A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 4

Once upon a time, before Professor Stephen Hawking wrote his book, it was possible to write a brief history of something and call is something other than 'A Brief History of Something'.

Not afterwards.

At first it was a joke, an increasingly obvious and un-clever go-to reference. But then it stopped being a reference and, because of its ubiquity, simply became the natural way to refer to a not-very-long written narrative detailing the origin and development of something.

(There were other Brief Histories before Hawking's, of course. But he put the phrase on the popular cultural map in a way that it hadn't been before -- or, to use a more elegant and apt turn of phrase, he put it into IdeaSpace.)

Not to expend too much effort justifying my own lack of creativity in blog post titles, but it never occurred to me to call this series anything other than 'A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge'. And I'd be willing to wager that none of you saw that title and thought that I was referencing Hawking particularly, whether cleverly or (more likely) not.

A Brief History of Blah-de-blah has become a trope.

This is not the only evolutionary path that a trope can follow, but it's an important one for storytelling -- for fiction. Because, occupying a level of universality that lies beyond references, homages, rip-offs and cliches, tropes are fundamental concepts that don't need to be explained for the audience.

Whether something is really a trope, or merely a reference/cliche/et cetera of course depends on who the audience is. There are tropes that are common to every culture, every demographic, every sub-culture, even every clique, that someone from outside those particular groups wouldn't get on the same subconscious level... and there are tropes that are common to all of humanity.

Cold Iron Badge was deliberately designed to be very, very tropey.

I touched on this in my last post, but it bears repeating and exploring in more detail: There are a number of points where Cold Iron Badge pretty blatantly uses tropes -- touchstones, storytelling conventions -- from either fantasy literature, cop shows, or both. And this was entirely intentional on my part.

A story that is fundamentally -- as I also noted last time out -- a genre mashup absolutely depends on honouring the key tropes of the genres that it's drawing from (and sometimes on subverting them). It's important on many levels, but one of the most important is the most basic. Because tropes, especially genre tropes, tell the audience what sort of expectations to have of the story. And when those expectations are either entertainingly fulfilled, or entertainingly subverted, the audience is generally happy. Which makes the writer happy.

This is true of all genres, but genre mashups are particularly fun for this, because an audience familiar with the tropes of all the genres involved will understand when there's conflict between the tropes of the underlying genres. Which creates dramatic tension, interest, and lots of opportunity for expectations to be fulfilled or subverted in a most entertaining manner.

And this, more than anything else, is what pushed the evolution of the collection of characters and other loose concepts that I've been talking about to become Cold Iron Badge.

What, for instance, would cause an interesting dynamic between Christine and Delric, while also forcing them to work together? Why would people like Ray and Bunny -- with their, to be tactful, questionable degree of competence -- be front-line law-enforcement personnel? What would cops as we understand them have to do with Fairyland at all?

The answer came to me, as many do, on the subway. I couldn't tell you what inspired it -- well, the whole process I've been discussing in these posts inspired it, but I don't remember what specifically led to the, "Eureka!" moment.

But there it was: After a mysterious event opens the doors between Earth and Fairyland, people who are themselves strange and marginal enough to be able to cope with all the weirdness are tasked to watch the new border between the two worlds. To enforce the laws, prevent incursions and excursions in either direction, and to keep a fragile peace.

I liked it. It made sense to me, it made sense for the characters. It gave both fantasy and cop show tropes free rein and it provided a roomy stage that would fit all kinds of stories and ideas.

It worked for me, and a couple of emails later, I knew that it worked for Patrick too. We didn't have a plot yet, but the core of what was now definitely called Cold Iron Badge was all there.

Next step: Go from characters and concept to an actual story. More on that next time...

A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 3

So Patrick was in a "super" mood -- eager to work on a story with superheroic or supernatural elements.

I can get behind a good superhero story, but I wasn't in the mood to write one.

(An idea that Patrick and I had talked about working on a couple of years previously had been a superhero story -- it got as far as being outlined, having the script for the first issue written and all the key characters designed. Then, between our schedules at the time, and someone else independently coming up with another version of the same idea, it fell by the wayside. I may talk more about this project another time, as I still have a great deal of affection for it.)

