Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

Uncanny Censorship Essay & Writing POV

Cover of Uncanny Magazine issue 34Below you’ll find some news, links to excerpts from Terra Ignota book 4, and a discussion of point-of-view in the craft of writing, but I’m posting today mainly to announce that I have an essay about censorship and its relationship with genre fiction in this month’s Uncanny Magazine, which is now free to read online.  I’ve been researching censorship for a couple years now, in collaboration with Cory Doctorow, and it was delightful being invited to share my thoughts with the genre fiction writer/reader world because genre fiction has a lot of power to affect our ability to resist censorship, more power than I think most people realize.

It feels strange having an essay on an unrelated political topic come out in the midst of this Black Lives Matter & COVID double-crisis, but they are related if we look more carefully. Every time we see coverage of an injustice, news of brutality or cruelty, news of heroism; every time we talk about the challenges and importance of disseminating medical news; every time we read op-eds and cheer, or disagree, or criticize, share, or condemn; every time someone exposes a fake, a lie; in all these cases we’re depending on free speech, on journalism, analysis professional and amateur, on speech.  Networks of digital communication are disrupting everything right now, by amplifying voices that have been silenced.  In this, the digital revolution is following the pattern of past information revolutions (printing press, radio, etc.).  During any information revolution, there is a cost of switching to the new medium: the cost of new equipment, the cost of setting up distribution and building an audience, the cost in time and effort of learning a new method; whether it’s buying a printing press or learning a new app, there is a cost.  Consequently, the first adopters of a new information technology are always those who haven’t been able to communicate with the previous technology, the voices that have been silenced, the communities that have been unable to find each other, or have been actively silenced.  First adopters of the printing press included scholars eager to spread rare Cicero to peers spread across Europe, but also religious and political radicals whose demands for change, banned on pulpits and in town squares, could circulate in pamphlets which authorities at first had no way to control.  My wonderful colleague Kathleen Belew has done work on the ditto machine, the first cheap way to print small-scale at home, and how (much like the early internet) it empowered many communities to speak and find each other: LBGT+ groups, tropical fish hobbyists, civil rights activists, science fiction fans, linguistic minority communities, and also the KKK, which saw a surge of membership and activity via ditto-printed newsletters, just as it’s seen on digital platforms (Kathleen’s book Bringing the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is invaluable reading right now).

We are living in the crisis of uncontrolled expression that comes with any information revolution, the equivalent of 1517; most of the denunciations of Church corruption in Luther’s 95 Theses had been voiced by others many times before, but in 1517 pamphlet distribution was so fast-yet-uncontrolled that when he released the 95 Theses they were in print in London 17 days after he made them public, enabling a pan-European movement and making it impossible for those in power to silence the calls for change they had silenced before.  Black Lives Matter has momentum now around the world, a call for change that can’t be silenced; the hate it battles also has momentum, and amid their clash another wave is gaining momentum, as it does in every information revolution: the wave of those in power (politicians, corporations, alarmed elites) wanting to silence the uncomfortable voices empowered by the new medium.  We need to fight this battle too, a battle to find a balance between protecting the new ability of radical voices to speak while also protecting against hate speech, misinformation, and other forms of communication toxic to peace and democracy.  As I explain in my essay, genre fiction, we who read it, we who write it, have a lot of power to affect the battle over censorship.  These days are hard; as someone both disabled and immunocompromised I can’t go join the protests in the streets, not without both endangering fellow protesters by getting in their way, and the risk of this one moment of resistance destroying my ability to be here helping with the next one, and the next.  But I can help on the home front as it were, working to protect the tools of free expression which those out on the streets depend on every minute, every protest, every video exposing cruel realities.  Everything we do to strengthen speech and battle censorship protects our best tool, not just for this resistance, but for the next one, and the next.  Change needs to speak, hope needs to speak, and one thing we absolutely have the power to do–especially we within the F&SF community–is to defend the instincts that defend free speech.  So that’s what my Uncanny essay is about, and I hope it makes you feel a little bit more powerful, with the responsibility that brings.  (And if you enjoy it, you can see more discussion of the question in this video, and please support Uncanny Magazine!)

Meanwhile, a few other things:

Two excerpts from Perhaps the Stars, the now-finished 4th book of Terra Ignota, were recently released as part of the Decameron Project, an awesome project which is raising money to protect refugees from COVID by posting a new story every day of the pandemic, in the spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron.  Lots of amazing authors have shared stories or novel excerpts, tons there to enjoy, and these two excerpts from book 4 are philosophical ruminations on the role of distance in the human condition, a bit topical in our current lockdowns and crisis.

I also recently did a giant 2.5 hour marathon podcast episode on the Singularity Podcast, where we talked about progress, technology, history, pandemics, teleology, the singularity, the history of knowledge, the crisis of the late 16th century when there was “too much to know”, what science fiction is for, how learning is a form of joy, and all sorts of things. I think it’s one of the best interview discussions I’ve ever done, and a lot of people have said they were wowed and comforted by it, so it’s highly recommended (when you have the time).

In happy personal news, the French edition of Too Like the Lightning (Trop semblable à l’éclair) has won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire 2020 award for Best Translation, for the heroic work Michelle Charrier did reflecting all the complicated things I do with gender, and archaic language, with my thee’s and thou’s and he’s and she’s.  Michelle absolutely deserves it, and it makes me especially happy too.  A few years ago I heard the French translation of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer had won France’s best translation award–that book was a huge influence on me and Terra Ignota, and I remember wishing at the time that I could someday write something complex and subtle enough that the French translation would require the same skill and mastery to translate.  So I’m very happy for Michelle, but it’s also a little wish of mine come true.

Finally, at Balticon 54 last week Jo Walton and I did a craft-of-writing panel focused on point of view, and afterward we had some great discussions in text chat which I thought others might enjoy – I’ve condensed and saved a best-of here (with consent from those who asked the questions).  The panel was also filmed and will be online once Balticon does the captioning, and when I figure out how to post a link to it I will do so here but right now I don’t know.  Meanwhile, enjoy!

