Other authors have taken this Golden-Age-ruin concept a few steps further, creating more deliberate echoes that question our understanding of history, confusing past and present. In The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series, a city very medieval in feel is dominated by the curious Matachin Tower — residence of the torturers — which is subtly revealed to be an ancient rocket-ship. Does Wolfe want to reimagine our own time as the Golden Age? The modern ruins standing among a medieval-style society call to mind Petrarch’s obsession with ancient Rome, to the denigration of his own (now revered) time. Thanks to the presence of such clearly non-fantastic elements, The Book of the New Sun is often described as science fantasy, with its merging of fantasy tropes into a setting that must be our own far future, taking the dreams of its readership and mercilessly forging them into the ruins of Urth.
While the ruins in Middle Earth and Wolfe’s Urth alike are significant in the setting and in the mind of the reader, they are rarely so attractive to the characters. Even during Roman times, early tourism centered on the locations of great battles and other moments of legend and history. This enthusiasm vanished for centuries, as peace was overtaken by collapse and war, the Roman roads fell into ruin themselves, and travel became a difficult and dangerous pursuit. Religious travel remained important, but travel for its own sake emerged later on, with stability in local governments easing their way.
For the wealthy European, this often meant an expedition to an exotic locale, perhaps cruising the Nile River to view the pyramids of Egypt, or even mounting camels to cross the desert to the rock-cut tombs of Petra. As explorers and travelers ventured deeper into the unknown, the ruin became a tantalizing destination, a place of mystery and discovery, and the lucky tourist might even take home a mummy or chip off a bit of statuary as a souvenir.
In this role, ruins are often divorced from those who created them. They represent not some Golden Age of our own history that we might mourn or aspire to, but a strange realm already half-fantasy, now invaded, however benignly, by the blundering foreigner. In fact, some hypothesized that the most wonderful or challenging ruins could not have been created by the locals at all, but required the intervention of outsiders. Even today there are those who claim that wonders like the Great Pyramids were created by aliens (or at least with some extraterrestrial engineering expertise).
A new generation of authors, questioning the values of our own societies as well as the legacy of the early fantasy writers, bring a somewhat different approach to the ruin. David Anthony Durham’s The Sacred Band features the juxtaposition of these two views — a post-colonial take on the role of ruins — when a party of travelers composed of a wealthy prince and a few of those apparently fallen indigenous people stops outside a ruined city. The prince displays excitement, eager to explore and learn about this fascinating place, a perspective armchair explorers are likely to echo, wanting to get inside the walls. But to the native travelers, the ruin is a reminder of their former glory, a piece of their own history rather than just a pretty place.
The view of earlier peoples on discovering a ruin is often less positive, with the ruin serving as a source of corruption and superstition. In Europe, attitudes toward pre-Roman ruins reflected concerns about the pagan past. Standing stones and barrows did not represent the wisdom of a greater time, but rather the sinister lurking of a troubling past. The stone circle at Avebury presents a startling example. During a restoration effort in the 1930s, one of the stones was lifted to reveal the crushed remains of a medieval barber, apparently killed while engaged in the popular hobby of pulling down the stones to bury them as pagan artifacts. Dangerous magic may linger in places like this, places we no longer understand or relate to.
[Stonehenge at dawn evokes the mystery of the pagan monument, Salisbury Plain, England.]
Even the travelers in Farland’s work know to fear and respect the power represented by the stones at the heart of the enchanted forest, and do not tread there lightly. Carol Berg uses this charged atmosphere to shroud the ruins of a magical rift town in The Spirit Lens. Destroyed by the battles of a sorcerous family decades before, the place remains a bit outside of reality, where magic is more acute. The hero comes to grief while searching the ruin — even as his companion is tempted by the power that it represents.
Power lurks at the heart of ruins both real and fantasy. Though many visitors to ancient ruins are merely tourists, willing to take photos and stand in awe beneath the sublime destruction of the past, others come deliberately seeking knowledge — and willing to risk the dangers to acquire it. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter revitalized the thrill of the ruin for many who followed the story: He opened a chink in the wall into a cave of gilded majesty. Just as familiar is the legend of the Mummy’s Curse, which then pursued Carter and his team, warning against the seeking of treasure and hidden knowledge.
There is, alas, no truth to the legend of the inscription said to curse the tomb-breaker (although such curses do exist elsewhere). But a tale combining extraordinary riches with great tragedy is sure to retain its appeal throughout the ages. While Berg’s travelers are searching for kidnap victims, the seekers in Daniel Abraham’s An Autumn War explicitly brave the dangers of the ruined city to bring back forbidden knowledge which they hope will help them to defeat magic once and for all. The reader does not witness the journey of General Balasar Gice and his men, only the terrible aftermath as the handful of survivors stagger back from the desert, successful, but forever haunted by what they experienced. The knowledge concealed by the foreboding ruin is dangerous, seductive, but often vital. In Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the palace of men is built atop the ruined palaces of the conquered Sithi — similar to elves — but the voices of centuries of combatants linger in the shadows, distracting the unwary. Ultimately, it is only by respecting the ghosts of the past that the present struggle can be concluded.
