Strange Horizons, September 2002

by Strange Horizons

  And then there's Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi:

  Gabriel had been undecided whether to fight right-handed or otherwise, and the sight of Silvanus made up his mind: he gave his body to a left-handed daimon and shifted the sword to his left.

  AUGENBLICK: He's left-handed, Aristos.

  GABRIEL: Take command of my body, Augenblick. He won't be used to left-handed opponents.

  In the section this quote is taken from, Gabriel, a man who has attained great inner mastery, is engaged in a deadly duel. Augenblick is but one of many of Gabriel's subsidiary personalities, or daimons, who chime in during the duel: chanting to direct his flow of qi, reporting on his opponent's pulse rate, suggesting strategies, expressing anger, reminding him to kiai. The world of Aristoi overflows with high technology and tapped human potential. Gabriel's daimons are not a symptom of mental illness, but his mind working at its fullest capacity: he is vast, he contains multitudes.

  Williams holds a fourth degree black belt in kenpo karate. The quote below is taken from an interview he did for SF Site:

  One of the things that a movement art will do for you is make you more aware of the interface between your mind and your body, and how that works, and how the one can program the other. And I realized that through doing kenpo, my mind was being reprogrammed through my body. The people who devised this art were very intelligent people who had very particular points of view, which they reflected in their movements. By doing these movements, you can absorb the thoughts and attitudes of generations of martial artists.

  I thought that expanding this idea into a kind of universal kinesic technology for Aristoi would be valuable, a way of creating a body language more universal than spoken language.

  Within the world of Aristoi, this body language goes beyond communication: gestures known as mudras can compel obedience or force a state of mind in an observer. The term is taken from the hand gestures in the Indian dance-drama kathakali, which is related to the south Indian martial art kalaripayat, which may have been the source art for kung fu. The mudras in kathakali, like the ones in Aristoi, have precise meanings.

  Martial arts in Aristoi fuse such ancient terms and traditions with the highest of technology and psychology. The mudra is an ancient concept, but one given power with a science fictional gloss. Qi, today's mysterious and possibly non-existent energy, is Aristoi's controllable phenomenon. The rush of thoughts, feelings, images, and physical impulses experienced while fighting are distilled into daimon voices.

  It seems idyllic: who wouldn't want to have daimons, or learn the Mudra of Compulsion? But daimons can take control. During Gabriel's duel, he discovers a new daimon within himself, and who subtly takes control. The progression of its hold on Gabriel is signaled through his kiai, or shout, which changes from “Tzai!” to “Dai!” to “Die!” At that, the new daimon gets its way: Gabriel, who had meant only to disable, kills his opponent. But when your daimon whispers, “Die,” it's hard to say no.

  Aristoi's martial arts mirror the themes of the book as a whole: the utopian fusion of the best of the old and the new, and its hidden cost; and that the most significant changes have come about through psychology rather than technology. (In a sense, the psychology is the technology.)

  Martial arts, in life as in Aristoi, are as much a matter of the mind as of the body; and the two are not as separate as one might think. Though physical capabilities decline with age, experience and savvy are quite capable of beating youthful strength and speed. As Williams suggests, the final frontier may be inner space.

  Martial arts as transformation

  SF and fantasy is a literature of transformation as well as extrapolation: the stable-boy who becomes a hero or a king, the human who surgically or genetically alters himself into a superior form, and the callow youngster who gains maturity and self-knowledge are common. As Walter Jon Williams pointed out, to become a serious student of the martial arts is to transform oneself physically and mentally.

  The most familiar way in which this plays out in fiction is the blossoming of the wallflower: timid and out-of-shape people take up martial arts and build muscle, lose the spare tire, acquire self-confidence and inner peace, and stride away with their fighting skills the least of what they've gained.

