence is over-the-top, and the protagonist’s narrative voice is, I hope, witty and wry.

I’m not sure what my next Pantheon novel will be, which set of gods it will concentrate on, what shape it will take. I’ve three other books to write first before I seriously have to start thinking about it. The joy of the concept, though, is that whichever pantheon I choose to exploit, I’ll be as surprised by the outcome as any reader.

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Also on CR: Interview with James Lovegrove, Guest Post on Age of Godpunk, Excerpt (Age of Shiva)

Guest Post: “On Change, Blood and Iron…” by Jon Sprunk

March 17, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Blood and Iron, Book of the Black Earth, Change, Fantasy, Jon Sprunk, Pyr Books, Shadow Saga, Shadow's Edge, Shadow's Lure, Shadow's Son

Hello everyone. I’m Jon Sprunk, the author of Blood and Iron (which came out last week) as well as the Shadow Saga, both from Pyr Books. I’m so glad to have this chance to speak to you. Today I’d like to talk about change.

Whoa, whoa. Don’t click away yet! I know everyone has a healthy mistrust for change, but I’ll keep it painless. Scoundrel’s honor.

What I mean by change are the differences between writing my two series. For those who don’t know my work, the Shadow Saga trilogy was about a lonewolf assassin named Caim. The new series, The Book of the Black Earth, follows the stories of three people caught up in the machinations of an empire ruled by sorcerers.

Besides the obvious story differences, I had a completely different experience writing these series. The Shadow books were all kinetic energy, with the characters bouncing from one perilous danger to the next. I likened it to the Bourne movies, but with more swords and arrows.

With Blood and Iron, I took a more deliberate approach. Does that mean it’s boring? I hope not. But it means that the action (and there is a lot of action) serves the story, rather than the other way around. I don’t believe one way is better than the other, but I’d done the “slash first and ask questions later” routine, so with the new books I wanted to try something different.

Speaking of action. Fight scenes. I love them and I’m not ashamed to admit it. And I love writing them. The biggest change in fight scenes between the two series is perhaps found in the mindsets of the major characters. As I said, Caim from the Shadow books is an assassin. He’s an expert knife-fighter, and killing is his business. The main character in Blood and Iron is a former shipwright and carpenter named Horace. While not a coward, Horace isn’t accustomed to confrontation. When he is taken captive by his enemies, it seems he doesn’t have any tools with which to fight them… until he discovers a latent talent for sorcery. Yet, even once Horace begins to learn about his new power, he isn’t as cutthroat (pardon the pun) or proficient in combat as Caim the Knife. Like most of us “real people,” fights typically happen to Horace, whereas Caim has no problem looking for trouble.

One thing I’m commonly asked is what I’ve learned since writing my first book. That’s not easy to answer. It’s a difficult thing to gauge your own progress. I feel more in control of my stories now, that I’m in a better position to try new things and push my personal envelop. As a lifelong lover of old-school sword & sorcery, the Shadow books were right in my wheelhouse. I also read a lot of epic fantasy, but I have to confess I was a little anxious approaching the new series. Epic usually means a bigger story world, a larger cast, more emphasis on the big picture. Big everything! But what I attempted to do (and perhaps some of you who read Blood and Iron will tell me if I’ve succeeded) was to take the cut and thrust dynamics of S&S and apply that to an “epic” setting and “epic” themes. In short, I wanted to have the best of both worlds.

Well, that’s it for today. I hope I was at least marginally entertaining.

Be well and keep reading.

***

Also on CR: Interview with Jon Sprunk, Guest Post (Lessons Learned)

Jon Sprunk is the author of Blood and Iron as well as the Shadow Saga (Shadow’s Son, Shadow’s Lure, and Shadow’s Master). He’s also a mentor at the Seton Hill University fiction writing program. Be sure to check out his website and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Guest Post: “Inspiration in Translation” by E.J. Swift

March 12, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Cataveiro, Del Rey UK, EJ Swift, Influences and Inspirations, Inspiration in Translation, Night Shade Books, Osiris, Osiris Project

The second book in my Osiris Project trilogy, Cataveiro, moves the action from an ocean city cut off from the rest of the world, to a South American continent which has been radically altered by climate change. I’ve always been drawn by the beauty of the South American landscape, but in writing Cataveiro I also wanted to explore something of the continent’s literary heritage. For inspiration, and in the hope that some of their flair might rub off, I started reading Latin American writers in translation.