A novella written by Charles Coleman Finlay brings our tour of ruins full circle, with a young man raised by trolls seeking refuge and rest in a mysterious ruined city. Like the fantasies in which the ruin’s history is never at issue, this story seems to present the ruin as a backdrop, as the character’s ignorance about the past and his own concerns distract from the ruin itself. The ruin becomes a source of fear — not because of what it inherently contains (as in the Berg novel), but because of the rival madness of its two other inhabitants, a troll woman wild with loneliness and a human searching for a jewel we never learn the meaning of. Finlay’s ruin escapes architecture and history into a realm more purely symbolic. This broken city stands in for the darkness, mystery, danger, and betrayal in the human mind, reflecting the hopes and fears of those who approach it — as ultimately all ruins do. The title of Finlay’s work is, of course, Abandon the Ruins.
[Tunnels beneath the Imperial Baths, Trier, Germany — a maze of darkness pierced by light.]
About the Author
E. C. Ambrose is the author of a new dark historical fantasy series about a medieval barber surgeon to start next year with DAW Books. E. C. spends too much time in a tiny office in New England with a mournful black lab lurking under the desk.
The Biker Chick Who Rides Her Own Bike: A Conversation with Nathan Long
Jeremy L. C. Jones
Jane Carver gnashes her teeth, shakes her head. Ol’ Dutch wants him “a piece.” Taunting, heckling. . . he’s more of a nuisance than an outright threat to Carver.
Besides, Carver’s got a record and doesn’t need another strike against her, so she throws a leg over her “fat-boy” motorcycle and smokes her Marlboro. She’s a self-professed “swamp-trash country girl,” a biker chick, tough as nails. She can take care of herself, thank you very much.
Then Ol’ Dutch goes too far.
“You can say all you want to me,” says Jane Carver. “Sticks and stones and all that, but no man, or woman for that matter, puts hands on me without invitation. It’s not a co
de or a creed or something I even think about. It just sets me off, and when I get my mad-on the world turns red and hot and Jane isn’t driving the bus anymore. I punch him once. Once.”
That single punch is more than enough to kill Ol’ Dutch and launch Jane Carver into a weird and wild ride that begins standing over a dead body on the sidewalk in front of a bar and leads to Waar, a planet where the sky is “Ty-D-Bol blue,” the locals are purple, and nothing seems quite right.
Jane Carver of Waar is adventure fiction at its rowdiest. And it’s Nathan Long at his freest, loosest, and most wildly inventive.
Very much a voice-driven, character-rich narrative, Jane simultaneously pays tribute to and parodies Edgar Rice Burroughs’ iconic John Carter of Mars stories.
Long’s previous novels are set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. His first trilogy features Reiner Hetzau and his band of criminals. The premise is simple: the Blackhearts are given the option of punishment for their crimes or they can complete impossible missions for Count Manfred. Fortunately for readers, they choose the latter. In 2006, Long took over as the writer in charge of William King’s iconic Warhammer duo, Gotrek and Felix. Most recently, he’s begun the novel-length tales of Ulrika the Vampire.
In the Warhammer universe, Long favors dark heroes, tight plots, gallows humor, and brutal action. On Waar, Long eases up on the reins a little and really cuts loose.
Below, Long and I discuss Jane Carver, John Carter, and moving the plot along.
What do you enjoy about writing fiction in general and what did you enjoy about writing Jane Carver of Waar in particular?
In general, I love telling stories. I was an avid reader as a kid, but like a lot of avid readers, the kind that live the stories and want to disappear into the books, I didn’t just want to sit on the sidelines. I wanted to tell my own and pull people into my stories the way other had pulled me into theirs.
More specifically, I love plot and character, and how each generates the other. While I like world building and scene setting, what I really love is coming up with an interesting, engaging character, then figuring out how I can ruin their day with a nasty, twisty, plot. I like the puzzle box challenge of plotting, fitting all the elements of the story into a tight structure in order to make a balanced whole that also moves along at a brisk pace and comes to a satisfying conclusion.
With Jane, what I loved was her voice. So much of my fiction is set in pre-industrial fantasy worlds, in which I have to be careful to describe everything in ways that make sense with the setting. For instance, I can’t describe a charge of cavalry smashing into a wall of infantry like a freight train, because there are no freight trains in that world. With Jane, all that’s out the window. Jane is a modern gal sent to a pre-industrial planet, who has brought her modern vocabulary and idiom with her. If she wants to describe a striped, six-limbed alien as having the face of the MGM lion, or say that the flower of an alien plant was the pink of a hooker’s hot-pants, I don’t have to stop her. She can say whatever she wants.
To me, that’s one of the central gags of the book — taking the old fashioned scenery and situations of planetary romance and seeing them through the eyes — and the vernacular — of someone who doesn’t usually get to be the hero of that kind of book.
Where on earth did you find Jane Carver?
I came up with Jane because, while I loved John Carter of Mars and all its imitators, the heroes always bored the shit out of me. They were always tall, square-jawed, stern-eyed men with no sense of humor and no self-doubt. Jane was my reaction to that. As I said above, I wanted to see what would happen if a different kind of person had the same kind of adventure John Carter and all his stuffed shirt buddies had. And Jane was about as different as I could think of.
