This week's novel is Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray. I really liked the first novel in this series, and this one did not
disappoint. It was arguably even more enjoyable because I did not guess
the twist.
Marguerite's parents created a device called the firebird that lets a person travel across the multiverse, their consciousness inhabiting the body of their selves in that universe. Now Evil Tech Mogul Conley blackmails Marguerite into working for him. Her parent's grad student, Theo, is going through withdraw and on death's door after being possessed by a Theo from another dimension who kept using a possession drug all through the events of the last book. Conley fractures her boyfriend, Paul's, soul into four pieces and will give her their locations and a cure for Theo if she sabotages her parents' research in two detentions where they are close to inventing the firebird.
The worlds that they visited were once again fantastic in their originality. They were all so different, they were each like a breath of fresh air. There was the Warverse, where the world was at war, everyone worked for the war effort, and all the supplies went towards the war effort. The thing I liked about this one was that it was never fully explained. Internet is restricted and used purely for the military and history books are a waste of rationed paper, so Marguerite never finds out who is fighting who or why or how it started or how long it's been going on. Just as Gray doesn't get sucked into a trap of unbelievable science by not explaining things, she doesn't get sucked into unbelievable worldbuilding also by not explaining things. It works really well.
But most of the differences in the worlds Marguerite visits in this story are different because of her interpersonal relationships. She never visits a world where she and Paul are together romantically. This gets her doubting whether math really does keep bringing people together over and over in all the universes, and more importantly gets her doubting her theory that every version of a person is inherently the same in every universe. It also starts to really get into how horribly violating it is to have your body controlled by another version of yourself, and whether they should continue to travel to other universes. The ethical dilemmas are laid out very well as believable reactions to the situations Marguerite encounters. There's an interesting bit where Marguerite stars to really think about these ethical decisions and Theo is like, "I've been saying that the whole book. Did it really have to happen TO YOU for you to believe me?" Yes. It's a little selfish and embarrassing, but I totally buy it.
I'm looking forward to the final installment, where it looks like this will shift into horror.
***
Next week: Swamplandia! alligator wrestlers and swamp ghosts by Karen Russell.
May 30, 2017
May 28, 2017
Worldbuilding and Relatability
I recently saw a video of Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik interviewing Jay Ward, "the man bat Pixar in charge of Cars." Cars is a franchise where all the characters are anthropomorphic cars and trucks and planes.
There are no humans around, and yet the Cars regularly refer to human things. They talk about food that a car wouldn't eat. Why would a character in a purely car society know that wasabi is spicy? Why would car society create Webber grills? Why do the cars have doors if there's no one to use them? How did cars develop a written language that doesn't consist of tread marks, and why do their languages, cultural costuming, and political boundaries align with our own?
Torchinsky has a long history of scrutinizing the holes of Car's world building and coming up with no prize answers, and what he generally comes up with are theories that humans used to exist but don't anymore or there is a human inside every car, giving it it's personality and soul.
Jay Ward is having none of this. He seems to think that these are nitpicky things and Torchinsky's constant questioning is both abnormal and detracting from any enjoyment of the movie as a good, popcorn having time. He addresses the interviewer's questions with a couple of good points. First, "You have to make the world in the film a relatable world. It's not a real world...but it's a believable one." The cars have to speak English because otherwise how would the audience understand them? Subtitles? The cars make jokes about wasabi and wear sombreros because the audience understands those references. Secondly, he says that they focused on picking cars that had great stories (using the example of the Jeep character that was in "the big one"). That car has a story, which we know (going back to the relatable point) and the story of that character is more important than the story of how car society works or the story of all of car history. They are picking their battles on the world building front and deciding to focus more on character than on detailed world building. He says, "And if you can relax your mind enough to enjoy the film...kinda relax and go with it."
But Torchinsky makes the point that when people engage with the film, when they like the film and want to think about it more, they start asking the same kinds of questions that he asks, and the holes in the world building become really obvious, really fast. So "relax and go with it" is set up in conflict with engagement with the movie--there's no way to enjoy it and think about it. (Of course there is, because sometimes worldbuilding holes are fun to get upset about or fun to try and rationalize.)
This exchange gets at the heart of how Ward...doesn't get it.
I bring all this up because it's reminding me of a bunch of discussions about world building that I've seen recently.
Lincoln Michel recently wrote "Against Worldbuilding" for Electric Lit. His argument here seems to be "While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction". I think my main problem with this essay (aside from the condescending tones against people who worldbuild) is that he and I are using different definitions of "worldbuilding." He says, "In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in." Then he goes on to describe checklists for the author to fill in about the world's currency, building materials, and transportation would look like. He thinks that the author must know ALL OF THIS and EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING in order for it to be worldbuilding. Now, if we go with this definition, he's absolutely right. There's no need for me to know all of that if I'm writing a short story about a trip to an actual-existing-in-the-real-world ER or about taking my kid to the actual-existing-in-the-real-world pond to see the ducks. What are the main exports of the country I'm in?...You know, it's kind of sad that I don't know that, but would not matter much to those stories.
He says these check lists are for beginning writers so they can trick themselves or trick their readers into thinking they have a realistic, flushed out world. He compares it to the same kind of checklists that exist for characterization. What's your character's favorite color? What's their phone number? It's true: you don't need that. But sometimes if you're stuck, you can find something helpful looking at one of those. And maybe the better question isn't "What's their phone number" but "Whose phone numbers do they have memorized? Whose do they have on speed dial? Whose do they have on a post-it in the mess on their desk that they have to dig through to find four months later?" So the question isn't "What building materials do they use?" but rather if you're writing fantasy or magical realism or speculative fiction "Does the weird thing, the central conceit, you've thrown into the world affect building materials? No? Cool, move along." Or if you're writing about a setting that people may not be familiar with--a swamp, the Sahara, the basement of the astrophysics building at a research university, a Martian settlement--"Would describing the building materials help convey the spirit of the setting or provide a better understanding of how people interact with the buildings and with each other?"
I believe this second worldbuilding question is still worldbuilding, even if the answer is "No, this fact doesn't matter or add anything, so I'm not going to think about it ever again." Deciding what aspects of the environment or of history or culture are important to include in your story are important. Michel wants to call this "world conjuring" because...worldbuilding is for Tolkien nerds and he doesn't be associated with those people even to the extent of using the same vocabulary? I guess. It's unclear.
So this seems to fit with what Ward is talking about. Who cares what the wheat is for? Why are you getting hung up on details, that's not what this story is about!