That left the supernatural.

As you've probably already inferred from some of our previous posts, though -- as well as the comic that we eventually cooked up -- we were both of a mind to create an action-adventurey kind of supernatural tale, rather than one that focused on, say, horror.

(Actually, I pitched Patrick a teenagers-getting-disembowelled story that I had on the shelf, in the form of a mostly-finished screenplay. It wouldn't have been difficult to turn into a comics script, but it wasn't Patrick's cup of tea.)

So we were looking at at least some of our protagonists being tough and competent.

But despite that, "Bunny Mayhem" was the first character to be imported into Cold Iron Badge.

Imported?

Yes. A lot our our characters existed in some capacity previously to Cold Iron Badge. Not precisely, of course... not in the final forms they appear in now. But Patrick and I -- entirely separately -- had character concepts or sometimes just names, from years of ideas that were waiting for the right venue.

Patrick had been looking for a story to use Christine McCall in for years. Ray Donovan was a character name I'd made up as a teenager meshed with a character concept that was much more recent. And Delric... well, Delric's origins are dorkily embarrassing.

But Bunny was the first. Bunny was one of mine, but I think Patrick suggested using her. And because she was the first, Bunny ended up defining a great deal of what came afterwards.

Because of her name, you see.

Because in the time between me coming up with the name "Bunny Mayhem", there was another supernatural action-adventure story that achieved some degree of success, featuring a title character with an ever-so-slightly similar name.

Bunny.

Buffy.

Bunny. Buffy.

Buffy. Bunny.

You see the problem?

I felt, very strongly, that I needed to deal with this similarity -- which really was a coincidence -- by crafting a story that would not otherwise invite comparison with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But was still a supernatural action-adventure story.

Well, this happened to dovetail with some other things I'd been thinking about. I tend to enjoy genre mashups, and I like procedurals a lot -- they provide story hooks that are immediately understandable to the reader and don't require a lot of complicated backstory to understand: The heroes are involved in the story because it's their job. This balances nicely with the need for fantastical stories to establish and explore a world that is clearly different from our own. So fantasy and procedural seemed like a good fit.

But what sort of procedural?

As I suggested in an earlier post ('Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?'), inspired by both the fiction and the criticism of Ursula K. LeGuin, I think a lot about ethics and fantasy. Much fantasy seems to be seriously at odds with contemporary ethics, and one ethical issue that bothers me a lot in many supernatural action-adventure stories is secrecy, a distrust of the public, and a lack of accountability.

The illustrious Vampire Slayer, for instance, operates in secrecy, aided by a few friends. An attempt by the U. S. military to get involved in battling the supernatural was a major plot point in one season, and interestingly, was treated as being at best horribly misguided, at worst an immoral conspiracy that became a tool of the forces of evil.

The irony of this wasn't lost on me, and neither was the opportunity to resolve my own ethical issues with some of the elements of my chosen genre while also clearly differentating my story from Joss Whedon's.

My heroes wouldn't be secretive vigilantes, but cops, protecting a public that was fully aware of both their existence and that of the supernatural menace...

Um, which was going to be what, exactly?

More on how we solved that problem next time.

The Riddle of Riddles in the Dark

On to Chapter Five: 'Riddles in the Dark'. Bilbo, lost and alone in forgotten caves beneath the Misty Mountains, finds a Ring, finds Gollum and finds his way out. And some riddles are exchanged.

That much is the same.

There's so much that fascinates me about the changes between Chapter Five of the first edition of The Hobbit and the revised version, released after the success of The Lord of the Rings, that most of us are more familiar with.

(I'm going to stop at this point to somewhat belatedly acknowledge that what follows is going to contain rather a lot of spoilers. Although if you don't already know what happens in The Hobbit, why the heck are you here? Go read it. Now. Come back later.)

Obviously, Tolkien's big ret-con* is the centrepiece. Over the course of writing The Lord of the Rings, his conception of what the seemingly innocuous ring of invisibility that Bilbo found deep under the Misty Mountains actually was changed so dramatically, that Chapter Five of the original version of The Hobbit simply made no sense at all anymore. So Tolkien came up with the brilliant idea that the story as originally written was a lie that Bilbo told, and wrote in his memoirs, because he wanted his claim to the Ring to be indisputable, and was ashamed at the thought that he'd stolen it.

