How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (16 page)

Do recall the difference between metaphor, simile, and analogy. Similes and analogies, which explicitly state that one thing
is like
another thing, are still available; it’s only metaphors, which state that one thing is another thing, that are forbidden. “You could treat Howard Merkle like dirt and he’d still come fawning back to you, just like a whipped dog,” a simile, is perfectly clear and usable in speculative fiction, whereas the metaphor “Howard Merlde was a dog, always eager to please no matter how you

treated him” is problematical early in a speculative fiction story, because it
could
be taken literally.

Also, beware of analogies that remove the reader from the milieu of the story and remind him of the present time. “The aliens had facial structures like eyebrows, only arched in an exaggerated way, so they walked around looking like a McDonald’s advertisement.” This sentence would be fine in a near-future story about contact with aliens; McDonald’s would presumably still be around. But the same sentence would be quite out of place if the story were set in a time and place so different from our own that the characters do not have McDonald’s restaurants as part of their daily experience. In that case, such a sentence is clearly the writer talking to the contemporary American reader, not the narrator creating the experience of another time and place. And it’s almost worse if you try to compensate for this dislocation by malting it explicit: “The aliens’ eyebrows arched like the logo of that ancient fast-food restaurant, McDonald’s, which Pyotr had seen once in a history book about the twentieth century on Earth.” This sort of thing throws the reader right out of the story. There’s a natural impulse to compare something strange to something that will be familiar to the reader-but as a general rule you should use only similes and analogies that would also be available to the characters in the story, so that the entire experience of reading contributes to the illusion of being in the story’s milieu.

Piquing our interest.
All this, and we’re only one sentence into Wild Seed! Remember, though, that while it takes pages to explicate all the processes going on here, the sentence takes only a moment to read; most of these processes are quite unconscious, and while Butler certainly chose this sentence carefully, many of the things that are right about it are simply good habits that she instinctively follows-like immediately naming the viewpoint character and not naming a character whose name is unknown to the viewpoint character.

But you can also be certain that she thought carefully before choosing the term “seed village,” to make sure that it was evocative and interesting. It is the mysteriousness of that term that first piques our interest, that makes us wonder, “Who is Doro? What is it he’s trying to grow? In what sense is this village his?” Without that term, all we’re left with is the much less intriguing mystery of who “the woman” is.

Mystery? Is
Wild Seed
an Idea Story? Not at all. These “mysteries” are

very small,
and no time at all is spent on them. Doro isn’t wondering who the woman is or what a seed village is. He hasn’t met this woman yet, so we know that when he does meet her, our questions will be answered; and he already knows what a seed village is, so we fully expect that we will soon be informed as well. These are transient mysteries, part of the exposition process, not the kind of story-driving mystery that can give shape to an entire novel.

It’s important, especially at the beginning, that you reveal information that promises your reader an interesting story to come. Those promises must be honest ones that you intend to keep. Because Doro is set up as the kind of character who can somehow “own” villages, we see him as a bit larger than life-Butler definitely will deliver on this promise. And the concept of seed villages is absolutely central to the story; it isn’t a trivial bit of strangeness to be tossed in and thrown away. In other words, Butler isn’t just giving us random but interesting information to fool us into going on-she’s giving us interesting information that is vital to the story.

A
workshop in exposition.
Let’s go on now with the entire opening paragraph of
Wild Seed:

Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left
of
one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mudwalled place surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized even before he reached it that its people were gone. Slavers had been to it before him. With their guns and their greed, they had undone in a few hours the work
of
a thousand years. Those villagers they had not herded away, they had slaughtered. Doro found human bones, hair, bits
of
desiccated flesh missed by scavengers. He stood over a very small skeleton-the bones
of
a child-and wondered where the survivors had been taken. Which country or New World colony? How far would he have to travel to find the remnants of what had been a
healthy, vigorous people?

What do we learn in this paragraph? First, the immediate situation is absolutely clearwe aren’t wondering what’s happening. Doro has come to one of his seed villages and finds all the people gone-either dead or taken off into slavery-and he now is thinking about going to find the survivors.

The immediate situation is powerful. The image of the bones and hair and bits of flesh, the small skeleton of a murdered child-these arouse a sense of loss and outrage in us, even when we hear about such things happening to strangers. There are good guys and bad guys already being sorted out in our minds: The slavers are bad and the villagers are their innocent victims.

But this is still only part of what Butler is telling us in this paragraph. Many other things are hinted, things that we may not consciously pick up but which are nevertheless working on us unconsciously; they are the foundation on which we’ll build the rest of the story and the rest of the world of this book.

For instance, we are getting a sense of the time frame of the story. The village is mud-walled, which suggests a pre-technological society-but the slavers have guns, a key piece of information that tells us that if the story takes place on Earth, it is set in fairly recent times. By the end of the paragraph, Butler’s reference to New World colonies gives us the strong implication that the story is set on Earth during the era when there was a market for slaves in the New World; and that means that this village is almost certainly in Africa. (“New World” might also be taken literally, as another planet, but the feel of the story so far is low-tech, and so a spacefaring culture is not our first assumption.) All these inferences are confirmed by later information, so that readers who don’t get all this from the first are not abandoned-but the fact remains that Butler has essentially set the time and place for us within the first paragraph and without stopping the action to tell us outright that we are in Africa in the slave-trading era.