These both remind me of "The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind," an essay by Matthea Harvey that I am not going to pretend I understand. She says
Michel says something similar. Why are you making up a new language that no one will understand? If the point is to have a language no one understands, something foreign that triggers the brain to think "I don't understand. I'm an outsider", then just make up some nonsense sounds and be done with it.
I think they have a point that the worlds we create have to be relatable, have to have something for the reader to latch onto as familiar. But I also think it's important to explore how the world you create is different, what affects your changes have, to give color and tone and a bit of tension. And I think it's important to be aware when the familiar and the strange openly contradict each other. Yes, I recognize a car, but I would not be able to recognize a car that was the product of a world populated and created only by sentient cars. The premise has made it unrelatable if we expand the world building.
There are no humans around, and yet the Cars regularly refer to human things. They talk about food that a car wouldn't eat. Why would a character in a purely car society know that wasabi is spicy? Why would car society create Webber grills? Why do the cars have doors if there's no one to use them? How did cars develop a written language that doesn't consist of tread marks, and why do their languages, cultural costuming, and political boundaries align with our own?
Torchinsky has a long history of scrutinizing the holes of Car's world building and coming up with no prize answers, and what he generally comes up with are theories that humans used to exist but don't anymore or there is a human inside every car, giving it it's personality and soul.
Jay Ward is having none of this. He seems to think that these are nitpicky things and Torchinsky's constant questioning is both abnormal and detracting from any enjoyment of the movie as a good, popcorn having time. He addresses the interviewer's questions with a couple of good points. First, "You have to make the world in the film a relatable world. It's not a real world...but it's a believable one." The cars have to speak English because otherwise how would the audience understand them? Subtitles? The cars make jokes about wasabi and wear sombreros because the audience understands those references. Secondly, he says that they focused on picking cars that had great stories (using the example of the Jeep character that was in "the big one"). That car has a story, which we know (going back to the relatable point) and the story of that character is more important than the story of how car society works or the story of all of car history. They are picking their battles on the world building front and deciding to focus more on character than on detailed world building. He says, "And if you can relax your mind enough to enjoy the film...kinda relax and go with it."
But Torchinsky makes the point that when people engage with the film, when they like the film and want to think about it more, they start asking the same kinds of questions that he asks, and the holes in the world building become really obvious, really fast. So "relax and go with it" is set up in conflict with engagement with the movie--there's no way to enjoy it and think about it. (Of course there is, because sometimes worldbuilding holes are fun to get upset about or fun to try and rationalize.)
This exchange gets at the heart of how Ward...doesn't get it.
T: "There are bulldozers and tractors, and they're kind of in the role of bulls...The only reason one would keep a lot of livestock type animals would be either you're getting some product from them or an eventual slaughter, you're going to harvest them."...But who is the wheat for? He seems to completely miss that this is a problem for people.
W: "No, no, no! Tractors are used on a farm all the time. Lots of tractors on farms, harvesting the wheat."
I bring all this up because it's reminding me of a bunch of discussions about world building that I've seen recently.
Lincoln Michel recently wrote "Against Worldbuilding" for Electric Lit. His argument here seems to be "While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction". I think my main problem with this essay (aside from the condescending tones against people who worldbuild) is that he and I are using different definitions of "worldbuilding." He says, "In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in." Then he goes on to describe checklists for the author to fill in about the world's currency, building materials, and transportation would look like. He thinks that the author must know ALL OF THIS and EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING in order for it to be worldbuilding. Now, if we go with this definition, he's absolutely right. There's no need for me to know all of that if I'm writing a short story about a trip to an actual-existing-in-the-real-world ER or about taking my kid to the actual-existing-in-the-real-world pond to see the ducks. What are the main exports of the country I'm in?...You know, it's kind of sad that I don't know that, but would not matter much to those stories.
He says these check lists are for beginning writers so they can trick themselves or trick their readers into thinking they have a realistic, flushed out world. He compares it to the same kind of checklists that exist for characterization. What's your character's favorite color? What's their phone number? It's true: you don't need that. But sometimes if you're stuck, you can find something helpful looking at one of those. And maybe the better question isn't "What's their phone number" but "Whose phone numbers do they have memorized? Whose do they have on speed dial? Whose do they have on a post-it in the mess on their desk that they have to dig through to find four months later?" So the question isn't "What building materials do they use?" but rather if you're writing fantasy or magical realism or speculative fiction "Does the weird thing, the central conceit, you've thrown into the world affect building materials? No? Cool, move along." Or if you're writing about a setting that people may not be familiar with--a swamp, the Sahara, the basement of the astrophysics building at a research university, a Martian settlement--"Would describing the building materials help convey the spirit of the setting or provide a better understanding of how people interact with the buildings and with each other?"
I believe this second worldbuilding question is still worldbuilding, even if the answer is "No, this fact doesn't matter or add anything, so I'm not going to think about it ever again." Deciding what aspects of the environment or of history or culture are important to include in your story are important. Michel wants to call this "world conjuring" because...worldbuilding is for Tolkien nerds and he doesn't be associated with those people even to the extent of using the same vocabulary? I guess. It's unclear.
So this seems to fit with what Ward is talking about. Who cares what the wheat is for? Why are you getting hung up on details, that's not what this story is about!
These both remind me of "The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind," an essay by Matthea Harvey that I am not going to pretend I understand. She says
"The near invisible stilts are a wonderful metaphor for how our invented worlds never let us fully leave the world we live in. As Frederico Garcia Lorca put it, "the imagination is limited by reality: one cannot imagine what does not exist. It needs objects, landscapes, planets, and it requires the purest sort of logic to relate those things to one another. One cannot leap into the abyss or do away with terms of reality.""Ward says the same thing. Yeah, it would make more sense for the cars to not have doors, but the cars we know have doors, so that's how they're presented so that we can immediately recognize it.
Michel says something similar. Why are you making up a new language that no one will understand? If the point is to have a language no one understands, something foreign that triggers the brain to think "I don't understand. I'm an outsider", then just make up some nonsense sounds and be done with it.
I think they have a point that the worlds we create have to be relatable, have to have something for the reader to latch onto as familiar. But I also think it's important to explore how the world you create is different, what affects your changes have, to give color and tone and a bit of tension. And I think it's important to be aware when the familiar and the strange openly contradict each other. Yes, I recognize a car, but I would not be able to recognize a car that was the product of a world populated and created only by sentient cars. The premise has made it unrelatable if we expand the world building.
