Metropolitan: Writing and Reception

This is the second essay on the conception and creation of my novel Metropolitan.  Perhaps it’s best, if you’re new here, to start with the first installment.

We now return to the narrative.

Actually writing Metropolitan was, as it turns out, quite a chore.

My previous two books, Aristoi and Days of Atonement, had been easy and joyful to write.  I have no explanation for why one work is easy for me and another is hard— Aristoi, Hardwired, and This Is Not a Game were effortless: Angel Station, Metropolitan, and Deep State were work.  I don’t see the common threat that connects  the items on either of these lists.

Certainly one problem was the level of invention required.  Days of Atonement takes place in the present day, more or less, and I didn’t have create anything that doesn’t already exist; Aristoi was full of invention but at least the present day is somewhere in that world’s past.  Metropolitan took place on an entirely invented world, and I had to decide how everything looked and worked.  The buildings, the telephones (headsets, not handsets), the cars (powered by hydrogen), the subway systems (both pneumatic and tracked), the elevators (hydraulic), the computers (analog or mechanical, nothing digital), data storage (on big dictaphone belts).  Not just television, but movies are carried by cable— there are no broadcast media.   There’s a sort of privatized transnational version of Minitel that’s available for rent in storefronts or cafes or whatever.

Having to create all this undoubtedly slowed down the actual writing.  So did working on the class, political, and philosophical stances adopted by the various characters.

I write about power.  In fact a write about power a lot.  And Metropolitan is probably my most overt meditation on the nature of power— plasm, after all, is a realized metaphor for pure power.  Power is expensive, and only rich people have it— unless you’re very smart or cunning or criminal, and manage to get some for yourself.

The Byronic adventurer Constantine, paraphrasing Spinoza, wishes freedom for himself in the same degree he wishes it for others.  (Or so he says, anyway.)  His sometime lover Sorya, paraphrasing Nietzsche, is all about the Will to Power, and cares nothing for the lower orders.  Aiah, our heroine, is very much a part of the lower orders, and must learn the ways of sorcery and power in order to fulfill her own, considerably more modest, ambitions.

It all took a long time to put this together, and by the time I had, I was running into trouble.  I had hundreds of pages of manuscript, and no end in sight.

It’s not as if I hadn’t planned on an ending.  It was right there in my outline, a very detailed outline that turned out to be of no help whatsoever in the actual writing.

I had over three hundred pages of manuscript, and I’d only covered the first two paragraphs of my plot outline.  I decided it was time to bring Metropolitan to an end and write a big To Be Continued on the whole enterprise.  I found what I thought to be a satisfactory ending, wrote it, and prepared to start on the next book, which would carry on the story from the same outline as the first.

I’m reasonably certain that I delivered the book late, but it wasn’t hugely late, and in any case I’d kept my editor informed.

After the delivery, a lot of Really Awful Stuff happened, which I will detail in a further essay.  For now, I’ll just skip ahead to the book’s actual release.

So here I had written what I considered to be an exemplary high fantasy, full of magic and mystery, but what did my readers see?

They saw science fiction.

I thought I’d seeded the fantasy elements in pretty obvious ways.  For one thing, the book was about these people called “mages” who were performing something called “magic.”  There were weird magical creatures, there was a complex mythology involving godlike and magical beings, and there was this magical current underpinning everything and making it all work.

Readers were convinced that plasm was some kind of advanced nanotechnology.  “How is this even possible?” I gibbered.  “You can’t do any of that shit with nano!”

“Listen up!” I wanted to say. “I do not confuse magic with bogus science!  Don’t you do the same!”

There were reviewers who wrote that it was a hard science novel.  I wanted to tear out my hair.  “How can it be hard science when I made all the science up!“

Most of all, there was this metaphysical object, the Shield, set between this world and everything else.  I figured that it was as if I’d drawn a map of my fantasy world and put “the Uncrossable Desert” or “the Unscalable Mountains” on it.  It doesn’t actually mean anything.  It’s just We’re not going there, you can stop thinking about it.

Readers totally obsessed about the Shield.  And furthermore, they were really angry at me for not explaining it, and for making this a book about magic instead of a book about Solving the Problem of the Shield.

“You’re not even supposed to think about the fucking Shield!” I spluttered.

What was happening was that readers were reading the books with science fiction protocols instead of fantasy protocols.  Fantasy is about cool magical stuff.  Science fiction is about solving technical problems.

To the readers, the Shield was a technical problem to be solved, and the fact that my characters hadn’t solved the problem meant that I was a bad writer.  It was as if I’d written a murder mystery in which everyone ignores the corpse in the drawing room and goes about their lives, and nobody even thinks about finding the killer.

(Actually that would be a pretty cool book.  Though I suspect JG Ballard has already written it.)

George RR Martin later explained to me his Theory of Literary Furniture.  Dragons, for example, are part of the Furniture of Fantasy.  Flying cars are part of the Furniture of Science Fiction.  I’d put flying cars in my novel, and therefore it was science fiction no matter what I thought or intended.  Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books, though ostensibly science fiction, are fantasy novels because they have dragons, and that’s how people read them.

So what happened with this book is that my megalomaniacal attempt to rewrite the rules of fantasy succeeded in confusing everybody and convincing a significant percentage of the readership that I completely suck.

(We note that George did considerably better with his fantasy series in which he put actual dragons.)

I think, once again, part of the problem is that I’m not British.  If I were British, Metropolitan could have been slotted into the stream of Mervyn Peake-descended works now called the New Weird.  But I’m not British, so I’m not allowed to be New Weird or New Space Opera or, basically, New.

I’m just this guy in New Mexico who wanted to write a fantasy novel that would change the world, and failed.

(to be continued)