Review of Day of Reckoning and Death Comes Again
December 2009
Why do we read?
For most people the answers are fairly simple . . . for pleasure, for entertainment, to learn something, to pass the time on the train. Chances are that most people who visit this site will be able to find one of their reasons in those answers. That's fine, that's expected.
So right now I'm not talking to any of those people. I'm talking to you. That's right, you. The writers, the scribes, the tale-spinners, the people who, whether they're represented on this site or not, constantly find themselves putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboards in the hopes that all those words and scribbles and scratches might one day form a story.
Why do any of us read? We have a universe of our own stories to play with in the fields of our imaginations, why bother reading anyone else's attempts? Well, probably for much the same reasons as the ones I cited above. Like anyone else we want to be entertained, provoked, transported. We want to meet the challenge put forward by another author, to not take another step into the next page of the story without having earned it. Or we want to be able to switch our brains off and coast along on someone else's storytelling prowess. In a sense we're not that different from anyone else, except that we have a penchant for spending many long hours in front of a writing device doing the most boring act imaginable. Thinking of stories is a fun exercise, writing them down is about as exciting as watching someone throw a ball against a wall for hours at a time.
But even with all that, we still don't read for the same reasons as everyone else. Because stories form a history, even when the stories themselves aren't related and by writing we're becoming part of that history, informing it and helping it progress. The shifts in tone, the evolution of storytelling, the way that the page interacts with the story, or the reader with the page. To pretend that it's something static is to miss the point. And to ignore that progression is to risk stagnation, or worse, never even truly forming.
Although I suppose there is a third option, to seal yourself off from all influences entirely and follow a path that only makes sense in your own head. But that path tends to lead straight to Henry Darger and, frankly, has its own problems.
We read to learn, and not just to see what the competition is doing. That misses the point, since nobody should be writing to compete with anyone else. We look, we assess, we discover what our own flaws are as writers and seek out people who do right the things that we do wrong, or improperly. We try to figure out exactly what they're doing right and incorporate it into our own styles, to take it and make it distinctly ours. We read to dissect, to find the new possibilities that are inherent in the page, the techniques and methods that no one else thought were possible, and somehow let ourselves be inspired by them. We read to be delighted, to see the spiraling triumph of someone attempting a highwire act that actually succeeds.
And, ultimately, we read to find out what has been done, to see what we can study and improve, to discover what the expectations are and thwart them. That may be the hardest reason of all to write, because there has been so much written that it becomes difficult to avoid repeating what someone else has done. In a way it's close to impossible, the joke about there being only five or six basic plots has its own basis in reality. Which isn't entirely bad, if romantic comedies have taught us one thing it's that people don't mind experiencing the same type of story over and over again, especially if it gives them a pleasant familiar feeling. But to me that's allowing the audience, and by extension you, to set the expectations low, as if plots by numbers is the best any of us can ever hope for.
This can lead down two dangerous paths, one where the writer just gives up entirely and is content to only deliver the tried and true, since that's what people expect. The well worn road that everyone else has gone down, without any surprises. Don't get me wrong, there is pleasure to be found in a well constructed story and even if you know the overall structure sometimes the fun is watching a master do his or her thing, even if they are just going through the motions. But it's not exactly bracing fiction. The alternative is to become too ornate, to pile layer upon layer of extraneous material in order to disguise a story that is ultimately pedestrian, giving the tale a sheen that it really doesn't need or deserve. Then it merely becomes the hallmark of someone trying too hard to be different. Fancy tricks are just fancy tricks if you have nothing to back it up.
The middle ground, to me, is to read everything. Not just for pleasure, not just to learn, but to absorb and process and get that sense of history, of what has been done before. Most of the writers here are working in science-fiction and fantasy, both genres with long and detailed histories, genres with well documented periods of boundaries being formed and pushed, things that could never be done and walls kicked down. Of retractions and regressions and digressions, side trips that never worked out and new avenues forged purely by accident.