May 25, 2017
Modern Monsters, Episode 8: The Seal Woman
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 1: Modern Monsters
Episode 8: The Seal Woman
Content Warning: This episode deals with an abusive relationship.
Stay safe.
For further reading: go here
The blog: Twenty Percent True
Twitter: @CaryAndTheHits
Facebook: facebook.com/twentypercenttrue
May 23, 2017
Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean Review
This week I read Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean: Stories of Imagination and Daring, a collection of short stories edited by Kristy Murray, Payal Dhar, and Anita Roy. I hadn't heard of this until I got it as a gift for my birthday.
This collection was a response to a wave of violence against women in India and Australia in 2012. Contributors were asked to re-imagine the world and push the boundaries of what girls were allowed to do. Then as an added bonus, the contributors were paired up, one writer from India, one writer from Australia. Some of them just bounced ideas off each other, traded stories, then went and wrote their own, while other teams collaborated on single stories.The result is a mix, a nice variety of dystopias, retold myths, sci-fi, and creepy fantasy.
These stories are all very short (the longest is 18 pages, and that one is a graphic story). It's a length I appreciate both as a reader and a writer. You can't get too much in there, you can't fit too many levels or story threads, but you can go into detail and get an emotional punch on one set piece, one idea. That said, some of the stories hit the mark better than others.
"Cat Calls" by Margo Lanagan, is wonderful. It made me cry. And it was positioned perfectly as the first story in the collection. A girl gets cat called by the same group of men everyday on her way to and from school. In this world, there exists a technology that retracts the last 30 seconds or so, sucking words back into the mouth of whoever said them and sucking the words from the brain of whoever heard them. It would be great for this cat calling situation, but this piece of technology isn't for poor girls and the main character can't have one. Instead, her friends stand up for her, shouting the words back at the men. The situation is real and relatable. Lanagan builds up the friendships, the emotion, and the fear, so at the climax is an honestly earned triumph. And I love, love, love that there's this piece of sci-fi technology, but it has no bearing on the story except that it's not there. It never appears. That's so cool on a craft level, and also says a lot about the socioeconomics of feminism.
"What a Stone Can't Feel" by Penni Russon was another stand out story. Vega's best friend Bonnie is dying and Vega has to deal with the loss of her friend and the fact that her super power can't save her: she can slip inside inanimate objects. There's a second plot where a girl with the power of flight finds out Vega has a super power and tries to befriend her. Russon does a fantastic job making the friendships believable through chatty dialogue and games about what object would you use to record a memory and other abstractions. Almost all the dialogue is light, the more somber moments left to the white space between sections. She packs a lot into the word limit like this, showing just snip-its before cutting away, each section short, and still saying a lot in the things that go unsaid.
"Memory Lace" by Payal Dhar was also excellent. In it, a slave is bought for a rich woman's oldest daughter, who teaches the slave to read and make lace, how to live a free life and replace the memory lace the rich woman bought with something they created. It's really cool commentary on expectations about gender, but it's hard to get into it without ruining it. Go read it and come back and we'll talk.
***
Next week: Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
This collection was a response to a wave of violence against women in India and Australia in 2012. Contributors were asked to re-imagine the world and push the boundaries of what girls were allowed to do. Then as an added bonus, the contributors were paired up, one writer from India, one writer from Australia. Some of them just bounced ideas off each other, traded stories, then went and wrote their own, while other teams collaborated on single stories.The result is a mix, a nice variety of dystopias, retold myths, sci-fi, and creepy fantasy.
These stories are all very short (the longest is 18 pages, and that one is a graphic story). It's a length I appreciate both as a reader and a writer. You can't get too much in there, you can't fit too many levels or story threads, but you can go into detail and get an emotional punch on one set piece, one idea. That said, some of the stories hit the mark better than others.
"Cat Calls" by Margo Lanagan, is wonderful. It made me cry. And it was positioned perfectly as the first story in the collection. A girl gets cat called by the same group of men everyday on her way to and from school. In this world, there exists a technology that retracts the last 30 seconds or so, sucking words back into the mouth of whoever said them and sucking the words from the brain of whoever heard them. It would be great for this cat calling situation, but this piece of technology isn't for poor girls and the main character can't have one. Instead, her friends stand up for her, shouting the words back at the men. The situation is real and relatable. Lanagan builds up the friendships, the emotion, and the fear, so at the climax is an honestly earned triumph. And I love, love, love that there's this piece of sci-fi technology, but it has no bearing on the story except that it's not there. It never appears. That's so cool on a craft level, and also says a lot about the socioeconomics of feminism.
"What a Stone Can't Feel" by Penni Russon was another stand out story. Vega's best friend Bonnie is dying and Vega has to deal with the loss of her friend and the fact that her super power can't save her: she can slip inside inanimate objects. There's a second plot where a girl with the power of flight finds out Vega has a super power and tries to befriend her. Russon does a fantastic job making the friendships believable through chatty dialogue and games about what object would you use to record a memory and other abstractions. Almost all the dialogue is light, the more somber moments left to the white space between sections. She packs a lot into the word limit like this, showing just snip-its before cutting away, each section short, and still saying a lot in the things that go unsaid.
"Memory Lace" by Payal Dhar was also excellent. In it, a slave is bought for a rich woman's oldest daughter, who teaches the slave to read and make lace, how to live a free life and replace the memory lace the rich woman bought with something they created. It's really cool commentary on expectations about gender, but it's hard to get into it without ruining it. Go read it and come back and we'll talk.
***
Next week: Ten Thousand Skies Above You, the sequel to A Thousand Pieces of You by Claudia Gray
May 21, 2017
To Tall Tale or not to Tall Tale
The last several months, I've been itching to write tall tales or fairy tales. I want to capture some of the story telling, the oral traditions, that I grew up with. But I've been having a lot of trouble doing it, and it's taken me an embarrassingly long time but I think I've articulated why I'm having such trouble.
A common feature in fairy tales, one of the techniques that signals that you're reading a fairy tale, is that the characters are flat or archetypal. The description is minimal to the point of only describing the setting in terms of "the woods" or "the castle", only describing characters as "lovely" or "sad", and only noting when colors are white, black, or red. No turquoise. No articulated conflicted emotions. No settings the reader doesn't already have a picture of. The bulk is left to the reader's imagination, allowing them to cast themselves as the main character and the setting as their home town.