The obvious place to start was with magical realism, although I was interested to discover a podcast on Latin American literature debating a move away from the form. I’d previously read Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but while I admired the novel greatly, Marquez turned out to be my least favourite of the writers I discovered.

One of the first books I read was by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. Last Evenings On Earth is a darkly satirical collection of stories, and proved a good place to start as an introduction to Bolaño’s work. His prose is effortless, clean as a knife, and stylistically, he seems to get away with things that on paper should never work. I’ve only just got round to the book generally acknowledged as his masterpiece, 2666, but already I’m lost in admiration over the seamless weaving of characters and their internal and external narratives.

Angelica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial has proved another favourite: a gorgeous work of fantasy which charters ‘The Greatest Empire That Never Was’ in a series of tales delivered through the classic frame of the story-teller. One of my favourite chapters tells the story of one of the empire’s cities, capturing centuries of history in sinuous, evocative prose. In the final chapter, stories offered by the characters during a caravan crossing of the desert are punctuated with gloriously bizarre riffs on everything from the rise of Hollywood studios to the Beatles.

Nine Nights by Bernard Cavalho is part memoir, part imagined history, in which the author becomes obsessed with an American ethnologist who committed suicide in the Amazon jungle in 1939. Dreamy and mysterious, you never quite know where you are with this narrator. Equally tricksy is the protagonist of Chico Buarque’s Budapest, a Brazilian ghost writer who becomes obsessed with the Hungarian language. This is a beautiful poem of a book where the narrative works like a series of mirrors, illuminating and reflecting back on itself.

I dipped into Borges with Dreamtigers – a collection which is half poetry, half reflection – and Silvina Ocampo’s The Topless Tower, a contemporary of Borges and another prolific writer of the fantastic. Lygia Fagundes Telles’s vividly told The Girl in the Photograph deploys a complex, demanding narrative as it follows the intertwining stories of three young women.

This was only a small sample of the writers I would have liked to read, and there are many more whose work wasn’t available in English. I’d love to read Rachel de Queiroz, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Andrea del Fuego, three recommendations whose work I couldn’t find a translation. What other writers in translation (Spanish/Portuguese speaking or otherwise!) would you recommend, and which are on your to-read list?

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E. J. Swift is the author of Osiris and Cataveiro, the first two volumes in The Osiris Project trilogy – published in the UK by Del Rey UK, and in the US by Night Shade Books. Her short fiction has been published in Interzone magazine, and appears in anthologies including The Best British Fiction 2013 and Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven. She is shortlisted for a 2013 BFSA Award in the short fiction category for her story Saga’s Children.

Guest Post: “Tower of Babel” by Aidan Harte

March 7, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Aidan Harte, Fantasy, Fiction, Historical, Irenicon, Jo Fletcher Books, Religion, Spira Mirabilis, Tower of Babel, Warring States, Wave Trilogy

Masons, like writers, learn the hard way to choose their foundation carefully. The strength of that first stone defines the structure, sets the tone. Accordingly, Chapter One of Spira Mirabilis begins with blasphemy. The Last Apprentice of Concord whips up a Children’s Crusade and instead of sending them to fight the approaching coalition led by Contessa Scaligeri, he sets them to construct a new cathedral. This is a recreation of the Tower of Babel, that structure torn down by an outraged God who then “confounded the language of all the Earth,” for good measure.

