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lenora_rose) wrote2010-10-25 08:30 pm
lenora_rose) wrote2010-10-25 08:30 pm
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More on Apocalyptica
Rule # 1 of internet passwords: No matter how weird or complicated my password is, how many random capital or numbers or other things are in them, it is almost invariably my username (Lenorarose or Lenora_rose) that I typo.
Another interview today. went so so. I know that I missed a rather important detail in one of the events she asked me about, and fumbled a bit with words. better than the last one, though.
Until this week, I've been working on a project that kind of bemuses me. See, I've said that I don't generally like stories set in some kind of post-apocalyptic world. I dislike some of the tropes. (The people who degenerate into violent crazies out for themselves is a major one. The usually unrealistic speed at which knowledge is lost; such that people who were around before the apocalypse sometimes seem to have forgotten what they knew. That incredibly common books, never mind movies or recorded music, become rare and prized -- pace coffeeem.)
But that project is set in a fantasy world after an apocalypse. Since it also includes three people visiting from 21st century Canada, I jokingly described it as Narnia meets Mad Max (a description the funnier for being pretty much totally wrong when it comes to the spirit of both those series'.)
Thing is, that description did point me to one thing.
I think I'm writing this because I didn't like at all what Lewis did with A Last Battle. (Well, besides Neil Gaiman's very correct point that as a novel, it's strangely and not very well structured). I can only sum it up as, "That's not how you break a world."
See, one trope about the post-apocalyptic things that I do appreciate is this; there's always something left. And from that, the seed for some form of new world.
Lewis wiped out Narnia. Completely.
And there are so many different things in this that are wrong besides just the fact that it ended.
First, and foremost, the entirety of Narnia seems to have existed so as to teach a sum total of eight earth children enough to get seven of them to heaven. (Susan has been discusssed enough elsewhere.) Once those seven children are all dead, the world simply goes away.
Yes, we see the people of that world brought into heaven (Or swallowed by Aslan's shadow), too. How nice. But the world ended when the last of those children ran through the door into heaven.
This, I couldn't even.
Until I realised that most of the stories about people from our world going to other worlds have the person who goes turn out to be special in some way. Not to the extend that the world begins and ends with them, but it's there.
Tuathea is in my head. All of it. It's fiction. it can't be as important as the real world. But so are the three Earth people who travel to it (especially as their world is the one I call Damina-Earth, which is ours with a few small variations). And they AREN'T any more special than the people they meet there. That world didn't exist up to that point to teach them anything. And when they're all dead, it will keep going. I admit, my trio were technically hand-picked as useful to the survivors. But useful is not the same as irreplaceably special. because I didn't want it to be that story.
(One of my other stories is about a world that will cease to exist when the inventor leaves. It's kind of nasty, especially to other people sucked into it.)
The next big issue I had is the lack of grief in the Last Battle. The end of the world is a bright new morning for the characters.
Because there's an afterlife, which is like all the good things in Narnia without the bad. And everyone was happy with this. The Pevensies, killed horribly in a train crash. The Narnians who stood by and watched the stars come down and the last light fade.
Which, okay, worked for the perspective from which he was telling it; the people who'd already passed through the door. Who weren't inside Narnia. But.
Imagine you were one of the beings watching it from within Narnia. On the side where the stars are falling. Think what you'd be thinking, even if you were one of the righteous who'd reappear on the other side of the door, whole and hale and with a whole bright and happy world ahead. Think about watching your world come apart, collapse into ruin, all for the actions of one selfish ape.
Even if you trust God to take you to paradise, when your own world ends, you mourn. You feel sorrow for what was left behind. For the people who fall around you.
Nobody in the Last Battle grieves. Oh, they grieve the horses shot down when they're still in Narnia, or the dryads cut off at the roots. But as soon as they cross over, the grief just stops. It's no longer bad news at all that they lost a battle for the very soul of their country, or that there's been a train accident on Earth (In fact, little or no mention is made of the people they left behind until the very end, when they're waving across a gulf between Earth (or rather Earth's heaven) and Narnia's heaven, and so are clearly also dead). the world they knew ends, and they don't feel any sorrow for it. Just a kind of wonder. The stars falling, and the things coming through the door in the end are described without much sorrow.
Nobody cries out and clings, or begs the world to survive. Nobody fights tooth and nail against entropy. There's no time, and no chance.