These makes for good short tales and fables, but not so much for full novels, especially not the kind I write with introspection and description and world building. A novel where the characters don't get flushed out would be almost impressive in how the author managed to avoid it, and I would find it dull if it went for long stretches without a character to latch onto.
I've been wondering if fairy tales and the kind of thing I usually write are mutually exclusive. I can write my own short fairy tales, but I wonder if I can incorporate them into a novel without fundamentally changing one or both of the forms, without stripping them of what attracts me to them. I can do a novelization of a fairy tale with all the tangents and back story and character growth and world building that I love to write, but I don't know how to do that without losing some of the lyricism, the dream logic, and perhaps some of the magic that draws me to fairy tales.
Right now, I'm working instead on characters telling stories--kind of a "Big Fish" thing. I like this because part of what makes tall tales so engaging is that the storyteller puts themselves into the story, casting themselves as a hero, and part of what makes them so interesting is to see how the stories they tell interact with or deepen their character. My grandfather once found a rare, exotic butterfly on his trumpet plant in his back yard. Just opening and closing its wings. He called the Dallas Zoo and a zookeeper came out to his back yard, thanking my granddad profusely for finding the escaped butterfly.
Another way I've been playing with it is to have tales interjected throughout as explanation or even exposition. "Why does this happen? Why does this matter? Well, let me tell you a story..." It gives some voice, some humor to info dumps, making them more engaging.
A common feature in fairy tales, one of the techniques that signals that you're reading a fairy tale, is that the characters are flat or archetypal. The description is minimal to the point of only describing the setting in terms of "the woods" or "the castle", only describing characters as "lovely" or "sad", and only noting when colors are white, black, or red. No turquoise. No articulated conflicted emotions. No settings the reader doesn't already have a picture of. The bulk is left to the reader's imagination, allowing them to cast themselves as the main character and the setting as their home town.
These makes for good short tales and fables, but not so much for full novels, especially not the kind I write with introspection and description and world building. A novel where the characters don't get flushed out would be almost impressive in how the author managed to avoid it, and I would find it dull if it went for long stretches without a character to latch onto.
I've been wondering if fairy tales and the kind of thing I usually write are mutually exclusive. I can write my own short fairy tales, but I wonder if I can incorporate them into a novel without fundamentally changing one or both of the forms, without stripping them of what attracts me to them. I can do a novelization of a fairy tale with all the tangents and back story and character growth and world building that I love to write, but I don't know how to do that without losing some of the lyricism, the dream logic, and perhaps some of the magic that draws me to fairy tales.
Right now, I'm working instead on characters telling stories--kind of a "Big Fish" thing. I like this because part of what makes tall tales so engaging is that the storyteller puts themselves into the story, casting themselves as a hero, and part of what makes them so interesting is to see how the stories they tell interact with or deepen their character. My grandfather once found a rare, exotic butterfly on his trumpet plant in his back yard. Just opening and closing its wings. He called the Dallas Zoo and a zookeeper came out to his back yard, thanking my granddad profusely for finding the escaped butterfly.
Another way I've been playing with it is to have tales interjected throughout as explanation or even exposition. "Why does this happen? Why does this matter? Well, let me tell you a story..." It gives some voice, some humor to info dumps, making them more engaging.
May 18, 2017
Modern Monsters, Episode 7: The Take down of the Gargoyle Containment Unit
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 1: Modern Monsters
Episode 7: The Take down of the Gargoyle Containment Unit
facebook.com/twentypercenttrue
May 16, 2017
Magic for Beginners Review
This week's book is Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link. This one comes from a magical realism recommendation list that I didn't bookmark and now have no way of finding ever again.
There are nine short stories here, so let me give you an overview of a couple of them. In "The Faery Handbag," a young woman is charged with keeping track of her eccentric grandmother's handbag, which holds the refugees of the village where she was born, but the girl's best friend takes it to lose himself in the handbag when his life takes a turn for the worst. In "Stone Animals," a family trying to recover from the wife's infidelity and the husband's inability to prioritize his family over work, buys a house that is eerily haunted, possibly by rabbits. In "The Great Divorce," a man and his wife are getting a divorce and take a last family trip to Disney Land, only the wife is a ghost who he met and must talk to through a medium, and their three kids "take after their mother" meaning they're also ghosts. "The Cannon" is a transcript of an interview with someone...who is in love with a cannon? It's stream of consciousness and the main character changes throughout the interview.
I liked that in several of the stories, it's possible that no magic is happening at all. In "The Faery Handbag,"it's possible the grandmother is lying about being two-hundred-years-old from a village that no one's heard of, and her husband isn't aging slowly in her handbag but rather ran out on her or wasn't ever her husband, and that the best friend too the midnight bus out of town. It's possible that the handbag idea was a lie the grandmother told to a child and that the young woman is now using the same lie. It's possible in "The Great Divorce" there are no ghosts and it's a huge scam set up by mediums. In these stories it's like you get two stories in one, one with weird magic and one with people who invent weird scenarios to make their lives easier.
But overall, these were not my favorites. Often there are ideas, sometimes a lot of ideas piled on top of each other in a single story, that don't go anywhere, that don't add anything to the other ideas or the themes of the story. There's a cool concept and I'm waiting to see where Link goes with it, and the answer is nowhere. I feel like I need a book club to dissect these with me so we can figure out what the painting of the woman with the apple was about, or why Soap is obsessed with zombies or why he kidnapped a kid. I don't get a lot of what's going on and it makes me feel stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid.
The strands don't come together. It's not like all the things going on are different facets of the same problem (which when done well, is so beautiful it's one of my favorite things about literary short stories) or that they all come together in the end. In a lot of stories there isn't really an end, not really a conclusion. In "Lull" there's a story within a story within a story, all of which are cut off before the conclusion because they've run out of time. Maybe there's a reason for this, but...these make me feel so stupid. I shouldn't post this and air my stupidity in the breeze for you all to see.
I think this makes me so twitchy because these are issues I've struggled with in my own writing. If I'm writing a story about a yeti, I have to ask, "why does this character have to be a yeti? What does being a yeti bring to the table and what themes can I build or highlight with that?" If I have a cool idea, a neat premise, I'll stress over "okay, but then what happens?" It feels like Link didn't do this. Maybe she's freed herself from the stress or the "have tos" and writes what she wants to write, and it doesn't matter if there's a point to everything or if there's a reason or a why. But this is such a sensitive topic to me right now that I can't get past the feeling that she just didn't do the work.
***
Next week: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a feminist anthology of short stories.