Why is this important? It's not just to subvert audience expectations, even though you are often dealing with readers who are more attuned to the parameters of the genre, who know how the rules work and what hasn't been done. Speaking as someone who spent, and still spends, a good amount of time reading science-fiction, fantasy and comic books, I can attest that most fans can recite a good portion of their genre's history, of the gritty details that make up the tapestries of stories. Not because they have this anal desire to know everything in order to lord it over those who don't know (although those people do exist, mostly so we can make fun of them), but because it genuinely interests them, the fabric of it all. It's not something you can easily predict, as genres can be wide ranging and people tend to read what they like. Not every fan of Epic Fantasy and Tolkein are familiar with Lord Dunsany and Tim Powers and John Crowley. Not every person who sat through every season of Babylon 5 can tell you the details of Doc Smith's Lensman series or the ins and outs of every space opera story ever invented or even who the hell Jerry Cornelius is. In that way it's a bit of a crapshoot.
Which is why it's important for us to know how the intricacies interact because often we're not here just to entertain and explain but to demonstrate (whether we realize it or not) how much we do or don't understand. Science-fiction is not just aliens and spaceships, fantasy is not just sword-fighting and people saying "Thou" from high atop castle battlements. There's deeper undercurrents that exist to all of this, the places where it intersects not only what we like, but what we know, the space between the world we perceive and the world as we'd like it to be. Other authors have visited the streets that you are looking to go down and if you don't bother to check the tracks you may find that the depressions you are sifting through were made by the footprints of those who have moved on and past already. And if all you're doing is sketching impressions in the dirt, then it's going to last as long as it takes for a stiff wind to blow through. Or another pair of heavier steps.
To that end we're going to attempt to cross-analyze two stories today, which to the best of my knowledge I've never done before, so this will either be a complete mess or . . . or frankly it's just going to be a complete mess. But that hasn't really stopped me before and both stories actually wind up lending themselves to this kind of discussion, for different reasons. So we're going to try it. Those wishing to jump off now may safely do so.
This time out we've got a science-fiction and a fantasy story for the site, John Hilario's Day of Reckoning and Adam Janus' Death Comes Again. Both went to predictable places for me, but my reaction to each one was different and after realizing that I figured it was worth going into those differing reactions, to see if the difference was in the author's approach, or if it was simply me being me. That said, I'm not real interested in contrasting the two stories to each other, not only are they in different genres but this isn't a contest or a competition and it's not fair to either author to raise or lower one at the expense of another. Each story is a story and what it does (or fails to do) happens on its own merits.
Day of Reckoning takes us directly into science-fiction, setting the scene right from the start with the notion of Outside Contact, aliens from beyond the stars finally touching down and proving to us finally that we aren't alone. Also a day of trepidation, because the problem with aliens is that you don't really know them and thus don't really know what you're going to be up against. Years of science-fiction movies have taught us that when we most expects hands extended in friendship, we wind up getting stepped on by tripods instead. And when we're ready to launch missiles, that's when the little alien and his giant friend come by to tell us exactly what we're doing wrong. You come to expect these things by knowing what you don't expect and start acting accordingly. We know this because we exist outside the story, but what about the people inside? Surely they see the same movies and read the same stories that we do? How do they approach this? And why do they perceive it differently from how we do?
Meanwhile, we have Death Comes Again, which at first takes us to a warrior and a battle and a Thing That Must Be Stopped. A warrior reenacting a fight that we've seen dozens of times before, the redoubtable warrior fighting against impossible odds against the enemy who cannot be easily vanquished. The overwhelming sense of Good versus Evil with nothing less than everything at stake. Pretty much a standard fantasy setup, all the elements existing exactly where you would expect them to be, almost to the point where you'd think the warrior would, in the middle of the battle, think "Gee, I am supposed to win here, right? Everyone else in the stories does."