Girl in a striking black and white dress, speaking the words "I am a piano"
Titular and POV character of Nakamura Asumiko’s “I Am a Piano”

On Writing And Point of View

Question: What I don’t get is why they tell new writers to not have multiple POVs in a novel. I mean, if the story calls for it, and you’re clear on the change, why not?

Jo Walton: Minimizing POVs is good discipline because it’s very easy to get sloppy. So it’s one of those things that’s good advice when you’re starting out, but not a law.

Ada Palmer: I agree that minimizing POVs is often wise.  Whenever I find myself wanting a scene to be in a different POV I think really hard about it. Sometimes it’s the right answer, but the fail condition is that you have too many POVs and the reader expects each of them to have follow-through and they don’t

Jo Walton: You need as many as you need, but no more. It’s good discipline as an exercise to try doing without the switch

Ada Palmer: In particular I think one challenge with multiple POVs, especially adding one part-way through, is making clear to the narrator whether we’ll keep seeing this POV again or not.  Since once you switch to a new POV this could be a one-time thing, or it could be that we’re now going to constantly take turns, and if you’re doing the one-time thing but a reader thinks you’re doing the many-times thing then the reader can be distracted waiting for narrator #2 to come back and wondering how long it will be.   In Too Like the Lightning we do switch narrators a couple times but I’m always careful to make very clear to the reader that it’ll be the exception not the rule. I do it using chapter titles, but it can be done many ways, but you want to make sure you think hard about whether the reader (A) expects this new POV to now be a frequent companion, (B) expects the new POV to be one-time or rare, or (C) doesn’t know.  Any of these can be what you want (sometimes C is what you want) but you always want to decide clearly what you want the reader to be thinking, and communicate that in some way. I have a chapter called “Sniper’s Chapter” narrated suddenly by a character called Sniper, and it makes it very clear that it’ll be unique.  But another time I might switch and intentionally give no clue how long it’ll be until we see the original narrator again, because I want the reader to not know.  I want the reader to have that suspense.

Ada Palmer: A good way to summarize it is that you want to think carefully about whether you want the reader to be in suspense about what the narration will do next, and if so what you want that suspense to be.  Do you want there to be very regular alternation of characters?  Or irregular so it’s uncertain?  Let’s imagine we were doing Romeo & Juliet but jumping POVs.  If we regularly alternate Romeo, Juliet, Romeo, Juliet then the reader isn’t in suspense, but if we are mostly Juliet with only occasional Romeo chapters then during any given Juliet chapter the narrator will be wondering how long it’ll be until we see what Romeo thinks of things.  Or if we were rotating Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, and then we do the death of Mercutio during a Romeo chapter, during the next Juliet chapter the reader will be in suspense wondering what will happen when we would get to the next Mercutio chapter, and guessing (will it be a new character? will it be a ghost? will it be nothing?).  That suspense may be something you can use effectively, or it may be something you don’t want that would distract the reader — that’s why you want to always think it through.

Jo Walton: I once did a chapter from the POV of a dead character in the rotation like that

Ada Palmer: We usually think of plot as the main source of suspense, but narration can be a big source of it

Jo Walton: Oh yes

Ada Palmer: One challenge that often makes one resort to a POV is when there’s information you want to get across that your existing narrator(s) wouldn’t have access to.  In book 3 of Terra Ignota I had a real struggle at one point where we really needed to know what was going on with one faction (the Mitsubishi) who at that time would not be sharing their info with our narrator (or indeed with any of the narrators we’d had so far).  It was a real puzzle for a long time and I was considering using another POV but there wasn’t any new POV that I felt would really justify itself since there wasn’t any character whose interiority I really wanted to share.  In the end I realized I could have the narrator overhear a phone conversation in which the faction was talking to a different person that they did have reason to share info with, and that was a much simpler solution to the problem which didn’t require substantially changing the characterization of whoever I would’ve had be the interim narrator.  At another point I use a newspaper clipping to achieve the same.  Different source of info but no new POV – documents can be great that way, if what you need is to get info across that no narrator would see but you don’t want to gain another narrator.

Question: Would titling chapters by character (in addition to place/date-time) smooth out the potential bumps that make a POV change difficult for the reader?

Ada Palmer: It can, but it doesn’t smooth the first bump, only the later ones.  It can be a tool to clearly signal when you’re changing characters (as can style, or tone, or subtitles, etc.) but it doesn’t get over the initial challenge of asking the reader to settle into and get to know a new voice.  It’s hard the way your class being moved to a new classroom is hard, it requires adjustment.  It’s disruptive.  it needs to have payoff: ah, way better chairs! (worth-it) but if it isn’t worth-it, if there isn’t a clear gain (ah, new information!) it can be frustrating.

Question: Would also it help if the new POV has already been present, and to some degree characterized, before the switch?

Ada Palmer: Yes and no. It makes the switch easier, and for people who like that character it’ll make that character be excited.  On the other hand, the more new and unexpected the POV the more new and unexpected the information and perspective and expansion of experience that can come with it.  In our Romeo & Juliet, if when Mercutio dies our new POV is Friar Lawrence, that’s pretty easy, we know him already, we get to learn more about why he thinks his stupid plan is a good plan, it all works.  If the POV is instead Lord Capulet it’s more unexpected, he’s been unsympathetic so far, we don’t know from the play what he’s doing during much of the action, we aren’t excited to enter his head but we’re learning more new stuff and our perspective is more radically different.  If our new POV jumps to Cesare Borgia who is camped with his army having just sacked Modena and is thinking of trying to conquer Verona, and his scouts have just come to tell him that Verona is weak thanks to this feud with the Montagues and Capulets and that if Borgia allies with one of them and promises to fight the other it could aid his conquest of the city, suddenly our mind is blown and the story is totally different–but the author really has to follow up on this, and can’t just have it be a one-off!  It has to become what the rest of the book is about!  Jumping instead to Friar Lawrence or Lord Capulet could be a one-off and still work.