There are nine short stories here, so let me give you an overview of a couple of them. In "The Faery Handbag," a young woman is charged with keeping track of her eccentric grandmother's handbag, which holds the refugees of the village where she was born, but the girl's best friend takes it to lose himself in the handbag when his life takes a turn for the worst. In "Stone Animals," a family trying to recover from the wife's infidelity and the husband's inability to prioritize his family over work, buys a house that is eerily haunted, possibly by rabbits. In "The Great Divorce," a man and his wife are getting a divorce and take a last family trip to Disney Land, only the wife is a ghost who he met and must talk to through a medium, and their three kids "take after their mother" meaning they're also ghosts. "The Cannon" is a transcript of an interview with someone...who is in love with a cannon? It's stream of consciousness and the main character changes throughout the interview.
I liked that in several of the stories, it's possible that no magic is happening at all. In "The Faery Handbag,"it's possible the grandmother is lying about being two-hundred-years-old from a village that no one's heard of, and her husband isn't aging slowly in her handbag but rather ran out on her or wasn't ever her husband, and that the best friend too the midnight bus out of town. It's possible that the handbag idea was a lie the grandmother told to a child and that the young woman is now using the same lie. It's possible in "The Great Divorce" there are no ghosts and it's a huge scam set up by mediums. In these stories it's like you get two stories in one, one with weird magic and one with people who invent weird scenarios to make their lives easier.
But overall, these were not my favorites. Often there are ideas, sometimes a lot of ideas piled on top of each other in a single story, that don't go anywhere, that don't add anything to the other ideas or the themes of the story. There's a cool concept and I'm waiting to see where Link goes with it, and the answer is nowhere. I feel like I need a book club to dissect these with me so we can figure out what the painting of the woman with the apple was about, or why Soap is obsessed with zombies or why he kidnapped a kid. I don't get a lot of what's going on and it makes me feel stupid, and I don't like feeling stupid.
The strands don't come together. It's not like all the things going on are different facets of the same problem (which when done well, is so beautiful it's one of my favorite things about literary short stories) or that they all come together in the end. In a lot of stories there isn't really an end, not really a conclusion. In "Lull" there's a story within a story within a story, all of which are cut off before the conclusion because they've run out of time. Maybe there's a reason for this, but...these make me feel so stupid. I shouldn't post this and air my stupidity in the breeze for you all to see.
I think this makes me so twitchy because these are issues I've struggled with in my own writing. If I'm writing a story about a yeti, I have to ask, "why does this character have to be a yeti? What does being a yeti bring to the table and what themes can I build or highlight with that?" If I have a cool idea, a neat premise, I'll stress over "okay, but then what happens?" It feels like Link didn't do this. Maybe she's freed herself from the stress or the "have tos" and writes what she wants to write, and it doesn't matter if there's a point to everything or if there's a reason or a why. But this is such a sensitive topic to me right now that I can't get past the feeling that she just didn't do the work.
***
Next week: Eat the Sky, Drink the Ocean, a feminist anthology of short stories.
May 14, 2017
Because Magic! Because Science!
I've been thinking about the genre boundaries between fantasy and science fiction.
There's a stellar interview (this is a long debate between the two, but this one is funny) between Ursula Le Guin and Margret Atwood, real life besties who disagree about genre boundaries. Le Guin argues that The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood are sci-fi and labeling them otherwise is a disservice to the works because you have to critique them differently. (It's also a disservice to the sci-fi genre as a whole when people get elitist about a story because it's too literary to be lumped into sci-fi with all the pulpy, alien squid monsters.) Atwood argues that her work is not sci-fi because she doesn't write sci-fi. Atwood sets the boundaries like this: if it could happen today or with technology already in place in some form, it's speculative fiction; if it could happen in the future but not with technology that's been invented (faster than light travel, time travel), it's science fiction; and if there's no way it could happen, it's fantasy.
In the last few months I've read and reviewed two books (The Forgetting and Where Futures End) that "start as fantasy and end up as science fiction." But what does that mean?
Using Atwood's definition, we could say that we assume at the beginning of these two stories that they present impossible situations, but then we're given more information and told, "no, no, it can happen. With SCIENCE!" If we roll with this, it means that readers are naturally skeptical and start these books assuming there's no way this could happen and have to be convinced.
Another way to define the genres is to look at the central conceit. Stories in these genres typically have one big "what if" or one thing that is fantastical about which the reader is asked to suspend their disbelief. The rest of the story, the world building and character reactions and plot, are affected by this. In 1984, we're asked to imagine a government that watches people's every move. In Harry Potter we're asked to imagine that wizards exist and are educated at a boarding school. Aliens send us a message. Dragons exist. Water molecules stacked a certain way freeze anything they touch. If we think about it like this, in science fiction the central conceit is explained by or derived from technology. In fantasy, the central conceit is magical.
This definition gets a little screwy if you start looking at it too hard. We generally assume that everything set in space is sci-fi (and it's marketed as such) because advanced technology is required to get them there. But The Little Prince, where he travels around in space and visits different planets, is fantasy because he travels with magic rather than technology. The movie Apollo 13, which is (mostly) true and doesn't require us to suspend our disbelief, does not count as science-fiction because it's not fiction. The movie Gravity is fiction, but I'm not sure it counts as science fiction either. All the technology used is already up there and the conceit is "there's an explosion that messes stuff up" which doesn't have anything to do with technology really. We suspend disbelief that this happened rather than that this could happen. What about Star Wars? Our conceit is that there are people and aliens on a bunch of different planets with space ships and lasers that blow up planets and lasers that are like swords (all sci-fi), but also a conceit that there's a magical force that connects people to the universe and gives them magic powers (fantasy).
So in these cases, I can see where Atwood is coming from. Gravity is speculative, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (or Blade Runner, either way) are sci-fi. They both have tropes common to science fiction, but they're not the same.
And where does magical realism fit into all this? By definition, the fantastical elements in magical realism are never explained. The reader assumes thing happen "because magic" and leave it at that, but since it isn't explained (even to the level of "because magic"), it could very well be "because science." Maybe it's radiation or nanites. We don't know.
So this would imply that until we're given an explanation, we assume "magic" and the story is fantasy by default. This would explain those two genre shifting books that start off as fantasy until you learn more and they become science fiction. And isn't that a neat thing--that the human mind jumps straight to magic, that that's what we're most comfortable with?
