Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 20

by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com

  Catherynne M. Valente’s Orphan’s Tales series dives deep into the mythic well that inspired Leiber, Howard, Tolkien, and Vance, all of whom were seminal influence on Gygax. However, RPGs had no influence on her early development as a writer. “I think whether or not you get into it at a young age is dependent on having that one friend who’s really into it, and I never did.” She did play a lot of console games such as Final Fantasy and learned the mechanics and terminology through them; so when her fiancé lured her into pen and paper gaming she already knew much of the lexicon. What made her reluctant was the effect this might have on her writing: “I spend most days coming up with characters and back-stories. I didn’t want to do much more of that.” She also feels that “a lot of fantasy novels take far too much from RPG tropes. They read exactly like campaigns — densely detailed weapons and political situations, flat characters who are little more than their races and either ’spunk’ or ’sullen.”‘. I didn’t want to be tainted by that, to let it into my head on a weekly basis.”

  Ultimately, these concerns became a non-issue for Valente. As simply a player in someone else’s game she can enjoy the entertainment of playing and stomping monsters without any drain on her own creativity. If she were GMing, however, she believes it would be an entirely different story: “I don’t think I could justify expending material on a campaign setting that could go into a novel. That would be incredibly hard not to do.”

  The major problem RPG-influenced authors face, Valente argues, is an inability to identify cliché. “The world of RPGs is more forgiving of cliché than the world of literature is. Familiar settings and characters help players to locate their function and acclimate to surroundings. ... To create a truly wonderful piece of fiction, you have to aim above the familiar, the tired, and the overused. As an author, it’s my job to have a discerning eye: what is game, and what is book? What is vivid and visceral, and what is cliché? I don’t feel RPGing affects those things, but that is probably because I am a player, not a GM.” (Incidentally, she plays a blunderbuss-wielding tiefling chaos mage in the D&D Planescape setting — using the Heroes system, so no levels.)

  Unlike Valente, Jay Lake, Campbell award-winning author of Mainspring, found D&D a great companion to his imagination, perhaps because it entered his life at a young age. “RPGs developed my ability to create narrative flow. They also reinforced my already strong love of fantasy. All of that fed the nascent writer in my head ... they’re also good for learning to get in character, a valuable trait for any writer. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they reinforce your sense of wonder. That is the key to genre fiction.”

  Lake also sees the influence of table-top games being significantly different than video or online RPGs. The environment of meat-space RPGs is, like that of a book, live in the mind. “Tabletop RPGs put most of the creative effort on the player, who must visualize the characters and their environment. Online RPGs feed the player a high-impact visualization of the characters and their environment. ... I think the effort of worldbuilding which players of my generation went through has been replaced by the immersive experience. That in turn has substantially changed the relationship between RPGs and the creative process. Whether that change is for the better or the worse remains to be seen. I am suspicious of it, but that might just be middle age talking.”

  Unlike the authors mentioned, Tim Waggoner, surrealist-horror author of Cross Country, also writes novels based on RPG properties. He sees a connection between the character and environment of RPGs and print storytelling. RPGs “showed me that the richer the world your characters live in, the more story possibilities there are. When I create worlds of my own — even worlds that are closely aligned with contemporary reality — I try to develop them in as much detail as possible. Gamers read a lot, so interacting with other readers, learning about what they were reading, exposed me to different writers.”

  Waggoner also agrees with Lake that RPGs provided early flexing of his narrative muscles by creating characters and dealing with exposition. “As a player, you know a great deal about the world from the various manuals and guides. But your character only knows whatever is part of his or her background, and discovers anything else as the game plays out. I learned a ton about how much information to give readers and exactly when to give it to them from gaming.” As with Pratt, the improvisation of working with players with their own frames of references was also instructive. “Characters can make wrong assumptions and make bad choices. So many writers plot out a story, march their characters through the plot, and then reach the outcome. They forget to leave room for the unpredictable, for the joy of surprise. Gaming taught me that what goes wrong for characters makes for the most interesting stories.”