Jo Walton: I want Cesare conquers Verona!  In Daniel Abraham’s Dagger & Coin series, he uses absolutely standard fantasy different POVs by chapter, but he uses kinds of characters we don’t expect as POVs.  Like Lord Capulet would be.  There is in fact an elderly conservative lord who wants people to get off his lawn.  You never see POVs like that, so it’s refreshing.

Question: So zooming way out, is the PoV character the one where you know some of their thoughts? How about a scene were they’re not present, but other characters are, but you don’ thear anyone’s thought, just conversation?

Ada Palmer: There are many ways to do that.

Jo Walton: Everything is from some POV

Ada Palmer: The phone conversation example I used is one.  Having there be a transcript or in-world document is another.  Switching to another POV is another.  In general if you want to see a scene but your narrator isn’t there, you want to avoid just narrating it in generic 3rd person because your readers will wonder who is narrating if they’re used to there being a narrator.  So you either have to make the voice very different to make clear that it’s absolutely not just another character narrating now, or you need to do something else to signal the difference, like having it be a transcript, or an overheard phone call, or in a different tense, or something clear. Just leaving your narrator w/o changing the narration will be awkward and confusing.

Jo Walton: It’s a really good exercise to filter everything through one POV and then rewrite the same scene through another — not for final story,  but to learn.  And doing unlikely people is also a good way to learn a lot about how to write. And doing 1st and then 3rd on the same scene.

Question: Do we have to know and care a lot about a new narrator before we switch to them? I feel like they have to be really interesting to make the reader willing.

Ada Palmer:  Sometimes, but switching into the POV of someone who’s hidden a lot about themselves can be an amazing moment to suddenly learn the truth about them.  What if in our Romeo & Juliet, after Mercutio dies, we suddenly switch into the POV of the Prince of Verona, who’s basically been doing nothing throughout the play and about whom we know very little, but suddenly it turns out he’s actually aware of what’s happening and scheming to get Romeo & Juliet to kill themselves because he wants the Montague and Capulet houses to die out so he can confiscate their goods!  Shock!  Unexpected!  Or what if we instead switch into that random servant who accompanies Romeo to the tomb, whom we know nothing about, but he suddenly turns out to be a prophet who’s used alchemy to predict what’s going to happen and is here to try to prevent the double-suicide, and then we see the tragic fascinating story of what intervenes to make him still fail to save them even though he knows what’s going to happen!  Both of those suddenly make an unexplored character’s very unexploredness into something fascinating

Ada Palmer: Another thing that can be powerful is paying attention to when your reader will be excited to get to particular POVs. Sort-of like being excited to see who’ll write the next Mercutio chapter after he dies, you can, for example, set up a pattern where the reader realizes a certain POV must be coming and gets excited

Jo Walton: Martin does that with Jaime Lannister. And with the long absence of Theon. You can see the pattern of antici…..pation

Ada Palmer: Let’s imagine a story where our main POV is the captain of a prison who, and the pattern is that we always have two chapters from the captain’s POV, and then we see one from the POV of one of the prisoners in the cells. And the cells are numbered and we’re counting down from cell 8, then 7, then 6, visiting each prisoner only once.  But as we go we keep hearing/learning strange things about the prisoner in cell 2: that prisoner is given strange food, everyone’s scared, everyone just calls it “Number Two” and never uses a name or even a pronoun, we learn it’s been there a looong time, we get into great suspense and excitement as we get toward cell 2.  But wait… what’s in cell 1 which we haven’t heard anything about and will come after the super-mega-foreshadowed cell 2?  We get meta-suspense.  Now, you can achieve most of that suspense w/o switching POV if, instead of being in each prisoner’s head, we instead simply had every third chapter be the captain interacting with that particular prisoner.  Doing it while staying in the captain’s head is easier for the reader. But on the other hand switching into their heads could gain a lot.  It depends on which the story needs more – smoothness staying with one narrator, or the extra breadth and complexity of getting all those POVs, which would let us plunge quickly into their opinions, experience, backgrounds, knowledge, telling a lot of new info more quickly than the same POV could.  Those POVs could let us quickly explore a big giant detailed world build in a way one POV couldn’t, or they could be too complex and more than the story will really make have payoff.  And in the sequence, he buildup needs to be worth-it.  Whatever is in cell 1 has to stand up even after whatever was in cell 2.

Here the discussion wound down, though of course one could discuss POV forever!!!!  But for the meantime here is a short list of works with interesting uses of POV that are useful to read and think about as you want to learn more about unusual or powerful ways to do POV:

  • Sumner Locke Elliott, The Man Who Got Away
  • Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist – the narration is a scroll
  • Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer – how complex a first-person narrator can be
  • Daniel Keyes, “Flowers for Algernon”
  • Alfred Bester, “Fondly Fahrenheit” (and a lot of other Bester too!)
  • Agatha Christie, Endless Night
  • Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones we never learn the 1st person narrator’s gender, in the 80s that was a novelty, also it’s really great immersive spaceship and planet SF
  • Roger Zelazny, A Night in the Lonesome October — dog POV
  • Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (2nd person direct address)
  • Choose Your Own Adventure Books (true 2nd person, unlike 2nd person direct address)
  • For Jo Walton doing interesting POV things see the short story on Tor.com “Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction,” and her forthcoming Or What You Will.  (Her Small Change books also have an unusual example of alternating first/third)
  • And for Ada Palmer, see Terra Ignota, which does a LOT of unusual things with POV, and keeps doing more volume by volume.

The discussion also, at the end, included a discussion of examples how strange POVs can get, including the Chintsubu boys’ love manga by Nase Yamato, which adopts the POV of talking penises, and while I don’t particularly recommend as a literary work but, like Asumiko Nakamura’s short story I Am a Piano, is a fascinating example of how outside-the-box a POV can be.

