Metropolitan: the Worldbuilding

I’m delighted to report that the Metropolitan ebook is now available on Amazon and via Smashwords, from whence it will migrate in time to the Apple Store, the Sony Store, the Kobo Store, Baker & Taylor, etc.

Those of you with Nooks, as usual, will have to wait another day or two for the file to clear customs at Barnes & Noble. Sorry about that.

Metropolitan was such an unusual project for me that I’ll probably devote several posts to it, one of which will have to do simply with its odd legal and commercial history.  (Lawyers were involved.  Threats were made.  A New York publishing company was shaken to its roots, and I walked away with a bunch of money.  [Consider this a teaser for the next episode.])

One of the first things to consider about Metropolitan is that it’s a product of megalomania.  Having subdued the cosmos in Aristoi, I decided with my next novel that I was going to fix fantasy.

It’s not like anyone asked me to do this.  It’s not like readers were demanding that I repair their favorite genre.  It was just something I decided to do, as a favor to the universe.

When I cast about for fantasy to read in the early 1990s, I always hoped to find a something that would give me the same thrill as reading Tolkien for the first time, or (a personal favorite) E.R. Eddison.  But I wasn’t much finding it.  Fantasy was being written by normal people— as normal as writers get, anyhow— instead of the great eccentrics who founded the genre.  And fantasy writers I admired, like Jonathan Carroll and John Crowley, were being marketed not as fantasy writers, but as writers of literary fiction . . . it’s as if the genre had cast them out as unworthy to write for the Dragonlance franchise.

I lamented this state of affairs in a essay about the writers who I called “the Bull Goose Loons.”

The people who created modern fantasy, safe to say, were not normal. They led reasonably normal lives, perhaps, but the territory inside their skulls was well off anybody’s map. Think of William Morris obsessively detailing floral wallpaper designs while his wife Jane was off boffing Dante Rossetti; James Branch Cabell spending decades writing his arch, umpty-volume saga about human futility while the twentieth century sang its song of greed, progress, and mass murder; JRR Tolkien (catholic and married in a day when Oxford dons just weren’t) doing scholarly work on the Oxford English Dictionary while secretly transforming his linguistic obsessions into the neography of Middle Earth; and Mervyn Peake— well, just look at Gormenghast, will you?

They just couldn’t help themselves. The books they produced are artifacts, great lumpy sticky things that stand outside of their own time, of anybody’s time. No one could mistake their books for works by anyone else. They stand without reference to the mainstream or any other literary tradition, even the traditions of classical fantasy. Their authors clearly had no audience in mind when they wrote them, aside perhaps from some friends or disciples, or, more likely, some inner daimons who demanded a prose work that recalled the experience of reading The Grettir Saga for the first time. Their works are clearly the results of obsession, of visions so eccentric that they verge on dementia. They were bull goose loons.

(“Bull Goose Loon, ” by the way, is a reference to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and refers to the top dog in a loony bin.  It doesn’t mean, as some have assumed, that I believe that good fantasy writers must be exclusively male.  [And here the author sighs heavily.])

What I decided to do was write a fantasy as crazed and eccentric as those written by the Bull Goose Loons, as a way of encouraging others to do the same.  (Was I as crazy as all that?  Well, I did have the megalomania going for me.)

(And by the way, universe, you’re very welcome.)

I started by applying to the Matter of Fantasy the Two Principal Rules of Cyberpunk.

• The future will not be monocultural.

• If you think about the Old Stuff hard enough, it becomes New Stuff.

So I thought about magic— Old Stuff, indeed— and what it actually meant.  Magic had been treated badly by genre fantasy, or so I felt— it had been crudely mechanized, as in Dungeons and Dragons, where wizards had two Level Three spells, four Level Two spells, and five Level One spells.  Damn it, I thought, magic should be, y’know, more magic than that.

This is what I concluded: Magic is the ability to alter the laws of nature in accordance with human will.  That definition takes in all active forms of magic (as opposed to passive magic, like divination, where you’re not trying to change anything, you’re just trying to figure out what’s going on).  So I decided to strip magic to its essence, the raw material, magic stuff, which I called “plasm,” and the human mind controlling it.

(I am indebted to Pati Nagle for the term “plasm,” by the way.  I was trying desperately to think of a word that meant “manna” but wasn’t “manna,” and Pati was right on the spot with the word that, in essence, made the whole project as singular as it was.  I can’t imagine the book would be even remotely the same without the word.)