Tolkien had a little bit of fun at his own expense, as well, when Frodo and Gandalf discuss Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring and Frodo describes the "true" version of the story as "much more likely."

And then, of course, Tolkien rewrote The Hobbit, emending many minor details (as discussed in one of my previous posts) and altering Chapter Five extensively, making it reflect the "truth" as described in The Lord of the Rings.

But that vital change was made up of countless other changes, major and minor. One of them in particular is surprising to me: Gollum barely matters to the story at all.

The Hobbit was written by a man who had studied, and who understood, myths, folklore and fairy-tales right down to the core of his being, so it's no surprise that The Hobbit shares at least some of the classic characteristics of the Hero's Journey as articulated by Joseph Campbell. Campbell suggests that the Hero's Journey consists of a call to adventure, a journey out, a series of tests, some sort of ultimate trial (usually a confrontation with death) and if the hero succeeds, a journey back, with a reward.

Of course these criteria are sufficiently general that they can be applied to a very broad range of stories. But I don't think that it's entirely a coincidence that the subtitle of The Hobbit is There And Back Again.

The point of this digression is that The Hobbit is a story about a journey, a going and a returning. It's also an episodic story, well-suited to being read aloud a chapter a night at bedtime. Bilbo goes from one point to another in his travels, meeting new characters and having fairly discrete adventures along the way.

But the interesting thing is that virtually every character that Bilbo encounters returns at some point. Every character becomes important again later on, either at the climactic Battle of Five Armies or during Bilbo's return home at the very end of the story. Elrond, the Goblins and Wargs, Beorn, the Elven-King. Even the trolls, indirectly, when Bilbo and Gandalf pick up their treasure on the way back.

Except Gollum. Gollum, after Bilbo leaves the Misty Mountains, never matters again in the story. He was a mechanism for getting Bilbo the Ring and getting him out of the caves.
Gollum, who is arguably the pivotal character of The Lord of the Rings -- key to the theme, the unfolding action and the resolution, the tragically fallen counterpart to Frodo -- doesn't matter.

He's also a rather more pathetic figure, who apologizes to Bilbo for losing the Ring that he apparently genuinely intended to give him for winning the riddle contest, and tries to make up for it by leading him to safety. He's clearly not a very nice person (the reference to him eating Goblins, when he can, is present in both versions) but he's not the treacherous, debased, tragic, obsessive figure we know from The Lord of the Rings. His last words to Bilbo are directions: "It musst squeeze in and sneak down. We dursn't go with it, my preciouss, no we dursn't, gollum!"

Compare that to the blood-curdling accusation and threat, "Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!" that echoes in Bilbo's ears, and across the pages of The Lord of the Rings right through to the conclusion.

Gollum was a minor, almost a throwaway character.

That Tolkien had the chutzpah to change things so dramatically is frankly astounding.

It's also inspiring, and illustrative.

It's a reminder that tales can, and sometimes should, grow in the telling. That I -- that we -- can grow creatively, and that the process of creative growth never really ends. That earlier works can be reinterpreted in the light of later ones. That characters too, can grow and become more than they were.

That these changes, sometimes even retroactive ones, are not something to be feared, but opportunities to be explored.

Tolkien was good enough, and wise enough, to grow with his work as his work grew with him, and he was smart enough to use that growth as a solution to the story problem it created.

None of which means that I'm about to rewrite the past to support the revelation that Christine is actually a spider elemental, or that Delric is really a giant who only looks like an elf because he's been merged with a magic sword.

But the reason not to do those things isn't because they'd be ret-cons, but because they'd be stupid. I think that's my take-away from all this, and a new mantra: Embrace change, but avoid stupidity.

After all, Tolkien managed it.

Next: 'Out of the Frying-Pan Into the Fire'. Yes, that's what Tolkien actually called Chapter Six of The Hobbit.
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* That's geek-speak that means a retroactive change to continuity.

From An Unexpected Party to Riddles In The Dark

So, we were speaking of The Hobbit.