The Key to the Kingdom, or How I Sold Too Like the Lightning

I want to share an essay today, one of the most personal things I’ve ever written, and one of those I’m proudest of. It’s about how I sold my first novel.

I’ve been stunned since I learned Too Like the Lightning is a finalist for the Best Novel Hugo. This really is the highest honor I can imagine, my work being recognized as one of the most valuable contributions to the community of conversation which drives us forward through speculation about other worlds to touching and creating them, both here on Earth and out among the stars. The community where the Great Conversation thrives. While I always intended to contribute to that conversation, I never expected this kind of reception for a very difficult and intentionally uncomfortable book, one which I had imagined as finding an excited but niche audience, never a large one.  I haven’t known what to say other than “Thank you!” but a common “Thank you!” feels mismatched, like paying the same 50¢ at a rock shop for a shiny hematite one week and the Philosopher’s Stone the next.  And I’ve also been swamped with final exams, colliding deadlines, three European conferences, research travel, illness, editing book 3, preparing a new project on the History of Censorship (more on that later), all the usual time-eating co-conspirators that make it easy to put off anything difficult.  And it is difficult to figure out how to write a world-sized thank-you to match this world-sized joy.

But I think one appropriate thank-you is to share this essay.  I wrote it for Shannon Page for her brilliant collection The Usual Path to Publication (Book View Café, 2016), which contains 27 different authors’ stories about how we sold our first novels. The volume’s variety succeeds in showing what it set out to, that there is no “usual path,” no consistent method, no one piece of advice that always helps on the path that no two people ever walk the same way. The book is absolutely my top recommendation for new or aspiring writers (also this really really good Book Riot Article on how much money authors make incl. self pub & traditional pub).

I suspect I’m not the only contributor to The Usual Path to Publication who found that the story that came out, when I tried to tell it, was so personal, so saturated with the most intense emotion, that I was more than a little nervous sharing it at first. But I also think telling the story means even more now that it has a Hugo nomination at the end of it, and a Campbell nomination, and the Tiptree Honors List, and the Compton Crook Award.  Because I grew up in Maryland, so I’ve seen the Compton Crook Award given out to a Best First Novel in the genre every year at since I was a little girl, every time thinking “Maybe someday it will be me?”  So this is how I got to Someday.

 

The Key to the Kingdom, or, How I Sold Too Like the Lightning.

by Ada Palmer, 2016

Some people say revenge is living well –
I’ve found it sometimes works to go away
And be more awesome. Let him sit alone,
To watch your wildfires leaping as you play.

-Jo Walton, “Advice to Loki” 2013.

The midpoint first, then the primordial darkness, then the ever after.

It was 2011 (remember, this is the creation myth of a book that won’t come out until 2016).  I was in Florence, sitting in the top of a 13th century tower between Dante’s house and my favorite gelato place (extra relevant in an un-air-conditioned August!), and talking to Jo Walton about whether or not I should start a blog.  It was the beginning of a year in Florence, a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s institute for Italian Renaissance studies.  Life as a Renaissance historian had granted me long stays in Florence twice before, once on a student Fulbright, and once taking a shift as I Tatti’s resident grad student mascot (#1 duty, be introduced to rich donors and look bright-eyed and promising).  During my earlier stays I had written a series of e-mails describing my Italian experiences, and sent them to a list of friends and family.  The list grew over time as the recipients recommended them to more distant cousins and acquaintances, until I had nearly a hundred people on my list.  In fact, those e-mails were how I knew Jo.  One of my then-roommates, Lila Garrott (a poet, author, book reviewer, and now editor at Strange Horizons) had posted a few of what, in neoclassical style, I called my “Ex Urbe” e-mails on LiveJournal, where Jo had enjoyed them.  In 2008 Jo had invited Lila and the rest of our eclectic household to visit her for Farthing Party in Montreal.  Jo was with me in Italy that August because the question “Do you want to come stay in my apartment in a 13th century tower in Florence?” has one correct answer.  “I wonder if it would be less work to just post them on a blog,” I said, overwhelmed by trying to assemble the new list of people who had asked to receive my e-mails.  Jo looked at me very seriously.  “If you make a blog, I’ll send the link to Patrick Nielsen Hayden.”

I did make a blog.  (This blog.)

In three months, it was in the sidebar of Making Light.

In six months, Patrick asked Jo if the author of this ExUrbe blog had written any fiction.

In two years (almost to the day, August 2013) Patrick bought Too Like the Lightning.

My appetite to see my fiction in print had been overwhelming since elementary school, and I vividly remember the thrill of standing on tiptoe to watch my first typed story (a single paragraph, about blue-and-silver alien raccoons) crawl its way out of the astounding new dot matrix printer at Dad’s office.  I had begun a novel by fourth grade, three by tenth, and I devoured summer writing courses, of which the courses on essay writing (Johns Hopkins) and prose poetry (Interlochen) proved far more valuable than the fiction ones.  I remember once thinking to myself at fifteen, bored during a school convocation, that if I hadn’t published a novel by twenty-five then… the end is vague.  Then I should give up?  Then I was a failure?  Then I should curse the heavens?  It was my first serious college writing mentor Hal Holiday who helped me understand how absurd that was.  He made me cry in his office, with my first-ever B on a paper. I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong.  “Writing is a long apprenticeship,” he said.  I hadn’t done anything wrong, but writing well—not well for your age group, but well in an absolute sense—was hard to achieve.  It took real time.  Spending every childhood summer and weekend writing, taking every summer writing course, those were good steps, they helped, but they were a beginning.  I finished my first novel draft that year, flipped back to page one, and started writing it all over again.

