Tag Archives: mythopoesis

Who Is John Demetrius?

21 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in My Fiction, Stories

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Photo Credit: Tina Negus

The last thing I had published–the last thing I’ve had published in a very long time, it feels like to me–is a story called “The Daughters of John Demetrius” in the October issue of Analog. (I know that October was only a month ago, but I usually date my publications by the date an editor accepts them, rather than when the story actually appears in print, and I haven’t had anything accepted for publication since April). I was trying something new with this story, working to reduce the infodump and the throat-clearing that I think can be a weakness of my work. So, while there’s quite a backstory to the characters and the setting (near-future northern Mexico), I deliberately left a lot unsaid or only hinted at.

And, while quite a few people seem to like the story, the reviews I’ve gotten often complain of the backstory and setting being not fleshed out enough. As Greg Hullender at Rocket Stack Rank charitably puts it, “There seems to be a well-developed world behind this little story, and it definitely leaves you wanting to know more about it.”

I feel a bit as though I failed to hit the sweet spot with this story–while reminding myself, as always, that no story is to everybody’s taste. But Hullender and other reviewers are right: there is a world behind the story. Last month’s Analog piece is one of four stories I’ve written that I refer to as “John Demetrius Stories.” They don’t fit into a single narrative–I’m not planning to make them into a single narrative, anyway–and the first two I wrote are not intended for publication, but I do think that I have a story cycle growing in my mind that centers around the character of John Demetrius.

Who is John Demetrius? Well, I’m not entirely sure myself. The character came to me after the death of my brother Dave, and I  wrote the first story with the idea of John Demetrius as a loose fictionalization of my brother. The loose fictionalization has gotten looser and looser over time, to the point that John Demetrius is my brother as he might visit me in dreams today.

I will say this: John Demetrius was a brilliant genetic engineer from a few generations before the story cycle takes place. He experimented on his own genome, he became an utter pacifist, and he wandered out of America into the south, siring children and coming to be regarded after his disappearance as some kind of spiritual master. He is, for the characters in the stories, a legendary figure whose real identity has been obscured by years of cultural accretions and appropriations of his name for all kinds of political purposes. Mythologically, he’s a reworking of the Green Man myth, a cousin of Tom Bombadil and Osiris and Jesus.

And that’s all I will say. “The Daughters of John Demetrius” is available in October’s Analog. I have another John Demetrius story, “Proteus,” which I hope to refine as soon as the current draft of Pacifica is finished. I have more ideas after that. If I can get a few of them published, I might even try to stitch them together into a single cycle: The John Demetrius Stories.

On the Popularity of Vampires and Zombies

10 Saturday Oct 2015

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For my first post in three months, I’ve been wondering what accounts for the popularity over the last ten years or so for vampires and zombies in genre literature. Of all the monster archetypes that seem to say something about the human predicament–the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character, Frankenstein’s creature, the cosmic hostility of Cthulhu–I’ve seen more vampire and zombie books, movies, video games, Happy Meal toys, and cutesy merchandise than for any other monster.

I say this knowing that vampires have largely passed from the flow tide popularity they had during the heady days of the Twilight Industrial Complex. But Twilight was really just a recapitulation of the energy of the Anne Rice books and movies that had been popular 20 years before. I fully expect that a few years from now there will be another vampire fad, hopefully less annoying than Twilight, but still mining the anxieties and desires that the vampire represents for us.

My tentative conclusion is that both zombies and vampires are about exploitation. What resonates with us, I think, is that modern people are dimly aware of–and anxious about–having been domesticated. The modern American is in some ways as domesticated as cattle and laying hens: our time is strictly managed by school and work, our food comes to us pre-processed (and often pre-cooked and practically pre-digested), and we are all taken advantage of, to a lesser or greater degree, by companies and agencies and authorities that understand human psychology and probability and algorithms better than we do.

In other words, we see ourselves in the zombie: the zombie is in a kind of un-life, a feeling people are all too familiar with after binge watching a TV show for 14 hours (or playing X-box or trolling YouTube or Facebook for 14 hours). In the vampire, we see the exploiter: the advertisers and employers and investment bankers whom we perceive to be insatiable for our money and our labor. We vote and play the lottery and pay our insurance premiums, all while being dimly aware that those asking for our votes or advertising the lottery are playing us for suckers, figuratively sucking us dry. Perhaps we are unconsciously anxious about the power the exploiter (the vampire) has over us, as well as of the chaos and misery to come when the exploited (the zombies) turn their indiscriminate and poorly thought-out hatred on the world. As a community college English teacher not so far from Umpqua Community College, where an ordinary English class ended very badly last week, I’ve been thinking more than I usually do about young men’s poorly thought-out hatred.

I’m genuinely curious, though, about why these monster types have such staying power with us. The Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character, or Frankenstein’s creature, both seem just as relevant to me as the vampire and the zombie, yet neither of the first two have anything like the resonance of the zombie to us today. I suppose one could make the argument that our AI fears, as represented in Ex Machina or Blade Runner or 2001, are our modern reworking of the Frankenstein myth. Even if true, though, zombies are still more popular right now. Why?

Why Fantasy?

17 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in My Fiction

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When people ask what I write, I almost always say science fiction. I almost never say fantasy, even though in many ways fantasy is my first love, going all the way back to reading The Hobbit and Watership Down and Roald Dahl when I was a kid. I’ve wondered lately why that is: am I embarrassed that I read and write and teach fantasy fiction?

In spite of all the blessings of nerd culture entering the mainstream, I guess I do feel more guarded about my love of fantasy. Both fantasy and sci-fi are snobbishly dismissed as escapist genre writing by some who have a very specific, Harold Bloomish notion of what literature is (I say “Bloomish” because the real Harold Bloom has been a vocal supporter of the work of fantasists like John Crowley and Ursula LeGuin). But even in the realm of nerd fiction, I get the impression that it’s more popularly acceptable for adults to be into science fiction than into fantasy. Perhaps that’s changed in the current market of the Lord of the Rings-Industrial- Complex and Game of Thrones. But I think there’s still a residual shame for many folks about their love of fantasy. Science fiction is about heavy, heady ideas: the ethics of progress, the shape we want our future to take. What’s fantasy about? Dragons?

podcastleHere’s an answer that took me a while to come to, but which makes me more ready to tell strangers that I write fantasy: fantasy–if it’s good–looks at the human experience sideways. All art is about what it means to be human, but fantasy (like surrealism or avant-garde music) takes a look at the human experience from an oblique angle, representing our fears and desires as creatures and powers that don’t exist in the everyday. This is what mythical stories did for earlier people, and fantasy for me is an attempt to apply mythical thinking to fiction, in a world where change comes too quickly and radically for traditional myth-making structures to keep up.

I’ve definitely written more science fiction than fantasy, but this last week I had a fantasy story picked up at the first place I’d sent it (PodCastle, the amazing fantasy podcast). I’m excited to hear it read, and to have others hear it, and I’m ready to say to people, when they ask, that I write science fiction and fantasy, and to be able to say why I do.