As I mentioned, I decided to finally -- I've had the book for about three and a half years -- read the first-edition copy of The Hobbit that my wife gave me.

So far, in the limited amount of time I have to read for pleasure (other than on the subway, which is not something I'm going to subject a seventy-year-old rare book to) I've covered just over a hundred pages -- from the start of the story to just past the ending of Chapter Five.

Chapter Five, 'Riddles In The Dark', is of course the chapter that's radically different from the version of The Hobbit that most of us are familiar with, the chapter that Tolkien felt he had to ret-con in order for Lord Of The Rings to work. More on that another time. The four chapters that precede it, in comparison, are not altered as dramatically. Minor changes at most -- a word here or a sentence or two there, that's about it.

And the overall difference is almost shocking.

It's not that the book isn't outstanding. It's just strikingly different. And, to anyone familiar with Lord Of The Rings, sometimes bizarrely so. The idea that one of Bilbo's Tookish ancestors had married a fairy is followed by a paranthesis noting that less friendly people suggested it had been a goblin. And Elrond refers to his High Elven kindred as "gnomes".

But it goes deeper than that.

The Hobbit, in the version that most of us are familiar with, is full of anachronisms and things that strike a tone that's not entirely consistent with Lord Of The Rings. But anachronisms and inconsistencies of tone are a huge part of what Tolkien cut -- so those elements are even more pronounced in the original.

The overall effect, for me, was that the story reached, and then crossed, some sort of tipping point. That tipping point was in Chapter 2, 'Roast Mutton', on page 43 in this edition.
The Dwarves are discussing the dubious character of the region they and Bilbo are crossing (as they do in both versions). The italics are mine, for emphasis: "These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Policemen never come so far, and the map-makers have not reached this country yet."

Policemen? In Middle-Earth?

In the long-abandoned wild lands between Bree and Rivendell? What policemen? Whose? How?

Policemen?

And with that, the balance of the familiar and the fantastic, that Tolkien was such a master of, was thrown irrecoverably off.

Again, none of this makes the first edition of The Hobbit a bad book, or a poorly-crafted one. It's a great book, wonderfully written. But it clearly doesn't take place in Middle-Earth, not really. It takes place in a world much more like our own, that uses the languages, and history, and some of the characters of Middle-Earth to enrich a fine and very engaging story.

Fantasy fiction depends on striking that balance -- what and where it lies depends on the story -- between the familiar and the fantastical. And what I've realized, in reading The Hobbit as it was originally written, is how small and subtle the choices that balance rests on can be. A single word, a single idea that doesn't quite fit, can make all the difference.

Fantasists, it is sometimes said, are playing God, freely creating entire worlds to tell their stories in. Well, this is a reminder of the tremendous responsiblity that accompanies that freedom. The existence of an imaginary world is always provisional; it depends on the reader continuing to believe in it. And the smallest inconsistency or wrong note -- a single word! -- can tip the balance from belief to unbelief. And then poof. A whole world gone, like that.

As a writer of fantasy, I haven't decided yet whether the fact that even Tolkien struggled to find and maintain that balance takes the pressure off me... or just makes me feel doomed.

Next time: Riddles In The Dark.

In A Hole In The Ground There Lived A Hobbit...

For me, it all begins with Tolkien. And that means that it begins with The Hobbit.

The Hobbit, besides being a genuinely great book, is a very interesting one from a writer's standpoint. It's the reason that The Lord of the Rings exists -- no Hobbit, no call for a sequel, and yet it was never intended to introduce people to Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit for his children -- he wrote a great deal for his children, including annual letters from Santa that were eventually collected as The Father Christmas Letters -- and as such it was mainly intended to be an exciting, entertaining adventure. But it's also, and this was quite unusual in fantasy for children at the time, clearly set not in a generic fairy-tale setting, but in a very concrete world different from our own -- a world with a deep and meaningful and mysterious history that was only really hinted at.

Of course, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit while he was also involved in his life-long project of creating the languages and mythology of Middle Earth -- the stories that became The Silmarillion. So he went to those tales when he needed names and events from the distant past of Bilbo Baggins's world. Elrond, the legendary blades of Gondolin and the ancient battles between Elves and Goblins (they weren't called Orcs yet), these are all Tolkien bringing his secret obsession to life by putting elements of it into a story that other people would actually see.