In 2002, at twenty-one and with Mom to stuff the envelopes, I sent my (totally-rewritten) first novel-length manuscript winging its optimistic way to slush piles at agencies and publishers.  I sometimes think, if we could harvest the emotional energy in all the fat manila query envelopes aspiring writers entrust to the post office every day, we could move planets.  I have a folder of rejection letters from that first volley, and, looking over them now, I can see the good signs in them, the peppering of personalized notes, praise and encouragement among the form letters.  I didn’t understand then how many queries editors, agents and interns read, how generous it was for them to sacrifice precious seconds to write these extra lines (thank you!), but it did a lot to keep me going.  And in the back of the folder I always kept a printout of Ursula Le Guin sharing a very grim rejection letter she received for The Left Hand of Darkness, with her note “This is included to cheer up anybody who just got a rejection letter. Hang in there!”  Thank you.  After eight months of agonizing suspense, and the sporadic gut-punch of rejections, that first volley got me an agent.  She was not an F&SF specialist, but was game to try, and spent the next years doggedly marketing what neither of us realized was an unsaleably long fantasy novel.

I don’t remember where I received the wisdom that it’s better to go on and write Book 1 of a new series rather than write Book 2 of a series when you haven’t sold Book 1 yet.  Wherever I got it from, I obeyed it, and soon my plucky agent was shopping two series, then three.  Despite loving to sleep in, I followed the old advice and wrote in the morning, every day, an hour or two, giving my best hours to fiction and the rest of the day to the demands of grad school, and thereby wrote close to a million words of fiction over seven years.  Looking over those practice projects now, I can see my writing improve with each, the sentences, the pace, the plot.  Every paragraph was a step in that long apprenticeship.  The wait stretched on—three years, four—and it hurt—the growing, gnawing appetite.  Sometimes I would lie awake at night just from the pain of wanting something so much.  But I had an agent, and that gave me confidence, and comfort.

Meanwhile I was working on my Ph.D.  The single best thing that ever happened to my writing—looking at the novel I was working on at the time you can see the very chapter break where it happened, like lightning struck and *ZAP!* the prose was finally good—was in 2005, when I had to cut down my 20,000 word dissertation prospectus into a 7,000 word conference paper.  Without knowing it, I had stumbled on “Half and Half Again,” as it’s called by people I know in journalism, a training exercise in which you go through the agony of cutting an old work down to half length, then half of that, learning to spot the chaff and bloat in your own work, and how to make it tight and powerful.  Lightning.  I published other things—my first academic article, blog pieces for Tokyopop about manga & cosplay, a Random Superpower Generator for Maple Leaf Games, but none of them eased the wanting.  I also learned more about the world of genre publishing, from going to conventions and chatting with author friends made through Lila, and through my science fiction clubs, HRSFA (the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Society), and Double Star (at Bryn Mawr College).  F&SF specialist agent Donald Maass spoke to us at Vericon, a great little con HRSFA runs at Harvard every year, and I learned from his talk about the field, the extreme oversupply of submissions, the challenges of length and salability.  I had queried Donald Maass (unsuccessfully) way back in 2002, but in 2006, with my writing much improved, preparing to begin a new series which I felt in my gut was leap above the others (and eventually became the Terra Ignota series), I decided to break off my relationship with my first agent (with much gratitude and good will) and to try fresh to get a new agent at a major F&SF specialist agency.

I finished the first draft of Too Like the Lightning (Book 1 of Terra Ignota) in 2008, my penultimate year of graduate school.  Between 2002 and 2008, plump manila envelopes had evolved into instantaneous e-queries, and my generic cover letters had acquired the varnish of name-dropping.  I had recommendations from random people in the publishing world (Walter Isaacson, Priscilla Painton) whom I had met through Harvard.  And, while my first 2002 volley had showered queries on dozens of doorsteps (many quite inappropriate), I sent Too Like the Lightning to only one press in 2008, my great hope: Tor.  The more I learned about the world of genre publishing, the clearer it became that Tor was one of the only (if not the only) press that had the stability and resources to gamble on a big, fat science fiction series (four long books!) by a first time author, books which were dense and highbrow, and totally not similar to anything—trends are a safe investment; oddities are a gamble.  Plus, I had an ‘in’.  There were people at Tor who were friends of friends, alumni and associates of both Bryn Mawr and Harvard, some of whom knew my Double Star and HRSFA connections.  (Yes, I tried nepotism for all it was worth, anyone would—I still lay awake at nights, just wanting.)

After another year of lying awake and wanting (and finishing my Ph.D., and facing the academic job market, which in 2009 had just entered its sudden death spiral), a Tor contact told me (I think at Readercon?) that the book had advanced from the “slush” pile to the “shows promise” pile.  This was good news, but an un-agented manuscript, which the editor knows has been sent to no other press, can stew in that pile forever.  That November I queried Donald Maass, hoping a kind word from Tor would help me get an agent, and that a good agent might prod along the literary glacier.  I even got a Harvard-made mainstream publishing contact to e-mail Donald Maass with his endorsement to accompany my query.  (Roll for nepotism!  Did it achieve anything?  Not really!)  On December 31st, I received an e-mail from Donald apologizing for losing my query and getting back to me so late (apologizing for a delay of only 2 months!  Such professionalism!  Such sanity!) and saying he loved the beginning of the book, and was eager to read the whole thing.  I sent it right away.  I waited.  I shopped other, older projects with a YA agent recommended by a friend (no luck).  I published other things—more academic articles, critical essays, introductions to manga and anime releases.  I stayed up nights.  Sometimes it was so bad I couldn’t go into a bookstore without feeling sick to my stomach.  In November 2010 (a full year after Donald had asked for the book) Amy Boggs, then a fairly new member of the Donald Maass Agency, wrote to say that Donald—swamped by unspecified and mysterious stuff—had passed the book on to her, and she loved it.  We finalized the contract by early December, and Amy started shopping the book around in the beginning of 2011.

That spring I received my I Tatti Fellowship, and that summer I sat in a tower in Florence with Jo Walton, contemplating a blog.  Jo had talked to me about Patrick Nielsen Hayden, though I also knew of him from other sources; legends of such titans echo far through our little magic kingdom.

