“Your wish may be granted. Blackhand wants me to forge a letter from some obscure lord no one’s ever heard of that’ll get your Murdering Bastard into the Emperor’s Guard.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course I can!”

“You going to?”

Seth caught Fings’ eye. When he was quite sure he had it, he dragged it to his tray of sodden pastries and then gave Fings a baleful look. “Blackhand asked nicely. What do you think?”

What he could have been doing – what he should have been doing if his life hadn’t abruptly turned into an ash-heap six months ago – was sitting in the nice warm undercroft of a nice cosy temple in front of a nice hot fire. What he should have been doing was putting his feet up, toasting his toes, sipping warm spiced wine and chewing the fat with other senior novices and junior priests, discussing politics, theology and which of the fat old Lightbringers who lorded it over them was the most likely to drop dead before winter ended. He missed that. Truth be told, he missed that a lot.

“Don’t read the forbidden books.” What do you do? Read the forbidden books. “Don’t sneak into the forbidden crypt.” What do you do? Fuck about in the forbidden crypt. “Definitely don’t go into the forbidden catacombs.” What do you do? Not that they’d caught him on the last one.

Of course, no one had said that all these things were forbidden, exactly. That was the galling part. A novice was simply supposed to know by some trick of divine telepathy, and then be a good little cleric and not do them.

But you did know. You knew perfectly well.

All he’d ever wanted was to serve the Sun. To understand the four Divinities.

Yes, and if you’d managed to do as you were bloody well told for five minutes, maybe that’s exactly what would have happened, eh? What you wanted, you cretin, was a little patience.

The end of a lifetime of dreams. There wasn’t even a shred of injustice to it. Warning after warning and he hadn’t stopped. Didn’t even know why, not really. He just… couldn’t.

“I hope you’re fleecing him,” said Fings.

Across the archery field, Sulfane was running from the stump of a tree. Seth watched as he vaulted onto a low platform and fired at one of the targets. He looked very determined. Dynamic. Intense. All good qualities a soldier was supposed to have, Seth supposed. He wasn’t sure where being as mad as a bag of spiders fitted, whether that was good or bad or whether it simply didn’t matter when you were standing in front of a thousand armoured horses bearing down on you at a gallop. Probably helped, didn’t it?

“I said I hope you’re fleecing him.”

“Blackhand? You must be joking.”

<p2>I’ve been this way for as long as can remember. As a child, blissfully ignorant that I was different from anyone else, steadily more aware through my teens of how it made me special. It did feel like a gift back then, the way I could summon any moment of my life and live it again, fresh and bright and with nothing faded. Tests and exams were easy. I could remember – can remember, even now – everything my teachers said in the classroom.

And then boys. The day I first saw Declan. The look in his eye, the first words he ever spoke to me, the first time we kissed; that first summer when we discovered each other, the sense of a love that went far beyond anything I’ll find again. Even now, after a bad day, I can lie awake and relive those memories and it’s all as vivid as ever: the colour and the joy, the anticipation, the love that brings tears to my eyes. My mind is wired differently from yours. The doctors have a name for it and there are only a handful of people in the world who live their lives as I do.

But a blessing?

Imagine the moments that broke your heart and crushed you flat. A loss, a humiliation, a betrayal. Imagine every slight, every rejection, every disappointment, all kept polished for safe keeping in a little chest inside you. Imagine the things you did and wish you hadn’t; every word spoken or received in anger; every regret as fresh as the moment it was made. Imagine every mistake and all the words never said that might have changed your life. Imagine them forever lurking, never knowing when they might steal out and take you.

A gift?

They say that time heals, but for me it festers. Where your scars fade, mine stay raw. On good days, my memory will take me to places that others can only dream of finding. On bad days, it rips the soul from my chest and shreds it in front of me.

Right now . . . ?

Right now, the phone is ringing. My hand hovers over the receiver. Whatever happens next, I will remember its every detail for the rest of my life.

I close my eyes and force myself to breathe.

It’s been a long, long day and I have a sense that something terrible is coming.

“In prose sometimes as elegant as a gold and glass airship, or as stark as a dragon destroying an entire city, the worlds Deas carefully built in his previous Memories of Flames novels are slowly torn apart. Bellepheros, Grand Master of the alchemists’ Order of the Scales, is kidnapped by Taiytakei slavers so their sea lords can exploit his control over immortal dragons. They need a dragon rider, so they capture the fallen dragon queen Zafir. The Taiytakei have also enslaved Tuuran, former soldier in the Adamantine Order that answered to Zafir, and Berren the Crowntaker, a warrior cast into another’s body through sorcery. Bellepheros is charmed by the compassionate witch Chay-Liang into building a dragon eyrie, Berren seeks to undo his curse with the help of Tuuran’s skills and companionship, and revenge-bent Zafir swears to destroy all Taiytakei everywhere with her dragon, Diamond Eye. All of them race toward a major clash that may appear in future books but is only hinted at in this installment. Deas’s dense tale unfurls a fantastic multiverse where a queen can become a slave but a slave can change worlds.”

It’s been a while since I got excited by a review, but for Publishers Weekly I make an exception.