  For Black Gate publisher John O’Neil, Gygax and his game acted as a catalyst for the interest in the fantasy adventure for which the magazine is known. “For someone discovering much of this for the first time,” O’Neil said, “[D&D] was an embarrassment of riches. All of it contributed to a fascination with pulp fiction in general, especially the period from 1930-1950.” Like others he admits that game-mastering served as his apprenticeship in storytelling and he offers some advice for writers gleaned from the gaming table. “No one cares about your 80-pages of background description. Give them something to care about before your start to pull back the curtain on all that homework.

  Black Gate managing editor Howard A. Jones notes that lots of new writers, weaned on D&D, may not know the fantasy antecedents of the game’s well-known tropes: “The author doesn’t realize that the fire and forget spell list came from Vance, or that the elves and hobbits came from Tolkien or that thieves’ guilds came from Lankhmar because they’ve never read the source material ... These games wouldn’t exist if Gygax and Arneson hadn’t loved the source material.”

  Arthur C. Clarke award-winner China Mieville has had an unabashed love of RPGs since he was a kid. While not a conscious influence on his desire to be a writer, RPGs had a powerful effect on his subconscious in what he referred to as the “awe/system” dichotomy. “Many of us who love the fantastic, particularly the generic fantastic (as opposed to, say, what you could loosely call the ‘haute literary’ fantastic (scare quotes deliberate) of Gogol, Bulgakov, Kafka, etc. —) is an oscillation between two aesthetic gravitational pulls. One is what is sometimes called the sensawunda. From this perspective, what draws us to the fantastic (including sf and, in a ‘bad-numinous’ version, horror), is the awe at the unrepresentable. The vasty strangeness, the ‘Real’ (in Lacanian terms), that which is definitionally beyond our power to successfully represent. You see that in everything from the appearance of Cthulhu to the apotheotic monolith of 2001 to the sudden Becoming at the end of Tiger! Tiger! That’s the side of the fantastic that puts it in a lineage with the visionary and ecstatic.

  At the other end of the pole, however, is “our obsessive love for systematization, for categorization and rigid and rigorous taxonomy. This you see in the profusion of bestiaries, of spurious encyclopedias, and above all in the ’stats’ and rules of fantasy RPGs. A lot of what we think of as genre fantasy seems to me a fascinating crossbreed of those contradictory pulls. What we love about Cthulhu is that it is beyond our ken, as Lovecraft repeatedly points out. Then, in an act of Promethean heroic vulgarization, the Call of Cthulhu RPG neatly laid out Cthulhu’s ‘Stats’ - Str, 100, or whatever it is. This is not a dis of RPGs. My point is that that desire to systematize even the fantastic, the point of which is to evade systematization, is a kind of geek honor, a ludicrous and incredibly seductive and even creative project, an almost majestic point-missing, that in missing the point, does something new.”

  Mieville views his own work as oscillating between these poles. “I see that tension between wanting to remain true to what I think of as a M. John Harrisonian fidelity to the inherently unstable and evasive nature of the fantastic — his Viriconium, after all, changes its names and its boundaries, and its refusal to submit to RPG-style rules is part of what makes
it magnificent — and the passionate D&D-style desire to rulify and systematize the world — to have stable maps, a set of bestiaries, a timeline, etc. (Perdido Street Station includes a party of cheerfully psychopathic and amoral player-characters, as an affectionate internal swipe at my inspirations.) For me that system/awe dichotomy is key to genre fantasy, and the systematization of the system half of that dyad is the RPG-tradition’s great feat. We can react against it, surrender to it, argue with it, or whatever, but it’s part of the mulch in which we grow.”

  Finally, when asked what other fond memories he might have of the game, Mieville made sure to state: “They left me with an intense crush on Morgan Ironwolf, iconic character from the D&D basic rules. I cannot be held responsible for the libidinal drives of my 11-year-old self.”