  In fantasy, this dream of empowerment often has a feminist slant. Gael Baudino's Strands of Starlight involves a literal transformation: a rape survivor who's too small to wield a sword prays to the Goddess, and is changed into a tall strong woman. Only then can her training begin. (Such is the power of the “training sequence” convention that even the Goddess can't just grant her skill.)

  In former karate instructor Barbara Hambly's The Ladies of Mandrigyn, the men of male-dominated Mandrigyn have been enslaved, so the women hire a mercenary to teach them to fight so they can rescue the men. But their training, and their time spent running the town businesses, empowers them in more ways than one. Gender relations in the town are permanently changed, and not all the husband-and-wife reunions are happy.

  He drew back his hand, stepped back and watched her, amazed at the pig-girl who moved like a figure in a drifting dream.

  His teaching, he thought. He was capable of creating something like this.

  C. J. Cherryh's The Paladin is a new twist on the archetypal tale of a young woman seeking revenge and the retired swordsman who reluctantly teaches her. It's told from the point of view of the teacher rather than the student, and this unusual strategy allows for a fresh perspective on an old story.

  Saukendar is a disgraced swordsman with a crippled knee who intends to spend his last lonely days as a hermit. Taizu is a stubborn peasant who wants to get revenge on a lord and doesn't care if she dies doing it.

  As he teaches her, they both begin to change. Taizu's transformation is immediately obvious, as she learns to harness her strength and agility into swordplay. She points out to Saukendar that he favors his wounded knee rather than strengthening it; and he, offended at first, begins training himself. Soon the changes go beyond the physical. She learns trust, he learns hope; both learn desire.

  By the time they leave the mountain, the aristocrat who despised peasants and the peasant who hated men have become lovers. Taizu learns to make better plans than “I'll just go to his castle and kill him,” and Saukendar gives up his precious meditative solitude to lead what turns into a small-scale military campaign.

  In a final transformation, this one of perspective, people take Taizu for a demon, as that's more plausible to them than a woman warrior. Taizu takes advantage of their fear and dresses up as one, claiming the power that she has been told women cannot possess. As a demon, she achieves her revenge. But the legends of demons say that they always leave after the battle, and Taizu walks away, caught up in her final transformation. But while Saukendar has taught her swordplay, she has taught him stubbornness, and he follows her. When you teach a student, Cherryh seems to say, the student will also teach you.

  Martial arts as transcendent experience

  SF and fantasy are uniquely well-equipped to deal with the desire for transcendence of earthly matters and the longing for a perfection that is inherently impossible. Martial arts may also be a spiritual path, or the pursuit of an unattainable level of physical and emotional control, or the medium in which to attain a level of focus so complete as to be ecstatic, as to lose oneself in the moment.

  I group these issues together because they involve aspects of martial arts which are subjective, intangible, and exist only in the present moment—which makes them subject to ceaseless longing and endless pursuit.

  Barbara Hambly writes sensitively of the doomed search for perfection through martial arts in the duology The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage. Steven Barnes often writes of martial arts as a means to transcendence. But one novel captures the quest for the perfect present moment better than any other:

  For the moment the two were evenly matched, arm against arm. Michael prayed that it would never stop, that there would always be this mome
nt of utter mastery, beautiful and rare, and no conclusion ever be reached.

  In this excerpt from Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, two men are fighting a duel to the death. It's nothing personal: St. Vier is a professional swordsman who has been blackmailed into dueling Michael, a young student of the sword. Michael's teacher, Vincent Applethorpe, is a swordsman who was forced to retire young when he lost an arm. St. Vier is the best duelist in generations. But when St. Vier challenges Michael, Applethorpe claims the fight.

  There can be no happy ending. Either St. Vier or Applethorpe will die; either Michael will lose his teacher, or a young man waiting across town will lose his lover. St. Vier is fighting the wrong man in a duel he never wanted; Michael is forced to watch as another man risks his life on his behalf; and a one-armed man can't stand a chance against the legendary St. Vier.