There is no warmth in the ancient fortress of the Pinnacles, timeless bastion against the dragons. The dragon-rider Hyrkallan is a harsh king with a loathing venom for all who practise alchemy. His consort is the mad queen Jaslyn, who once woke a hatchling dragon because she thought there could be peace between men and dragons without the poison of alchemy, a madness that came to her after Speaker Zafir beheaded her mother. The union between this king and queen once carried the desert realms of the north to war and victory, but there is neither love nor desire nor affection between them. Hyrkallan dreams of glories he will never see returned. Queen Jaslyn thinks of the simple things she cannot have. To be with her sister Lystra. To be with a dragon and fly once more. To be left alone and never be touched.

Together and apart Hyrkallan and his queen lay tattered claim to realms now ruled by monsters. They make their home with a thousand souls inside the Moonlit Mountain, above the fire-gutted dragon-wrecked majesty that was once the Silver City. Safe within their fortress they search the endless tunnels for relics of the Silver King, the ancient half-god sorcerer who once tamed dragons. It is said, in whispers, that the old queens of the Silver City were one by one driven mad by the half-god’s Enchanted Palace, whose white stone walls shimmer with their own inner light.
The last of those queens was Zafir, vanished when the dragons shattered their chains of alchemy.

The Black Moon has returned, Zafir is coming home and the dragons are waiting. Will anyone be able to stop them?

The Silver Kings is a direct sequel to The Splintered God. Read it on its own and it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or maybe it’s utterly wonderful, who knows. But it’s the tenth book in a series and draws on all of what has gone before, soI’d be surprised if it works well on its own.

Excerpt: in which Zafir returns to the world in which she was born.

Be honest: you’re not going to read this unless you’ve ready some of the rest, not the last volume of a series like this. And I’ll be honest too – nor should you. It won’t make a great deal of sense. So reviews are unexpected and largely by the by – at this point you’re either in or your out. But I’ll post them up as and when i stumble across them anyway.

“No one does dragons like Deas…” Upcoming4me

]]> http://www.stephendeas.com/the-silver-kings-june-2015/feed/ 3 http://www.stephendeas.com/hugos-puppies-and-terrorists-2042015/ http://www.stephendeas.com/hugos-puppies-and-terrorists-2042015/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2015 06:43:13 +0000 Stephen http://www.stephendeas.com/?p=4461 This is supposed to be a post about the Hugo slate, but I’m going to digress for a while first.

I grew up in England in the seventies and eighties. My memories of that time are of (among other things) a background noise of Irish terrorism. I lived in a conservative part of the country, both upper and lower case, and “terrorism” was universally how it was presented. A lot of people where I lived commuted into London to work. Occasionally a bomb went off. They hit train stations for a while, now and then, which is why there haven’t been any litter bins in London stations for a very long time. We didn’t talk about it much. It was a bad thing that was going on in the background. Occasionally my dad would be late home when he was working in London because of a bomb threat, but not all that often. Even when he worked in Northern Ireland for a few years, it was still background noise. It was only decades later that I put the pieces together. My dad was a chemist. His area of particular expertise was explosives (we still have some German chemistry textbooks from his days in university straight after the second world war, because back then Germany was the cutting edge when it came to blowing things up). He worked for the Ministry of Defence, for a while he worked in Northern Ireland. I’ll never know for sure because he’s gone now and so I can’t ask him, but for a while, somewhere in a lab using science, I think he hunted bomb-makers.

We rarely talked about it. It never intruded much on our lives. I was aware of it, and later, when I was older, I was aware of the causes and the grievances. My one and only point with all this, really, is that it didn’t change how we lived our lives, what we did, who we talked to, where we went or what we thought. The mantra of the times, whenever it came up in conversation, whether in politics around the dinner table, was that we should carry on as we were, keep on with our lives as though nothing was happening because otherwise the terrorists would win. I don’t know how well we really did that as a society at the time. I didn’t live in Northern Ireland, I’d heard about internment but I didn’t really know what it was; yet it seemed to me at the time, living in my rather narrow bubble as it was, that the philosophy, at least, was right. Looking back now, it seems that civilisation eventually succeeded. The terrorists changed many individual lives. The response of the state changed many lives too, and very little of it for the better, but in the grand scheme of things we didn’t fundamentally change. Thirty years on, people have largely stopped blowing each other up. The landscape is much the same, but for the most part there are words instead of violence.

In a way I have deep anxiety that we are losing this new so-called “war on terror.” This time we are letting it change us. We are letting it make us be afraid, and amid that fear we are shrinking the cage in which we live and giving away little pieces of the freedoms we have allowed ourselves. It’s an old adage in politics: fearful people are easier to control. I hope, thirty years from now, I’ll be able to look back and relax, to see that yes, we wobbled like we did before, but we got over it, and we didn’t let fear win, because fear is what lets monsters grow among us.

So look: the puppies of all various adjectives are not terrorists. They gamed the system, that’s all. And before anyone rushes to change that system, have a good long look around at all the other awards out there. The Hugos aren’t broken and they don’t really need fixing. You don’t like the slate? Go to Worldcon and vote no award. Threats of disrupting the awards for the rest of time are just that, threats. Don’t let fear or anger or outrage change us. It’s sad that people feel they have to be this way, but don’t try to shut them up and don’t try to keep them out, because that’s when some far worse monster slowly grows behind you.

