Rowling, Arthur C. Clarke and the demise of science fiction

The literary high point this week, at least in terms of mention on the web, etc., has to be the publication of the covers of final Harry Potter book. Unless, dear reader, you are a writer yourself, you cannot appreciate how utterly depressing it is that a mere cover (which by general agreement has told us nothing) has attracted so much attention. (BTW an interesting experiment is to ask any ordinary writer about J K Rowling. You will see the lips move into a facsimile of a smile but there will be a strange coldness, if not malice, in the eyes.)

This thought brings me to magic and science. You will no doubt remember Arthur C. Clarke’s celebrated statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is, of course, one of the many barbs at religion that Clarke makes: a fact that is not however my concern here. A key part of the definition, which is not adequately expanded, is what constitutes ‘sufficiently advanced’. Perhaps a better expression would be any “insufficiently understood technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This highlights the fact that it is a relative effect: there are probably still some remote cultures where a working cuckoo clock would be seen as magic. In order to aid our understanding here I would suggest the creation of a new unit, the Clarke Value. Clarke values measure how little we understand any given piece of technology. The details need to be worked out, but I suggest that one Clarke is the gap where someone says “I'm not sure of the details, but I'm pretty sure I know how it works” and I suggest that 10 Clarkes expresses that point where someone says it “has to be supernatural”.

Now the interesting fact is that Clarke Values of technology are actually increasing. There are two factors: the first is that the technology itself is getting more and more inscrutable. So, for instance, you can go into your local mobile phone shop and find a tiny little pocketable object that will allow you to phone, used a GPS and listen to FM radio as well as play games. That that side of things is inevitable, unsurprising and probably to be approved. But, less happily, rising Clarke Values are also due to the fact that the understanding of science is declining. All the evidence suggests that kids, at least in Britain, find science tedious, and that most damnable of things, “hard work”. Science numbers, in schools are, in most places, declining. They are slightly boosted (hurrah!) because immigrant communities tend to encourage their sons and daughters to become engineers and doctors, both of which for the moment (thankfully) require science.

The impact of these effects is simple: high Clarke Values now abound. Who, for instance, among us can adequately explain how GPS works? Who can reliably inform us how broadband video works? Who can explain how I merely have to type in the words ‘Science’, ‘Magic’ and ‘Clarke’ into Google and, in barely a second, have the quote I need?

Now there is any writing corollary of this. It is that in a world of inadequately understood technology it is easier to write about magic than science. You may as well invoke magic, because most of your readers can't tell the difference between that and science. And magic, as I have said, elsewhere, is much easier. So frankly, the attempts of Britain's fantasy flagship ‘Doctor Who’ to make things scientific are now paper-thin. It might as well be a series about a magician and his apprentice.

It is a source of some irony - but very little satisfaction - that Clarke's rule has worked very at prophesying the demise of the very science fiction that he loves so well. As I said at Wheaton chapel two years ago (there’s name dropping), as a Christian I find no grounds for burning Harry Potter books but as a scientist, well, it’s awfully tempting.

Images, books and a matter of theology

I had a very gratifying e-mail this week from someone who runs an animation studio saying how he and his wife like the Lamb among the Stars books. The company's web site is www.lostpencil.com and it's well worth a browse of some of the animation samples. Rather jokingly, I replied that I would love to see them do animations of the Krallen and Allenix creatures that occur in the series and would be delighted to post them on my web page with due credit. And the answer I got back was the very kind one that if they had time they would try and create them. Many thanks! Now I hope they do manage to produce them because they have the talent to make some impressive renderings. But on reflection, I have realised that this has raised a number of issues, at least one of which has a very important theological consequence.

My main concern is this: whether in their heart of hearts, readers want writers to flesh out their creations with images, even author-approved ones. I wonder. Don't we actually prefer to be given that degree of freedom that allows our minds to create pictures? In other words, wouldn’t we rather to be given hints and intimation, rather than specifics which must inevitably limit our imagination? Isn't this why a good book is ultimately more enriching than even the best film? As a teenager my imagination was enormously nourished by Lord of the Rings and I was quite happy to draw pictures of how I felt Minas Tirith and Mordor looked. My imagination was much less nourished and prompted by the Star Wars films. The imagining was done for me. In films the universe is closed and limited. And although I count Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films as tolerable (they were certainly not the disaster that we feared) I still think the pictures in my mind are infinitely superior and closer to what Tolkien imagined.

In fact it's quite hard to think of books that have had author-approved drawings in other than children's books (for example, Pauline Baines drawings for C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books). The Dickens sketches by Phiz and Cruikshank and Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland are some of the few I can think of. In general, hinting seems to be more popular than describing. (As an aside, isn't this the attraction of maps in such books? Instead of telling us what a place looks like, they encourage us to conjure up an infinite number of landscapes and scenes). Is it perhaps better to sow seeds in our imagination than give us cut flowers? So, if I did get my Lostpencil images, I would make sure they were not seen as definitive but as ‘valid interpretations’.

Now, I promised that I would segue this into theology. It is this: in the Old Testament God clearly prohibits images of himself. That is in the ruling at the start of the Ten Commandments. Isn't this related? Making an image of a character is impoverishing because, in essence, it is limiting: it says ‘this is how he or she is’. And when our character is, as God is, unbounded in his nature, character and glory, it is vital there can be no such limits.

On bits and pieces.

No major blog this week, I'm afraid; just various bits and pieces.

Perhaps one of the most significant things this week was that I had an interesting e-mail which I would like to think represents a very positive straw in the wind. A gentleman wrote saying ‘I haven't read your books but I've read the reviews and heard they are quite good. When I have some money, I will be buying them. But I want to say that from what I've read about the books, I have real problems with your theology. How can you possibly believe that …..?' Now I will try and reassure him as best I can. I may perhaps point out that if he thinks I'm heretical, he really ought to have a go at Jonathan Edwards (who held not dissimilar views) and is generally held to be the smartest mind America ever produced. (No snide comments please, Brits.) But this is most encouraging; if there's one thing better than praise for a book it's controversy, and nothing pleases an author more than the sound of a possible witchhunt. (As long, of course, as there is several thousand miles of ocean between you and the pitch forks.) I really don't mind becoming a figure of controversy. Indeed, I am half inclined to fake an Amazon review that says, ‘This wicked book should be banned and the author severed into small pieces, for his disgusting and shameless attempt to undermine biblical orthodoxy. Having failed with the open evil of the Da Vinci code the Devil is now at work amongst the faithful with the more subtle wickedness of The Lamb Among the Stars.' Oh please.