  That's the view from outside. Inside the minds of the men involved, it's a different story. Michael is drunk on the beauty of the technique, swords flashing so fast that he barely follow the movements. St. Vier is startled to find himself fighting for his life, and delighted: at last, a challenge. Applethorpe seems thrilled to be back once more in the life he was forced to leave, and even giving the great St. Vier a run for his money.

  All three men are caught up in the transcendent moment. Like the cherry blossoms that symbolize the brief life of a samurai, its brevity is what makes it precious. The characters of Swordspoint are on a quest for such flashes of transcendence, for the grand and glorious gesture, for the stylish life that's lived purely in the moment, for a life lived at swordspoint.

  Swordplay is not only a means to that end in Swordspoint, but the quest itself in miniature. The hypnotic concentration of practice leads up to the precious moment of the duel itself. And then it ends, and one man is dead, and another goes off to seek another moment. The quest, the art, the life, the sword itself all reflect each other, deadly and irresistible.

  If you've ever wondered why people who are forced to quit martial arts because of injuries rarely regret the practice that ruined their joints and made expensive surgery necessary, but only say wistfully, “Sometimes I still dream of karate,” Swordspoint goes a long way toward explaining it.

  There are two more uses of martial arts which are rarely or never dealt with in SF and fantasy.

  One is the indictment of martial arts as part and parcel of a deadly military culture. While this has historically been a common sentiment—conquerors often ban the martial arts of the cultures they've subdued, and it's not just because they're afraid of being attacked by barehanded jujitsu masters—it's rare in genre fiction.

  SF novels which are anti-war or anti-military culture don't tend to deal with martial arts as I've defined them, as a study which requires extensive training and doesn't involve firearms. The powered armor of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War or John Steakley's Armor is an anti-martial art, like an automatic rifle, something which needs only possession to confer deadliness.

  Fantasy, which rarely features firearms and often features traditional martial arts, is not often written from a pacifist point of view. Though some writers, like Martin, are busy exploding the myth of the chivalrous knight, so far no one's done the same for the samurai. Fantasy still tends to glorify both knights and bushido-influenced societies.

  Finally, people who write about martial arts often do so because they've studied them extensively, and no one voluntarily devotes enormous amounts of time, effort, and sweat to something they believe is pernicious.

  T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone is one of the few books in this category, and it's an anomaly in more ways than one. It fits neatly into the third stage paradigm by including martial arts not only for the purposes of plot, plausibility, and atmosphere, but to illustrate some larger point—and it was published in 1939.

  Throughout the novel, the young Arthur's martial training is a counterpoint to his intellectual training. As Merlyn uses magic and words to teach him the civic virtues of government, compassion, and justice, an array of knights and sergeants teach him jousting and archery and sword-fighting—the pursuits of a culture that's convinced that might makes right.

  A sword, not a book, is the talisman which reveals his heritage and gives him the throne; and by the end of White's later expansion of the tale, The Once and Future King, peace and government have given way to war. Arthur must fight Mordred, and their prowess with sword and spear results in nothing but death, and the end of Camelot.

  This is one of the few books which makes a connection between martial arts as sport and martial arts as skills for warfare, points out that they're inextricably intertwined and suggests that getting a taste for the sport makes one start thinking that real fighting would be equally appealing. White pin-points political geography—the lines on maps that are national borders—rather than martial arts as the primary cause of war; but one suspects he'd have thought the SCA in poor taste.

  And the loneliest category of all, which I haven't come across in a single SF or fantasy novel, is that in which martial arts are studied as a means of cultural preservation or exploration. This is not only a common real-life motivation, but one which has been covered extensively in mainstream literature.

  A few non-fiction examples are Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, about a year spent studying wu shu in China, and Lost in Place, in which he learns kung fu from the lunatic Sensei O'Keefe in 1970s Connecticut; and Dave Lowry's Persimmon Wind, about his trip to Japan to visit his sensei and research the history of their sword style.