The Villain with a Thousand Faces (Part Two): The One-Line Backstory

Yes, back again, so shut up and pay attention and I don’t care if you are on fire. Last time I deigned to share some wisdom on the nature of villains (antagonists, if you absolutely must) we cast an eye on the most common of villains, the cardboard cut-out shrub with no soul. These are basically the no-backstory villains who simply exist in order to rub your heroine up the wrong way and get hit round the head with an axe. Today our villains get slightly more sophisticated.

Note: again, for clarity – when I talk about villains here, what I actually mean are the antagoinists of a story – the people who get in the way of your central character doing what they damn well want. Everyone is the hero of their own story. If your hero is an angel then the demons are thevillains. If your hero is a demon then the angels are the villains.

The One-Line Backstory

Yes, they get some backstory, a whole line of it. Think of the difference! From nothing to a COMPLETE SENTENCE. It’s possible that the one-line backstory villain is more common than the total cardboard cut-out; in fact a lot of cardboard cut-out villains technically have a one-line backstory kicking about somewhere, but frankly, if your one-line backstory doesn’t actually have at least some bearing on or relevance to either the plot of your story or the motivations of your heroine, well then then WHY DID YOU WRITE IT? If your story is supposed to be about your heroine’s struggle to make a success of the small rural tavern inherited from a distant uncle with a dubious past, then relevant one-line backstories for the villain of the piece might be: “competing owner of the next tavern along the road who wants to make our heroine fail so that his own business succeeds,” or “former associate of said distant uncle with a dubious past who was involved in the same dubious goings on and thinks the tavern should be his,” or “bloke form same dubious past who has hidden secrets in the tavern that he wants to stay secret.” Even “heroine’s evil twin who just doesn’t like her,” while pretty lame, at least has a connection to the protagonist, if not to the actual story. “He’s just mean, ok,” isn’t a backstory. “He’s a demon from the 11^th dimension” IS a backstory, but unless being a demon from the 11^th dimension has some sort of relevance to either the history of the heroine or, better, the history of the uncle with the dubious past or of the tavern itself, being a demon from the 11^th dimension is actually irrelevant to both the heroine and the story and seems rather pointless and WHY DID YOU WRITE IT? I suggest that a one-line backstory that has no actual connection to the heroine or the main thrust of your story is not only a waste of time, it’s actually worse than doing nothing at all – you leave the reader trying to figure out what the backstory has to do with anything, and then they start questioning everything and picking at your worldbuilding and all sorts and it’s all downhill from there. A backstory that works, however – one that’s actually useful – fits seamlessly into the story and explains WHY the villain is the villain, why he stands in opposition to the heroine.

I have a mild OCD that means I like lists, so for no other reason than that, I’m arbitrarily going to create three categories of one-line backstory villains. Take it as read that these overlap somewhat, and there may be other one-line backstories that don’t fit into these categories, although if you find any you should keep very quiet because I don’t like to be wrong and I have a dragon.

The background-generic backstory

These are villains whose backstories are related to the global or at least general set-up of the world in which the story happens. We moved on a bit into the one-line backstory villains in the last part, with villains who are avatars of (or agents for) something else (the Big Bad, the Opposing Ideology). These are examples of background-generic backstories. They are not, usually tied to a specific individual, and there will likely be many villains at large in the world for whom the same one-line backstory is true. Hydra has many lieutenants; the Big Bad has lots of avatars; the world has plenty of avaricious slum-landlords/greedy bankers/serial killers/racist orc-haters/property developers/whatever to choose from, and the one in the story just happens to be the one with whom the the heroine crosses swords. In a story with many bad-guys, the generic one-liner can usefully serve to cover all the cannon fodder whose purpose is to show up, be humiliated by the heroine, and then conveniently expire.

The background-specific backstory

A rather more personal villain is one whose backstory is tied to something quite specific in the story’s setting. There are many slum landlords, but only one slum landlord for the tenement block in which the heroine lives, for example. There are many demons from the 11^th dimension, but only one whose secret true name which will damn them forever back to hell is hidden in a secret room in the cellars of the tavern the heroine has inherited from a distant uncle with a dubious past. A significant difference between the generic and the specific is that in the case of the generic villain, a new one can reasonably arise in place of the old with basically the same agenda and motivation and goals, whereas for the specific villain, doing so would feel somewhere between contrived and utterly ridiculous. A villain with this backstory will usually be properly unique.

The heroine-specific backstory

Even more personal. Again the villain is unique and has a backstory that sets him up as opposition to the heroine, but now it’s not to do with the world or setting or other outside circumstances, it’s directly related to the heroine herself. Something she’s done, something she’s going to to, something she’s trying to achieve, whatever it is, the villain’s opposition is personal right from the start. Arguably I should split this into generic and specific too – arguably the heroine could have done something in her past that has resulted in a whole slew of people having a personal grudge or vendetta against her (ratting out the mob, thwarting the schemes of Satan, exposing Tory party lies, or otherwise crossing some large body of organised villainy). However, that sort of generic-but-personal doesn’t fit terribly well with the rest of the argument I’m about to follow, so let’s just acknowledge that it theoretically exists, smile and wave, and then shove it back in its box; because even in the examples I’ve given, it usually comes back to one specific villain leading the charge (in fact, my favourite example from last time, The Terminator, could easily go either way, but a part of the strength of that story is how unrelentingly personal the attack is.