There is a fresco by Perugino in the Sistine Chapel, which shows St. Peter, in a beautiful neoclassical square, receiving the Keys to Heaven from Christ, with a group of apostles and others gathered around to watch.  It’s a deeply tender moment, Peter’s awe at the sight of the divinity which is also the friend he loves so much.  But I can never see it without imagining the next panel of the comic book, where Christ has gone back to Heaven, and Peter is left in the square holding these enormous gold and silver keys, and everyone is standing around awkwardly, trying not to stare, and someone sidles up saying, “So… can I get you a cup of coffee?”  You can’t put them down, that’s the thing, once you have the keys to Heaven, no one on Earth can forget it, not for an instant.  And that’s very much what it’s like being an acquiring editor (I’ve described this to Patrick, he agrees), because you have the Keys to the Kingdom, and people around you—at conventions, at talks, online—want it so much.  So much they lie awake at night.  There are infinite horror stories about editors being harassed and chased at cons, having manuscripts shoved under bathroom stall doors, repeated e-mails which get weirder and more desperate.  So, from childhood (picture me scrawny and eleven, following Dad and Uncle Bill to a Doctor Who convention, with my boy-short bright blonde hair, dressed as the Peter Davison Doctor) I had it drilled into me that you should never approach and bother an editor (or published author) about your manuscript.  Q&A when they were on panels was OK, but outside that sphere verboten!  In fact, I had met Patrick at Farthing Party back in 2008, but, knowing who he was, I was an emotional wreck just being near him, racked between the Scylla of my desire and the Charybdis of the taboo, so I spent much of the weekend actively hiding around corners and behind pillars to avoid looking at him.  But Jo knew I had a manuscript, and passed it on to Patrick for me in spring of 2012 when he asked her if the author of ExUrbe had written any fiction.

And I waited.  And I lay awake at night.  On a trip to New Orleans, an editor friend of Jo’s told a story about a query which had taken twelve years to be accepted, which actually made me throw up.  I tried to start another novel series, but I couldn’t.  Terra Ignota meant too much to me, so I broke my own law and wrote Book 2.  And Book 3.  So many heartfelt eggs in that basket.  Amy had occasional non-news for me, and I was overseeing the publication of my first nonfiction book, the academic history Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, which will hopefully (knock all the wood you can!) get me tenure here at the magnificent I-dare-you-to-prove-it’s-not-Hogwarts University of Chicago.  (Where I teach history of magic. Really.) [addendum 2018: I got tenure!!] I had submitted the monograph proposal to Harvard University Press way back in 2009.  Given the infamous snail’s pace of academic publishing, I often thought of Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance and Too Like the Lightning as twins fighting to see which would be the first to make it out.  But Tor, wonderful, infuriating, experimental, ambitious, field-shaping Tor, is slower.

In March 2013, Jo reported to me that Patrick had said positive things to her about the first page of Too Like the Lightning.  One page down, 333 to go.  That spring and summer were the madness of producing and recording my two hour close harmony a cappella Viking stage musical Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, and its demands were exhaustion enough to let me mostly sleep.  As August came along, Patrick told Jo to tell me (in our surrealist game of telephone) that he and Teresa wanted to have dinner with me at Worldcon in San Antonio, and I should have my answer then.  This was more than a year after Patrick had asked for the manuscript, and five years after I had first submitted it to Tor.

I was working a booth at that Worldcon, an outreach display for the Texas A&M University Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, which has one of the world’s great science fiction collections, an impregnable treasure vault full of rare pulps, fanzines, first editions, and the archived papers of authors from Star Trek scriptwriters, to George R.R. Martin, to (now) me.  (Are you a writer? Do you have random papers and notes from old projects cluttering your house?  Cushing’s awesome librarians totally want to take your clutter, index it, and preserve it for posterity!  Win-win!).  The first morning of Worldcon, I was walking through the dealer’s room on my way to our booth, when Jo Walton gestured me over to the table where she was doing a signing.  I gestured back that I didn’t want to interrupt the people who were waiting patiently in line, but she flailed emphatically, so I came.  She told me that Patrick told her to tell me “Yes.”  I remember hugging, and crying, and intense crying, and gasping out a vague apology to the guy who was in the front of the line, but he said “It’s OK, it’s clearly important.”  Jo smiled at him and said, “She’s just sold her first novel!”  A keen, satisfied, brightness entered his face, like when you taste an unexpectedly excellent sour candy, and he said, “So, it does happen.”

Most of the rest of the San Antonio Worldcon is lost in the mists of bliss amnesia.  I remember staggering back to the Cushing booth all puffy and red-faced, and struggling to communicate to my colleague Todd Samuelson that I was OK, just overhappy from yes! Yes! YES!  I remember I couldn’t find my phone to text my dear friend Carl Engle-Laird (a HRSFA alum, who was then a new editorial assistant Tor.com, and sharing my suspense) so I borrowed a phone from Lauren Schiller (my singing partner and roommate of 10+ years), only I couldn’t see through my tears, so the message came out all garbled and full of typos and r5and0m nuMB4rs.  I was on a panel right after that, with Lila Garrott (whose online connections had been so instrumental in all this), and I had no time to break the news before the panel, so I just typed it on my then-recovered cell phone and set it on the table in front of us: “Patrick said yes.”  Lila glowed.

After Jo’s signing, we found Patrick in the concessions area, and there ensued perhaps the most absurd conversation I shall ever have.  I was still paralyzed by the aftereffects of Scylla and Charybdis, so shy and overwhelmed that I could barely force myself to look directly at the legendary Patrick.  But Patrick is himself a naturally shy person, and skittish after so many years carrying the Keys to Heaven, so he couldn’t look at me either.  And there we were, both trying to hide behind Jo (who is a head shorter than both of us), unable to make eye contact while trying to talk about how we wanted to work together for the rest of our careers.  That was when I started to see the absurd flip side of it: all the while that I had been terrified of approaching this incredibly important editor who had power over everything I ever wanted, in his world I had been the intimidating one, this distant Harvard Ph.D., with all these impressive publications, this learned and authoritative tone on my blog, and I had everything he wanted, great science fiction that it would be a pleasure to publish.  In Settlers of Catan terms, I had bricks, he had wood, but we were so mutually overwhelmed neither of us could get the words out: “Shall we make this road?”  We had dinner with Jo and Teresa at one of those Brazilian Barbeque places, where they hunt the great beasts of the plains and serve them to you on spits carried by excessively statuesque young men—at least that’s what Jo says, because bliss amnesia has erased everything except a vague memory of asparagus and a beige tablecloth.  I remember Patrick said he and Teresa wanted to audition to edit and shape my career.  Audition?  I would have begged!