Even more important is the information we’re given about Doro. The fact that he regards a mud-walled village as “comfortable” tells us that he doesn’t feel at all out of place in primitive settings and that he can feel at home in one of “his” villages.

Doro also knew that the people were gone
before
he reached the village. How did he know it? He might have observed that there was no one working in the fields; he might have noticed it because there was none of the usual noise of the village. Butler doesn’t tell us how he knows, though, so the possibility remains open that his knowledge is not based on the normal means of ascertaining such things. The reader may or may not notice it, but the implication is there.

We get Doro’s attitude toward the slavers-he thinks of them as

greedy- but then as Doro observes the village, as we are shown the bones and hair and bits of flesh, the child’s skeleton, what surprises us is his lack of appropriate emotion. Standing over the skeleton, he doesn’t wonder who the child was, doesn’t grieve at all, doesn’t even think with outrage of the inhumanity of the butcherous slavers. Instead he wonders where and how far the survivors have been taken. And his wondering is not sympathetic (“He imagined their terror as they were dragged away from the screams of their dying loved ones …”/, but wholly practical: “How far would he have to travel?” Even his memory of the people is the way a man remembers a valued but unloved animal: “A healthy, vigorous people.” The phrase “his seed villages” begins to be clarified: Doro is the farmer, and the human beings themselves are his crop.

The next two paragraphs tell us that Doro is not unemotional-but confirms that his relationship with other people is indeed strange:

Finally, he stumbled away from the ruins bitterly angry, not knowing
or caring where he went. It was a matter of pride with him that he

protected his own. Not the individuals, perhaps, but the groups. They gave him their loyalty, their obedience, and he protected them. He had failed.

It’s his pride that is injured; he hates failing. His affections are not for individuals, but rather for groups. It was the village as a whole that he cared for, not the people. He really is just like a farmer, who would hardly notice the death of a few stalks of wheat but would be bitterly angry at the destruction of an entire field.

Yet in the strength of his emotions, he does stumble away, not knowing or caring where he goes. So while he doesn’t relate to other people in a natural way and clearly regards them as being less than he, like a flock or a field, he is still human himself, after a fashion. It is possible to understand at least some of his feelings. He is at once strange and familiar.

It is in the fourth paragraph that we are given the final bit of information about Doro that tells us exactly how strange he is:

He wandered southwest toward the forest, leaving as he had ar-
rived-alone, unarmed, without supplies, accepting the savanna and
later the forest as easily as he accepted any terrain. He was killed several
times-by disease, by animals, by hostile people. This was a harsh land.
Yet he continued to move southwest, unthinkingly veering away from
the section of the coast where his ship awaited him. After a while, he
realized it was no longer his anger at the loss of his seed village that
drove him. It was something new-an impulse, a feeling, a kind of
mental undertow pulling at him. He could have resisted it easily, but
he did not. He felt there was something for him farther on, a little
farther, just ahead. He trusted such feelings.

Notice how casually Butler lays in the information that he is killed more than once. She doesn’t make a big deal about it, because to Doro being killed isn’t terribly important. But to us it is, and the very fact that Doro can be killed several times and still continue to move southwest tells us that he is very strange indeed. He looks down on human beings like crops or herds because he is, somehow, immortal, able to be killed and yet go on.

We know now that he owns a ship and that its crew expects to meet him at a prearranged place-this suggests what we will eventually discover is a network of servants and possessions that reaches all around the world.

We also know that he is sensitive to sources of information that normal people just don’t have-he is drawn by a “mental undertow” and willingly goes along with it because he trusts such feelings. Obviously, he’s had experiences like this before.

And because Butler is one of the best writers of sf during a time when there are many very good ones, this whole passage is imbued with emotions and we are carried along by language that flows and swirls with grace and power.

Two paragraphs later, after a line space (on a manuscript, you mark such spaces with an asterisk), she changes point of view. Now we’re seeing what’s going on through the eyes and mind of a woman named Anyanwu. Naturally, if we remember the reference to “the woman” in the first sentence, we assume that Anyanwu is that woman-and we are correct. A good writer like Butler would never confuse us by leading us to incorrect assumptions.

We soon realize that Anyanwu is, in her own way, as strange and remarkable as Doro. First, we know that she is capable of lulling-she once killed seven men who were stalling her with machetes-but that she regrets it and regards lulling as a terrible thing to be avoided when possible.

She is aware of a lone intruder now, prowling the underbrush near her.

we immediately assume-again correctly-that this is Doro, though of course Butler can’t say so because Anyanvru doesn’t know him yet. Anyanwu is still “the woman” to Doro; Doro is still “the intruder” to Anyanwu.

We also learn that Anyanwu is a healer, and that “often she needed no medicines, but she kept that to herself”-so she, too, has some kind of transcendent power. Like Doro, she thinks of the people of her village as “her” people-but they are not just one village among many, and she doesn’t just come to pay a visit now and then. She lives among them; she serves them by healing them and also by allowing them to spread stories about her healing powers, so they can profit when people from other villages come to her to be healed.