The description of the world ending is fast - a chapter - going from a fading bonfire to flat water (nothing as alive as an ocean) in a short span. But because of all the things that happen, I always, even as a kid, figured that was compressed time; that they stood there watching the days and years spin by like a time-lapse camera. That it wouldn't be that fast on the other side.
On one hand, once I was old enough to grasp just what was missing there, I wanted that story, too, in addition to the one on the other side of the door. Of the complete fall of the whole of the world. what it looked like from inside. of the grief.
I also wanted, as a child especially, but also even now, for it not to end. Just because things don't really end. Lives end. Civilizations end. Species end. LIFE dos not. Not until the heat death of the universe.
There have been any number of cataclysms and near apocalypses in human history. And yet we keep on. And we fight entropy. Even those who believe in heaven, who feel heaven is real and that suffering here is a shadow, are, as often as not, also working for a better world here (though since details as to what makes a better world have differed wildly, and occasionally included committing atrocities to get there, they've failed at least as often as succeeded). For the hungry fed, the poor clothed and sheltered, the family happy, the life satisfied.
We keep on keeping on. Good and bad.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote an essay once on disliking apocalyptic fiction because she always felt that she wouldn't be one of the heroes, the rough rugged survivors, or even the barely clinging on. She'd be one of the ones in the mass graves, ashes in the crater where once there was a city. There's some truth to that, too; if we had an apocalypse, I am not a likely long-term survivor.
But I'd want to try. I'd want to gather those I cared for around, and try to grow food, and try to work together, and protect each other. To keep the flame of knowledge and some semblance of the rights and responsibilities of a society.
Now, I know this story is going to follow the trope of apocalypse stories to the end I prefer, the point at which things are restored to at least some degree. Because one thing I feel that I am trying to do with my fiction is offer light not always available in the real world.
But also because I resist everything that the Last Battle taught me about the end of the world. The world isn't here for me. The world is worth mourning even if followed by heaven. The world is worth fighting for, not passively watching from elsewhere as it dies.
(Also this is far from the only thing the story is about. One of the questions the story seems to be exploring is how, if ever, a person - or being - who commits an appalling act can be counted redeemed. Including and especially by his victims. Also lots of nifty odd plot thingies - a lot of what I've been writing so far has a certain amount of "coping with language and translation". OH, and yes, I seem to have wandered onto another project for this week, ebcause I couldn't get one scene out of my head without writing it. but I think I'll be back to the apocalyptic thing.)
Another interview today. went so so. I know that I missed a rather important detail in one of the events she asked me about, and fumbled a bit with words. better than the last one, though.
Until this week, I've been working on a project that kind of bemuses me. See, I've said that I don't generally like stories set in some kind of post-apocalyptic world. I dislike some of the tropes. (The people who degenerate into violent crazies out for themselves is a major one. The usually unrealistic speed at which knowledge is lost; such that people who were around before the apocalypse sometimes seem to have forgotten what they knew. That incredibly common books, never mind movies or recorded music, become rare and prized -- pace coffeeem.)
But that project is set in a fantasy world after an apocalypse. Since it also includes three people visiting from 21st century Canada, I jokingly described it as Narnia meets Mad Max (a description the funnier for being pretty much totally wrong when it comes to the spirit of both those series'.)
Thing is, that description did point me to one thing.
I think I'm writing this because I didn't like at all what Lewis did with A Last Battle. (Well, besides Neil Gaiman's very correct point that as a novel, it's strangely and not very well structured). I can only sum it up as, "That's not how you break a world."
See, one trope about the post-apocalyptic things that I do appreciate is this; there's always something left. And from that, the seed for some form of new world.
Lewis wiped out Narnia. Completely.
And there are so many different things in this that are wrong besides just the fact that it ended.
First, and foremost, the entirety of Narnia seems to have existed so as to teach a sum total of eight earth children enough to get seven of them to heaven. (Susan has been discusssed enough elsewhere.) Once those seven children are all dead, the world simply goes away.
Yes, we see the people of that world brought into heaven (Or swallowed by Aslan's shadow), too. How nice. But the world ended when the last of those children ran through the door into heaven.
This, I couldn't even.
Until I realised that most of the stories about people from our world going to other worlds have the person who goes turn out to be special in some way. Not to the extend that the world begins and ends with them, but it's there.