There's a stellar interview (this is a long debate between the two, but this one is funny) between Ursula Le Guin and Margret Atwood, real life besties who disagree about genre boundaries. Le Guin argues that The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood are sci-fi and labeling them otherwise is a disservice to the works because you have to critique them differently. (It's also a disservice to the sci-fi genre as a whole when people get elitist about a story because it's too literary to be lumped into sci-fi with all the pulpy, alien squid monsters.) Atwood argues that her work is not sci-fi because she doesn't write sci-fi. Atwood sets the boundaries like this: if it could happen today or with technology already in place in some form, it's speculative fiction; if it could happen in the future but not with technology that's been invented (faster than light travel, time travel), it's science fiction; and if there's no way it could happen, it's fantasy.
In the last few months I've read and reviewed two books (The Forgetting and Where Futures End) that "start as fantasy and end up as science fiction." But what does that mean?
Using Atwood's definition, we could say that we assume at the beginning of these two stories that they present impossible situations, but then we're given more information and told, "no, no, it can happen. With SCIENCE!" If we roll with this, it means that readers are naturally skeptical and start these books assuming there's no way this could happen and have to be convinced.
Another way to define the genres is to look at the central conceit. Stories in these genres typically have one big "what if" or one thing that is fantastical about which the reader is asked to suspend their disbelief. The rest of the story, the world building and character reactions and plot, are affected by this. In 1984, we're asked to imagine a government that watches people's every move. In Harry Potter we're asked to imagine that wizards exist and are educated at a boarding school. Aliens send us a message. Dragons exist. Water molecules stacked a certain way freeze anything they touch. If we think about it like this, in science fiction the central conceit is explained by or derived from technology. In fantasy, the central conceit is magical.
This definition gets a little screwy if you start looking at it too hard. We generally assume that everything set in space is sci-fi (and it's marketed as such) because advanced technology is required to get them there. But The Little Prince, where he travels around in space and visits different planets, is fantasy because he travels with magic rather than technology. The movie Apollo 13, which is (mostly) true and doesn't require us to suspend our disbelief, does not count as science-fiction because it's not fiction. The movie Gravity is fiction, but I'm not sure it counts as science fiction either. All the technology used is already up there and the conceit is "there's an explosion that messes stuff up" which doesn't have anything to do with technology really. We suspend disbelief that this happened rather than that this could happen. What about Star Wars? Our conceit is that there are people and aliens on a bunch of different planets with space ships and lasers that blow up planets and lasers that are like swords (all sci-fi), but also a conceit that there's a magical force that connects people to the universe and gives them magic powers (fantasy).
So in these cases, I can see where Atwood is coming from. Gravity is speculative, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (or Blade Runner, either way) are sci-fi. They both have tropes common to science fiction, but they're not the same.
And where does magical realism fit into all this? By definition, the fantastical elements in magical realism are never explained. The reader assumes thing happen "because magic" and leave it at that, but since it isn't explained (even to the level of "because magic"), it could very well be "because science." Maybe it's radiation or nanites. We don't know.
So this would imply that until we're given an explanation, we assume "magic" and the story is fantasy by default. This would explain those two genre shifting books that start off as fantasy until you learn more and they become science fiction. And isn't that a neat thing--that the human mind jumps straight to magic, that that's what we're most comfortable with?
May 11, 2017
Modern Monsters, Episode 6: The Roommate
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 1: Modern Monsters
Episode 6: The Roommate
May 9, 2017
On the Edge of Gone Review
This week's novel is
On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA by Corinne Duyvis.
A comet will shortly
crash into the Earth, setting off an EMP, throwing debris into the
air that will block the sun for at least a year, raining flaming
debris, and setting off earthquakes and tsunamis. While some people
are lucky enough to get spots on generational space ships bound for
distant habitable planets, and others get into permanent shelters
where they can survive underground, Denise—an autistic, biracial
teenager—and her family have spots in a government constructed
temporary shelter meant to last only through the initial impact.
When Denise's sister doesn't come home on time and Denise and her mom
are late leaving for their shelter, they end up giving a ride to a
desperate couple, late for their generational ship. Now Denise has
to bend over backwards to get spots on the ship for her and her
family, find her sister, and hold it all together at the end of the
world.
This book gets
intense. They outrun the comet, the comet hits, they outrun a
tsunami, the tsunami hits. That's all in the first third of the
book. And if that's not enough, this story is set outside Amsterdam, which is below
sea level, so after the wave hits, half the country is underwater.
But aside from the nail biting disaster moments, the book gets more
and more stressful as you realize there is no perfect solution to
Denise's problems. Even if she can get herself, her drug addict
mother, and her protest-organizer sister into space...maybe she
shouldn't. She'd be better off without her mom (IMHO) and sneaking
her mom aboard would use up resources the ship can't afford and make
everyone angry once they found out after lift off. Her sister would
do better staying on Earth (IMHO) where she can help the survivors.
And then there's no happy ending for the people who stay on Earth or
for the people on the ship leaving family behind.
Along these lines,
Denise's autism works to great effect in this story. I'm not saying
there has to be a reason to
have an autistic character, but here the situation through her eyes
was so much more impactful and emotional and overwhelming as a result
of her autism. In addition to representation, it works
to emphasize the horror and stress of it all. People keep breaking
the rules and asking too much of Denise, and the situation would be
too much for anyone, much less
someone who gets overstimulated by people bumping into her and loud noises. It's taking what anyone would feel a the end of the world and turning it up to eleven.
The relationships are beautifully complex. Denise's mother keeps messing up, jeopardizing Denise's plans and nearly getting them thrown off the ship. She doesn't respect Denise's personal boundaries about touching or being coddled. Her mom might get her killed, but at the same time, she's her mother. There's also complicated (and spoilery) tensions between Denise and her friends on the ship and between her and her sister. It's all layered in conflicting emotions, and again there's no perfect answer.
It's also a diverse story. From the family that can't sit shiva because they have to work through the apocalypse, to the couple trying to scavenge halal food. There are gay and bi characters. There are trans characters (yes, plural). Denise and her sister are biracial and encounter micro aggression racism throughout the book. There are refugees from other countries who speak broken Dutch. It's pretty neat, and it's sad that I have to point out that it's pretty neat.
***
Next week: Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link.
The relationships are beautifully complex. Denise's mother keeps messing up, jeopardizing Denise's plans and nearly getting them thrown off the ship. She doesn't respect Denise's personal boundaries about touching or being coddled. Her mom might get her killed, but at the same time, she's her mother. There's also complicated (and spoilery) tensions between Denise and her friends on the ship and between her and her sister. It's all layered in conflicting emotions, and again there's no perfect answer.