I’ve ordered these categories by increasing intimacy to the heroine. Different levels of intimacy fit with different styles of story-telling. If your story features a single heroine and is heavy on her character aspects, a villain who is intimately bound to her will fit better than a very generic villain. If your story is an ensemble piece with multiple heroines and a broad sweeping scope then a generic villain might fit better while a very specific villain might actually skew the narrative force towards a heroine who wasn’t supposed to steal the stage. Depends on how intimately your story focusses on your heroine(s), but matching the intimacy of the villain (whatever that actually means, but I think you get the vague idea) to the intimacy of the story will generally result in a smoother ride.

Generally. There are always exceptions. But one should only ever approach exceptions having first understood the rules to which they apply.

And here’s a proposition for you: is it possible that every memorable villain ever created can be reduced to a one-line backstory without losing their significance to their story? In fact, I challenge you find one that can’t[1]. No matter how simple or complex, subtle or blunt, that one line is a very powerful place to start, and you shouldn’t ever lose sight of it.

That’s almost it for today’s ponderous lecture. Worlds to conquer, castle to burn, protagonists to execute in inventive ways, that sort of thing. But before we part there’s a rather special cardboard cut-out villain that I forgot deliberately neglected last time and needs a little more attention: the scenery chewer.

The Scenery Chewer. What do I mean by that? Loki in The Avengers. Jeremy Irons in Dungeons and Dragons (and yes, that movie did exist, no matter how much you all might wish to pretend it didn’t. I acknowledge it for it’s dragons, which at least had a properly bad attitude, and for Jeremy Irons, who… never mind. Shut up). Alan Rickman in Prince of Thieves. Alan Rickman in Die Hard. Alan Rickman as Professor Snape. Alan Rickman in, well, you get the picture. Notice that every single example here is a movie, not a novel. That’s because I can’t think of a single novel with a good scenery-chewing villain in it where the villain isn’t actually a dominant character in the story. . . and, kids there’s a big clue for you, right there. Remember lesson one of being a *cardboard cut-out* villain (as opposed to the sort that’s actually a real person)? You exist as a foil for the protagonist. As far as the heroine is concerned, your purpose is to oppose her [2]. You are black to her white or white to her black. A good villain exists within a story just enough to define the heroine’s strength, virtue, ability to play pokemon, whatever it is that’s being tested, and no more. Their job done, the cardboard cut-out villain dies or otherwise conveniently buggers off until the next instalment. The clever cardboard cut-out villain may integrate himself into the fabric of the world somehow to improve his chances (as the Avatar of the Big Bad or the Nasty Ideology or some such), but his job is most certainly NOT to steal scenes, and that is what the scenery chewer does (and if he doesn’t then he’s not chewing well enough). So ask yourself, before your villain chews the scenery, what the point of it is? Is it a substitute for being interesting in some way that actually benefits the story? Because that’s bad, that is. Simply to be funny/cool/exciting? I suppose I won’t chide you for that, but do beware of the villain who moves from stealing the occasional scene to stealing the whole story, and for the love of Robert E Howard, don’t let him make your heroine look bland. General rule: it works in movies, it doesn’t work in books.

And yes, yes, next time I write I’ll talk about subtle, three-dimensional villains. They’re difficult and needs lots of precious thinking time. Worlds to burn, castles to execute in inventive ways, etc., ok?

This article first appeared on Fantasy Faction earlier this year. The penultimate chapter in Zafir’s story, The Splintered Gods is out in paperback now. The last volume, The Silver Kings will be published by Gollancz in June/July.

[1] I put several seconds of thought into this and I couldn’t think of any, which is good enough for me. Find one for me. I’ll secretly be impressed while my dragon eats you.

[2] Not all stories are about the heroine. More on that next time. And there are ensemble pieces. But your basic story is hero/heroine vs. villain, and you are advised to understand how that works even if you choose to move away from it.

Last week I self-published a short story through Amazon. Here it is. It’s a story that appeared in the BFS anthology Unexpected Journeys published for World Fantasycon 2013. It’s about six thousand words. Problems I encountered with this first pipe-cleaning exercise

• I haven’t figured out how to make it available for free. Yet. It’s free if you’re signed up to Kindle Unlimited
• Getting a cover sorted out can be something of an arse. Note the lack of author name and title. I also have no idea how well this cover art comes out on a kindle for reasons…
• If you download a sample from Amazon, you’ll see the paragraph indent formatting is all off. I believe I have fixed that. I believe I have uploaded the fixed file. I believe I did that about a week ago. Yet still the file Amazon shows as its sample is the original published upload (my first major mistake was publishing before the formatting was right in the belief that I could change it later).

