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OtherRealms Issue 19 Part 02
Electronic OtherRealms #19
Winter, 1987
Part 2
Behind the Scenes:
The Kindly Ones
[Baen Books]
Melissa Scott
Copyright 1987 by Melissa Scott
It's always difficult to pinpoint the precise beginning of a novel, not
because I don't remember, but because the actual inspiration is usually
so banal. In this case, The Kindly Ones has its origins in a series of
Japanese-inspired fantasies I read during my senior year in college.
Like many Westerners, I find the idea of bushido, the samurai code of
honor, dramatically appealing; I began thinking, vaguely, about a
science fiction novel with that kind of absolute code of honor at its
core. My first novel, The Game Beyond, did indeed involve a strict code
of behavior -- Convention -- but that code was little more than the
rules of the game, to be evaded or turned to the players' advantage,
rather than something that must be blindly obeyed. The idea of social
rules so strong that they could actually compel the suicide of a
guilty, or merely mistaken, person continued to nag at me. The word
"honor" retains much of its evocative power even today; the high price
exacted for mistakes under such a system has a certain dramatic appeal,
too -- and the tension between the good and the bad aspects of such a
system certainly had potential.
Once I sat down to work out a science fictional world whose sociology
was based on some variant of bushido, however, I ran into a major
problem. The Enlightenment, and all the other Western philosophical
and politics developments that exalt the rights and responsibilities of
the individual, have inescapably happened. I didn't think that, unless
I had a population drawn exclusively from eastern cultures, I could
create a society that would impose the death penalty as the only
punishment except in the most extreme circumstances -- aboard a lost
colony ship when supplies are limited and any mistake or unregulated
quarrel could mean the death of the entire population; or perhaps in
the first years of colonization in an unexpectedly hostile environment.
Once those extreme circumstances were removed, I felt that western
sensibility would demand some outlet for those who choose to disobey
the code. And that was where the idea of "social death" came into play.
A person could choose to disobey the code, and not actually lose their
life -- but society would treat them as dead. That person becomes a
ghost, invisible to "living" society. And the only person who can talk
to a ghost is a medium.
Out of that simple idea came an unsold short story titled "As Many
Ghosts As There Were Days" about an off-worlder employed as a medium,
who tried and failed to stop a disaster caused by the strict
interpretation of the social code. I already had a shadowy multi-system
government called the Conglomerate, in which planets continued to be
named after mythological figures, and wanted to set the story in that
universe. When I mentioned this to my roommate, she laughed, and said
that the obvious name for a planet obsessed with honor, justice, and
omnipresent ghosts was Orestes. She was right: and the planet's name
eventually shaped the society, the final title, and ultimately the plot
itself. After all, The Eumenides ends in resolution....
The name also took the whole situation away from its too obvious
Japanese origins. To continue this separation, because the story's plot
had a fatalistic attitude toward the ultimate likelihood of beating the
system, which felt like the old Norse attitude towards Ragnarok, and
because I liked the visual possibilities of a burned tower with its
shadow of soot spread out across a snowfield, Orestes became a cold
planet. This may seem to be a rather minor distinction, but climate
shapes clothing, customs, architecture, native and imported wildlife,
the plant life, everything.
At this point, I had an unsold short story, a simple world and society
that I liked fairly well, and a main character who annoyed me. I put
the story away, but the basic idea continued to nag at me. For me, the
problem with the short story had been that I had not had room enough to
explore a potentially intricate situation. The Orestes of "As Many
Ghosts As There Were Days" had not really been connected to the
conglomerate to which is supposedly belonged, which limited the
possibilities for the main character, an outsider, to comment on the
anomalous system -- but if it were connected, if the Oresteians had
even limited contact with worlds that believed in a less demanding
ethos, why and how would the code survive? My answer was that it
wouldn't, and the focus of the story shifted from an incident that
simply reaffirmed the code's power to the destruction of that code.
It also became quite clear that, whatever the story finally turned out
to be, it couldn't be told within the confines of a short story. The
feeling of increased space was wonderful, but it also meant that I had
to do some serious thinking about the code, about what had created it
and what was destroying it, in order to make the system believable. I
stuck to my original idea that only a major disaster could force a
partly-western society to accept such a Draconian code. Orestes, I
decided, had been settled by accident: a generation ship's guidance
computers malfunctioned, taking the colonists off course and forcing
them to impose strict controls both to make it through the lengthened
journey, and then to survive the first years on a planet far more hostile
than their original destination. That created the society I wanted;
now, I had to put it under sufficient stress to force a change. For
that, I turned to the easiest method: if you change the economic base,
you change the society, and Oresteian society could bend only so far
without breaking completely. Originally, therefore, Orestes' economy
had been based on mineral wealth. Now, those mines were nearly played
out, and the five clan-like Families who controlled the world were
struggling to find some other source of wealth. One Family, the richest,
was probably going to succeed; the others were probably going to fail.