Another slightly encouraging sound sign this week was that I had two responses, to my website from people (or just possibly automated spammers), who really hadn't quite got it all together. The first was from a man who claimed to be have been abused by the son of a long dead author whose name is frequently mentioned in fantasy circles. I am circumspect here because I have no wish to promote rumours. If it is true, it is all very sad, but I'm not quite sure of the cause and effect here. Does writing fantasy encourage paedophilia in one’s children? The second one, which could have been funny if it wasn't blasphemous, was a man who sent me an advance copy of his ‘Inaugural Address from the Great White Throne’. I'm afraid I didn't read very far.

No: the reason for not writing a major blog here is that I have posted a very substantial article on the Speculative Faith website with the slightly bizarre title of ‘Jesus, the Fox, and the niceness of Christian fiction.’ It actually deals with a matter whose importance goes beyond fiction, namely the character of Jesus and has received some interesting comments; most of which seem to be very positive. To take a look and feel free to complain, either there or here.

And the meantime, the manuscript of The Infinite Day grows slowly longer. But unfortunately at the end of a busy week at college, I have not yet succeeded in being suspended on full pay. Memo to self: must pray harder.

On simplicity as a virtue

First of all, thanks to all who read this. Just because no-one posts comments doesn't mean that it's not read. This week, for instance, someone from California and a student in one of my classes, admitted to being regular readers.

Now, this week's observation Often when authors go on about writing, they talk about the big stuff. You know, how to create some wonderful epic spanning centuries or galaxies; how to put meaning into the text or even how to make significance significant. What I want to do today is just go to the other end of the scale and make some points about rather trivial elements of writing. Actually, though, when you put them all together, something rather important emerges.

Hint one: avoid characters with names that resemble common verbs.
In this last book of the Lamb among the Stars series, a character called Luke has an important part to play. But it's a problem name, because you can never say ‘Luke looked pale’ or ‘Luke looked away’. Avoid Luke! Equally, there is a fairly common Arabic name, Said (sometimes spelled Sayed) which is also unusable: you really don't want to have to write ‘Said said’. Of course, you can work around this, but it often looks obvious. There are probably lots of other names with similar problems. I know it's not just a problem with me because I remember reading a detective novelist, bitterly lamenting she had called her protagonist Parker, because she always kept having to avoid ‘Parker parked the car’.

Hint Two: keep names simple.
In the very first drafts of the first book of my series I decided that I wanted everybody to have either a patronym or matronym. If you are unfamiliar with this, it's the sort of thing you get in Russian literature, where the character is, say, called Stephan Borisovitch Tallin or something like this. The Borisovitch means that he is ‘the son of Boris’. It allows the writer to refer to his protagonist as a) Stephan, b) Borisovitch or c) Tallin. It's a nice and atmospheric system, but it doesn't half make for confusing books. So, I dropped it fairly early on.

Rule Three: Avoid meetings with lots of people.
The English language (or possibly language generally) does not easily handle the sort of complex meeting where everybody says things. If you're not careful, it can take several pages for even a relatively simple discussion to take place. X speaks, then Y, then Z and then X interrupts him. And each time you have to explain who is saying what. It's much simpler to have meetings between one or two people. In that case, you can even go for a whole page without having to say who is actually speaking, because it is so obvious from the text.

Rule Four: Try to keep the exotic stuff under control.
In an alien world set far in the future it would be really quite logical to have twelve months, all with totally different names to those we know. And, while we're at it, to have days of the week that are totally different. The effect, of course, would be to heighten the sense of alienness. It would also be to utterly bemuse and confuse the poor reader and have him or her constantly resorting to some voluminous appendix.

The fact is that any writer who persists with writing will soon find out that writing is a very artificial business. You start off by thinking that you are going to try and accurately depict something that is going on, and then you realise that it is far easier to keep things simple. One of the interesting things about fantasy or speculative fiction is that you can simplify worlds and that can help with plots. Sometimes the real world is appallingly complex. To talk of a subject of which I know a little because I was there, I suspect there are probably no more than one or two people in the whole world who could give anything like an accurate account of the shifting loyalties and treacheries of the forty or so militia groups that battled their way through the Lebanese civil war. Were I to try to accurately depict events there all but the most devoted reader would throw the manuscript in away in confusion and dismay.

Ironically, speculative fiction can allow us to simplify things. And sometimes, in order to tell a good tale or make a point, reality has to be simplified. Complexity is rarely a friend of communication.

Tolkien and a changing world

At church on Sunday, someone gave me a copy of a biography of Tolkien (Michael White, Tolkien: a Biography, Abacus) on the grounds that I might be interested. So far I'm about the third of the way through. It's a reasonable and readable stab at explaining the man and his background and several thoughts have emerged as I have read it.

What struck me most of all was perhaps the way in which White has to spend an awful lot of time explaining Tolkien and his world. So matters cultural and historical that I had assumed could be taken for granted are expanded upon. In fact White is right: speaking as a teacher, I now increasingly realise that we cannot take anything for granted. Indeed, let me state Walley’s Rule of Contemporary Education: ‘There is no piece of knowledge that we can safely assume that the modern British schoolchild actually knows.’ Two weeks ago, I had a an apparently well-educated student aged 18 for whom the concept of the water cycle (rain, rivers, sea and evaporation, and round again) was a total novelty. And then she wasn't even ashamed. Another student, albeit at a somewhat lower academic level, displayed a similar lack of embarrassment when when given a blank map of Europe. 'Which way is up?' she asked.

Anyway, White does all the explaining you could wish. And I found it a reminder that the world of Tolkien (and C. S Lewis who so far is coming out very well in the biography) has now all but gone.

Not of course in a physical sense. Much of ‘collegiate’ Oxford is very much as it was then. But culturally, the world has shifted a long way. So for instance, it is very hard to imagine the Inklings; a happy little gathering of vaguely boozy literary men apparently existing without the slightest hint of homosexuality. Or a world in which it was remotely possible for a child at school to be allowed to study Middle English. This sense of distance is heightened because both Tolkien and Lewis were very backward looking people, shunning modern technology and self-consciously aware that they were the dinosaurs that had overstayed their allotted time.

It is undeniable that in the last 30 years there had been changes so fundamental in Britain that one struggles to find parallels. The Norman invasion of 1066? But then, that simply replaced one the language of rule from Anglo-Saxon to French. I doubt many people really noticed; the clergy presumably kept on speaking Latin and the general Christian tone of the culture probably stayed much the same. What has happened here strikes me as much more like the days of the Old Testament when Israel was taken into exile under the Babylonians. It is a wholesale cultural shift, and one of which we have only so far perhaps seen the beginning.