So I’m kind of torn. I’d like you to download The Sin Eater so that someone can tell me whether the formatting and cover are now present and OK (they’re not on my version, but I bought the original and I can’t seem to get an update to happen). But on the other hand you shouldn’t be paying for something that isn’t formatted right. So don’t buy my book, but if you happen to be able to get it for free and happen to have a look, please do let me know whether the paragraph indents are fixed (and as of writing they’re still not fixed on the Read-A-Sample sample, so if that changes I’d like to know too!) and whether the cover downloads OK.

[UPDATE: The feedback I've had so far is that it's all fixed. So, um, DO buy my book after all...

Lessons learned. I'm in the process of getting another story ready. A story about Syannis the thief-taker, a sort of the-beginning-of-everything companion to go with the end-of-everything Silver Kings. Hopefully I'll do better.

Some new reviews have shown up. One of Empires that actually likes it! Hurrah!

“All round a cracking piece of fiction and something that a lot of Science Fiction fans can really get behind especially as the tales not only keep you hooked but leave you wondering throughout if mankind can triumph against such odds. Magic.”

I think, if I'm honest, the fairly ciritical SFX review was one of the most accurate. "One tenth Iain M Banks-lite … 90% is half urban thriller, half Michael Bay’s Transformers." I don't think that was meant in a good way, by the way, but for better or worse, it's on the nail. I note that Empires wasn't submitted for the Clarke award. Probably wise.

A new one up for The Royalist too.

“... an intriguing, drama-laden, heart-thumping crime thriller with historical accuracy and authenticity. I found myself sorely disappointed at the last page; not with the ending, but that it had ended!”

I struggle harder to find a critical alternate point of view with this one, but the guy on Amazon who doesn't like William Falkland for having a mindset that very accessible to modern thinking (as opposed to having a Seventeenth century mindset) has a point.

Anyway, I'm in an Empires frame of mind at the moment, so this week's giveaway is Robot Overlords by Gollancz's very own Mark Stay, who also wrote the script for the movie.

"The adults lost the war and now the kids must save the world! Robots rule the streets and the people are locked in their homes. Stepping outside risks being vaporised by a hulking Sentry or picked off by a lethal Sniper. Through the ruins of Britain a group of kids set out to join the Resistance. Hot on their heels however is their old teacher turned robot collaborator Mr Smythe."

The movie has a limited release in theatres and is on right now (Vue cinemas seem to be showing it), so there's some Easter viewing for you if you like 

Robot Overlords

Usual deal – comment on this post in some way before Sunday 5th  April and I’ll randomly select a lucky victim for a free copy. No one has complained (so far) about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, but it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far. Am currently a week behind with posting things.

The Villain with a Thousand Faces (Part One)

There’s been a lot of talk and discussion in these halls over the last months and years about the evolution of the fantasy hero, anti-hero, thing, whatever is the protagonist-du-jour. It’s all very interesting. There’s no doubt that a good story of any genre needs, almost without exception, a good central character or cast.

The protagonists, generally speaking, need to be characters the reader can cheer or boo for. They are, by definition, the champion or advocate of some cause which ought to be readily identifiable. Many protagonists are heroes, but not all. Some are out-and-out villains and gleefully so; but I’m not really here to talk about heroes and villains in some sort of moral sense, more to blow the trumpet for the oft-overlooked foil to the main character’s quest.

The thwarter of dreams, the denier of ambition, whether those dreams are of avarice or altruism. The antagonist. The one(s) who stand against. The obstacles to the hero getting the girl (yawn) or establishing her dominion over all she surveys (much better). It is true, I’m afraid, that most antagonists are also cast as villains, while most protagonists are cast as heroes; and I put it to you that this is the voice of history rearing its ugly head. Whoever she is, the protagonist is the hero of her own story, and the villains, frankly, are whoever get in the way. Write your motives as pure or base as you like, that’s still what it comes down to. In my story, I am the hero. In many others, I am the villain; and for the purposes of the rest of all of this, I’m going to talk about heroes and villains instead of pro- and antagonists, because “hero” and “villain” are much blunter words and I like them.

The Cardboard Cut-Out Shrub With No Soul

Villains, then. Let’s start with the easiest: The Cardboard Cut-Out Shrub With No Soul, also often referred to as the cartoon villain or sometimes the comic-book villain (a disservice to many comic books). The cartoon villain is easily recognisable. He has no personality, no discernible motivations or desires except the one that makes him the villain. There is no nuance, no subtlety, no particular effort at rationale or explanation. He is simply the villain, doing bad things, against which the heroine or heroines must pit themselves and overcome. At this point, some of you will no doubt be ready to laugh and scoff and point and jeer at the idea of an utterly shallow and two-dimensional villain. You couldn’t get away with writing a hero like that, after all.

But really? Bite back your shameful cackling and remember this: a villain serves a different purpose. A villain is there to provide obstacles to the heroine. To some extent, the depth of the heroine’s resolve is revealed only by the villainy of the villain, by his strength and power, not by how much backstory he has. Writers use these cookie-cutter villains all the time. Guardians of the Galaxy: Ronan the Accuser and Thanos. Cardboard Cut-Out Shrubs With No Soul, both of them. A lot of super-hero movies, in fact (the better villains get some personality, but we’ll come to that later). Many action stories, war stories, cardboard cut-out villains are used all over the place, all the time, by good competent writers, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. They can’t carry much weight in a story, but that’s sort of the point: if you want as much time and focus on the protagonists as possible, a complex villain only gets in the way. So don’t be afraid to use the cardboard cut-out shrub. I can even find one in Game of Thrones if you like (Gregor Clegane), so note that even the great Martin, antithesis of cardboard cut-out characters, still uses them now and then.