This set the stage, so to speak, but the society remained fairly
simple. In particular, I was still bothered by the lack of any outlet
except social death for those people who couldn't live within the
system. In the first generations, of course, this wouldn't matter, but
as the settlements stabilized and the population expanded, it would
become a new cause of tension. My story had to be set late in Orestes'
history -- I needed the effect of hundreds, perhaps even a thousand
years of blind obedience to the code -- and therefore that problem had
to be solved. Thus a new social class was born: the para'an, the
outsider. At any point in a person's life one could choose to step
outside the system, to say, in effect, "I won't play any more," but for
a price. The para'an was no longer part of the Family into which they
were born, not could they claim any of the rights of Family membership,
from the basic right to support by one's kinfolk to the right to
participate in political decisions -- but the para'an was no longer
obliged to follow the code, or to serve the Family in any way
whatsoever. the para'anin as a class differed from the ghosts in that a
para'an had a legal and social existence of sorts; a ghost does not.
The nice thing about playing games with societies is that when you
change one parameter you change the rest of the system with it.
Para'anin turn out to be dramatically useful in two other ways. First,
they as a class provide a rootless, socially unconnected work force
that could become extremely important in the changing economy. Second,
they are a large group of people who have been disenfranchised for no
good reason, unlike ghosts, most of whom have done something that the
majority finds offensive. Therefore, they are a potent source of power
for anyone who wants to change the system. At this point, I felt I had
enough background to work up a plot outline, and submitted it to Jim
Baen at Baen Books.
Having spent quite a bit of time playing with abstract structures, I
turned back to the original inspiration for the novel, and began
reading again about Edo Japan. This time, instead of looking at the
nobility and the samurai, I looked at the merchant class, and found the
great crystallizing idea I had been looking for. In sixteenth and
seventeenth century Japan, the merchant class was the lowest of the
social orders, ranking even below the peasants. (A peasant produces
something; a merchant, as a middleman, does not.) The merchants were
also the richest people in Japan. This disparity between social
position and actual power (merchants were known to keep samurai and
even lesser nobles on pension) helped produce the magnificent
phenomenon of the Floating World.
The "floating world" of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century
Japan is an urban phenomenon, confined almost entirely to the cities of
Edo and Osaka -- but what a wonderful world it is. This is the culture
that produced the magnificent woodblock prints, in turn the inspiration
for the European impressionists three hundred years later, and the
first popular novels; this is the world of the teahouse and the
courtesan and the geisha. This is the world of kabuki. And the kabuki
theater, for all that it provides a momentary escape from the
restrictions of society (men play women, and, very occasionally, women
play men; men and women of samurai class compete with merchants and
beggars for the actors' favors; the plays may even have outright
villains as protagonists), ultimately affirms the rightness of that
society. Kabuki, like the European carnival, overthrows only to restore.
Orestes needed its own kind of kabuki. It needed some institution -- and
theater seemed the ideal form -- that could provide both escape from
and affirmation of the social code. I wanted Orestes' theater to be a
mirror for its society, and to contain all the possibilities implied in
the word "kabuki" itself. Originally, the components meant
"song-dance-woman," the final ki being written with a character that
meant "woman/prostitute"; later that ki was replaced by one that simply
meant "person." Thus, sexual license and/or irregularity were implied
in the word; other connotations included both "askew" or "off-center"
and all the meanings carried in English by the term "avant-garde."
However, kabuki itself, considered as a form of theater, wouldn't
provide the images I wanted. It is, like all theater, very much a
creation of its own time and place. I needed its equivalent, not the
thing itself. I had some old notes for a short story that hadn't gone
anywhere, in which I'd started sketching a theater that used
holographic puppets, and mixed those puppets with live actors. The idea
seemed promising -- I liked the idea of being able suddenly to transform
an actor/puppet into something else, or into a genuine ghost -- and I
decided to transfer the form and a couple of the characters into the novel.
The conjunction of theater and revolution reminded me of a fact I'd
come across in my first year of graduate school. During the French
Revolution -- at the height of the Terror, in fact -- the Parisian
theaters played to full houses -- but the plays being performed were
the crudest of melodrama. Was it just a search for order, as some
historians have suggested, for the promise that Good would indeed
triumph over Evil, in a time when that seemed far from certain, an
escape from the guillotine into a world of black and white? Yes,
possibly, but these fantastic melodramas also implicitly justified the
Terror by setting up a world in which powerful evildoers were punished,
not by law, but by an act of God, or, failing that, by the rough
justice of the streets. Once again, popular theater was in an extremely
ambivalent position, at once critical of and in complicity with the
society that created it. This reaffirmed my feeling that the Oresteian
theater had to become an important part of the story.