It's also a diverse story. From the family that can't sit shiva because they have to work through the apocalypse, to the couple trying to scavenge halal food. There are gay and bi characters. There are trans characters (yes, plural). Denise and her sister are biracial and encounter micro aggression racism throughout the book. There are refugees from other countries who speak broken Dutch. It's pretty neat, and it's sad that I have to point out that it's pretty neat.
***
Next week: Magic for Beginners, short stories by Kelly Link.
May 7, 2017
Place
Dorothy Allison wrote an essay called "Place" for The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. In it, she describes place not as a description of the setting, but as an experience for the character.
This relates to something my friend, Eric, has been talking about for quite a while. He hates description and makes the point that great description tells us about the character, about their emotional state, their habits, or their background. For example, if a character who just lost her mother describes her kitchen, everything will relate back to her mom and the description will slip into memories, and Eric likes memories.
If you have a non-omnipotent narrator, the things they mark as worth mentioning in a description, where they choose to point the camera, are the things they think are notable--things that remind them of memories or the things that are out of place or strange or wondrous. They note things they haven't yet taken for granted. So in a way, any description will tell you about character, about their experiences and their understanding of their environment. But I think Dorothy Allison and Eric want it pushed further, they want you to lean into those emotional moments and make the connections more explicit. "I remember my mother standing at our electric stove-top, cursing over inedible spaghetti."
Allison's advice is also related to Jay Asher's advice. He says that there's no point in describing a 7-eleven or a grocery store, because everyone has experienced those places and knows what you're talking about. You don't usually have emotional memories of 7-eleven, so going on about how the character feels about a fridge full of Dasani would be a stretch. I'm not sure if Allison would argue not to set a scene in one of these settings, or if she would argue that they just aren't a place, that the character brings "place" with them.
Allison also mentions that a writer has no idea who their audience is, where they are, or what they've experienced. So is it presumptive to assume that your reader knows what a 7-eleven looks like and considers them non-places?
Then there's something to be said about non-places. Just as you can learn about a character through what they choose to describe*, you can learn from how they feel about being in a non-place. Do they like it? Are they used to it? Is it uncomfortable? Are they in a non-place physically because they're in a non-place emotionally?
So maybe there's some middle ground in all this. You don't need to describe the 7-eleven, but if you describe the lighting as "Mountain Dew colored" hitting a resonance point and a witty detail, and saying it aggravates your hangover (pulling the character's situation and emotional state into the setting, then that works for me.
*This is short hand. I know a characters are fictional and have no agency to choose anything and it's all the writer making decisions. [loud raspberry noise]
"Place requires context. Is it responsive? Does it notice me? Or is it porcelain, pristine, and just ignoring my passage through? Are there people on the street who flinch when I smile at them? Is there a reason they do that?"
"What I'm trying to say is that place is not just landscape--a list of flora and fauna and street names. That's not place, that's not even decent research."
"I want a story that is happening in a real place, which means a place that has meaning and that evokes emotions in the person who's telling me the story. Place is emotion."She compares the place of a hotel room, which is exactly like all other hotel rooms and has no emotional resonance with the character or the reader with the place the character was when her boyfriend said he didn't want her and the place where the character's mother slipped a cookie into her luggage for her to find when she got to that hotel room far away and unpacked.
This relates to something my friend, Eric, has been talking about for quite a while. He hates description and makes the point that great description tells us about the character, about their emotional state, their habits, or their background. For example, if a character who just lost her mother describes her kitchen, everything will relate back to her mom and the description will slip into memories, and Eric likes memories.
If you have a non-omnipotent narrator, the things they mark as worth mentioning in a description, where they choose to point the camera, are the things they think are notable--things that remind them of memories or the things that are out of place or strange or wondrous. They note things they haven't yet taken for granted. So in a way, any description will tell you about character, about their experiences and their understanding of their environment. But I think Dorothy Allison and Eric want it pushed further, they want you to lean into those emotional moments and make the connections more explicit. "I remember my mother standing at our electric stove-top, cursing over inedible spaghetti."
Allison's advice is also related to Jay Asher's advice. He says that there's no point in describing a 7-eleven or a grocery store, because everyone has experienced those places and knows what you're talking about. You don't usually have emotional memories of 7-eleven, so going on about how the character feels about a fridge full of Dasani would be a stretch. I'm not sure if Allison would argue not to set a scene in one of these settings, or if she would argue that they just aren't a place, that the character brings "place" with them.
Allison also mentions that a writer has no idea who their audience is, where they are, or what they've experienced. So is it presumptive to assume that your reader knows what a 7-eleven looks like and considers them non-places?
Then there's something to be said about non-places. Just as you can learn about a character through what they choose to describe*, you can learn from how they feel about being in a non-place. Do they like it? Are they used to it? Is it uncomfortable? Are they in a non-place physically because they're in a non-place emotionally?
"If you're lucky, Oprah is on at eleven-thirty at night. And you can check out what she's done lately. Try, try, try not to start channel-hopping and watching the ads. You can't afford any of that stuff anyway. It's the middle of the night, three o'clock in the morning, and you're in a room in which the art on the wall is a stylized painting of a flower or an unknown landscape. And I do mean an unknown landscape. Someone is doing these paintings and making money, but it's not an actual artist and that landscape is nowhere you recognize. Also, the mattress is kind of soggy, and you've got one of those covers that you are too hot if you have it on and too cold if you pull it off. You're awake at three o'clock in the morning and you are nowhere; this is not a place."This section is her own most damning counter argument. It is so much more engaging than the scene after a breakup that she describes. Why is the "you" in this passage awake at 3 AM? You're clearly having a miserable time. Is it the fact that emotion slips into what she intends to be a boring setting, a non-place, that shows you bring place with you? And the details she uses are so relatable. Oprah on at a weird time! The comforter that doesn't work! Yes! I've been in that hotel room! That's exactly what it was like! But Allison reads to learn new things, and I read for escapism and for those moments of resonance, those moments of things I've experienced put on paper where I know I'm not alone.
So maybe there's some middle ground in all this. You don't need to describe the 7-eleven, but if you describe the lighting as "Mountain Dew colored" hitting a resonance point and a witty detail, and saying it aggravates your hangover (pulling the character's situation and emotional state into the setting, then that works for me.
*This is short hand. I know a characters are fictional and have no agency to choose anything and it's all the writer making decisions. [loud raspberry noise]
May 4, 2017
Modern Monsters, Episode 5: The Reaper
The Twenty Percent True Podcast
Season 1: Modern Monsters
Episode 5: The Reaper
Content Warning: This episode deals with suicidal ideation. Stay safe.