The most significant change is, without doubt, the loss of the Christian consensus. Tolkien and Lewis lived in the twilight of the Christian West. Lewis of course recognised it and ‘railed against the dying of the light’. That loss has led to other losses and with it has come the dissolution of much that was achieved in the 1500 years or so of Christianity's dominance in Britain. Let me just list a few things that, although they may be subscribed to are now being trampled over: the sense of being accountable to God, the value of the individual, the objectivity of truth, the importance of doing right over pragmatism, the absolute nature of evil and the value of history. I could go on. Modernity or post modernity (or whatever we are to title post Post-Modernity) has ploughed under much that was vital.

It is easy to be pessimistic. Yet the curious thing is that the very popularity of Tolkien's work actually gives the lie to much of what modernity proclaims. In reading Lord of the Rings we sense the terrible peril that hangs over Middle Earth, because we do believe that if Sauron were to rule things would be very much worse. We all value and rejoice in episodes of heroism and nobility, and we are all disgusted by cowardice and treachery. Although we may subscribe to cultural relativism, when it comes to Middle Earth we believe in evil and good. The popularity of the virtues and values proclaimed in Lord of the Rings are a reminder that the relativism of the present is likely to be a temporary - if terrible - thing.

A very English mystery and the nature of criticism

I have an interesting mystery story to recount today, and one which has caused me to reflect on the whole business of critics and criticism. But before I do let me institute what I hope will be a recurrent theme, of delivering unsolicited praise where praise is due. I have a local computer shop, who in the four or five years I have known them, have unfailingly delivered the goods, whether it be in repairs or upgrades. This time, they have doubled the speed of my computer, improved its graphics no end and boosted my Mac for a very modest price. If you're in the Swansea area try Swan CD Limited and tell them I say they are a good thing. My only reservation as a conservationist is that their logo looks like a swan being bisected from the rear by a chainsaw.

Now to the mystery. I was planning to write on lots of things this week but then the extraordinary business of Joyce Hatto emerged. Although this is basically a tale of classical music it has given rise to some questions in my own mind about critics and criticism.

The background is this. About this time last year, a number of classical music magazines (including the Gramophone which I have read without fail for twenty three years) started to lavish praise on the piano recordings of one Joyce Hatto. It was an edifying tale of a woman, now in her 70s, who had given up professional public piano playing a quarter of a century earlier on account of cancer. Yet now she was releasing discs through a small record company owned by her husband. And what discs! The critics stumbled over themselves with fulsome praise at this triumph of persistence and talent over illness and neglect. The quality was astonishing: how did an elderly woman, with this thirty year battle with cancer, manage to grapple with the most athletic works in the repertoire? The quantity was also astonishing. At the time of her reported death she had ‘recorded’ around 100 discs. (As will become obvious any mention of Ms Hatto requires much use of the word ‘reported’ and many inverted commas). There was also the matter of the range. There seemed to be nothing in the classical repertoire from Bach to the notoriously spiky Messiaen that she was not able to play as well, if not better than the best. As one critic said: ‘Joyce Hatto must be the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.’

Anyway, a week ago the story exploded. You can read it all on the Web and a good lead is the Wikipedia article on her. Someone attempting to put one of her discs on to Itunes found that it was recognised, but as being by someone else. Very soon, the web was buzzing over which of her discs had been copied from which other recording and now there doesn't seem to be a single genuine Joyce Hatto recording known. They appear to be all borrowed - and slightly tweaked - from other discs. It is, we are told, the greatest fraud/hoax in the history of classical music recording. What the motives were (or even who did it) is at the moment unclear. More revelations are promised.

Now, I am a writer, not a musician, but there are aspects of this that have intrigued me. Central to the story are the critics, who are frankly, trying to keep a rather low profile at the moment. They are the ones that told us how great this woman was, how we should buy her discs and how revelatory her playing was.

Here I need to say I have no axe to grind: such critics as I have had, have been kind to me. But several points do arise.

1) The critics were naive to the point of negligence. In hindsight, that there was fraud or something like it, going on should always have been considered possible. One or two comments, should have set alarm bells ringing. It was, we read, very hard to pin down any Hatto style; she was clearly such a modest pianist that she let the music speak for itself. Hmm. And did no one really question where the great works for piano and orchestra that were being released actually been recorded? A hundred musicians do not fit into a garden shed. And why were there no recent accounts of her playing? Why so few interviews? Was it really just modesty? From the Christian point of view perhaps the most revealing comment was something to the effect that ‘we don't expect fraud in the music business’. Sorry guys, sin makes its ugly way everywhere.

2) The critics failed at the task they claim to be best at. They signally failed to notice that the recordings were identical to existing ones. Now if the pirated material had come from obscure Bulgarian pianists, one might have forgiven the oversight. But the ones she/he faked, often aren't obscure. I have a couple: the list of pianists hijacked is starting to look like a who's who in modern pianism (Previn, Ashkenazy, Hamelin to name three well-known names). In some cases, there were only three or four other versions of a piece around. Yet these men, (and it is mostly men), who regularly blind us with detailed references to the record catalogues and intimidate us by their erudition, failed to notice that these were one and the same.

3) The critics appear to be - how shall we say it? ­- inconsistent. A point was reached towards the end of last year, where this lady could clearly do no wrong. Every recording was awarded superlatives. This is now looking very curious, because some of the recordings that were hijacked were not so highly praised when they first came out. The myth had swept objectivity before it.

Now, you may say this has nothing to do with writing. In one sense, that is true. Yet it is undeniable that critics are important to writers. They make careers, they create stars and they live in the reflected glow of those very stars. But in the wake of this debacle for music critics, I am inclined to be a little bit suspicious of book critics as well. They too give opinions, and offer verdicts, and we listen and respect their judgements. Well, I for one, am now minded to take some of their pontifications a little more cautiously. And I do wonder how many musicians, having been mauled by those very critics who lauded Joyce, are now smiling quietly and saying to themselves: 'well they aren’t so all-wise after all'.

I’m inclined to agree.