Looking at the French Revolution was also a salutary reminder that
playing with economics and social structure is a dangerous and usually
bloody business, especially when things have gone so far that
compromise is impossible. Once my main characters stepped outside the
code, there would be no going back -- and no way of avoiding a
bloodbath. I was willing to write that story, but at the same time I
found it vaguely unsatisfying. To end this particular story in bloody
revolution was too easy, melodrama rather than tragedy. While I could
make no claims to writing a tragedy in the true classical sense, I
could at least avoid crude melodrama. Besides, the Oresteia ends, as
I've said, in resolution, not revolution, and I wanted to keep playing
on the parallels.
It was at this point, while I was still mulling over all the issues
I've raised so far, that I went to Boskone. Boskone is one of those
conventions at which I always end up running around in a state of
wild-eyed near-hysteria, because I'm usually on panels, listening to
friends on the concom tell me about disasters, and trying to sell books
at the same time. This particular Boskone was no exception. Both my
agent and Baen Books' editors were in attendance, and I knew perfectly
well that they were negotiating -- and then Jim Baen appeared at the
door of the room I was sharing with several other people towards the
end of a rather subdued party. He proceeded to explain why he wasn't
sure about the outline for The Kindly Ones (he felt it was much too
low-tech as it stood), and suggested setting the story on three planets
instead of one. Aside from making it more high-tech, and thus more
obviously science fiction, putting it on three planets would let him
put a spaceship on the cover, which would boost sales significantly. He
made this suggestion in such a way as to make absolutely clear that his
solution to the problem was not the only one possible. At the same
time, he made equally clear the fact that he felt the story as it stood
was too low-tech for him. To my mind, this is one of the absolute
prerequisites for a good editor: the ability to define a problem,
suggest possible solutions -- and then step back and let the writer
grapple with what's been said.
In point of fact, I didn't like the idea of three planets: to make the
social system work, I needed more or less instantaneous communications
among the various Families. On the other hand, his points about the
world feeling too low-tech were well taken, and in fact I hadn't intended
Orestes to be particularly primitive. I suggested three moons orbiting
some kind of gas giant, and that seemed acceptable. Jim thanked us and
left, I hoped to continue talking to my agent in the morning.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of Orestes'
being a moon -- the parent planet was obviously Agamemnon, the sister
moons Electra and Iphigenia -- primarily because of the visual
(descriptive?) possibilities of an immense ghostly shape hanging in the
daytime sky. However, I wasn't entirely sure I could justify having a
habitable moon in the position I wanted -- or, more precisely, I wasn't
sure how I could justify it. Don Sakers and I happened to be on a
world-building panel the next morning with Hal Clement, and Don bullied
me into asking Mr. Clement if it was possible to get life on the kind
of moon I needed. Mr. Clement very patiently considered the matter,
and decided that it was, given certain parameters, and explained the
possibilities in as much detail as we had time for before the panel
started. (Mr. Clement, as anyone who's ever met him knows, is a true
gentleman, and quite amazingly patient).
The more I thought about the idea, the better I liked it; by the time I
met Jim and my agent for drinks that afternoon, I was more than willing
to make the changes Jim wanted, and a rough agreement was reached,
contracts to follow. Don, intrigued by the astronomy, offered to make
some of the calculations I needed, and in fact I started getting
letters from him almost as soon as Boskone ended. I told him what was
absolutely necessary for the story, he worked out how to achieve that,
and what else would happen under those conditions, and then I asked
more questions. In the first letter, he provided basic information --
mass, period, surface gravity -- and mentioned a few extra things about
the system that he thought would interest me. One of those was the fact
that there would be a "midday" eclipse on Orestes, which I promptly
seized on. The next letter deals with the timing and duration of the
eclipse in more detail, and discusses the question of volcanic activity
and earthquakes during close approach. The letter after that answers a
question about angular diameters -- and told me that, from Orestes,
Agamemnon was going to seem immense (an angular diameter of 18 degrees,
about thirty-six times bigger than our moon seen from earth). And so
on. Finally, Don wrote me a computer program that would display the
moon's relative positions at any given date. The program -- and the
tables I made from it - is the origin of the almanacs that are
mentioned more than once in the novel.