May 2, 2017
Ghost Talkers Review
This week's novel is Ghost Talkers by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Ginger is a medium working for the British Spirit Corps during WWI. Ostensibly, the Spirit Corps is a group of women who entertain the troops and keep their moral up. But actually, the British servicemen are conditioned to report to the Spirit Corps as ghosts after they die to describe the events of their deaths, like the locations of snipers and machine guns. The women of the Spirit Corps speak to the ghosts and take their reports before releasing their spirits. But now the Germans have figured out that the British are using ghosts and are trying to find details of the project's operation, and there's a spy in the British ranks giving the Germans information about the ghosts--a spy that killed Ginger's intelligence officer fiancé, Ben, when he got too close to discovering the leak. Now Ginger and Ben's ghost have to go to the front, find the leak, find Ben's murderer, and save the Spirit Corps.
My favorite thing about this book was how Ben's ghost deteriorated over time. His memory would slip, so he couldn't remember the specifics of what he had learned in his investigation. This worked well for the story's plot in that he couldn't just tell Ginger who the spies were, so she had to go on an adventure to retrieve his notebook and then figure out how to decode it, because he couldn't remember the cipher he used. But it also worked to raise tension, because it wasn't simply that he had amnesia, but that he also misremembered things. He talked about memorizing poems in school that didn't come out until years later. He confused the cipher he used on his notes about the spies with the cipher he used to talk to Ginger. So in all this, Ginger not only has to find the truth herself, but she has to sort what he says as true or false. This was on top of suspicions from early in the book that the war has changed Ben and that he might be the spy and might be misdirecting everyone even after death.
He becomes more and more driven by his base emotions, like protecting Ginger and taking revenge on his murderer. He went into rages and poltergeisted at people who hurt Ginger on accident because she startled them. Eventually there wasn't much left of him and what was left wasn't recognizable as Ben, or even as human. My favorite image of the book is that ghost Ben would be both standing at attention and crumpled in a ball, holding his own head.
This is all putting the emphasis on Ben a bit more than I would like, so let me clarify: my favorite part was that Ben deteriorated and Ginger handled it. She was professional as a trained medium who constantly experienced death. She was afraid of Ben's rages and of his personality being lost. She was broken up that he had died, yet glad he was still around, and ashamed that she wanted him to stay and worried that he would stay too long, and then pained again that he would leave eventually. There was so much love in her, and she was so strong in the face of supernatural yet relatable hardship.
I did get confused sometimes as to why Ginger wasn't talking to certain people, when they would probably have valuable information. Sometimes it seemed a bit because the plot needed her to not know things and to be in certain places. For instance, at one point Ginger and Ben's former assistant get separated on a train because the doctor in charge drags the injured assistant off to a car with people with similar injuries and sends Ginger to go nurse the not-so-wounded guys in the car for the not-so-wounded. When she gets off the train, she can't find the assistant. Instead of asking the doctor where the assistant went, she hides so she's not spotted. I almost get that. But not completely. It would have saved a lot of time if she'd kept up her nurse-supervising-one-wounded-guy disguise to have one conversation with the doctor who was supposed to have taken responsibility for her charge. Oh well.
***
Next week: On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA, by Corinne Duyvis.
Ginger is a medium working for the British Spirit Corps during WWI. Ostensibly, the Spirit Corps is a group of women who entertain the troops and keep their moral up. But actually, the British servicemen are conditioned to report to the Spirit Corps as ghosts after they die to describe the events of their deaths, like the locations of snipers and machine guns. The women of the Spirit Corps speak to the ghosts and take their reports before releasing their spirits. But now the Germans have figured out that the British are using ghosts and are trying to find details of the project's operation, and there's a spy in the British ranks giving the Germans information about the ghosts--a spy that killed Ginger's intelligence officer fiancé, Ben, when he got too close to discovering the leak. Now Ginger and Ben's ghost have to go to the front, find the leak, find Ben's murderer, and save the Spirit Corps.
My favorite thing about this book was how Ben's ghost deteriorated over time. His memory would slip, so he couldn't remember the specifics of what he had learned in his investigation. This worked well for the story's plot in that he couldn't just tell Ginger who the spies were, so she had to go on an adventure to retrieve his notebook and then figure out how to decode it, because he couldn't remember the cipher he used. But it also worked to raise tension, because it wasn't simply that he had amnesia, but that he also misremembered things. He talked about memorizing poems in school that didn't come out until years later. He confused the cipher he used on his notes about the spies with the cipher he used to talk to Ginger. So in all this, Ginger not only has to find the truth herself, but she has to sort what he says as true or false. This was on top of suspicions from early in the book that the war has changed Ben and that he might be the spy and might be misdirecting everyone even after death.
He becomes more and more driven by his base emotions, like protecting Ginger and taking revenge on his murderer. He went into rages and poltergeisted at people who hurt Ginger on accident because she startled them. Eventually there wasn't much left of him and what was left wasn't recognizable as Ben, or even as human. My favorite image of the book is that ghost Ben would be both standing at attention and crumpled in a ball, holding his own head.
This is all putting the emphasis on Ben a bit more than I would like, so let me clarify: my favorite part was that Ben deteriorated and Ginger handled it. She was professional as a trained medium who constantly experienced death. She was afraid of Ben's rages and of his personality being lost. She was broken up that he had died, yet glad he was still around, and ashamed that she wanted him to stay and worried that he would stay too long, and then pained again that he would leave eventually. There was so much love in her, and she was so strong in the face of supernatural yet relatable hardship.
I did get confused sometimes as to why Ginger wasn't talking to certain people, when they would probably have valuable information. Sometimes it seemed a bit because the plot needed her to not know things and to be in certain places. For instance, at one point Ginger and Ben's former assistant get separated on a train because the doctor in charge drags the injured assistant off to a car with people with similar injuries and sends Ginger to go nurse the not-so-wounded guys in the car for the not-so-wounded. When she gets off the train, she can't find the assistant. Instead of asking the doctor where the assistant went, she hides so she's not spotted. I almost get that. But not completely. It would have saved a lot of time if she'd kept up her nurse-supervising-one-wounded-guy disguise to have one conversation with the doctor who was supposed to have taken responsibility for her charge. Oh well.
***
Next week: On the Edge of Gone, apocalyptic YA, by Corinne Duyvis.
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