Finishing The Wave Trilogy, I found myself toiling in Babel’s shadow. This influence can be partly ascribed to the setting – cathedral building was medieval society’s engine, the focus of mathematics, engineering, art and devotion – but what troubled me was what Nimrod’s Tower says about creation. It condemns all creation as a blasphemous encroachment. What more damning indictment of the hubris of storytelling than a tower reaching to heaven, swatted aside by the greatest creator of all? The Middle East’s attitude to idolaters has always swayed between hostility and ambivalence. No accident then that Scheherazade, like Babel, springs from the fertile soil between the Euphrates and the Tigres. The lovely slave girl forever spinning yarns to keep her head from tumbling is, I like to think, the patron saint of storytelling. Her story reveals the secret of all stories: once you get in the habit of it, it’s easier to keep going than to stop.

There’s always a new twist, a cliff-hanger to escape, a long lost uncle to appear, a reconciliation or – better yet – a quarrel to be had. The deeper one is immersed, the more improbabilities one will accept. Watch the end of any Hitchcock film; it will seem overwrought, even silly, but only because you haven’t earned the heightened emotions the last act demands. Plenty of wonderful stories, like political careers, simply capsize before the finish line. The final season of The Wire is a catastrophe, but it seems churlish to say so. Instead we echo the builders of Babel: ‘Shame how it ended, but wasn’t she splendid?’

It’s a bittersweet thing to leave a place you’ve lived in for years but I’m finally saying addio to Etruria. No matter how much we rehearse farewells, they are almost always anticlimactic. Only a committed Austinian can recall the last lines of Pride and Prejudice:

“With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.”

I know – yawnsville, right? Dear Jane is simply putting the chairs away and turning out the lights, but we’ve enjoyed the evening’s entertainment so much that we can’t complain if it ends in diminuendo. First impressions matter. Endings? Not so much. That last Parthian shot won’t mar a wonderful story or salvage a dull one. The battle’s won or lost long before then. Famous farewells, then, are necessarily a rare species. There’s Gatsby with his green light and boat going nowhere and Sydney Carton doing that far, far better thing. My favourite comes from Tracy Chevalier’s The Girl with the Pearl Earring. ‘A maid comes free’ is the final bittersweet flourish which makes this poignant tale linger.

Parting pickings are slim because it is a truth universally concealed that most writers are too preoccupied leaving the stage with dignity to craft something beautiful. But endings should be fashioned as carefully as the keystone that completes the arch, and not afterthoughts. Readers are well used to preposterous final acts when the air suddenly escapes. The sound of that rushing air is usually a Calvary horn. When it toots, it’s time to get your coat. The technical term is Deus Ex Machina, or God from the Machine. The phrase, as every eager Lit Grad know, originates in Greek theater when Zeus or one of his progeny would drop down and resolve things with a thunderbolt.

In Spira Mirabilis I throw a spanner in the divine machinery, asking what if God wants to help, but is powerless. I posit that God was not merely offended by Nimrod’s Tower, He was threatened. The Apprentice’s Tower is a knife to sever earth and heaven, and Contessa Scaligeri is the only one who can stop him. High stakes then. Does it come off, or does it come crashing down, leaving me with the poor hod-carriers at Babel, unpaid and gibbering nonsense?

Let’s see when the dust settles.

***

Aidan Harte is the author of The Wave Trilogy – Irenicon, The Warring States and Spira Mirabilis – published in the UK by Jo Fletcher Books. Spira Mirabilis will be published on March 27th (eBook) and April 3rd (hardcover).

Also on CR: Interview with Aidan Harte, Guest Post (Yesterday That Never Was), Excerpt of Irenicon

Guest Post: “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, Tell Story” by Jonathan Wood

February 24, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Anti Hero, Final Fantasy, Jonathan Wood, Mass Effect, Night Shade Books, No Hero, Supernatural, The Witcher, Thriller, Titan Books, Urban Fantasy, Video Games, Videogames, Yesterday's Hero

When videogames first appeared, they really were games. There were victory conditions to meet, puzzles to solve, opponents to outwit. You could win. But then somewhere along the way, story snuck in, and videogames changed. You were no longer simply trying to win, instead you were struggling to get to the end, to complete the narrative.

Back when I was in college, I watched my friend play Final Fantasy VII. There was a group of us. We’d make an evening of it, gather round as my friend loaded the disc, pour some drinks, and watch what happened next to Cloud, Yuna, Barrett, and the rest of the gang.