There’s a possibly apocryphal story of a convention panel where one of the panellists got a bit sniffy about the Lord of the Rings, pointing out that at least his/her villains had some sort of reason / motivation / backstory, only to be given a righteous smackdown by the rest of the panel. I don’t know if it’s true, but if anyone has any doubts as to the potential of the cardboard cut-out villain, I give you two of the most widely recognised fantasy villains: Smaug and Sauron. Free from personality and backstory [2], but do they work as villains? Hell yes. And are you going to tell me that the Terminator wasn’t a good villain? Are you going to tell me he was anything but one-dimensional? Being one-dimensional was his whole point, wasn’t it?

Yes, a story with a cardboard cut-out hero or heroine is likely to be pretty lame, but a cardboard cut-out villain can work just fine. It’s both a pitfall and a strength of this villain is that they’re black and white. Their opposition to the goals of the heroine needs to be direct and straightforward and instantly recognisable, something a reader can easily understand. The heroine must carry all the drama of the story through how she overcomes the challenges, internal, external, whatever, necessary to force a final confrontation of some sort and then either fail or prevail.

Cardboard cut-outs don’t leave much wriggle room for twists at the end – they can’t suddenly be persuaded or redeemed because things like that (to be done well, at least) require foreshadowing and some crack in their armour or beliefs into which the heroine can insert a lever, and to make that work they need to have a little more depth. Darth Vader is arguably a cardboard cut-out villain in Star Wars, but the story moves him well away from that long before the end of Return of the Jedi, and rightly so. Nevertheless, if you want a story heavily focussed on the character of the hero or heroine, you might do better to ask “why not?” than “why?” when it comes to the cardboard cut-out villain.

The Cardboard Cut-Out Avatar of The Big Bad

I was a little cheaty with my examples before. Live with it. Villains cheat, lie, and twist the truth. So do heroes, but they try to pretend they’re better than us. None of my examples were actually human, and that leads me on to another kind of villain – the inexplicable thing that threatens the heroine (or her society, culture, beliefs, blah blah whatever, just as long as we’re all clear that threatening can be anything from poking a knife at me to refusing to accept my dominion of all I survey – and from the back of a dragon I can survey a long damn way). No one considers attempting to argue or debate or negotiate with Sauron because Sauron simply IS the Big Bad. I can’t think of a better example of this sort of villain than the Terminator: it’s here to kill you, it cannot be reasoned with, bargained with, and it absolutely will not stop until one of you is dead.

The Big Bad can be aliens, supernatural forces, you can go all the way with this to volcanoes, a virus or mutating neutrinos if you like, although some of these are more or less likely to have a some form of avatar as a focal point of their villain-ness. The point is that the Big Bad is coming from somewhere so different that effective communication, even if anyone wanted to, isn’t viable, and the avatar reflects exactly that (doubts or inner conflict push our villain out of the cardboard cut-out collection and into the more complex sort I’ll witter about some other time). To make this sort of villain work well it helps for the Big Bad to be integrated into the fabric of the setting.

Sauron is a distant implacable villain, but the history of his presence throughout the world is felt, deeply ingrained and permeates almost everything. He is a part of Middle Earth’s history. He belongs there, and that’s why he works. Further, even if the Big Bad is an implacable alien force, its avatar can still have a human face and the conflict can still be personal. Cthulhu’s priests might want to take over the world, but they can also kidnap and sacrifice the heroine’s boyfriend while they’re at it [3].

I come back to the Terminator, which executes this villain perfectly: the movie is quickly and unswervingly centred around the premise of a time-travelling killer; although the Big Bad is an AI that hasn’t even been built yet, it’s avatar Arnie is both a nigh unstoppable force that cannot be reasoned with and has a human [4] face; and best of all the conflict is made as simple and personal as a conflict can possibly be. Sarah Conner is battling for the fate of the world, true, but what makes the Terminator so visceral is that as far as she’s concerned she’s battling for her own survival. One of them has to die and there’s no other way.

Cardboard Cut-Out Avatar of Some Other Ideology

There’s another variant that I don’t see much in fantasy, which is the Cardboard Cut-Out Avatar of Some Other Ideology. Particularly in genre writing, ideological conflicts (and thus villains) are fairly well represented, but if the story is about ideological differences then its villains are unlikely to manage to stay properly two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, and nor should they.

Elsewhere the story is different. Anything with Nazis, for example. Robert Redford in The Winter Soldier (and if that’s a spoiler, I don’t care. Psychotic bitch-queen from hell, remember?). I’ll come to more complex ideological villains some other time, but for the simple cardboard ones work The Ideology works much the same way as the Big Bad. You just need it to be an ideology that’s easily recognisable and be prepared to cast it as the Big Bad without much thought.