But while self-awareness in a story can be a sign of a writer acknowledging his own history (or at least someone trying to remind you how clever they are), to do that here would be to the detriment of what both writers are trying to do. Because the hearts of the genres lie in a certain internal ignorance, even if the writer him or herself has to be aware of what has gone before. Most science-fiction stories seem to exist in a world where nobody writes the kinds of stories that depict the situations that everyone lives through (one can argue the point Alan Moore made in Watchmen with pirate comics taking precedence over superheroes . . . if aliens and spaceships already exist, popular entertainment wouldn't be all that keen to write about it) and so everyone keeps coming into every new situation with wide and open eyes.
Fantasy, on the other hand, tends to relate back to itself, with folk songs and poems inside the story often giving color to a world that has an active history of relaying legends and myths, with the kicker being that nobody realizes the legends are real until black clad horsemen start showing up to lop peoples' heads off. Both of these methods involve a sort of collective audience leap to allow writers to engage in draping the story over the standard genre frameworks without people going, "Wait, wait, hasn't someone done this before?" Well, yes. A thousand times. But there's always room for variations. So it's that ignorance, two different sorts really, that lets the audience suspend its disbelief. And that's where we go in.
On some level the heart of science-fiction lies in interacting and understanding the unknown. People who think that it exists purely to try and predict the future are missing the point, at best it extrapolates and gets things right by accident but ideally you're really discussing what a society might be in like a hundred or a thousand years time. And what could be more unknown than the future? Meanwhile, while fantasy is mainly concerned with themes of good versus evil, the underlying impetus seems to be of constant escape, whether it's escape from a boring life or a terrible society or into another world, a driving need to simply get away, whether it's physically or conceptually.
Thus, we have basically two standard setups, ones we've seen many times over in other stories from other authors. In Day of Reckoning the basic premise is that aliens are landing on the world and everyone is ready to deal with them. In Death Comes Again, the warrior must best the ultimate aggressor if he hopes to walk off the battlefield alive and save everything that holds dear. Neither of these is anything we haven't seen before in its most basic form . . . and yet both writers are doing their best to subvert our expectations so that the stories are what they are and yet are something else entirely.
Day of Reckoning goes for playing it straight and keeping the situation terse. Our narrator tells us of the incident with clear eyes and ornate text ("verily"!) and his descriptions are amazingly detailed, giving us a society that is instantly recognizable as one that we know . . . or is it? The attitudes, the outlooks, the approaches, all of it winds up being taken from places that we're familiar with, a society peaceful and warlike and confident, so that when the inevitable attack does come, it has that sense of "Well, you were asking for it." A society that becomes so arrogant that it trusts for the wrong reasons and when the trust blows up in their faces, everyone can only stand around in the wreckage and wonder what went wrong.
Death Comes Again, on the other hand, doesn't even give us the comfort of a background scenario on which to hang our initial understanding of the story. We're thrown directly into a fight and a war and a battle without anything resembling preample. For all we know, and this may become important later, the battle may have always been going and may continue long after the story closes. Yet there's no real way for us to get in, right away we're simply plunged, as if immersing your head inside the flow of a river is going to somehow give you the perspective to understand how it starts and where it ends. But it won't, all it does is get you wet and maybe see a few of the immediate sights. So something else has to carry it, or we're merely reading about an extended fight scene.
That isn't quite the case with Day of Reckoning, which gives us all kinds of details and yet what winds up being important is the details that aren't said, the ones that are left out entirely. For a story like this to do what it has to do, it must walk a very delicate balancing act. Because as we've hopefully seen, nothing really exists in a vacuum and no matter what the story is playing out against echoes of what has gone before. We've seen so many instances of alien contact that immediately we start looking for the places where it isn't straightforward. Will be an example of mistaken intentions, such as the classic Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? Will it wind up being a cautionary tale like The Day the Earth Stood Still? Or will both worlds wind up transforming the other like Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye?
Granted, this is a short story and we shouldn't really expect transcendence from a few thousand words. Nobody is really asking the story to do that. But when the rockets start to come down we have to start examining, operating from the assumption that the author is working off the same collective history that we are, aware of it and doing his best to work within it or manipulate it. And from the start, that seems to be the case.