Final Fantasy was the first videogame story that really grabbed me. It was epic, operatic, sprawling through twists and turns, through a mythology that was utterly alien to me. The next two games in the franchise were stutter steps for me, but Final Fantasy X held me in its grip once more, as I hastily fumbled through sections of gameplay to get to the next installment of the story.

I started trying to write my first novel shortly after finishing Final Fantasy X. I knew I didn’t want to write a traditional, Western fantasy. Elves and dwarfs did little for me. Instead, I remembered the fresh mythology I’d seen in the Final Fantasy games — summoning towering spirits, battling titanic monsters… I remembered that sense of the new. Turning a corner in the game and having my jaw hang at a glowing vista, at an aerial battle, an intimate scene in the glow of a phosphorescent tree… That inspiration drove the novel. It filled page after page with words.

The rather unfortunate end to this story is that the novel stunk. It was a first novel. These things happen. But it wasn’t the last time a videogame has inspired me.

Videogames are not often known for their literary ambition. It’s a situation that’s starting to change, but only slowly. There is often an uneven truce between story and gameplay, one trying to drive the desire for the other. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t lessons a writer can learn.

My personal videogame obsession is the Mass Effect series. There are moments of magnificent storytelling in the game. The pinnacle for me comes in the first game. You must choose which of two shipmates you will save. On the surface it’s a standard life-and-death question, but due to hours of careful characterization, it goes deeper than that. It’s about loyalty, friendship, morality, and love. It’s about the person you want to be playing this game. It is a very personal set of character stakes brought to a towering crescendo.

I write a series. I can’t kill my main character. That’s off the table. But Mass Effect taught me that that doesn’t have to lower the stakes. Rather, I force my protagonist to make these kinds of choices. Who is he going to decide to be? Far worse than dying can be the things we are forced to live with.

The Witcher is another popular RPG series that puts a strong emphasis on storytelling. The focus is on the character Geralt, a monster-killing badass fueled by magic and drugs. On the surface Geralt is everything you could want a hero to be, competent, slick, and cold as a sharp steel blade. The games are everything I want them to be. And yet, I’ve never completed one.

The problem is, I don’t like Geralt. As competent as he is, nothing is ever done to make me actually feel for him. I am simply thrown into his skin and told to go forth and kick righteous ass. It feels hollow.

Readers like characters to be competent. But that’s not enough on its own. That’s what The Witcher taught me. To make sure there’s something human in my characters to hold on to. A sense of humor, a love of cats, an inability to bite ones tongue. We like characters for their qualities, but we fall in love with them for their flaws.

Writers are encouraged to read, and I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that advice. In fact, I think it’s critically important. But I also wouldn’t say that books are the only storytelling medium that writers should pay attention to. I wouldn’t even limit it to books and videogames. Movies, newspapers, conversations around the dinner table. The world is full of stories, and each one contains a lesson. And if we choose to learn them from videogames, we even can do it while stabbing monsters in the face.

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Jonathan Wood is the author of NO HERO and YESTERDAY’S HERO, first published by Night Shade Books, but coming later this year from Titan Books (March and September). A third novel in the series, ANTI HERO, is due to be published in March 2015. Be sure to follow him on Twitter and Goodreads for news, etc.

Guest Post: “And the World Turned Gray: Gritty vs. Classic Heroes” by Kameron Hurley

January 23, 2014 Civilian Reader Guest Post Bel Dame Apocrypha, Del Rey UK, God's War, Grimdark, Gritty, Gritty vs Heroic Fantasy, Heroes, Infidel, Kameron Hurley, Night Shade Books, Rapture, Sci-Fi

Kameron Hurley is an award-winning writer and freelance copywriter who grew up in Washington State. She is the author of the book God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture, and her short fiction has appeared in magazines such Lightspeed, EscapePod, and Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as The Lowest Heaven and Year’s Best SF.