The perils of being a writer

All in all, it has been a pretty good week. I have had about five nice e-mails on the books, a small cheque from a publisher and mentions from a couple of people that, although they don't comment, they do read this blog. I also published a long and, I hope, very thoughtful article on ‘speculative faith’ on the (wait for it) Speculative Faith website: although some of the themes will be familiar to my readers here, it is all new material. What else? I've got my Macbook up and running with Microsoft Word for Windows using the fun Parallels software. I even had some vaguely enjoyable teaching. But– and here’s the rub – I haven't got the writing done that I would have liked and the reason is simply because I'm a writer.

Let me explain that paradox. By dint of working late and hard during the week I had managed to make Thursday night free for writing on the Infinite Day. However Thursday afternoon, one of my students asked me whether I had a glossary of geological terms I could give him. It was a single sentence request. I thought about it and decided that he and the other students probably deserved something like that as there are no decent textbooks at our level. Anyway, I thought, I can pull one off the Web, they are bound to exist.

So after supper, I set to work to find this glossary on the web and print it. Assuredly, I told myself, a half hour task. I soon found a good glossary pitched at the right level with most of the terms I wanted from a United States organisation with no copyright attached. I downloaded it and pasted into Word. Now at that point I should simply have printed it and got on with my book.

But as I scanned my eyes over the definitions the writer in me took over. ‘Hang on’, I thought, ‘that's not the British spelling’. Then, a moment later, ‘Wait, if these words are included, why don't we also include these others?’ Then after a few more minutes I realised that the style was frequently what I call ‘clunky’; so I set to work tidying the worse paragraphs. ‘Hey’ I said, ‘the kids know I'm a writer and with my name attached, I don't think I can let anything substandard go’. Then I realised that some of the definitions were far more thorough than others and so I thickened up a few of the thinner ones. So, you can imagine what happened. I finally got it done by ten o'clock and a very fine booklet resulted. But I didn't get to work on the book.

What was going on here? I think two things. One was professional pride on a matter where frankly it didn't really matter. The other was that I had found a legitimate displacement activity to stop me from writing. Now here, I don't want you to get any high-flown psychological fantasies about me ‘not wishing to write’. Let's be blunt: writing is hard work and after a long day at work, I preferred something else. Those who are outside the writing business consider writing to be easy and there are times in my writing when it as easy as going downhill on bike. But then there are also times when it's like going uphill into wind on a bike. It hurts and it takes effort. And when faced with that almost anything will seem to be attractive. So if you know a writer then pray for them that their words will come easily. Because sometimes almost anything is preferable to writing: even a geological glossary.

News and a thought provoking adventure

First, I shall be doing a very regular spot once a month on Speculative Faith a really nice website to do with Christian fantasy writing. I will probably recycle some of these blogs with expansions there. Do come and join in.

Second, I have acquired a Macbook. However I am unable to break myself entirely from my PC, which has such things as a nice voice recognition package, and so retain a foot in both camps. My first impression of the Macbook is that, while I would not go all the way with the wild-eyed Mac evangelists, I do think it's got a lot going for it. In particular, and here would-be writers may want to pay attention, there is an excellent writing package called Scrivener, which really does wonderful things for authors. I think, when I start a new book, I will use this. But at the moment, I suspect it is a capital mistake to shift wordprocessing tools midway through a manuscript with a looming deadline.

Third, today, I had an adventure. It doesn't often happen these days; this is Swansea, not Beirut. Basically, Swansea missed the great British snow yesterday, much to the chagrin of all and sundry. So we all went to work today in the predicted rain, expecting more of the same. However, during the first lesson, snow to fall heavily and to everyone's surprise, began to stick. The result was something not unlike the Titanic striking the iceberg. There was soon a notice that some of the college buses would be taking students home early; this was followed within a quarter of an hour by news that all the buses would be going and very soon after, that the entire college would be closing down at twelve. It wasn't quite panic, but it was a pretty feverish evacuation. By now the snow was about an inch thick, which of course, by American terms, is nothing, but in our part of the world without snow ploughs, snow chains, and precious little in the way of gritting equipment it is enough to make a mess of the roads. Especially when, as it did, it arrives without warning.

Anyway, I decided to head home very quickly afterwards and it was soon pretty obvious that driving conditions were atrocious, and getting worse. It was compounded by the fact that very few people here are used to driving in snow, and either take it too fast or in the wrong gear, and that almost everybody had decided to head back at the same time. I had to make some hard decisions about what route to take to get home as both the main possibilities were over winding hills that I suspected (quite rightly, as it turns out) would be log-jammed with traffic stuck on slush. So I slithered my way with a trusty old Peugeot along the road I normally take home and at the foot of two hundred metre hill that that lies at the back of our house parked the car safely on what was now becoming a rapidly deserted road. I acquired a couple of plastic bags from the nearby supermarket and put them over my socks and then set off over the hill on the snowbound minor road.

The road I took is an odd little one that seems to bear no resemblance to the fact that it is within the Swansea city boundary; along much of its length it is a deep, winding, narrow road shaded by trees, with fields either side and you could be in the very heart of Wales. Now, with the snow bending the branches and utterly devoid of traffic it was a pleasant, and almost exhilarating walk. Yet far away over the snow and under the grey clouds, I could hear continuous sirens as the police tried to deal with the crashes and clogged roads.

One of the things I thought about, as I trudged up through the snow, was how very easily a little flicker on the weather systems had taken a routine Friday and turned it into utter chaos for everyone. Within ninety minutes, a city of a quarter of a million people had totally ground to a halt. Perhaps it is a legitimate task of fantasy, or at least a subgenre of fantasy, to remind us in our comfy, cosy worlds that the only grace of God separates us from utter disaster. It was Will Durant who said that ‘civilisation exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice’. There are a lot of provisos that I would want to put on that statement, but it doesn't hurt us to be reminded once in a while that things are far more fragile than they seem.

On cosy murders

Readers, I present you a puzzle. I have in my mind the detailed outline of a super series of books which, based on what I now know about publishing, ought to do stunningly well. Now before I come onto my puzzle let me outline the books. They are set in an imaginary but picturesque part of South Wales, not a million miles removed from where I live, in a more or less present day setting. The protagonist is an ungodly university-based geologist, in his early 30s, with more than the usual hangups about life, women and most things but with some sort of traditional morality which stops him from having the language and behaviour that gives a writer problems. He lives in a wonderfully picturesque and rundown cottage given to him (with strings) by his aunt in wooded countryside that runs down to the sea. There he lives alone with a battered Land Rover and a black dog who out of sheer perversity he has named ‘Snowy’. As the book opens we see how, in order to supplement his meagre income, he is forced take on as a lodger an American theological student who has a living faith and a very different attitude to most things.