On the other hand, Death Comes Again appears to glorify in the expected, as the doomladen villain that menaces our hero sifts through the checklist of every evil act and statement that one can rustle up. Vows to follow the hero to the ends of the world? Check. A story palette that seems to be drawn entirely from variations on the color "black"? Check-a-roo. Shields being shattered leading to grim resolve? Hey! On the surface it's so steeped in the strains of things we've seen already that one might wonder if the author felt he independently discovered the genre on his own or that the story is geared toward people that have never seen a knight in their entire lives. One could assume that, but then that's not why we stop reading stories after a few paragraphs. Because if fantasy is about nothing else, it's the journey.
Science-fiction, by contrast, tends to be more about exploration, with the journey aspect of it only coming into play by authors who want to show off that they've read Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's about discovery and while the story wants us to be interested in discovering more about the aliens who are landing on this planet, it's a bit of a feint that doesn't completely work as the lens of the story keeps being directed toward a mirror, toward the faceless first person narrator telling us about all of this. Who is he? And where does he come from? The aliens themselves aren't as prone to making us curious, the nature of the story suggests that we'll know what we need to know in due time. But here, where the tale is set . . . we find ourselves in a society that is familiar on the surface because the narrator graces us with surface details. In times like this, the missing is what fascinates, calls attention to itself. Why does the narrator never name anyone else, name a city that we know, a single piece of technology that we can latch onto and know what place we're at? The answer is simple, and everything hinges on it.
But fantasy treads more on the collective memory and leaves us unable to ask questions, because the answers lie in different stories. Why is this warrior fighting Death? For the same reason that Beowulf went after Grendel and his mom. Because there is evil in the world and evil has to be fought for the world to go on. Because fantasy scrapes against the parts of our dreams that force us to shift in the night, the notion that every wrong thing we've ever seen, from the big to the small, can somehow be corrected through nothing less than a matter of sheer will. The street robbery you're not fast enough to witness, or thwart. The friend whose boyfriend leaves her a sobbing wreck through a combination of casual thoughtlessness and elegant dispassion. The protester shot in the head on television by a government more concerned with keeping the status quo than doing what's right. The shivering homeless person at the corner, at the mercy of decisions that were once made out of necessity and are now all coming back to call collect. It doesn't matter who this warrior is, because the quest and the goal are more important. So they say. So we're told, by stories without voices. But the merits are all held in other sources, then why keep on reading?
Day of Reckoning forces us to keep reading but only because we're insistent on figuring out the puzzle that the story isn't explicitly telling us, even as events begin their brief pile up and march to the end. The aliens are attacking, of course, without word or warning. The denizens of the world are scrambling to both retaliate and understand, because that's the only way they're going to make it out of the story alive. Mirroring us, in a sense, but it appears we're looking in different directions. The focus is on the aliens but meanwhile, what about the society? Why are so many details darted around when they should be specific? There's no dialogue, no landmarks, no signposts other than the curtains that keep obscuring what we're meant to not see. It starts to make one ask what the author is trying to hide. The story sets itself up in such a straightforward fashion that you have to start asking yourself what the twist might be, because clearly there has to be one. And because there's only so many twists one can do in this scenario, the answer comes easily enough . . . to us, the aliens aren't the ones landing.
Elsewhere, we don't even have the hope of discovery, just battle. Straining, sweaty, sooty battle. There's an excitement to it, the kinetic display of action that even takes time for the petty, as Death obliterates a fox simply because that's the kind of thing Death is supposed to do. We're not given any kind of insight into what might be happening or how long this is going to go on . . . we have no reason to think that this will do nothing but end in the resolution of the fight, maybe we'll get to see a princess. At best our expectations may be thwarted by having evil win, showing the futility of struggling against a world where everything wants to do you in. It'd be dark but it could go there. It would give us something else to latch onto beyond being awash in death-related imagery, as the story literally seethes with flies and crows and decay and filth, all jockeying to tell us that this is a Serious and Important Fight. But fighting can't be the point of fighting and if it's here to only tell us that struggle is sometimes necessary, then again, why stick around?