Tuathea is in my head. All of it. It's fiction. it can't be as important as the real world. But so are the three Earth people who travel to it (especially as their world is the one I call Damina-Earth, which is ours with a few small variations). And they AREN'T any more special than the people they meet there. That world didn't exist up to that point to teach them anything. And when they're all dead, it will keep going. I admit, my trio were technically hand-picked as useful to the survivors. But useful is not the same as irreplaceably special. because I didn't want it to be that story.
(One of my other stories is about a world that will cease to exist when the inventor leaves. It's kind of nasty, especially to other people sucked into it.)
The next big issue I had is the lack of grief in the Last Battle. The end of the world is a bright new morning for the characters.
Because there's an afterlife, which is like all the good things in Narnia without the bad. And everyone was happy with this. The Pevensies, killed horribly in a train crash. The Narnians who stood by and watched the stars come down and the last light fade.
Which, okay, worked for the perspective from which he was telling it; the people who'd already passed through the door. Who weren't inside Narnia. But.
Imagine you were one of the beings watching it from within Narnia. On the side where the stars are falling. Think what you'd be thinking, even if you were one of the righteous who'd reappear on the other side of the door, whole and hale and with a whole bright and happy world ahead. Think about watching your world come apart, collapse into ruin, all for the actions of one selfish ape.
Even if you trust God to take you to paradise, when your own world ends, you mourn. You feel sorrow for what was left behind. For the people who fall around you.
Nobody in the Last Battle grieves. Oh, they grieve the horses shot down when they're still in Narnia, or the dryads cut off at the roots. But as soon as they cross over, the grief just stops. It's no longer bad news at all that they lost a battle for the very soul of their country, or that there's been a train accident on Earth (In fact, little or no mention is made of the people they left behind until the very end, when they're waving across a gulf between Earth (or rather Earth's heaven) and Narnia's heaven, and so are clearly also dead). the world they knew ends, and they don't feel any sorrow for it. Just a kind of wonder. The stars falling, and the things coming through the door in the end are described without much sorrow.
Nobody cries out and clings, or begs the world to survive. Nobody fights tooth and nail against entropy. There's no time, and no chance.
The description of the world ending is fast - a chapter - going from a fading bonfire to flat water (nothing as alive as an ocean) in a short span. But because of all the things that happen, I always, even as a kid, figured that was compressed time; that they stood there watching the days and years spin by like a time-lapse camera. That it wouldn't be that fast on the other side.
On one hand, once I was old enough to grasp just what was missing there, I wanted that story, too, in addition to the one on the other side of the door. Of the complete fall of the whole of the world. what it looked like from inside. of the grief.
I also wanted, as a child especially, but also even now, for it not to end. Just because things don't really end. Lives end. Civilizations end. Species end. LIFE dos not. Not until the heat death of the universe.
There have been any number of cataclysms and near apocalypses in human history. And yet we keep on. And we fight entropy. Even those who believe in heaven, who feel heaven is real and that suffering here is a shadow, are, as often as not, also working for a better world here (though since details as to what makes a better world have differed wildly, and occasionally included committing atrocities to get there, they've failed at least as often as succeeded). For the hungry fed, the poor clothed and sheltered, the family happy, the life satisfied.
We keep on keeping on. Good and bad.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote an essay once on disliking apocalyptic fiction because she always felt that she wouldn't be one of the heroes, the rough rugged survivors, or even the barely clinging on. She'd be one of the ones in the mass graves, ashes in the crater where once there was a city. There's some truth to that, too; if we had an apocalypse, I am not a likely long-term survivor.
But I'd want to try. I'd want to gather those I cared for around, and try to grow food, and try to work together, and protect each other. To keep the flame of knowledge and some semblance of the rights and responsibilities of a society.
Now, I know this story is going to follow the trope of apocalypse stories to the end I prefer, the point at which things are restored to at least some degree. Because one thing I feel that I am trying to do with my fiction is offer light not always available in the real world.
But also because I resist everything that the Last Battle taught me about the end of the world. The world isn't here for me. The world is worth mourning even if followed by heaven. The world is worth fighting for, not passively watching from elsewhere as it dies.
(Also this is far from the only thing the story is about. One of the questions the story seems to be exploring is how, if ever, a person - or being - who commits an appalling act can be counted redeemed. Including and especially by his victims. Also lots of nifty odd plot thingies - a lot of what I've been writing so far has a certain amount of "coping with language and translation". OH, and yes, I seem to have wandered onto another project for this week, ebcause I couldn't get one scene out of my head without writing it. but I think I'll be back to the apocalyptic thing.)