So we have the 'buddy movie' thing and also the conflicts over belief. During the course of these books it will transpire that our naive right wing American actually, has something going for him. All this, course, is mere background to the murder story that emerges involving a sinister and powerful figure in the science world with a lot to conceal. Book 1 ends with the murder solved, and the murderer dealt with, but hints that there were people who protected him. In book two we are introduced us to our American’s beautiful sister and glimpse more of this sinister group of people who get up to a lot of skulduggery.

Isn't it just wonderful? I could see it running for about five or six books; each 100,000 words longs with only gentle violence, but full of deep and pious comments on life and the universe. (and the dog). Can you imagine the television series? 'Fantastic,' I hear you say, 'what's the problem?' Quite simply, it is this. I just can't get excited about the idea. Oh, if it was between writing these books and being unemployed I’d do them. And if you offered me a million dollars I'd write them. But somehow, I just can't fall in love with the books.

Now it could be this is because, deep down inside me, there is a genuine artistic streak, and I'm not simply a hack writer. My guess is that it's not that, but possibly something related. I think it is that I believe that writing should in some way push against barriers and the job of the writer (and particularly the Christian writer) is, to use the phrase often used of preaching, ‘to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. Interestingly enough, I suspect, the worst and probably most accurate criticism of Christian writing from outside the faith, is that it is simply too cosy.

And even murder stories can be cosy.

Why we write

Just a quickie this week. Why bother writing? The great and good Dr Samuel Johnson once said "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." I am reluctant to disagree with the man but Christian writing pays little in this life. There are, however, other rewards. I had this email a few days ago.

Dear Chris

I have just finished the third book (and re-read the first two, prior to that) and am astounded by the breadth of vision in the books. Andrew and I have had a few late nights, unable to stop reading them! Very good, very exciting, very thought-provoking - especially with the current debate over mixing human & animal cells. But, more than that, thought-provoking on a spiritual leveI re. pride, obedience and motives.

Also, I wanted to share that a close friend 'lost' her faith in Jesus last year, following a time abroad where different churches preached very different things. She couldn't say she didn't believe in God, but she found the things preached in the name of Christianity and Jesus deeply distasteful (and they were). Someone gave her yours and J. John's book on Jesus, and she has come back to faith in the 'real' Jesus - praise God!

Please finish the 4th book soon!

A.

Further comment would be superfluous.

Chris

Some honest words on Christian Fiction

That got your attention didn't it? But let me be honest: if you think I'm going to accuse anybody of dishonesty, think again. Naivete perhaps, dishonesty no.

Let me explain my background as a writer of Christian fiction. My first real success, at least in the United States, was under the pen name of John Haworth when I wrote a couple of thrillers (now rather dated) called Heart of Stone and Rock of Refuge. These were published by Crossway just after Frank Peretti had had an enormous hit with This Present Darkness. I can well remember that at the time everybody was getting very excited about Christian fiction. ‘Look at Frank’s sales!’ they said, ‘we have hit the big-time! Christian fiction has broken out of the ghetto! A new dawn beckons.’ Then things quietened down and book sales became much more modest again.

My second involvement with large-scale publishing has been with Tyndale, and this started just after they had had an enormous success with the whole Left Behind phenomena. And as the books were accepted and I read the press, I heard a familiar refrain. ‘Look at LaHaye and Jenkins’, they said, ‘we have hit the big-time! Christian fiction has broken out of the ghetto! A new dawn beckons!’ Here I have to say that I do not recall anybody in Tyndale saying this to me: I think they are far shrewder. But I had a sense of déjà vu. And sure enough things have quietened down and book sales are much more modest again.

So does Christian publishing go through the spasms of excitement every ten years, or is there only the most tenuous of linkages between these two cases? Here let me introduce you to what I call ‘Walley’s Theory of the Christian Blockbuster’. This simply states that ‘Enormous mega-sales of a Christian fiction title never occur because of its literary value but the only when the book is held to have some major spiritual value as well.’ So in the case of Frank Peretti it was felt by many people that his books provided an enormous insight into how demonic forces battle with God’s people. And in the case of Left Behind it was the detailed description of the imminent end of the world that had been thundered from so many pulpits. Now this is not to say these books have no literary merits (I have not read a single Left Behind book). It is just to say that the buzz around them was not so much literary, as theological. And that is what propelled them into the mega-sales league.

In a sense, I don't think we should be surprised at this. Let me ask you a question, what pre 20th-century works of Christian fiction can you name? My guess is only Pilgrim’s Progress. And there again, Walley’s rule applies. The book has some fine prose; but its chief selling point has not been its literary merits but its effective, and challenging, portrayal of the Christian life.

So my honest words basically amount to this. When people talk about mega-sales in the Christian market it would be perhaps more honest to exclude books such as This Present Darkness, and the Left Behind books, as these are not strictly bought as fiction. With those removed, the picture for what we might call works of fiction is somewhat leaner. But then at least on these criteria we do not feel utter failures when our book sales are numbered in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.

An open letter to Apple Inc etc

‘Dear Mr Jobs

Readers of my books (The Shadow and Night and Dark Foundations) will know that I posit the widespread use of a Diary in the 14th Millennium; a small slablike device that does almost everything from telecommunications to imaging. I am prepared to overlook your pale imitation -shown in public this week as the so-called Iphone – as minor plagiarism. Mine, after all, has a ten year battery life and a few other tricks. Indeed as a token of goodwill, let me make you an offer. In view of the much publicized claim by Cisco that it owns the trademark Iphone I am prepared to allow you to use my term ‘Diary’, perhaps in the form of the ‘I-Diary’ , for the modest sum of say £100,000 sterling.

Yours

Chris Walley.’

I am not writing a major comment here this week because I contributed a long answer to the Speculative Faith website (http://specfaith.ritersbloc.com/2007/01/11/chris-walley-answers-questions.aspx) on the differences between British and American fantasy fiction. That is really quite an active site, and so my article was soon replaced by other comments but I feel it was on some interesting issues and you may find it worth looking at.

One other observation. An odd thing happened to meet this week: an Amazon review of Dark Foundations disappeared. One day there were two reviews; the next just one. For the benefit of posterity, here is the missing review (I got it from the cache).