  It's a strange omission from SF and fantasy, as so much of both genres is concerned with the destruction and preservation of culture. Surely the Taoist-analogue culture in The Telling had a martial version of the healthful tai chi-like exercises Ursula K. Le Guin so lovingly details; the fighting arts of Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana must be an integral part of the sophisticated culture his Tiganans are battling to save; and when the elves of Lord of the Rings pass over sea, their sword styles no doubt pass with them.

  But if any of that is true, it exists only off-page and in my speculation. Perhaps this will be the next wave of martial arts in SF and fantasy, as I can see no particular reason for its absence other than that no one has happened to tackle it yet.

  That next wave has begun to break. We are in the midst of a renaissance in the depiction of martial arts in Western media, a more advanced version of the breakthrough in the early seventies.

  Hong Kong has been making brilliantly choreographed martial arts films for decades; movies like Jet Li's Once Upon a Time in China series, Michelle Yeoh's Wing Chun, and the collected works of Jackie Chan. Now Hollywood and its American audiences have started to catch up, making hits out of The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

  As in the first media martial arts revolution of the 1970s, where visual media is at the vanguard, print media is bound to follow. The trend toward sophisticated and thoughtful depictions of martial arts in written fantasy and science fiction is likely to continue and advance.

  * * * *

  Rachel Manija Brown has been a development executive at the Jim Henson Company, a staff writer on Fox Family's horror-comedy “The Fearing Mind,” and a disaster relief worker for the Red Cross. She has an MFA in playwriting from UCLA, and had a play produced off-Broadway before she was old enough to drink. She lives in Los Angeles, where she studies Shotokan karate and works on her first novel, a fantasy set in 1850s India which combines her favorite bits of weird history, like the practice of using monitor lizards as live grappling hooks for sneak night attacks on forts, with Indian mythology. She is collecting self-defense success stories, especially from women; if you have one or know anyone who does, please contact her.

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  Interview: Maureen F. McHugh

  By Pat Stansberry

  9/9/02

  Maureen F. McHugh often delves into the world of the outsider, from society, from politics, even gender. She has published four novels and
numerous short stories. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the James Tiptree Award, the Locus Best First Novel Award, and a Lambda Award, and was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula. “The Lincoln Train” won a Hugo for best short story in 1996. Her latest novel, Nekropolis, will be published in trade paperback in Nov. 2002.

  The New York Times Book Review observes that “McHugh writes science fiction from the inside out, with the focus on character.” Karen Joy Fowler writes, “I know of no writer who is more deft, more dazzling, or more dangerous to read. You pick up one of Maureen McHugh's books and whole days pass before you remember to put it down again.” She has been compared to Ursula K. Le Guin.

  This discussion took place at Café Tandoor in Cleveland, in the torpid afterglow of Jhinga Biryani, lightly spiced rice and shrimp, Baigan Bharta, rich and pungent roasted eggplant, Palak Raita, a spinach and yogurt condiment that cools the palate, and the wondrous Indian bread naan. “Food is the center of my existence,” says McHugh.

  Pat Stansberry: When writers talk about writing, it's fun to start with our embarrassing youths. Do you remember your earliest speculative fiction story?

  Maureen F. McHugh: Well, I was going to tell you what the first thing I wrote was, but it occurred to me that it really started before that. My family thought I was going to be an artist. I read a lot, but I drew constantly. I think that I was in fifth grade when I found Andre Norton, stories about people who thought they were ugly ducklings who had mutant powers. I just loved those books and I did a series of post-apocalyptic drawings of a girl who could communicate with animals, and they are long gone, thank goodness. There was, I'm sure, an implied narrative. In my head she was going through a series of adventures. They were probably pretty clumsy. I was a reasonable draftsman for a fifth grader, but not brilliant, and I remember being more fascinated with drawing the animals. All of them were her friends. And this post-apocalyptic landscape didn't have very many people.