  Of such things fantasy literature is made.

  About the Authors

  Justin Howe was born and raised in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Spacesuits & Sixguns, and The Internet Review of Science Fiction. His story “Skillet and Saber” will appear in the anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails available from Night Shade Books in October 2008. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writers workshop, works for an architectural preservation company in New York City, and belongs to the Homeless Moon.

  Jason S. Ridler has been a punk rock musician, cemetery groundskeeper, and bookstore clerk. He writes in as many genres as possible because all his heroes do the same. His fiction has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, The Harrow, Dark Recesses, and the anthologies Dead in the Water and Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy. His non-fiction has appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, and Fearzone.com. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, Mr. Ridler lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where he is finishing his Ph.D. in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, and writing as much short fiction as his arms will allow.

  An Interview with John Picacio

  Jeff VanderMeer

  John Picacio is one of the respected artists in the field, having won the World Fantasy Award and the Chesley, among others, along with being a four-time Hugo nominee. Picacio is also one of the nicest people in the field, so perhaps it’s no surprise that one of his most recent projects has been creating the cover and interior illustrations for the first of an iconic set of books by the nicest person in the field, Michael Moorcock. Ballantine/Del Rey is launching the new Elric trade paperback series this month with ELRIC: THE STEALER OF SOULS . I talked to Picacio about his work for Moorcock, upcoming covers for Jeffrey Ford, and a variety of other subjects...

  The Elric novels are not the first time you’ve animated Moorcock’s work with your art. Do you ever bounce ideas off of him? How well do you know him?

  The first book I ever illustrated was by Mike — the 30th Anniversary edition of Behold the Man. I did the cover, interior illustrations, and full book design for that one. I’ve done a few covers for his books since then. This new Elric book really feels like things coming full-circle though because not only am I working with Mike again, but this time, it’s for one of the most iconic fantasy characters ever. Quick story from back when I did that Behold the Man gig... Rick Klaw and Ben Ostrander (editor & publisher of Mojo Press) drove me to Mike’s house to discuss the project. I had done all my reading and had all kinds of questions, and I was thinking Mike would set the course and tell me what he wanted the project to look like. I mean, he’s Michael Moorcock, one of the giants of the field, and I’m a guy who’s never done a book cover before, so I figured he’d just say, “Here’s what you’re gonna do.” Instead, he basically said, “Hey, it’s in your hands. You’ve got talent. I trust you to make it great.” Looking back, that may have been the most important moment of my career. Mike’s faith gave me huge confidence and really, I’ve never looked back since. That attitude of being proactive rather than waiting to be told what to draw and paint....to think for myself and be an active participant in the publishing process....that attitude was really sparked by Mike and his trust back when I did that first gig. Last year, when I did the new Elric stuff, I had a pretty firm battleplan for what I wanted to do, and when I met with Mike to break it down with him, he just kept smiling and giving me the nod. A kind word here, a kind word there, but he again gave me virtually free reign. When I had questions, he was always quick to clarify, but never told me what to do. He’s not only one of the great authors in the history of fantasy, but he’s one of the great gentlemen. I’ve said it before, and it still holds true — I’d take a bullet for the man.

  When dealing with classic material like this, do you ever worry about trying to match the vision in the heads of the many, many readers who have a specific idea of, for example, what Elric must look like?

  Early on, a good friend pulled me aside and said, “No matter what you do on Elric, you know a lot of people are gonna hate it, right?” Oddly enough, that statement really took the pressure off me. I felt like, “hey, I might as well do my thing because there’s no way to please everyone, so let’s just go for it.” Like I said before, Mike expects out of an illustrator what any creator should expect of themselves — he expects you to bring the absolute most potent and personal vision you can offer to the audience at that given moment. He doesn’t expect my way to look like Yoshitaka Amano or Michael Whelan or James Cawthorn or anyone else. And hell, I’d be disappointed in myself, if my stuff turned out that way. There’s a history of greats that preceded me, and if I’m not adding any fresh insight or vision to the lineage, then what’s the use, really? So I expect myself to bring something fresh and new to the icon. However, along with that, it’s possible that some fans who see the character a certain way may not embrace my way immediately. That’s totally cool; that’s part of the biz.