And by the same token, once you've figured out that the aliens are in fact going to be people, that we are seeing first contact from the other side of the fence, as it were, where can the story go from there? We're already trained to expect that the aliens are going to be humans, otherwise the story becomes almost completely pointless . . . if we're only going to have a tale of aliens descending and people defeating them through pluck and courage, well, that's been done before. You may have heard of one of those examples, perhaps as recent as Independence Day? Just for starters. So the switch-up of perspectives is interesting and in fact necessary but the story perhaps makes the mistake of going to great lengths to conceal that fact until nearly the end, as if the surprise were somehow the point. The surprise can't be the point, because we're already expecting the surprise. We can't be startled when others have taken bright lights and shone them into every conceivable corner.
This becomes the moment where the story needs to delve into a kind of deeper meaning, because the surface gyrations aren't exactly going to be enough to keep it moving. If a fight is only going to be a fight then it better be the Best Fight Ever to keep our attention, otherwise it has all the staying power of a UFC championship but with armor and more people saying "Nay!" to each other. To adopt the trappings of fantasy without giving any kind of nod to the deeper meanings involved means that the story is simply suffused with bluster and loud noises, withering away as soon as the shouting stops. Fantasy can be an escape, literally and metaphorically, and with that eye, we have to ask what the warrior has to be escaping from? He's running headlong into the fight to the point where disengagement is no longer an option. He's fighting the ultimate apparent enemy, someone who calls themselves Death. The clues are dropped in broad strokes and jousting words, mistaken for arrogant taunts, even. The obviousness of it, the lack of any kind of progression beyond the martial, begins to beg the question, what if this isn't the focus? What if the genre is only a projection?
We can ask the same questions of Day of Reckoning, because they are good questions to ask . . . but it only leads to more questions. The aliens, who are us, come down and attack the peace-loving actual aliens, apparently because that's what humans do. An interesting assessment and not the first time someone has made that assertion that we tend to shoot first and inquire about it later. The aliens, being peace-loving, somehow find the means to fight back, all the while confused why this militant race would bother traveling across all the stars to attack them. One gets the sense that the final twist is meant to be shocking, but given the body of work that precedes it historically, it's not really a twist. There can be no other option. Which is fine, but then where do you go from there? It's hard to read the story as a comment on humanity's war-like nature because the beginning of the story depends on us mistaking them for people, for us. Thus if we're supposed to see ourselves in the aliens to the point where we're supposed to be surprised that it isn't us . . . well I guess then the spaceship that shows up with guns blazing isn't going to be anything we recognize. And if that's the case, then what power does the ending have over me?
There's a twist in Death Comes Again, as well, and even with a somewhat clunky transition we arrive at it in a sort of elegantly organic way, to the point where we don't realize there is going to be a twist. The naming of the big bad villain "Death" telegraphs it slightly but the blunted battle-happy nature of the story leads us to start hoping that this means something else, that we're really going in a direction with this. That the struggle is more than two man roaring at each other over a blasted landscape. That instead of pure good versus evil, or man versus society or government or machine it's going to be shadow puppets acting out the physicality of a larger struggle. A war with a force that won't relent and won't give up and can be beat back for a little while, and that's the best victory you can hope for. A spark arcing into the sky while everyone watches to see just how far it can get before it falls. The fall is inevitable but it's the streak it makes that catches the attention. The mark we all hope to draw. The confines we're constantly fighting against, and need to get away from. The exit. The escape.