I didn’t want to make her a typical adventure heroine either. I didn’t want Jane to start weak and powerless and grow strong through adversity. Nor did I want her to be the cold killer who has abandoned her femininity in order to fight injustice. I’ve seen those heroines too many times before. I wanted Jane to be a kind of woman I’ve met many times in real life, but rarely in books — the boisterous gal at the honky-tonk, the brassy broad at the ren faire, the biker chick who rides her own bike, and doesn’t need any help picking it back up again when she ditches, thank you very much. I wanted her to be woman who could take care of herself, but who too often let her appetites get her into trouble — both of which are ideal attributes for an action heroine to have.
What do you admire about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fiction and his vision of the world?
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a master of invention. He created many fantastic worlds — Barsoom, Pellucidar, Tarzan’s Africa — and characters — John Carter, the Mucker, and of course Tarzan, who is perhaps the most recognizable adventure hero ever.
Burroughs was also a genius at coming up with monsters, races, places, machines, strange pseudo-science, and incredible situations. He is the great American father of genre. Science fiction and adventure fiction would not have been the same without him, nor nearly as fun.
What he was not so good at, however, was plot and character. As I said above, John Carter is a bit of a cardboard cut-out, and ERB’s other characters are the same. They are all pretty much interchangeable. Tarzan on Mars would be John Carter, and John Carter in the jungle would be Tarzan. His plots are fairly interchangeable too, all very linear and episodic across all his series. I hold neither of these things against him, however. He was self taught, and a man of his time and place, writing at the beginning of a genre and inventing it as he went along. If he were alive today, with the benefit of having read a century’s worth of the science fiction and fantasy that he helped invent, he would very likely write with more modern techniques and sophistication. Hopefully he would remain as original as well.
How’d you go about plotting Jane Carver of Waar?
I am of the note card and three act structure school. Once I have a rough idea for a story and a firm idea of how it ends, I start laying it out in three acts, using the ends of the acts and the mid-point as markers for where my major turns should go, then filling in the scenes around them using post-its. Once I have all my post-its laid out, I pour over them a while, tearing some up and replacing them with others until everything makes sense and the scenes flow smoothly, and there are no continuity problems.
With Jane, I was not as careful with the plot as I normally would be. I would usually be a lot tighter and symmetrical, weaving subplots through and making sure that things at the beginning pay off neatly at the end, but I wanted the book to mimic the Barsoom books not just in spirit but in structure, and, as they were originally written as serial chapters that appeared in pulp magazines, they tend to be very linear and episodic. Dejah Thoris is kidnapped, John Carter races off to rescue her, but before he can save her, she is taken to another place, so he races off to rescue her again, but before he can save her, she is taken to another place, and so on until he finally saves her at the end of the book. I wasn’t quite as linear as that, but I did let the story follow it’s nose, and play out in distinct episodes more than I normally would.
Can you talk a little about building Waar?
I’m ashamed to say that, just like the plotting, I was not as careful with Jane as I have been with other books. Indeed, I basically just made it up as I went along. I had some basic concepts before I started. I knew I wanted Waar to have a very hide-bound, honor-bound society. I knew I wanted there to be parallels to a lot of the races and animals that appeared in the Barsoom books, but I didn’t want to make it a one-for-one recreation. I deliberately didn’t re-read the John Carter books before I started writing. I wanted Jane to be fueled by the memories of what the Barsoom books felt like to read when I was a kid, not how they actually were.
Is there a part of Waar you’d most like to visit? Least like to visit?
Hmmm. Good question. Of all the places in the book, I think I’d like to explore Ormolu, the capital city of Ora. I set a fair amount o
f action there, but there is so much more to explore — much more than there was space to mention in the midst of the plot.
As for the place I’d least like to go, I would pick the inside of the Temple of Ormolu, since it is said that, but for its priests, no-one who enters it ever returns to the outside world.
Any advice for writing action scenes?
Be briefer than you think you need to be. I have a tendency to overwrite action, and I really have to watch it. Blow by blow descriptions gets boring pretty quickly. Try to get the feeling of movement and danger into it too. An action scene where there doesn’t seem to be any risk or danger for your hero isn’t going to thrill anyone.
Also, an action scene has to move the plot along just like any other scene. If nothing has changed for your heroes at the end of an action scene, it probably wasn’t necessary.
Will we be seeing Jane Carver again?
Absolutely. I am hard at work on the sequel, Swords of Waar, as we speak.
And what’s next for you?
I’ve got quite a lot coming down the pike. In addition to Jane Carver of Waar, which comes out on March 6th, I have two Warhammer books debuting soon. First is the Gotrek and Felix Anthology, which comes out March 27th, in which I have one short story and one novella. After that is Bloodsworn, the third in the Ulrika the Vampire series, which comes out may 29th. Also Swords of Waar is supposed to come out later this year, but I don’t know the date yet, and I have a few under the radar projects which I can’t talk about yet, but which I’m really excited about. Stay tuned!
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