(five stars******) Finally!, November 1, 2006

Reviewer:

Barlow "Future Author" (Planet Earth) - See all my reviews

Finally! This book is here! I have been waiting so long! :)

The Dark Foundations by Chris Walley is an excellent continuation of an excellent series! With the exception of a very annoyingly nerve-wracking cliffhanger ending, I am completely happy with this book! This book is really quite shocking - you never even suspect anything like it from the first two books. It continues the story of Merral and the fight for Farholme and the Assembly, but introduces some additional sideplots and stunning backhistory from a non-Assembly world. None of the characters are flat, even Lezaroth the captain of the ship that is leading the war against Farholme, you grieve for, because of what he once was, and what he then became through following Nezhuala (who kind of seems like the Antichrist). Excellent, excellent, excellent!

At the time I was very miffed because it's a nice review and I didn't want to lose it. However since then, two new reviews of Dark Foundations and one of The Shadow and Night have appeared: all three are five stars. So that makes up to the missing one. But this raises lots of questions. Who removed it? Why? Is it an Amazon mistake? Did friend Barlow regret his statement? Has he been unmasked by Amazon as a serial reviewer, or worse? Or did his pastor corner him and say, ‘Brother Barlow, I hear you have been favourably commenting on a heresy?’ Who knows?

Can I say as a British author, whose main sales are in the States, that one of the few handles I have on whether or not my books are liked is Amazon. I like reviews. They are also a reasonably quick rebuttal to those who say ‘well, are they any good?’ (Do they really expect me to actually say 'no?’) So if you're thinking about writing an Amazon review and you want to write something nice and positive, please do. It will be appreciated.

In praise of ignorance

First, a happy New Year to all my readers. I hope both of you have a prosperous 2007. Sorry, that was a joke. Second, I got a nice mention by Shannon McNear in the Speculative Faith website. Yes, it would be nice to think that there was a bit of a buzz about my books. I can hear it now ‘There's this British guy…’ ‘You really ought to read him…. .’ or (best of all) ‘this guy is weird, I think we ought to burn his books. Publicly.’ Oh please!

Now on to my main subject this week. I don’t know if anybody else does this, but when I browse the web I often come across fascinating sites, skim through them and then later on, end up thinking to myself. ‘Where did I come across that?’ Anyway on a site, a well-known SF author (I am pretty certain it was Orson Scott Card, who has written some jolly fine stuff in his time) suggested that it was an absolute essential that anyone writing within the genre of science fiction ought to read extensively within that genre and he gave a long list of titles that must be read.

Initially this produced in me the sort of embarrassed reaction normally associated with turning up in T-shirt and jeans to some function where everyone else is in suits and ties. Have I read this year’s Hugo Awards? Hugo who? And as I thought about it I began to imagine that there could indeed be a buzz about the name of Chris Walley; that quieter insistent whispering that goes ‘Apparently – or so they say – he hasn’t even read ….. Can you believe it?’ (But I have read Ulysses; yes, really, all the way to the end).

Then after I had stopped feeling incredibly ill-equipped I actually began to wonder whether it was true that to write successfully in a genre you had to have read all the great classics within it. A couple of points have come to mind.

The first is that I think you can over-prepare too much for almost everything in life apart from the Day of Judgment. We all know people who say they’re going to go camping or climb mountains, but spend so much time getting all the kit ready, buying all the maps and doing all the preparations, only to find that night has fallen, the rainy season has started or they have become bedridden with old age. We only have so much time, particularly those of us who are amateur writers. (By the way I’m happy to be relieved of that status: e-mail me for details of my bank account.) Isn’t one of the best ways to learn to write, just to write? Carpe diem!

The second thing is to wonder whether extensive reading within a genre might (and I only say might ) produce a tendency for a writer to produce just ‘more of the same’. Mightn't it just reinforce some of the stereotypes and clichés? If you only ever read within a genre, are you ever likely to produce works that push the boundaries of the genre?

Actually, I never set out to be a science fiction author. This is not simply because there are more people who have flown in space than there are authors who have made a respectable living from science fiction. It is that I don’t care for much of what I have read – or glanced at in the genre. Confession time: I don’t like books that spend 300 pages working out the possible implications of one bit of science: I can get very unenthusiastic about tales of romance amongst the Yhyg’stail of Flaterwump 5 and I don’t actually like Star Trek!

The thing is I want to write about what might happen to real people in weird and extraordinary situations. In other words, I’m only interested in ‘science fiction’ as a genre in as much as it provides me with framework for dealing with things that I cannot deal with in any other setting.

In fact I not even sure that I liked the idea of ‘genre’ at all. Maybe the whole idea of genre is simply the effort of booksellers and librarians to try to keep things in some sort of order. Perhaps, really I’m a secret anarchist. There's a thought!

The state of the art.

I try to do a blog a week on this site. Normally, Friday or Saturday, but I just realised that I will be away from my computer for the next three days. So instead of offering some deep and meaningful discussion of say the 'laws of physics in a world of magic' or whether three books really are better than two, I’m simply going to say where I'm at with my writing.

Being a full-time teacher with a commitment to teaching well (hey, you can only try) I find writing during term time quite difficult. My last really sustained bash at the final volume of the Lamb among the Stars – The Infinite Day was in August. However, in the last week, I've actually had about four full days writing. There were some interruptions: Christmas, church, family visits, none of which I either wanted to – or could – push to one side. Anyway, I have been getting along quite well. This stage of writing is a little bit like throwing a bridge across the chasm but only being able work from one side. You begin to wonder whether you are going to overshoot or undershoot. So far, I am on 144,000 words and have a limit of around 220,000. There is a lot to happen, but I know what's going on. Of course, editing can tighten up a book and we could lose perhaps 10% of what I've written. On the other hand with this being the final book in the series there are issues about ‘closure’ to do with characters. And one would like to slowly build to a climax, rather than race frantically towards it. But I definitely can't put in a whole new subplot.

What I find extraordinary is to think how people were able to do this before the word processor. They must have very carefully planned out where things were going to go. I find myself constantly slipping back a couple of chapters to insert in Chapter 8 some fact that we need to have in Chapter 20. Sometimes, I find myself going back to boost characters so that when they are required later, they don't appear from nowhere. I suspect someone, somewhere has done a scholarly work on the influence of the word processor on the way we write. I have a suspicion that our not-too-distant ancestors could craft perhaps a couple of long sentences or even an entire paragraph in their heads and then write it down. Personally, I struggle to come up with more than the rough draft of a sentence which I then play around with to make it sound right. Is this just me? And does it make books better or worse?

Anyway back to the text!