Also on CR: Review of God’s War

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I’ll sometimes hear folks musing about where the “gritty” hero came from. And though you’ll get a lot of knee-jerk responses of the “Well, it’s a reaction to traditional goody-goody heroes,” I’d argue, in fact, that gritty, unlikeable heroes have been around a lot longer than you’d think. Gormenghast wasn’t exactly full of heroes. It was full of idiots and backstabbers. We just didn’t celebrate them. They were funny.

Oh, sure, what littered the shelves as I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s were indeed mostly traditional sorts, I suppose. But there were notable exceptions – Jennifer Roberson’s Tiger, Mary Gentle’s Ash, and let’s face it, you know, Conan wasn’t a sweetheart fun dude.

But the hero who broke all the rules – who didn’t really save the world, who didn’t get the girl that tore me up the most – was Fitz in Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice. I’d argue Hobb’s semi-tragic hero, who did not slay the dragon or win a kingdom (even Joe Abercrombie’s characters sometimes win a kingdom) or run off with the love of their life, was among the first to start the shift toward a hero who was a bit more gray, a bit more complex, and whose end was a lot less predictable than most. Fitz was the Catalyst. He was the person great events moved around. He was not the active agent. Only the spark.

In truth, on looking at a lot of fantasy heroes and heroines of the past, what I found had changed most between, say 1970 and 2004 wasn’t the level of grit or gritty. After all, there was a lot of dark, messed up stuff going on in the New Wave (The Stars My Destination, for a brief departure into SF-land, was hardly full of nice people). Instead, what changed was this idea that the good guys were always going to win. That the Big Bad would be defeated. So you got heroes like Fitz, and KJ Bishop’s war-wrecked veterans, who, it could be argued, often did more harm than good. Maureen McHugh writes complex characters whose endings always tend to be ambiguous, sort of non-endings, more abrupt halts than tying up all the loose ends.

What we’re falling in love with, over time, isn’t necessarily the grittiest jerk with a sword – we had Conan for that. What began to happen is that we craved more complexity in our stories. And with complexity comes a good deal of ugliness. The bad guys sometimes win. Sometimes it’s not even clear who the bad guys are. Oh, sure, folks wrote dark, complex fiction prior to when the term “grimdark” popped up, but grimdark – tragedy, complexity, brutality – of this type has been especially sought after from the early 2000’s. Just as New Weird started becoming a Named Thing, the dark fantasy writers were beginning to get more attention, too.

It’s been interesting to watch video games go through this same tilt toward the more complex, the tragic. I sobbed my way through Mass Effect 3, while the galaxy was being destroyed around me. And… I found it deeply cathartic. But… why? What are these complex stories giving me that fluffier, more comfortable stuff isn’t?

I’d argue this love of the grim and complex isn’t just about the maturity of an art form, but a reflection of the times we live in. The United States has been at constant war since 2001. That’s thirteen years of war. That kind of war – even one conducted on far shores, and brutally ignored in our media – seeps into everything. The world looks a lot more complex when you’re fighting in residential areas and sending drones to blow up wedding parties, doesn’t it?

Our fiction, the stories we were interested in, changed too. Because war gets into your bones. Veterans come home. The war they fought not only affects them, but everyone around them. It bleeds into everything.

And that seepage is nothing compared to the grim reality faced by those whose countries we waged war in.

So when people tell me that the rise of gritty, complex fiction is a reaction against traditional heroes, or something only aliened teen boys read, I can’t help but sigh. Because I’m seeing the desire for grim stories from another angle. From the position of a people who perpetuate violence on others but have very little experience of violence. People struggling to figure out who the good guy is, because, increasingly, as they look in the mirror they realize that it isn’t as clear as it once we.

We look for ourselves in our stories. It’s how we make sense of the world.

The gritty and traditional heroes are products of their times. We used to believe we were right. We’d always win. The world was black and white. As the world is split wide open with greater access to information and instant communication, many are waking up to that fact.

It’s the gray heroes we see – the ones who don’t always win. The ones who bring more war than peace. Who solve disagreements with brutality. With force. And fear. And fault.

We see ourselves.

And we’re not traditional heroes.

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Kameron’s God’s War, Infidel and Rapture are published by Night Shade Books in the US and Del Rey in the UK (only God’s War has been released so far in the UK).