That’s it for this instalment; but before you go back to Twitter, carry this thought with you. Complex villains might sound great, but 95% [5] of story villains are cardboard cut-outs and FOR GOOD REASON: the stories in which they appear aren’t about them, they’re about the hero or the heroine, and every second of page-time spent turning your villain into something more is page-time you could have spent on the person your story is supposedly about.

This article first appeared on Fantasy Faction back in Autumn last year. The penultimate chapter in Zafir’s story, The Splintered Gods is out in paperback now. The last volume, The Silver Kings will be published by Gollancz in June/July.

Wait, what? I’m supposed to give a book away? I’m not giving away one of mine – you can damn well buy it because I’m worth it. You can have that loser Falkland and his silly civil war stuff if you like, but only if you promise to review it and say pretty things on Amazon and Goodreads and all that. About me, not about him.

Usual deal – comment on this post in some way before Sunday 23^rd March and I’ll randomly select a lucky victim for a free copy of The Royalist. No one has complained (so far) about how long it takes me to get to the post office and post things, but it can take a while and if you live abroad then it can take even longer. Sorry about that, but they do get there eventually. Well, so far. Am currently up to date with posting things.

[1] or food, if your point of view is that of a dragon, but they think that about everyone.

[2] Dear pedants, yes, I realise there is more in what I shall call the secondary material. Writing a lengthy biography of your villain as supplementary material and sticking it on the internet doesn’t count.

[3] For the sake of the story, she’s pissed about this.

[4] ish…

[5] This is a guess but I have a dragon so it’s also right and shut up.

]]> http://www.stephendeas.com/villains-part-one-1532015/feed/ 11 http://www.stephendeas.com/the-crimson-shield-chapter-one/ http://www.stephendeas.com/the-crimson-shield-chapter-one/#comments Sun, 16 Nov 2014 15:19:13 +0000 Stephen http://www.stephendeas.com/?p=4132 Sarvic turned to run. A Vathan spear reached for him. Gallow chopped it away; and then he was slipping back and the whole line was falling apart and the Vathen were pressing forward, pushed by the ranks behind them, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen.

For a moment the dead slowed them. Gallow turned and threw himself away from the Vathan shields. The earth under his feet was slick, ground to mud by the press of boots and watered with blood and sweat. A spear point hit him in the back like a kick from a horse. He staggered and slipped but kept on running as fast as he could. If the blow had pierced his mail he’d find out soon enough. The rest of the Marroc were scattering, fleeing down the back of the hill with the roars of the Vathen right behind. Javelots and stones rained around him but he didn’t look back. Didn’t dare, not yet.

He slowed for a moment to tuck his axe into his belt and scoop up a discarded spear. The Vathen had horsemen and a man with a spear could face a horse; and when at last he did snatch a glance over his shoulder, there they were, cresting the hill. They’d scythe through the fleeing Marroc and not one in ten would reach the safety of the trees because they were running in panic, not turning to face their enemy as they should. He’d seen all this before. The Vathen were good with their horses.

Sarvic was pelting empty-handed down the hill ahead of him. They’d never met before today and had no reason to be friends, but they’d stood together in the wall of shields and they’d both survived. Gallow caught him as the first Vathan rider drew back an arm to throw his javelot. He hurled himself at Sarvic’s legs, tumbling them both down the slope of the hill. Gallow rolled away, turned and rose to a crouch behind his shield. Other men had dropped theirs as they ran but that was folly.

The javelot hit his shield and almost knocked him over. Another rider galloped towards them. At the last moment Gallow raised his spear. The Vathan saw it too late. The point caught him in the belly and the other end wedged into the dirt and the rider flew out of his saddle, screaming, the spear driven right through him before the shaft snapped clean in two. Gallow wrenched the javelot from his shield. He forced another into Sarvic’s hand. There were plenty to be had. ‘Running won’t help you.’

More Vathen poured over the hill. Another galloped past and hurled his javelot, rattling Gallow’s shield. Gallow searched around, wild-eyed and frantic for any shelter. Further down the hill a knot of Marroc had held their nerve long enough to make a circle of spears. He raced towards them now, dragging Sarvic with him as the horsemen charged past. The shields opened to let him in and closed around him. He was a part of it without even thinking.

‘Wall and spears!’ Valaric? A fierce hope came with having men beside him again, shields locked together, even if they were nothing but a handful.

Another wave of Vathan horse swarmed past. The Marroc crouched in their circle, spears out like a hedgehog, poking over their shields. The horsemen thundered on. There were easier prey to catch but they threw their javelots anyway as they passed. The Marroc beside Gallow screamed and pitched forward.

‘You taught us this, Gallow, you Lhosir bastard,’ Valaric swore. ‘Curse these stunted hedge-born runts! Keep your shields high and your spears up and keep together, damn you!’

The Vathan foot soldiers were charging now, roaring and whooping. As the last riders passed, the circle of Marroc broke and sprinted for the woods. The air was hot and thick. Sweat trickled into Gallow’s eyes. The grass on the hill had been trampled flat and now gleamed bright in the sun. Bodies littered the ground close to the trees, scattered like armfuls of broken dolls where the Vathan horse had caught the Marroc rout. Hundreds of them pinned to the earth with javelots sticking up from their backs. There were Lhosir bodies too among the Marroc. Valaric pointed at one and laughed. ‘Not so invincible, eh?’

