Influences, Part 4

Technology never solved any of our real problems. The moment we squash one, another pops up. We praise ourselves for defeating polio only to see the disease morph and avoid our vaccines. We congratulate ourselves on decreasing the amount of backbreaking work present in our daily lives only to fear heart disease and obesity. We thwart terrorist attacks only to infringe on personal liberties. Beyond that, we just use our new sciences to fuel our old fires of hatred.

The advent of modernism, I think, demonstrated this extremely clearly. Remember the eugenics movement? This "science" was used to perpetuate racism and to shirk off social responsibility. Its most disastrous use was its role in the Holocaust, when it was used to "prove" the inferiority of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, among others. Those who assumed these people were inferior determined the genetic traits they didn't want society to have, rounded up those who represented them, and quarantined or killed them. Were they simply weeding out undesirable elements as the cold logic of science dictated? Or were they using flawed logic that supported their hatred? Germany had already begun to hate Jews and gypsies before eugenics made its appearance on the scientific state, so it seems the use of eugenics to prove the inferiority of the Jews was quite convenient.

Peace, it seems, never comes to man. We've fought countless wars and yet can never quench our thirst for violence. World War I was called by some "the war to end all wars". It didn't of course. Today we find ourselves mired in combat with those in the Middle East who simply want to rule themselves instead of being at the mercy of every other nation in a tumultuous region, or being sliced up and handed over to oil companies. We generate doctrines of hate against those who want the same thing as America wanted when it declared its independence from England: freedom from oppressive lands across the sea. We cry for (nuclear!) war against Iran simply because they hate us, yet we think we are justified in our hatred towards them. Despite all this, rather than settle our differences with words and thoughtful understanding, tools we have had since the dawn of man, we rush to kill others with our new weapons of war.

If I say I want Shadows & Silver to be realistic, it's because the real world offers the epic, tragic conflict of which fantasy novelists can only dream. Reality, then, is the primary influence on my fiction.

Influences, Part 3

Today we'll tackle some of the influences on Shadows & Silver's style. Remember, theme (what we have mostly talked about thus far) is what you want to say; style is how you say it. I've already made the basic stylistic decision of having this setting be one of early industrial technology and have decided that this is one of the primary causes of the discouragement on which the main theme hinges. While I could rant on and on about how technology has made us forget our spiritual selves, I'll summarize with this statement: we err when we attempt to solve our problems with technological knowledge because we treat symptoms rather than the cause. I may explain a little later what I mean by this, but for now we'll see what has influenced me in my concept of the destructiveness of technology.

Nowhere is my point better made than in mainstream fantasy. Most of these works deal with generic medieval worlds where the conflicts are easily separated into us versus them, good versus evil. The hero is a shining knight going to rescue a fair maiden in distress. Or perhaps he is an outcast from an evil society who has thrown off the ways of his people. Regardless, the world of the Middle Ages is highly romanticized. Is that bad? No. If anything, it supports the idealistic view of the world that I'd like to promote in my work, even if it's the sort of idealism you just conjure up so the horrors of the real world don't drive you insane.

The height of this romanticism can be found in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which captures, in the struggle of the hobbits to destroy the One Ring, the necessity of throwing off the evils of modern society. Tolkien's work, while heavily influenced by Germanic and Norse folklore, was largely a reaction to Industrialization, culminating in the catastrophes of the second World War (hence the theme of the book, "How can the world return to the way it was after so much bad has happened?"). Though the Ring was destroyed, its influence was not removed from Middle Earth. Even the beautiful Shire was corrupted. We can liken the Ring to many modern ills, and many have done so. From Nazism to the atomic bomb, it's all been suggested. But for Tolkien, the Ring represented the machine and the way of life machines represent. He watched as England's lovely rural countryside was replaced by smokestacks billowing clouds of wretched smog, and all he could think of were the orcs tearing down trees and building their machines of war. How he wished we could return to the age when magic and beauty were bountiful, when men's lives were not dictated by the clanking of cogs and the beating of war drums!

I want Shadows & Silver to model this, to truly show the disease technology brings upon the world. And yet, there is so much good that it brings. It increases production, raises the standards of living, and increases health. Well, it does when it's used responsibly. But in the last hundred years we have seen our world racked with war, and the greatest advances of our time are those things designed as weapons. This is because technology is a means to an end, and if we devote ourselves to the end of obtaining wealth and power, then technology will only serve to increase our misery. The key, then, is to keep a spirit of childlike idealism, to use technology in a way that benefits mankind as a whole, to ignore our own selfish desires, and to hold the hope for a brighter tomorrow. In Shadows & Silver, as in our world, few are so enlightened.

Style

Form follows function, which is to say, "purpose first; style later." You may create a beautiful world that carefully articulates an atmosphere, but if it's not the atmosphere you want, then the style is useless. The style (what truly makes it a setting, as opposed to a world) should develop out of the purpose you want the world to serve. Similarly, you must understand why you are writing; only then can you hope to know how to achieve your goal. Once you have decided on the purpose of your setting, you can begin to flesh out the style of the world.

In Shadows & Silver, I want the reader to encounter a sense of hopelessness and despair, and to struggle in his own mind to not succumb to postmodern nihilism. This serves the purpose of demonstrating my stated theme: "by forsaking childlike idealism, men lead sorrowful and hopeless lives." This is the function. What then, should be the form?

Functions suggest appropriate forms. I've already shown that a dark world would best support my theme. It requires readers to react against the world, inserting their own opinions into the work, debating what they may perceive to be the message of the work. A very pessimistic world in which idealism has been forsaken in favor of mind-numbing realism leaps out to me. This, in turn, prompts several stylistic decisions:

• The world should have a relatively high technology level. However, it should be close enough to medieval technology so as not to be too far removed from what characters could perceive as the "good old days" before machines changed life. I'm thinking of the early Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment as historical analogues. In order to effectively show the problems with a modern mindset, however, industry must be a relatively new concept. This allows it to be a "new wave" with very little time for serious reactionary measures.
• Technology should bring with it the problems of modernity, especially since the world has had little time to solve the problems a paradigm shift brings. Corruption, pollution, poverty, slavery, nationalism, zealotry, racism, etc. are all things that are accentuated by technological shift.
• Racial tensions should run high. This may be based on the human desire for power, or on the human desire to blame the ills of society on others. In a world where other races and even monsters exist, there are more outlets for this sort of thing.
• Since technology is new, there should be plenty of lands that don't have the same level of industry as the more developed ones yet. Even today, there are many rural communities and even wandering hunter-gatherers, and this is long after the advent of industrialism. This should create many political struggles as more advanced cultures attempt to overpower the less developed ones.
• Magic should take a backseat role. In a world where discovery and science are the new buzz, magic is seen as the way of the past, something with which superstitious folk deluded themselves into believing in forces beyond their control. I may even have it outlawed.
• Religion, if it is present at all, should support the new order of technology in order for it not to go the way of magic. Perhaps it even supports the shift, resulting in a sort of divine versus arcane struggle.

This is plenty of good basic stylistic information. I'll ruminate on this some and then flesh out the style a bit more.