In essence, all of these calculations filled in my picture of the moon,
from the sheer size of full Agamemnon, to the duration of the long
"night" and of the eclipse. Then I started fitting the society I'd
invented into the new physical world Baen had forced me to provide. In
the long run, I think it worked even better than the original idea could
have. The seventy-one hour night was an ideal time for the theaters,
bars, brothels -- all parts of the "kabuki" world -- to function; equally,
those businesses would close during the long day. I borrowed an idea
from the authorities of the Edo, and decided that all theaters and
related businesses, and housing for most ghosts, in the city of Destiny
would be confined to a single walled district, known naturally as the
Necropolis. And all other Oresteian cities had to have a Necropolis,
too, since they would also have substantial populations of ghosts.
While filling in the details of Orestes, I was also working on the two
other moons. The larger of the pair, Electra, became in its entirety
the Holding of the least important Family, the Orillon; the smallest
moon, Iphigenia, was too small and too far from the other moons for
life to have evolved on its frozen surface, and was to be uninhabited.
Electra had to be poorer than Orestes, or the Orillon would not be its
only Holders. I knew it was significantly colder than Orestes, and
lacking in the mineral wealth of its larger cousin. It had been settled
thirty-nine years after Orestes, as part of a feud settlement, and it
was clear to me that the Orillon had lost the feud. I ended up drawing
the surface map for Electra while proctoring an exam, and came up with
a set of archipelagoes, linked by a permanently frozen inner sea. It
was just possible, given the stable land-mass and the climate, to feed
a moderate local population, but at the same time Electra's people
remained dependent on Orestes -- which was vital to the plot.
The major elements of the background were not pretty well in place.
The novel's main characters had been evolving with the setting: Trey
Maturin, the Mediator, remained the central figure, and the narrator of
most of the story, but the supporting cast had filled out properly. I
wanted another off-world perspective, to match and contrast with
Maturin's, and I needed someone to fly a spaceship at one point: Leith
Moraghan, ex- Peacekeeper, present mailship captain, was born. I needed
Oresteians, too, and wanted a dramatic foci for the two "disadvantaged"
classes: I got Rehur, ghost and holo-puppet actor; and Guil ex-Tam'ne
para'an of Tam'ne in Orillon, and a tug pilot for the Port Authority in
Destiny. Strangely, those two characters reversed the obvious social
positions. It was Rehur the ghost, with no legal existence, who by
virtue of his profession of puppet- actor, was truly a part of society,
while Guil the para'an was more fully disenfranchised by her in-between
status. The subsidiary characters fell into place as well, both the
members of the Halex Family, by whom Maturin was employed, the actors
and technicians of Witchwood and of the other theaters, the various
Brandr antagonists, and so on. It was time to start writing.
Looking back on this long essay, the thing that strikes me most is how
inadequate this sober, linear explanation is to explain the way odd
bits of information and experience weave themselves into a story. How,
for example, do I really explain the impact of going to the Museum of
Fine Arts one Sunday morning, and stumbling into the standing exhibits
of Japanese woodblock prints, many of which that quarter seemed to show
scenes of people and places in the snow -- Oresteian scenes, for all
that there is nothing Japanese in either the clothes or the
architecture of Orestes -- and of going from the prints to the textile
exhibit, which was displaying a Noh costume, a green choken with gold
cords? Neither had any direct impact on the story or setting, but
something of the image, the emotional resonance of these things, stayed
with me while I wrote. The same is true of trips I've made to the yarn
mills around Boston: all the exotic yarns that I couldn't afford, silk,
ribbons, mohair, alpaca, knitted themselves into the Oresteians'
clothing, and became the industry that might save the world's economy.
And what's to be said about the impact of my own family's rather
far-flung web of kinship -- I was told during my freshman year in
college to be sure to look up my maternal grat-uncle's second wife's
godson (my god- cousin, we decided), who was also at Harvard -- on my
conception of the Oresteian Families?
And, of course, none of this was happening in a vacuum. Each bit of
information interacts with everything else: changing one parameter
changes the entire structure, while inventing a new idea or a new term
automatically shapes all subsequent decisions. For example, the
decision not to specify Maturin's gender involved a reconsideration of
all the gender references in the book, and drove me ultimately to
wonder if it is possible to write non-sexist English. All "masculine"
nouns had to be neuter -- e.g., Maturin may have been an actor, but so
is the woman Jahala an actor -- which is, I suppose, the logical
English usage anyway, since the language persists in using the same
form for the masculine and generic human. But that, I suppose, is how
novels get written, or at least how I go about it. It's a peculiar mix
of sober intellectual consideration, emotion, and sheer visual
pyrotechnics, fueled by omnivorous reading and flagrant coincidence.
Welcome to Orestes.
OtherRealms #19
Winter, 1987
Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.
OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written
permission of Chuq Von Rospach.
The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety
as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain
intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or
republished in any way without the express permission of the author.
OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:
Chuq Von Rospach
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