But in doing so, and by being so unbelievably good at it, he set in motion a chain of events that would lead to him writing The Lord of the Rings, and eventually (after his death) to the publication of The Silmarillion, in a version compliled by his son Christopher Tolkien with the help of Canadian and later fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay.

What that means, is that what was intended to be a one-off story for children that had a few minor references to Middle Earth became most people's actual introduction to the actual Middle Earth.

So there were a number of discrepancies, in both tone and detail, between The Hobbit as originally written and Tolkien's vision of the "actual" Middle Earth. And since Tolkien was before all else an inveterate world-builder, this bothered him.

What did Tolkien do about it?

As a writer, I find what he did very interesting.

First of all, when The Hobbit was re-released in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien went back and changed things, mostly minor details. Terms that that had fallen out of his evolving "translation" of the languages of Middle Earth, and words that didn't quite convey the right tone were most of it.

But there was a much bigger change along with the minor ones, and it's something Tolkien included in Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings contains an early example* of what we Big-Time Geeks call a ret-con -- a retroactive change to a story's continuity. Without giving too much away, it has to do with how Bilbo Baggins gets the Ring from Gollum. Tolkien's changing notion of what the Ring was by meant that the story as originally written didn't make sense anymore.

So Tolkien, through Gandalf and Frodo, explained that the version of the story that appeared in The Hobbit had been a lie, made up by Bilbo to justify keeping the Ring.

But the new, "true" version of the story was also incorporated into the revised edition of The Hobbit -- Tolkien rewrote that whole chapter. So the ret-con in Lord of the Rings read a bit strangely to anyone, like me, who first read the revised Hobbit. Because it was a fix for something that wasn't broken anymore.

I love that story. It's a wonderful illustration of Tolkien's brilliant, meandering and incremental creative process. But I've always wanted to read the original version, to see for myself how it differs, and to find out just what Bilbo said when he lied to the dwarves.

Yes, I'm a huge Tolkien geek.

I am also, now, the proud owner of a first edition of The Hobbit. It was an engagement present from my wife, which is a whole other story that deserves its own post.

But the funny thing is, I still haven't actually read it. There's always so little time -- and with work and family obligations, I've never had the time to read it in a place and situation where the book would be safe. A first edition of The Hobbit is genuinely rare, and when a book is genuinely rare and also one that you personally revere and that was an engagement present from your wife... well, you don't just take that book on the subway for the morning commute, you know?

But I think it's time, now, to read it. To see what Tolkien changed, and what he didn't. To read 'Riddles in the Dark' as it was originally written. And to share my impressions.

I'm looking forward to reading The Hobbit for the first time. See you in a couple of weeks with some thoughts on the subject.

--

*"Early" is a relative term, of course. A genuinely early example of a ret-con would be the idea, which seems to have been popularized in the Athenian tragedies of the Fifth Century BCE, that Helen had not actually gone to Troy, but had sat out the Trojan War in Egypt while a doppelganger was in Troy in her place. So, you know, she hadn't actually done anything wrong, and it was okay that she and her husband got back together after the war because she wasn't really responsible for the death of thousands. But I was speaking mainly about Western popular fiction.

Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about two subjects that don't always live in the same intellectual neighbourhood: Fantasy and democracy. Democracy, because the Canadian federal election is this Tuesday (if you're Canadian, please do vote). And I've been thinking for some time now about how to reconcile my love of fantasy with the values of democracy.

Fantasy is often viewed as being an essentially anti-democratic genre, and it's hard to argue with that in the post-Tolkien milieu that still dominates the field. Epic fantasy, especially, idealizes monarchy and the aristocracy; it romanticizes agrarian life and rural conservatism while condescending to the people who actual live on and work the land (there's usually, for instance, only one peasant or working-class character, and he or she is always humble, down-to-earth and played for laughs).

