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. 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