Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I discarded quite a number of auditioning heroes before settling on Morgon, Prince of Hed, ruler of a tiny island, who liked to make beer, read books, didn’t own a sword, and kept the only crown he possessed under his bed. He did not talk like an English butler, he knew which end of a shovel was up, and only a penchant for wanting to learn odd things kept him from being a sort of placid gentleman farmer. That small detail—among all the details of a prosaic hardheaded life that included farming, trading, pigherders, backyard pumps, and a couple of strong-willed siblings—became the conflict in his personality that ultimately drove him from his land and set him on his questing path.

  Before I let him set forth, I placed him against as detailed a background as I possibly could. I wanted the reader to see the land Morgon lived in and how it shaped him before he left it and changed himself. So I let him talk about grain and bulls, beer and plowhorses, and his sister’s bare feet, before I let him say fairy-tale words like tower, wizard, harp, and king, and state his own driving motivation: to answer the unanswered riddle.

  THE HEROINE

  In The Sorceress and the Cygnet, my questing hero found himself falling literally into the path of my questing heroine. She is, in one sense, the princess in the tower whom my hero eventually rescues; in other words, she is very much a piece of the familiar storytelling formula. But she has imprisoned herself in a rickety old house in a swamp, trapped there by her own obsession with the darker side of magic.

  As she defines herself: “I have been called everything from sorceress to bog hag. I know a great many things but never enough. Never enough. I know the great swamp of night, and sometimes I do things for pay if it interests me.” She has pursued her quest for knowledge and power into a dangerous backwater of mean, petty magic, from which, it is clear to everyone but her, she must be rescued. The language she uses, like Morgon’s, covers a broad territory between palace and pig herder’s hut. Her wanderings have freed her tongue.

  In the same novel, I also used a female point of view—that of a highborn lady—to contrast with the more earthy, gypsyish, view of my hero. She is a female version of the “friend of the hero”; she frets about the sorceress, gives advice, and fights beside the sorceress in the end. She is perhaps the toughest kind of character to work with: genuinely good, honest, and dutiful. Making a point-of-view character both good and interesting is a challenge. Traditionally, a “good” character has a limited emotional range, no bad habits to speak of, and a rather bland vocabulary. As the “friend of the heroine,” she is also a sounding board for the heroine’s more colorful character.

  I deliberately chose that kind of character because I wanted to see how difficult it would be to make her more than just a device to move the plot along its necessary path. She turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. I wanted her to be elegant, dignified, calm, responsible. . . .

  To keep her from fading completely into the plot, I constantly had to provide her with events that brought out her best qualities. Keeping her dialogue simple kept her uncomplicated yet responsive as a character; it also moved the plot forward without dragging along the unnecessary baggage of introspection. She is meant to observe and act; the language should not be more complicated than she is.

  THE LURKING EVIL

  Traditionally, the Evil in fantasy is personified by someone of extraordinary and perverse power, whose goal in life is to bring the greatest possible misery to the largest number of good honest folk. Sauron of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Darth Vader of the Star Wars trilogy, Morgan le Fay of Le Morte d’Arthur are all examples of social misfits from whose destructive powers the hero and heroine must rescue humanity and hobbits and the world as they know it.

  The problem with the Lurking Evil is that as social misfit, it might become far more interesting than the good and dutiful hero. Yet without proper background and personality, the Lurking Evil becomes a kind of unmotivated monster vacuum cleaner that threatens humanity simply because it’s plugged in and turned on. I have trouble coming up with genuinely evil characters who are horrible, remorseless, and deserving of everything the hero can dish out. I always want to give them a human side, which puts them in the social misfit category.

  In my Riddle-Master trilogy, I used various kinds of misfits: the renegade wizard Ohm, who was motivated by an unprincipled desire for magical power; the sea-people, whose intentions and powers seem at first random and obscure, until they finally reveal their origins; and the ambiguous character Deth, who may be good and may be evil—and who keeps my hero offbalance and guessing until the end of the tale.

  In The Sorceress and the Cygnet, I used much the same kind of device: allowing my hero to define characters as evil until, in the end, they reveal that the evil is not in them, but in my misguided heroine. I do this because evil as a random event, or as the sole motivation for a character, is difficult for me to work with; it seems to belong in another genre—to horror or mystery.

  Jung says that all aspects of a dream are actually faces of the dreamer. I believe that in fantasy, the vanquished evil must be an aspect of the hero or heroine, since by tradition, evil is never stronger than the power of the hero to overcome it—which is where, of course, we get the happy endings in high fantasy.

  MAGIC

  If you put a mage, sorceress, wizard, warlock, witch, or necromancer into fantasy, it’s more than likely that, sooner or later, he or she will want to work some magic. Creating a spell can be as simple or as difficult as you want. You can write, “Mpyxl made a love potion. Hormel drank it and fell in love.” Or you can do research into herb lore and medieval recipes for spells and write: “Mpyxl stirred five bay leaves, an owl’s eye, a parsnip, six of Hormel’s fingernails, and some powdered mugwort into some leftover barley soup. Hormel ate it and fell in love.”