Science-fiction isn't necessarily about escape, though, but confrontation of the unknown. Rushing headlong into understanding or the realization that you just aren't going to understand. To have the aliens act just like a nicer version of us undermines a point of the story, which is that aliens can't be understood. Our actions make no sense to these aliens, and yet their actions make sense to us. To have the "aliens" turn out to be exactly what we expected serves as a leaping off point, not the ultimate culmination of the story. As it stands, we read it and go "Oh, right, that's what I thought all along" because we've been sort of trained to expect what the story is telling us to least expect. See what I mean about reading? Perhaps it might have been better to write the aliens are truly alien, with their own modes of thinking and interpretations and then having them confront a new menace whose actions make little sense to them and only in retrospect can be interpreted as those of human beings. Dispense with the twist and refigure our actions as bizarre so that we can see how otherworldly we might appear to those who don't have a frame of reference for us. Or rid oneself of the concept of aliens entirely and take a page from Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, with members of the human species millions of years apart on the evolutionary scale running into each other, demonstrating that we're not going to stay the same and that in the long run, time makes aliens of us all.
Don't get me wrong, as surprised as I was by the shift in Death Comes Again, I was on some level expecting it, but more in the hopeful "Please don't let this just be a fight scene" sort of way. I don't know how much fantasy the author has read and it's useless to speculate, but there's a sense of delivering on expectations that we didn't realize we had. I wanted the story to be about something more than Man Versus Bad Guy, and by throwing in the scene at the end it throws the entire story in a different light, without necessarily invalidating anything that's gone before. The story still remains fantasy, all the conventions are still in place, but cast more metaphorically, the desire to escape from battle, from evil, becoming someone who is trying to escape from the very thing he'll never escape from, with the notion that any victory is only temporary, and very much worth it. The brutal literality of the battle gets configured as a fiendish fever dream, and it's up to us to decide whether the mind really does exist in two places at once (q.v. Pan's Labyrinth) or if it's simply the brain attempting to cope with a finality that it's not quite prepared to accept. It could even be the warrior himself dreaming, wishing that instead of dying with a blade through his chest, he got to die in bed. Sometimes the open spaces left behind are more intriguing than what gets filled in.
As we've wound through this it's probably clear which story appeals more to my own sensibilities as both a writer and a reader. Which is what it is, I've tried to make my biases clear in the course of doing these things so that there really aren't any surprises. But the one point that I hope stands out in the midst of all this rambling is that writing is not the most important thing a writer can do, it's reading. It's knowing the angles from which other writers have approached the same topic you're writing about so that you're not flinging a story out into an audience that has grown inured to the types of situations that you make believe are completely original. It's about deciding what you want to do, seeing what's been done and seeing how that can be taken a step further, refined, spun off into a different direction. It's about pushing yourself, so that when the final words are typed the person most surprised by the tale is you, sitting back and going "I didn't think I was capable of this." We all want to be influenced, because those are what inspire us, but we also want to aspire to be more than the sum of those influences, no matter what story or genre we're writing in. The best writers retain that awareness, because if you're just going to write stories we've seen before without giving us anything else to grasp onto then you're making a far less compelling argument for writing than any I've ever seen.
The point is, you can't grow without knowing what you're growing into, or growing around. The context of the growth, if that makes any sense. In my little perfect world, everyone who wants to be a writer carries around a working knowledge of genre classics, of side trips and dead-ends, and is constantly sifting through those tidbits and chunks in an attempt to ensure their own writing is pushing both away and against a body of works that looms larger every day. My brain kind of works that way and admittedly, most people probably don't want to achieve that level of crazy. Most people probably just want to write a story, get down a clever idea that they had, get it down and move on. I guess in a way I'm not really speaking to those people. I may not even be speaking to the authors whose stories I went through here, or they may have no overwhelming desire to listen. That's only fair. If I can get nothing else across then, let's go with this: presumable some day some one will read the things that you write, much like you've read the authors that have taken you to this point. And when those people do read, ask yourself what you want them to see? A tale sparkling with the potential not just of its genre, but of fiction and language itself? Or another tired thread that simply loops backs on itself, closed and with no way out?
In a world where we have control over little else, we have control over this. Know what answer you want, and take it.
- MB
11.29.09
"Like good men I am disabled from understanding what we are taught to condemn . . ." - Lambchop, "National Talk Like a Pirate Day"
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