Learning the World
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The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher BuehlmanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A strongly built world in which a cast of well developed characters have numerous and often distinctly interesting adventures. It's a typical fantasy novel developed in untypical ways as the author makes it clear that yes, fantasy is fantasy is fantasy but _this_ fantasy is going to be something different.
An entertaining read that kept me guessing to the last page about whether or not I was going to enjoy it. Turns out, I did.
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SoB, SoG:
I’m not going to tell you much about the characters or the plot of The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buelhman because that’s not how we’re going to decide if you should read it or not.
Instead, we’re going to talk about swimming a bit. And then a bit about how writers can bring readers along into their big, shiny new world. And, of course, this will apply to tabletop gaming as much as it applies to reading and writing.
See, there’s a school of thought that says you do not throw your readers in at the deep end without providing some sort of lifeline to reality for them to grab. That’s how you drown them and make them put your book down.
Case in point, a college creative writing class I took way back when I used to drive cab. Which is better than 15 years ago now. Opening day, the instructor went around the room asking each of the 30 or 40 students what kind of fiction they wrote. Among the hordes of would-be Anne Rice post-teen goth girls and people working through their grandmother’s Alzheimer’s disease was a fellow who proclaimed he was working on a 20-part Science Fiction series set on a far-off world.
Which, y’know, fine. Fair enough. Some people do, right from the get-go. Some people give you the sense right off that it is certainly within their capabilities to do that kind of thing and make a success of it even though they are sitting in a creative writing 101 course at the local community college.
This guy did not, but there you are. Dreams for everyone. The instructor nodded, mouthed a few words of encouragement, and moved on to the next vampire darling. For the first week or so everyone worked on their writing on their own and listened to the occasional lecture about good writing practice and so forth. The basics of character, plot, and dialog. That sort of thing. By week two, people were getting called up to read some of their writing and get feed back from the rest of the class, with a few closing hints from the instructor. Always nice, always polite feedback. Oreo cookies, basically. You know the kind.
Except Sci-fi Guy. Sci-fi Guy always wanted to read but was never called on. His hand always shot into the air and waggled around up there like a half-shot bird any time the class was asked for volunteers to read their work. And every time it was ignored.
See, what we eventually worked out was that day one, Sci-fi Guy had talked the instructor into taking home his manuscript and reading it. And she had. And she’d returned it the next day with some marginal notes written in for him to take into account and maybe adjust his writing with. Which he steadfastly refused to do. He had his vision, and it was clear to him, if to no one else. He never officially read to the class and never officially got any feedback.
But one day the instructor was out sick, and no one could cover, and she hadn’t got word out to the class that it was cancelled for the day. So, a bunch of us turned up. Easily two-thirds of us. And it seemed such a shame to waste all the travel time and attendance. So, we held a reading class for ourselves. And hardly had the words “Would anyone like to read and get some feedback” been spoken before the dead bird appeared and made itself known. Well, what do you do? Sci-fi Guy went to the head of the class and stood up and began reading.
I like Science Fiction. It’s a genre I enjoy quite a bit with its ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ and ‘what ifs’. I like the way it can take an idea and chase it down a path you maybe hadn’t thought of and then show you what the consequences might be. I enjoy the way it can take any theme and expand it in surprising ways and in so doing show you yourself and everyone around you. There is, to my mind, no better genre to simultaneously show what can be, and at the same time warn you against treating it lightly. I’ve read most of the Sci-Fi classics written by most of the classic authors and I’ve acquired a taste for it at it’s best and a delicious pleasure for its worst. Which is all to say, I’m used to the genre and its trappings, and I like it enough to know when it’s at its best and worst, and when it is suffering somewhere in between.
Sci-fi Guy had somehow got the impression that Sci-Fi was all about made up things happening in made up places to made up creatures, except without magic so you could tell it apart from fantasy. A typical sentence went something like this (and there’s not a hint of exaggeration here):
Major Blupldup hopped aboard his galenfrey transporter and blasted the xellbomarths to full. At quatsits an erb, Blupldup expected the galenfry to reach Pepple by simbo. Just beating the narftings.
If that means anything at all to you, by all means write in and explain it, but to I and the rest of the class, five minutes of this sort of thing, sentence after incomprehensible sentence, was more than enough. Which is, apparently, what the instructor had told him. And what he had steadfastly ignored in deference to his vision.
See, the problem with all that was there was nowhere for the reader to grab on and try to derive meaning. No way for them to try to make sense of what they were hearing. And even if someone could work out that, say, a galfrey was some sort of ship or something, by the time you had that in your mind’s eye, five other incomprehensibles had slipped on by and you were hopelessly behind, constantly scrambling to work out what was happening, to whom it was happening, and why it was happening at all in the first place.
There was no description to help you. No point at which you could ground to something in reality as a reference point from which you could begin to understand the next bit. There was no following any of it at all. And once we’d all had as much as we could stand, I told him so.
I explained carefully that we were drowning in terminology, that we had nothing we could grab on to to help us through. That, while it all might be extremely clear in his head what was going on and who was doing what and why, we, the listener-slash-reader, had no firm ground to stand on. The way to help us, I said, was for him to stop and slow down. Go back and add in things we could be familiar with. Show us the shape of a galfrey. Did it have wings? Giant motors? A cockpit? A color even? Anything at all to help us fix a thing in our mind and begin to understand it. The venerable “show, don’t tell”. Which, for something as left-fielded as this Sci-fi offering, was sorely needed so that the reader is brought along into the world which Sci-fi Guy had created and was so very proud.
Something like what Christopher Buelhman was able to do in The Blacktongue Thief. Mind you, I wasn’t sure he was going to pull it off at first. There was an awful lot of opaque wording floating around and confusing bits of information for which there was little context at first. But, over the length of the novel, it began to all hang together in a way that started making sense. And in a manner that showed Buelhman had spent time sticking this world together in meaningful ways. All this alternate language wasn’t just stage dressing for a tidy little play. It was all meant to illuminate and move an entire carefully considered world which was going about its own business even as the main characters were going about theirs.
Would it have been better if Major Blupldup hopped aboard his one-man galenfrey run-about and jammed the throttle to full, causing the big xellbomarth engines to roar to life? Did his quatsits need to be per erb, or would it have been fine to do kilometers an hour? Would it have helped to know Pepple was a place some distance away that needed to be reached by local noon? Should we have been told why it would have been bad for the narfting creatures to get there first? Most assuredly, yes to all.
Would it have made the story better? Who knows? But at least we’d have had a chance at understanding it to find out. At least, like Buelhman, Sci-fi Guy could have made an effort to bring us along, instead of leaving us behind as his characters zoomed off to whatever fate awaited them. At least then, we might, like Blacktongue, have been willing to make it to the end to find out.