They reached the shadows of the wood and paused, gasping. Behind them the battlefield spread up the hill, dead men strewn in careless abandon. Crows already circled, waiting for the Vathen to finish so they could get on with some looting of their own. The moans and cries of the dying mixed with the shouts and hurrahs of the victors. Before long the dead would be stripped bare and the Vathen would move on.

‘Got to keep moving,’ Gallow said.

‘Shut your hole, forkbeard! They won’t follow us here.’ Valaric picked up his shield. He kicked a couple of Marroc who’d crouched against trees to catch their breath, glared at Sarvic and headed off again at a run. ‘A pox on you!’ he said as Gallow fell in step beside him. ‘They’ll move right on to Fedderhun and quick. They don’t care about us.’

But they still ran, a hard steady pace along whatever game trails they could find, putting as much distance as they could between them and the Vathen. Valaric only slowed when they ran out into a meadow surrounded by trees and by then they must have been a couple of miles from the battle. Far enough. The Marroc were gasping and soaked in sweat but they weren’t dead. There wouldn’t be many who’d stood in the shield wall on Lostring Hill who could say that.

The grass was up to their knees and filled with spring flowers and the air was alive with a heady scent. ‘Should be good enough,’ Valaric muttered. ‘We rest here for a bit then.’ He threw a snarl at Gallow. ‘This is the end of us now, forkbeard. After here it’s each to his own way, and you’re not welcome any more.’

‘Will you go to Fedderhun, Valaric?’

Valaric snorted. ‘There’s no walls. What’s the point? Fedderhun’s a fishing town. The Vathen will either burn it or they won’t and nothing you or I can do will change that. If your Lhosir prince wants a fight with the Vathen, I’ll be seeing to it that it’s not me and mine whose lives get crushed between you. I’ll be with my family.’

There wasn’t much to say to that. Old wounds were best left be. Gallow’s own children weren’t so many miles away either. And Arda; and they’d be safe if the Vathen went on to Fedderhun. He touched a hand to his chest and to the locket that hung on a chain around his neck, warm against his skin, buried beneath leather and mail. He could have been with them now, not here in a wood and stinking of sweat and blood. ‘I’m one of you now,’ he said, as much to himself as to Valaric.

Valaric snorted. ‘You’re never that, forkbeard.’

Gallow set down his spear and his shield and took off his helm, letting the air dry the sweat from his skin. ‘It’s still your land, Valaric.’

But Valaric shook his head. ‘Not any more.’

In a couple of weeks the SF novels Empires: Extraction and Empires: Infiltration come out. Like Elite: Wanted, these both have a colon in the title and are coming out under the name of Gavin Deas on account of having been co-written with Gavin Smith. Unlike Elite, we each got to do our own whole novel in Empires. Although most of the events are set in 2015, Extraction starts twenty years earlier, in Bosnia, in 1995, with the massacre of Srebenica (or at least a part of it). Around that time I was exchanging a few letters with a Slovenian girl I’d met on a train a couple of years before and who happened to be into the same music as I was, and yes, OK, Slovenia wasn’t Bosnia, but it wasn’t exactly Scotland either. We didn’t talk about what was happening to what was once Yugoslavia, but it shamed me later to realise how ignorant I was, which is why this week’s giveaway is the way it is.

It’s also quite sweary, that opening chapter. I’m sure there are genteel squaddies out there, but I haven’t met them yet.

Other news: here’s a review for Elite: Wanted…

“I’ve enjoyed “Wanted” much more than I was supposed to enjoy any tie-in novel. Deas and Smith spin a mightily interesting yarn and I’ve especially enjoyed the way personal lives of characters influenced their decisions and often completely changed the course of events. This is in spirit of the original Elite which was not about heroes as such – it was more about small people trying to find their place in an endless, violently merciless environment. Having said that, the story does end up rather abruptly. Final 30-40 pages are some of the finest sci-fi I’ve ever read and admittedly I wanted to read more.” Upcoming4me

And here’s a review for The Royalist…

“Deas … integrates history and narrative knowledgeably, with wisdom that shines through in Falkland’s voice based on his experience of the tragedy of war.” The Historical Novel Society

The rest of the last week was spent working on a third Nathan Hawke story, Dragon’s Reach, which is centred around Oribas and Achista and what happens when Gallow isn’t around and the forkbeads are out for their revenge.

Now to the giveaway:

The covers are a bit of a clue as to the content. I think they’re well suited for what’s inside. In Extraction, it’s basically badass aliens, snarky spaceships and sweary SAS men. I think Gav give Infiltration a slightly darker, edgier feel, but then the novels have their differences in what’s going on around each protagonist. If you like you that sort of thing, the way the two novels both mesh and work on their own is pretty cool.

This week’s giveaway is a copy of Extraction and Infiltration. There’s a possibility I can get Gavin to sign Infiltration so they’ll be a matched pair. You can read the first chapter of Extraction here.

Usual deal – comment on this post before November 16th  and I’ll randomly select a lucky victims for a free copy. This week’s “game” isn’t game, really, but I’d like to know what else we should remember, lest we all forget. Or if that’s too touchy or difficult a subject, just comment and say “hi”  to enter.