The problem with kings, in fantasy, is when you have a bad one, and when he's replaced with a good one, the problem is solved. Cities are viewed with suspicion, as dens of sin, disease and crushing poverty... And yes, medieval cities were all that, but so was the medieval countryside, and unlike life on the farm, the city offered freedom and opportunity. There was a saying in Germany in the Middle Ages: "City air is free air."

In reality, the solution to bad kings was no kings, or (as in the British and Canadian tradition) monarchs who are so powerless that it doesn't matter very much if they're good people or not. The greatest good has been accomplished by getting more people, and more different kinds of people, empowered and involved in the decision-making process. Too often, fantasy writers suggest, this was all a mistake, and what we really need is a king with a magic sword to stab evil and keep the lower orders in their place.

Tolkien gets blamed for a lot of this. But in fact, his idealized agrarian society of hobbits functionally has no government at all, either before or after the Return of the King, and both the hobbits and the king like it that way. It's a society that gets along because the hobbits want it to, which is a good functional description of anarchism in action. Of course, it's an insular, patriarchalist, classist, culturally conservative and anti-intellectual sort of anarchism, but the fact remains that Lord of the Rings isn't quite the "Hooray for aristocracy!" tract some critics suggest.

That being said, it was the idea of the returning king who would save us all, not an anarchistic agrarian society, that echoed through the legions of Tolkien imitators.

Of course, many fine writers have reacted against this trend, and its troubling ethical implications. Ursula Le Guin's early books were full of lost kings and mentoring wizards, but then she started thinking about what all of that would really mean. Terry Pratchett, in a more comedic vein, is another example. His Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork, ruled by a sort-of benevolent dictator, has the usual prophecy of a king who will return... but the king has decided not to. And the dictator, partly by accident, has over the course of several books installed all the institutions required for a functioning democracy except democracy itself, including social mobility, mass communications, a free press, the rule of law and equal opportunity for women and minorities.

The exceptions are bright lights, but they shine in a dark sea of secret heirs with magic swords and their wizard mentors who return to take the throne and defeat the Evil Overlord of Blahdeblah. They're exceptions.

The interesting thing is that this disdain for democracy often extends to fantasy set in a more contemporary milieu as well. Urban fantasy is full of wizards keeping magic alive in secret, of families with the magical door to another world kept safely locked away in the basement, or secret orders of monster hunters protecting us from threats they never bother telling us about.
Aristocracy is alive and well in fantasy novels set in modern-day Canada and the U.S.

And in the stories, this is always treated as good, or at the very least absolutely necessary. There's usually a hand-waved explanation that either us plebes would have our puny minds blown by the existence of magic and monsters, or we'd be jealous and try to destroy the people who can do magic.

In other words, some people -- special people -- are above accountability, and the more important their job, the more above accountability they need to be, to Do What Has To Be Done.

Again, much like the generally anti-democratic principles of epic fantasy, this view is entirely at odds with the values of a modern democratic society. We have learned, through painful experience, that the only thing that prevents power from being abused, that keeps the public good being advanced, is openness, transparency and accountability. People who believe they need to wield their power in secret, without scrutiny, tend to be at best tragically mistaken.

Christine McCall, and the other heroes of Cold Iron Badge, are police officers. They live in a world that's very like our own -- except, as Christine has pointed out, on a strange day not very many years before, the gates to Fairyland opened, and magic returned. But that event, although it shook the world, did not bring down civilization or destroy democratic institutions.

The Borderland Guard aren't conventional cops by a long shot, but they have many of the same responsibilities. There are crimes to investigate, a border to patrol, and people to protect -- or try to. And being a police officer, in contemporary Canada, means being a member of an organization that is (sometimes more in theory than in practice) accountable to democratic institutions. It means accountability.

This is not terribly innovative; it's not the first time it's been done in a story. It also isn't going to be immediately relevant to the plot... not for a while.

But it's important to me, and something I felt was worth exploring. Democracy gets short shrift too often in fantasy, but democracy is better than rule by monarchs or aristocrats, and in a democracy, power is supposed to be used for the public good by people who are accountable to the public.

Magic doesn't have to be a secret, and monster hunters don't have to be a shadowy conspiracy keeping us ignorant for our own good. In Cold Iron Badge, the monster hunters aren't just responsible for the people they protect; they're accountable to them as well.