Patrick took me to the Tor party that weekend.  I know he introduced me to Tom Doherty and fifty other genre VIPs, but I genuinely don’t remember a thing except recognizing Liz Gorinsky from a distance by her hair.  Patrick forgot to give me his business card, so I almost left without the ability to contact him.  It took three weeks to stop feeling like a dream.  No, that’s not true—it still feels like a dream.  I signed the four book contract by crackling firelight, huddling over the hearthstone during the power outage caused by a New Year’s blizzard, which absolutely feels like a dream.  I have a release date now (that took two years), and cover art (same), and the Advanced Bound Manuscript in front of me (well, a defective ABM missing the last three chapters—oops!), and I have a fantastic recording of Patrick—the Patrick—playing guitar with me while I sing my ode to fandom’s support of space exploration “Somebody Will” (super ultra win condition!).  But I still feel prepared to wake up tomorrow, back in my old bedroom, and discover it was all a dream.  Maybe there will always be that edge of doubt, the scar of how intensely I worried that the door might never open.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  But if it did open for me, it wasn’t because I kept pounding on the gate with the same desperate query.  And it wasn’t the favor-trading, or the Harvard connections, or my attempts at nepotism, or even (honestly) my agent (though she’s done so many great things for me then and since).  It was that I set forth to be more awesome.  I kept honing my craft, starting new projects better than the last, producing other works, articles, music, essays, research, the blog.  I made my fire burn bright in the dark.  People do see.

From The Usual Path to Publication, ed. Shannon Page, Book View Café, 2016.

Novel Launch Blog Entries, plus Useful Plants

TooLikeLightning_coverHello, friends & readers.  This is a quick update to share links to a couple short essays I’ve written for other blogs.

My first science fiction novel Too Like the Lightning comes out very soon now, May 10th!  Initial reviews and reactions have been extremely enthusiastic, and these days Twitter sometimes feels like a surreal dream, with authors I’ve admired deeply for years gushing over… me?  (Karl Schroeder: “most exciting SF future I’ve encountered in years.” Ken Liu: “reflective, analytical, smart, beautiful.” Max Gladstone: “I’m kind of in love with this book.” Fran Wilde: “Too Like the Lightning = AMAZEBALLS! GET! READ!”)

In honor of the occasion (and to help pre-orders & first week sales which can do so much for a new author!) I’ve been asked to write a bunch of short guest blog pieces which I hope you’ll enjoy.  You can also read the first four chapters up on Tor.com.

On SF Signal I have talked “Middle Future Science Fiction” i.e.  SF set later than near future but while the majority of human culture is still on Earth, and why I think this is an exciting and new space for speculative fiction. Take-home quote: “We have many ways to talk about the End of History, so many that talking about the Future of History is now the novelty.”

On the Tor/Forge publisher blog meanwhile I have a piece on “World Building like a Historian” about how my historical training helps me build a future which is rooted, not only in the present, but in the past.  Take-home quote: “All humanity’s presents have been full of the past, for as long as there has been a historical record. So if there’s one safe bet we can make about the future, it’s that it will be full of the past too.”

Ten or so more guest blog pieces will be going up over the next weeks, many of which I’m very proud of, and I’ll gather and post links here. Meanwhile reviews on Barnes & NobleFantasy Literature and Romantic Times (<=best ever plot summary!) do a much better job describing the book than I can manage.

Here on Ex Urbe, with readers who know me well through my essays and travels, I can describe it a different way.  I’ve poured myself into this book. This is the real thing, the centerpiece.  You’ve seen my essays here.  You’ve seen my love of craftsmanship, and rhetoric, of playful structures and framing twists, describing a stick in water as the “antagonist” or suddenly letting Descartes stray into a dialog with Socrates.  You’ve also seen the depth of my empathy, my Machiavelli series which so many readers have written in to say moved them to tears, and moved me to tears too as I wrote it.  I love essay writing, and history writing, but every bit of skill I have at it, every hour I’ve put in, I’ve put in for the novels.  “Writing is a long apprenticeship.”  That was the best and most important piece of advice I got from my favorite writing professor when I started college.  He was right, and I took him seriously, wrote every morning for two hours before breakfast, did extra drafts beyond what class required, spent my summers and my breaks taking more writing classes.  Hours and hours and hours.  I love writing nonfiction, and I love writing essays, but it was these stories, the ones I wanted to tell in the novels which kept the fire burning through a long, long apprenticeship.  Too Like the Lightning isn’t an easy book and it’s not for everyone.  It takes a lot of concentration, reading with your brain at your best.   It takes skill at reading genre fiction, at picking out the puzzle pieces of world building and piecing them together, which can be difficult if you aren’t used to reading in the genre.  It takes patience as you watch very complicated things play out as fast as I could make them when you need to know so much to understand.  It takes trust as the narrator and narrative take twists or show idiosyncrasies whose true purpose may not be clear until the end (or until the next book, which comes in December).  I hate spoilers, and hate recommendations that give half the story away, and believe strongly that the very best recommendation is simply “You’ll like it, trust me” from a friend who knows me very well.  So I’m not going to talk about the plot and themes and characters, since Romantic Times does that much that better than I can.  I will just say that this book may be for you, if you like philosophy, and history, and challenging books that really stretch your mind, and new ideas about society and culture, and my essays here are a good sample.  But you have to enjoy and be able to handle challenging world building.  And above all you have to be willing to trust me, the author, that all the threads will come together, and that in the end the tapestry will be beautiful, the kind of tapestry I can only weave if you give me four books, 700,000 words, a lot more time and trust than I have with my essays here. I will absolutely keep writing essays for Ex Urbe (no worries there!), but if you have enjoyed them, then you may enjoy the real work they were practice for.  It comes out in five days; hard to believe it’s real.

