In Dreams Awake

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Monday 28 May 2018

Carried off by a Dragon

 Age is a funny thing y'know.

 When I hit 20 I didn't care much. I wasn't a teenager anymore, and so what? Same when I hit 30, and then 40. I didn't really understand the idea of a mid-life crisis. They're just numbers. If we counted in base 60 like the Sumerians then nobody would worry about these multiples of ten.

I reached 50 last month, and I've slowly realised I feel different this time. I mean, 50. Half a century. I don't even think I want another 50 years, slowly declining into senescence and confined to comfy chairs in a home somewhere. But that might lie ahead. There's a voice in my mind that's lost and alone, and a little afraid. Only a small voice, but it's there.

 I am already on the downward slope, over the crest of the hill and closer to the finish than the start.

 Wow. Just... blimey. I mean, I have two infant daughters, and after all this time I've got reasons to want to live. And yet at the same time I've come to understand that I'm probably at a point where my energy and stamina begin to fade. Doesn't seem fair, does it?

 Now, my twisty won't-stop-twittering brain has taken all this and wondered what it would have been like five hundred years ago, when 50 would have been a pretty grand age. The average might have been 30 or so. Does that mean people had mid-life crises in their twenties? Did men of twenty-four have a sudden urge to get a tattoo and buy a really fast racing mule? A man like that might have been married at 17, seen his wife die in childbirth and married again at 22, have three kids that lived and two that didn't. If anyone had the right to dream of freedom and a more exciting life, he did.

 It's interesting, but hard to see how it could be incorporated into a Fantasy story. Modern readers won't sympathise with a twenty-something with an identity crisis, they'll just think he's a self-indulgent cockwomble. You can't really write a true account of how life was for people back then, or in a similar world. Too much of it would be dealing with plague or smallpox scars, and working a twelve-hour day of backbreaking labour only for the crops to be eaten by greenfly. Or the cows carried off by a dragon, but that doesn't change much. An author needs to create the right mood, but not too right. An overdose of realism kills the mood.

 The genre is called Fantasy, after all.

Thursday 10 May 2018

No Pressure, Then.

 I've been thinking about battle in SF and Fantasy.

 In SF onscreen, it's usually rubbish. Star Wars has fighters that behave just like planes in World War I, dogfighting around planets. Space: Above and Beyond was the same. Moonraker and others feature marines who drop from orbit into battle. But all these things are nonsense. Our technology is already so advanced that we can pick aircraft off from miles away with homing missiles, so why use lasers that miss even from a few hundred metres? Why drop assault infantry from orbit when micro missiles would shred them high in the atmosphere?

 Fantasy is bad too. Partly that's the LOTR tradition, in which the Good Guys come through massive battles without a scratch, leaving a trail of dead Orcs or generic Bad Guys behind. I know a bit of history, and nobody comes through a battle that way. You suffer burns where your shield ring rubs, or blisters, or bruises from your armour taking a hit. In medieval days people died when their armour was driven into flesh and jumbled up their organs. No scratch? That means no one hit you, so you're either luckier than gods or faster than light. Silly either way.

 As for magic, mostly we find what I think of as the Terry Brooks approach. Mages who throw spells around, usually beams of red or green like lasers, sometimes illusions. And this, friends 'n neighbours, is the one that really annoys me. Is that really the best way a mage can think of to fight?

 I have a new WIP which involves a good bit of magic. It's used to fight, which means I need to work out how. I don't want to have this mano a mano approach. I'm looking at illusion, mages changing their appearance or fading into the background, so you don't know they're there until they strike. But what else could a sorcerer do? Slice time, perhaps. Divide a second into smaller and smaller segments, allowing himself to move more quickly than an opponent and so counter his moves before they develop. They might win by crushing the rival's mind. Someone watching would see the figures blur, and not much else, except that maybe the ground around them bubbles or cracks with the force unleashed.

 These are broad strokes, and I don't have details yet. But I like the direction of ideas. It's a little different from the usual, and that's a good thing I think. Let's give the reader something new to look at. It might be better, might be worse (that up to me, so no pressure, then). But at least it will feel new, and that matters.

 That's all for now. Pip pip.