  Or you can consider love itself, and how Mpyxl must desire Hormel, how frustrated and rejected she must feel to be obliged to cast a spell over him, what in Hormel generates such overpowering emotions, why he refuses to fall in love with Mpyxl the usual way, and what causes people to fall in love with each other in the first place. Then you will find that Mpyxl herself is under a spell cast by Hormel, and that she must change before his eyes from someone he doesn’t want to someone he desires beyond reason.

  The language of such a spell would be far different from fingernails and barley soup. The Magic exists only in the language; the spell exists only in the reader’s mind. The words themselves must create something out of nothing. To invent a convincing love potion you must, for a moment, make even the reader fall in love.

  WhY?

  Why write fantasy? Because it’s there. Fantasy is as old as poetry and myth, which are as old as language. The rules of high fantasy are rules of the unconscious and the imagination, where good quests, evil lurks, the two clash, and the victor—and the reader—are rewarded.

  Good might be male or female; so might evil. The battle might be fought with swords, with magic, with wits, on a battlefield, in a tower, or in the quester’s heart.

  At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it is still the oldest kind of tale in the world, for it began once upon a time, and we haven’t heard the end of it yet.

  Dear Pat

  Afterword by Peter S. Beagle

  Ah, Pat. . . .

  I know for certain that you and I met in 1975, because The Forgotten Beasts of Eld had very recently been published. I remember hunting through an entire convention, back in 1975, looking for the person who had written that astonishing first novel. I can’t count how many Q&A sessions with fans and professionals I’ve sat through over the years, mentioning you first whenever I’m asked what modern fantasy writers I read.

  Then I remember you came to visit me in Santa Cruz and we walked on the beach where the elephant seals are. I know I owe you for drag
ging me into Brisbane, one night almost forty years ago, to catch a scraggly-looking band called the Prairie Dogs—who turn up, charmingly transmogrified, in your Fool’s Run—which resulted in a singer-songwriter named George Kincheloe’s becoming the nearest thing I’ve got to a functioning brother. Also for staying for one delightful night with you and your mother in Roxbury, New York, when George Kincheloe’s twin brother, John, came over with his wife and toddlers, several of whom grew up to become the band Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds.

  And the books . . . ah, the books. The growth in range and language, the progression in style from the epic Riddle-Master trilogy to The Book of Atrix Wolfe, twenty years later, to that bloody breathtaking The Bell at Sealey Head. Somewhere around there—speaking personally, as another writer, prey to the very mixed bag of genuine professional admiration and raw envy that is our shameful lot—I realized that you were becoming flat-out alarming.

  Mind you, even I don’t know all the books. There’s no keeping up with you, but that’s cool. I can live with the fact of your output far surpassing mine: prolificacy isn’t the same as prolixity. The real problem is that you just keep getting better, more daring, more original. I mean, how long has this got to go on?

  Of all the stories amassed in Dreams of Distant Shores, “Weird,” the first and the shortest, may be the weirdest. I know it’s the one I keep coming back to, because of its puzzling central image: two lovers under siege in a bathroom, the woman challenging the man with increasingly strange tales out of her own life . . . while someone beyond the door pounds on it with insane rage and howls in an incomprehensible tongue. The story feels as hauntingly unresolved as a major-seventh chord, left hanging in the twilight air at the end of a song. Except that it isn’t unresolved at all, and it is warmly sad, and distinctly scary as well; and I’m going to read it once again, when I’ve finished this foreword, to make certain that I understand what I think I understand. Because, in its small, dark way, it’s not like anything I know of you or your work.

  “Mer” is an easier read, but no less of a knockout for that. The nameless witch who has inhabited, first, a goddess’s body, and then a wooden mermaid; then, temporarily, a tall, slightly ungainly, human body, working as a waitress in a coastal Oregon fish-and-tourists town; and then finds herself—to her own mild surprise—protecting nestling cormorants against their human predators (the church service at Our Lady of the Cormorants is well worth the price of admission) mostly wants to curl up somewhere comfy and silent and go back to sleep. She’s earned it, between one thing and another.

  I might not have written “Mer” as well as you’ve done—you’re always quietly setting the bar just a bit higher—but at least I can imagine thinking about writing it. That’s something, anyway. Its blend of humor and the suggestion of things that, as a major character puts it, “I will never want to know,” brings it somehow closer to my side of the street—to “my ain countree,” as the old song has it. That being said . . . okay, maybe. On a good day, with a following wind.

  But then . . . then you follow that with “The Gorgon in the Cupboard.” Now it’s personal.