I was also intrigued by the term “urban fantasy,” which had become attached to a certain kind of fiction in the mid 1980s (and to a very different kind of fiction around 2007, but that’s neither here nor there).  At the time, urban fantasy consisted of stories in which orcs, say, would appear in a hardware store in Milwaukee, and adventure would ensue.  I confess that I didn’t quite grok urban fantasy’s appeal, for all that some very talented writers were doing it.  I couldn’t work out what elves, or other sylvan beings from pre-Christian Northern European mythology, were doing hanging around in punk clubs.  They should be back home in their oakwoods or garths or whatever. Punk is a reaction to class issues and despair, and I didn’t see why elves would be a part of that.

No doubt that’s a blindness peculiar to my character.  My fault, anyway.

So anyway, I thought hard about the Old Stuff in urban fantasy and tried to turn it into New Stuff.  I decided I would write Total Urban Fantasy, or TUF.  (I’m not sure I’ve ever shared this acronym with anyone before.)  The magical beings and creatures in Metropolitan wouldn’t be imported from some Germanic garth but entirely the creation of the urban environment, creatures at home in, and partly created by, industrial infrastructure like factories, subway tunnels, elevators, and skyscrapers.

The magic would be created by the urban environment as well, through geomancy.

One big influence on the cityscape of Metropolitan was Mervyn Peake and his Gormenghast books.  Gormenghast was a castle so huge that it took a day to walk across it.  I decided to create a city so vast that it encompassed the world— like Trantor, only with wizards.  Though Gormenghast was enormous it wasn’t in any way generic: reading the books you can see the Hall of Bright Carvings, Swelter’s kitchen, the faded velvet cushions in the rooms of Cora and Clarice Groan.

In a similar way I tried to envision a city that wasn’t at all generic, but composed of millions of distinct environments.  I had in mind Anton Furst’s production design for the Tim Burton Batman film, with the huge deco buildings looming down on the dark, cavernous city; and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with its shining skyscrapers, aerocars, and its Moloch-haunted underworld.  The scene of Metropolis’s ancient cathedral, overshadowed by giant modern buildings, was very powerful to me, and spoke of the way one city can become layered on top of another, all those layers of pentimento growing  . . .

Having decided to set a story with magic in a modern city, I had to consider what modernity meant to magic.  All those stories of ancient magic living in the modern world never made a lot of sense to me— here we are in a world of computers and 767s, and witches are still wearing pointy hats, waving wands, and mumbling spells out of a book?  How come science and industry have advanced, but magicians haven’t evolved since the days of Paracelsus?

If you had a world in which science and magic coexisted, then scientists would be looking at the magic in a scientific way.  If the recipe called for eye of newt and toe of frog, scientists would try to find the specific element in newt-eye and frog-toe that produced the intended result, then refine it, bottle it, and make it available in Walgreen’s.  Your spells would go off the same way every time, and many more newts and frogs would go on to live long, happy lives.

Since magic in Metropolitan is created by the city itself according to well-known principles, I made plasm a metered public utility.  Rich people can afford a lot of magic, and poor people can afford none at all.

(A lot of traditional fantasy is about class, for all that American readers tend to be somewhat blind to this.  In my book, access to plasm is a class divider.)

Some reviewers like Norman Spinrad commented on the way I handled language in this series.  The language is indeed singular, and the reason the language is singular is is that it’s translated from Elizabethan English.

No, really.  It is.  The book came to me in the full richness of Elizabethan prose— in the traditional language not just of Shakespeare and Ralegh but of many of the Bull Goose Loons— but for the benefit of my readers, I translated it into modern English.

(It was impossible not to note that E.R. Eddison, who I love and who wrote naturally in high Jacobean style, is not the Bull Goose Loon whose trilogy was turned into a money machine by Peter Jackson.  In this case, my commercial instinct overrode my original inspiration.  And besides, I couldn’t see people in office blocks staring out at the weather and saying, “Lud, I mislike the sight of yon stormcloud.  The tempest shall rattle the windows i’ their frames ere long, I warrant— I hope the Wi-Fi shall not go down.”)

And apropos Eddison, I should point out that Constantine is very much one of Eddison’s hyper-masculine heroes translated to a modern milieu.  He’s all emotion, all action, all opera, and he’s so butch that he’s not the least embarrassed to collapse in a fit of weeping when the burdens of being Constantine grow too onerous.  (It does get him what he wants.)  Constantine even paraphrases Spinoza, as does Dr. Vandermast in Eddison’s Mezentian books.

Well.  Be that as it may.

Having written my lovely high fantasy, I sat back to await the world’s reaction.

What I had not anticipated was that readers would refuse to recognize it as a fantasy at all.

(To be continued . . . )