  Did you do any research into prior Elric covers? If so, did you discover anything Clarkesworld readers might find of interest?

  Yeah, I was already aware of a lot of the great Elric stuff, but I went back and studied what I thought worked and what didn’t. Like I said, Amano, Whelan, and Cawthorn are a given. Robert Gould, Walt Simonson, Brom, and others...I went back and looked at what they each brought. There’s no seminal research volume entitled The Art of Michael Moorcock’s Elric or something (although it would be nice if one existed, wouldn’t it?). It’s too bad that there isn’t more Cawthorn Elric imagery in print. What’s cool about him is he was there with Mike in those seminal days when the character was first finding his way. He’s the very first Elric illustrator, and I know Mike still considers his b/w ink illustrations to be amongst the very strongest Elric work ever done.

  You’ve also recently done the interlocking art for the reissues of Jeffrey Ford’s Well-Built City trilogy. That art seems very different in tone and execution, in some ways, from the Elric material. How would you describe the difference? (In terms of process, etc.)

  Yeah, the two really are extremely different. I’m proud of both, but I’m especially proud that I did both simultaneously. I think true artists thoughout history not only respond to time and context, but aren’t slaves to a single method or approach. So these two projects gave me a chance to measure myself a bit. The Elric interiors are all straight traditional pencil on Crescent illustration board. No more, no less. On the other hand, the Well-Built City trilogy is a big shadowbox assemblage of oil paintings on masonite surrounded by found objects and ephemera, all housed in a custom-built box. I was working on the Well-Built City for the better part of a year, but it was a long deadline for that one, so I was able to interweave it between Elric and all of my other cover work.

  When did you start creating art?

  Yikes....loaded question. Some might say I’ve barely begun to start creating “art!” As far as when I started doing professional freelance illustration work full-time....spring 2001. I had been freelancing professionally part-time doing book covers and editorial work since ‘95 when I did the BEHOLD THE MAN book. I was holding down a day job working in res
idential architecture from the time I got out of college (late ‘92), all the way until spring 2001. So the cover work soaked up most of my non-architectural waking hours, during those years. It hasn’t been the most conventional route toward becoming an artist, but I guess I’m a late bloomer.

  You have a whole book devoted to your art — just a beautiful, wonderful exhibition, really. As a kid, as a teenager, in college — did you ever visualize that moment? Did you think, “Some day I’m going to have a book of my art?” And what else did you think about beyond the art itself as you were developing your craft?

  As a kid, I always believed I would eventually write and illustrate comics for a living. All the way into my 20’s, I figured that’s where I’d eventually be, even when I was paying my dues in the architecture world. Of course, the way it worked out, the early self-published comics I did caught the attention of book publishers (namely Mojo Press) and I ended up where I am now — completely in love with book cover illustration for sf, fantasy and horror. So I guess the answer is “no”....I don’t think I dreamed all along of having my own art book. Cheesy as it sounds though, what I did always hope for was that my art would make a difference...that it would make an impact. Back when I was a kid, I dreamed of hanging out with great writers and artists I idolized, and doing work that could be worthy of an audience.

  The truth is, when I’m about to start a new picture, I always get the same crazy feeling....that anything’s possible and the new thing I’m about to do has a chance to be the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s like falling in love. Of course, the picture inevitably falls short, and then here comes the next picture, and that crazy feeling comes back again, and so on, and so on. So yeah, I think I’ve got plenty of megalomania to spare, but it always comes down to the joy of that drawing in front of me.