My problems with magic

One of the great problems I have as a writer is that of identity. When people ask me what sort of thing I write I often mutter, ‘well, fantasy’ or ‘science fiction’. (Actually I sometimes worry that I have slipped down the gap between the two terms. I have too much science for the fantasists who want the occult to ooze off every page and too much supernatural for the scientists who are desperately allergic to any hint of the paranormal. I think the phrase speculative fiction is much better, but it hasn't really caught on.) Anyway, one of the problems with using the word fantasy is that it is assumed that magic is a major element.

Now,I don't really do magic. There are no witches or benign wizards in my books. (Actually in Dark Foundations magic does occur, but it spectacularly backfires in a manner that I would like to think would get me undying praise (and purchases) from the Christian Right.)

But why don't I do magic? I have three objections; theological, scientific and literary. The theological objection is pretty mainstream; magic is manipulation and God is not a god who we can bend to our purposes. The scientific objection – and I am a scientist – the fact is that successful magic rarely occurs in this age of the world. God in his wisdom seems to me to have largely restricted its use: we are pretty much left with those forces governed by the so-called ‘laws’ of physics. And I think that is for our good. A world with magic set loose would be a pretty terrifying place for the weak.

My main objection however, is literary. For me, the problem of magic is that everything is possible. And if everything is possible, the one thing that is not possible is tension. In order to create tension, there must be some sort of resistance, some kind of challenge. And unless you make it (by creating laws of magic etc) there is no such resistance in worlds steeped in magic. In this way magic corrodes reality. Why plough fields to make crops when you can create bread by a spell? Why work to learn medicine when you can heal all ills with a whisk of the wand? Has anyone ever seriously considered the mechanics of say, Hogwarts? Why bother even learning when knowledge could presumably be instantly transferred by magic? Authors of such books get round this by creating various laws and rules of magic so that the very things the hero needs to do cannot be done magically. Consider Lord of the Rings. The Chris Walley Shorter Version has Gandalf turning up on page 20 or thereabouts and saying to Frodo: ‘You have a magic ring that needs destroying but I however have found the Famous Item Transporting Spell.’ And with a few arcane words and a wave of the wand, the ring is transported into the heart of Mount Doom. End of book. I think actually Tolkien realised that this was a problem. Have you noticed how rarely Gandalf uses magical powers? He is far more a prophet (in biblical terms) than a sorcerer. Interestingly, the same principle is at work with Superman, who because he can do almost everything, is actually far less interesting than some of the superheroes with inferior powers. So I don’t do magic. Or even the sufficiently advanced technology (such as matter replicators or transporters) that achieves the same purpose as magic.

As this is Christmas it might be worth pursuing these thoughts in a theological direction. In the Bible, the miraculous is really rather uncommon and when it does occur – it is rarely – if ever, ordered from below, as if it were magic. There are no good wizards in Scripture. The miraculous is only granted by God on his terms and in his time. I like to think that in being wary of magic I am in good company.

Have a good Christmas!

On epic fantasy sequences (again).

This is very much an addition to a blog I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the problems of writing epic sequences. There I was concerned with the problems of writing such things but there is of course the whole dimension of actually finding a market for them. It seems to me that there are particular problems with the three, four or (heaven forbid) the even longer epic.

Marketing is a major factor here. You have to get the reading public drawn in to a) buy the first volume and b) want the successor volumes. Yet here there are problems. Because the writer is setting out on a large-scale work, he or she needs to lay foundations in the first volume. But foundations, in the very nature of things, are not the most attractive subject. First volumes can sag (even Lord of the Rings has a very slow start) and this is bad news. How bad the problem is could be measured if we knew what the fall-off rate was from volume one to two and so on. I suspect it's pretty high; my guess would be that each volume sells 75% what its predecessor did. So you need pretty high Vol 1 sales! I also suspect that it's hard to revive a flagging epic. A great Vol 3 is hardly going to help slow sales of a rather dull Vols 1 and 2.

I also wonder whether publishers know what they are letting themselves in for. Now I have no intention of criticising publishers (I love Tyndale). But I can imagine that it is very easy to buy into the concept of a series without realising the implications. Trilogies etc are, like children and pets, a serious commitment. And curtailing them is a sad business. (See for example, the discussions about the news that Kathryn Mackel's Birthright Project may be cut short two-thirds through the planned trilogy -- Just click the CSFF button above.)

I wish I had some idea of a solution for both readers, writers and publishers. One thought is that we write our epics as a series of standalone volumes so that if the concluding books are cancelled, we still have something worthwhile. The problem with it is that many themes just don't work on this basis. The heroic quest certainly doesn't.

One final thought on this difficult topic, here, as elsewhere, Tolkien stumbled on a winning formula. He wrote a popular standalone book (The Hobbit) and then 15 years later (if memory serves me right) submitted the completed trilogy of Lord of the Rings to Allen and Unwin. But even then, he had some massive support from folk like C. S. Lewis. And it still took years before it sold massively.

Maybe we need more books that aspire to be the Hobbit and less Lord of the Rings.

On problems in writing science fiction and fantasy (with a Christmas link)

I have already touched on some of the issues in this general area but I was just writing something just now and a particular issue emerged which I thought I would share it. The sentence I was writing was this: “He gave the order and the man jumped to his feet as quick as….” As quick as what? As quick as… A rabbit? A speeding car? The recoil on a Strumback M31 battlelaser? In ordinary speech we use similes endlessly. ‘As thick as X,’ (our most disliked person); ‘as good-looking as Y’ (our current hero/heroine), ‘as strong as an ox’ (Hmm, when did you last see an ox?) But we use similes (and related metaphors) all the time and when we do we use imagery from the world about us. Our language reflects our world .

Now do you see the problem with dealing with the exotic cultures of fantasy? In my case, my character is a military man from worlds where there is very little in the way of nature. And with its loss, goes a whole range of imagery. He can't easily used words such as bird-like or tree-like. Of course, I could do something wacky, like 'as fast as a Jegerbanian rat' but you can't do it often and sometimes it comes over rather odd. What is rather alarming is the speed with which some of our imagery dates. ‘As fast as a Pentium’ sounds pretty pathetic now. How about ‘with Spitfire like’ speed? Even ‘watch-like complexity’ sounds a bit dated.

In this respect, future and fantasy cultures are much easier to deal with in film. We can see rather than be told. The good news about fantasy and science fiction is that it exposes us to strange and exotic cultures. The bad news is that it is sometimes hard to relate to them. I suspect it is this, amongst other things, that C. S. Lewis is referring to in a wonderful aside of his in an article whose location I have lost (reference please someone) about the importance of having ordinary people in science fiction/fantasy/ speculative fiction. He writes thus: ‘to have strange things happen to strange people is a strangeness too much.’ Here as elsewhere, I doff my metaphorical cap in utter agreement. Not just true, but elegantly expressed.