  Okay, Poul Anderson beat me to the title “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.” What the hell, it was long ago, and he was a dear man and a wonderful writer, and fair’s fair. And there was no way you could have known that I was working on a story called “To Medusa: We Have to Talk.” But did your Medusa story have to be so damn good? I can’t even tell you exactly why I’m so taken with that story. (Though I did know a Jo once, and the name is still a personally evocative one. . . .) I grew up around painters and models—my oldest friend (we met when we were five years old) is a painter; and those parts of the tale that deal with the relationships of painters to their work and their own lives are as believable as if they were set in my uncles’ Greenwich Village studios in the 1950s and 1960s instead of late-Victorian London and its environs. Rightly or wrongly, I see your artists as Pre-Raphaelite types—Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, and the like—all working away on religious allegories and Arthurian landscapes. And you have the desperation and the casually heartless—practically Republican—attitude toward the desperate down, without melodrama or billboards. When Jo finally weeps, we know enough—enough, never overmuch—to believe that it’s been a very long time since her last tears. Damn, Patricia!

  And Medusa. Your Medusa.

  She’s dead—she remembers her head being cut off by Perseus, that obnoxious, not especially bright boy who got lucky—but, in common with many fictional ghosts and figments, she has the best one-liners in the story. She’s funny, sardonic, wise, dangerous—and, at times, very nearly as touching as Jo herself, even though she’s only a painted mouth on a canvas. Immortal, her survival in this time and this world yet depends on a questionably talented young artist, Harry Waterman, whose knowing, raucous Muse she becomes. The painter fancies himself passionately, desperately, hopelessly in love with the wife of another artist, whose unspeakable beauty almost literally turns him to stone. It is the Gorgon who rouses a different awareness in him and teaches him, for the first time, to see. It may not make him a better or more successful painter—but there will be more to his work than there was before.

  I couldn’t have written that damn story, Pat. I’m old enough and experienced enough to want to write it, but I couldn’t have done it. This is not the first time that this has happened.

  I have a particular soft spot for the understated and deeply touching “Alien.” I don’t think I’ll ever consider a “little-green-guys-abductedme-and-studied-me” story in the same way again—sorry, X-Files. Sorry, so many long-beloved clichés of first contact, from monster invasions to physical or psychic bodysnatching. Absurdly, it reminds me, of all things, of a French song I often sang at a restaurant in Santa Cruz, long ago and properly far away. In “Un Tout Petit Homme Timide,” a flying saucer lands in a Paris park, and what emerges is a shy, big-eyed little guy with his helmet under his arm. He regards the Parisians and apologizes: “Oh, forgive me—wrong planet! But I’ll come back again—you seem very nice!” And he’s gone again, leaving the singer to comment, “Well, he thought we were nice, which definitely shows that he’s not from around here! But once he and his people get a good look at us, at what we are, they’ll say, ‘Sorry, children, we’ll come back when you grow up.” And perhaps quit shooting toy ray-guns at us. . . .

  And then there’s “Something Rich and Strange.” What the hell does one say about that story? I hardly knew where to start reading this one, let alone start thinking about it afterward. It’s about human beings and sea gods, and I’m not going to try to describe it, except to say that if there’s one thing you realize perfectly in this truly r-and-s story, it’s the thoughtless otherness of the gods. I think of it, dazed as it left me, as your take on the eternal legend of Tam Lin: the young knight taken hostage by the Queen of the Shi, the fairy folk, and the determined woman who has to rescue him from his otherworldly mistress. Except that in your version, the seducers are two: a brother and sister out of the sea, and the valiant heroine is herself beguiled. And very nearly falls victim to the song that lured her longtime lover from her side. And how they will go on together in the mortal world, knowing what they know, having been where they have been, you have—as, of course, you would have—sense enough to leave to your readers.

  What strikes me more and more about your recent work—apart from the increasing range of your adventurousness—is your obvious determination either to ignore or sidestep the standard tropes of classic fantasy, or to shake them up so as to leave them more than a bit dizzy and disoriented, like Edie and Henry (and, surely, their calmly competent driver, Thompson), when their motoring jaunt takes them down the Road Not Taken and brings them home—or not?—to a familiar world grown promisingly unfamiliar. Or, in your words, to “a world that had shifted, expanded, to let the fantastic in.”

  When I speak of your work to strangers and students, the majority of them inevitably want to di
scuss the Riddle-Master books, or the Kyreol and Cygnet duologies—which is perfectly fine with me, always. But lately the stories seem determined in themselves to challenge you yourself more and take you further toward distant shores, if you will. Not that they ever lose the humor and deep humanity that is their ground bass (to elaborate on the earlier musical metaphor); it’s more that the melodies, more often than not these days, don’t necessarily go where I was expecting them to go, but swing off over the hills and far away. And as always—for full forty years now—I catch my breath and follow, trusting and sure.