Now let me add a seasonal aside. As a Christian I believe that God, acted uniquely in human history in the events recounted in the Bible. Why then, some people ask, then rather than now? Is it perhaps, I answer, because the biblical cultures were so low down in the development of technology that their imagery is almost universal? Even if we personally have no experience of shepherds or carpentry we do not have to go too far back in our own culture to know what a shepherd or carpenter did. We must be very grateful that the Son of God did not become incarnate as a computer technician or a car mechanic: his words would have become incomprehensible within a generation.

On the writing of epic fantasy

Large-scale fantasy epics spanning many books are pretty common these days. The temptation for budding writers and – believe me, I hear from a lot of you – is to write just this sort of thing. What I want to do here is to give a warning: be very careful about venturing on the longer and perilous road to Mount Doom (or wherever). Let me give you three reasons.

The first is that an epic saga of say 600,000 to 750,000 words is not simply a scaled up version of a 100,000 word novel. You don't just keep writing longer! The best parallel is in architecture. The novel is a house and the multi-volume epic a cathedral. To go from the first to the second is not simply a matter of scale. You need a much larger and more complex architecture. The saga needs to have a very different structure; with such things as a different pacing of high points and the relaxing and tightening of the plot. Rather like any traditional symphony, all the main components (the however many volumes there are) need to work separately. The practical implication is this: I don't really think you can just start writing with the intention of ending up with a satisfactory creation in a few years time. At very least sketch it out!

Secondly, staying with the architectural image; size of building is linked with depth of foundations. A single floor cottage can probably be constructed even on poor ground with very little effort. But a cathedral, with its great height and vast spans, must have deep and solid foundations. With the most successful epic tales you always get the feeling that you are walking into a real world with an existing, if largely untold, history. The reader must sense that were he or she to metaphorically tap the walls, they would ring hard and solid and were they to open the books on the shelves in the heroes library they would have facts and histories in them. This sort of foundational depth is probably not conjured up in weeks or even months. It is salutary to remember that the type example, Lord of the Rings, was fermented and matured for nearly 40 years in Tolkien's brain before it was completed and published.

Thirdly, because of these factors, you ideally need to do what the master did with Lord of the Rings and that is write it all and then go back and edit it. If you write and publish it volume by volume by the time it comes to the last book, with the previous books irrevocably published, you will find that the die is cast. You cannot now introduce major new characters, reveal that your hero is a diabetic or invoke hitherto unsuspected magic or acts of God. Your first pages determine your last.

That sounds like I know what I'm talking about. I'm not sure I do. But I'd wish I read the above a long time ago.

On books and sales figures

About three years ago, I completed the last of my projects with the British evangelist, J. John. It was a summary of the life, teaching and work of Jesus called The Life: a portrait of Jesus. It was meant to be a ‘one-stop’ shop for everything on Jesus and the something of an antidote to 'Jesus was an alien, Jedi Master, mythical figure, ancestor of the royal line of France etc' book. So there was a chapter on Jesus’ birth, teaching, miracles, trial and resurrection, etc. Originally, we set the word limit at 80,000 words but it got squeezed down to 60,000 in order to make it a small book. It was a tough challenge, but I was fairly pleased with the result. It was released in the Christian bookshops and never seems to have got beyond them. This was a source of some irritation, particularly as it got extremely good reviews from people and filled an obvious empty niche in the market. This week, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from the publishers to say that total sales had now reached 50,000 and they were going to give it a new cover. (Perhaps, this time, they can actually get it into the secular bookshops, which is where it was designed for).

So there was much rejoicing. But it also gave rise to some thinking about the value of books. Let's say, I went into the ministry and did regular preaching slots, two times a week. So let's do the math: thirty minutes a time to the typical British Baptist congregation of fifty people; that’s fifty contact hours a week or 2,500 a year. Now consider the book: although a light read it is densely packed and will probably take at least five hours to read. So 50,000 copies times five hours gives you 250,000 contact hours. Now unless my math is very dodgy that is a hundred years worth of preaching.

Of course, it might be argued that some books are unread, but we can probably also assume that some books are read by more than one person. (You have no idea how my heart sinks when I hear someone say ‘We like your books, someone got one and the whole church read it.’) And you can't daydream while reading a book. So the statistics suggest that I have reached numbers that only big star preachers get. Gratifying, hey what?

Tolkien's curse

It had to happen I suppose, but it occurred sooner than I had expected. An early reader of Dark Foundations came over at church to compliment me on the book and then proceeded to tell me that in one section I had copied from Lord of the Rings. As it is impossible to describe the plot point he was referring to without spoiling a great deal, I will leave readers to guess the particular moment. Suffice it to say that consultation with my domestic editor (my wife) confirmed that there was only the most tenuous linkage with the Professor Tolkien’s epic trilogy.

But I am hardly surprised: writing a large-scale fantasy these days is like living at the foot of Mount Doom itself. Tolkien’s work casts such a wide and sombre shadow that you cannot escape it. So when you write your fantasy epic, stumble upon some attractive plotline and pursue it you almost inevitably find a little engraved stone. ‘J. R. R. Tolkien was here first’. So, the hero has a faithful friend, who sticks fast by him in battles? Be careful: it's Frodo and Sam. You have a disinherited king looking for his throne? Been there, done that and got the banner of the House of Elendil. Flying monsters? The Nazgul. The quest with its companions? The weapon that must be destroyed? Done, all done! And it’s the details too; the deadly stairway, the gleaming city, the broken sword, the treacherous companion. It's all there in Tolkien, and cursed is he who tries to repeat it. It's a pain, trust me, and part of my exasperation at being accused of borrowing is that I spent long, long hours, trying to avoid simply that.

So what's going on here? Ultimately the very strength of the Lord of the Rings is because Tolkien uses so many of the great archetypes of epic fiction. The problem for those who write in his wake, is that if we do go back to these archetypes, we are now accused of plagiarism. He took what was universal and made them his own. In my darker moments, I feel that Tolkien was like a boy who, reaching a banquet before everybody else, helped himself to most of the best things on the table, leaving the rest of us with mere scraps. When I try to approach many of the great fantasy themes with a view to appropriating them, I seem to hear a little voice with an Oxford accent that whispers ‘Thief! We hates you. It’s my precious!’