Meanwhile, the primary reason it’s been so very long since I wrote a proper Ex Urbe entry is simple: a fire at the end of February drove me from my home. Happily no family members (or books!) were harmed, but the complications of temporary quarters, construction and insurance have eaten the few hours research that already consumed by research and preparing for the book launch.  I’m still struggling my way out from under the to-do mountain that has caused, but as I make my way out Ex Urbe is starting to get toward the top of the pile again, and I’m really, deeply looking forward to finishing the essay I did manage to start in February before fire became more than a metaphor.  Meanwhile I’ll post here when new guest blog pieces go up.  And I’ll try to write another little piece next week to share my feelings when the day comes.  May 10th.  Five days.  So many, many years… five days!

Too Like the Lightning is available through Powell’sBarnes & Noble (also on nook), Amazon, Kobo, Indiebound, Goodreads, and your own wonderful local bookstore which is always great to support!

Meanwhile, for general human edification, here are some photos of fascinating plants with cards explaining their interesting historic uses, which I got to see at the botanical gardens in Sydney Australia, where I was for a conference last month.  (Did I mention I’ve been overwhelmingly busy?)

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Machiavelli and Intellectual Technology, plus Shakespeare & Summer Updates

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Hello, patient friends.  The delight of brilliant and eager students, the siren call of a new university library, the massing threat of conjoining deadlines, and the thousand micro-tasks of moving across the country have caused a very long gap between posts.  But I have several pieces of good news to share today, as well as new thoughts on Machiavelli:

  1. Most important: I have a new essay up on Tor.com: “When Less Plot is More Play: Love’s Labour’s Lost vs. Pericles Prince of Tyre.”  I’m sure anyone who enjoys my usual pieces here will enjoy it in the same way. It’s part of the wonderful Tor.com Shakespeare Reread series, which has a lot of other great authors contributing, so I hope you’ll check out their pieces too.
  2. The next installment of my Sketches of a History of Skepticism series is 2/3 finished, and I hope to have it up in a week or three, deadlines permitting.
  3. I have an excellent new assistant named Mack Muldofsky, who is helping me with Ex Urbe, music, research and many other projects.  So we have him to thank in a big way if the speed of my posting picks up this summer.
  4. Because I have a lot of deadlines this summer, I have asked some friends to contribute guest entries here, and we have a few planned treating science, literature and history, so that’s something we can look forward to together.
  5. For those following my music, the Sundown Kickstarter is complete, and it is now possible to order online the CD and DVD of my Norse Myth song cycle Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok. In addition to the discs, you can also order two posters, one of my space exploration anthem “Somebody Will” and one which is a detailed map of the Norse mythological cosmos.  CD sales go to supporting the costs of traveling to concerts.
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    The finished CD, with its full-color lyrics booklet. So many hours of layout and proofreading, but so worth-it!

    I have several concerts and public events lined up for the summer:

    1. At Mythcon (July 31-Aug 2), Lauren Schiller and myself, performing as the duo “Sassafrass: Trickster and King” will join Guest of Honor Jo Walton for “Norse Hour,” in which she will read Norse myth-themed poetry in alternation with our Norse-themed songs.
    2. Sunday August 9th, I have been invited do a reading of the freshly-polished opening chapters of my novel Too Like the Lightning (due out in Summer 2016) at the Tiptree Award Ceremony event honoring Jo Walton, who couldn’t make it to the initial ceremony but received the Tiptree this year for her novel My Real Children. The event is being held at Borderlands in San Francisco at 3 PM, and will feature readings by local authors, and music performed by myself and Lauren.
    3. Monday August 17th, at 7 PM, I am joining Jo and Lauren again at Powell’s, where Jo will read from her books, Lauren and I will sing, and I will interview Jo and talk about my writing as well as hers.
    4. Finally at Sasquan (Worldcon, Aug 19-23) Lauren and I will have a full concert, I will do another reading from Dogs of Peace, and I will be on several exciting panels.
For those who read and enjoy my Tor Shakespeare post, one addendum: the recent Globe production of Love's Labour's Lost (available on DVD) is VERY good, highly recommended!
For those who read and enjoy my Tor Shakespeare post, one addendum: the recent Globe production of Love’s Labour’s Lost (available on DVD) is very very good, highly recommended!

Meanwhile, I have a little something to share here.  I continue to receive frequent responses to my Machiavelli series, and recently one of them sparked such an interesting conversation in e-mail that I wanted to post it here, for others to enjoy and respond to.  These are very raw thoughts, and I hope the discussion will gain more participants here in the comment thread (I have trimmed out parts not relevant to the discussion):

In this discussion, I use a term I often use when trying to introduce intellectual history as a concept, and which I have been meaning to write about here for some time, “Intellectual Technology.”

A little conversation about Machiavelli:

From Michael:
I have been reading your blog posts on Machiavelli. You write with tremendous learning, clarity and colour, and really bring past events alive in a brilliant way.  But……..  I think you’re far too soft on Machiavelli!!!
I’m working on a PhD about him and it’s fascinating to see that nearly all present-day academics, and indeed academics during much of the second half of the 20th century, have a largely if not completely uncritical admiration for him and his works. He is lauded, for example as a forerunner of pluralism, and supporter of republicanism/democracy, yet his clear inspiration of Italian fascism is almost completely overlooked.  The fact that Gramsci revered Machiavelli is dealt with by many scholars, but Mussolini’s admiration for him is hurriedly passed over.
In the absence of a relevant illustration, please enjoy this beautiful hand, on a ceramic Madonna, in Berlin.
In the absence of a relevant illustration, please enjoy this beautiful hand, on a ceramic Madonna, in the Bode museum, Berlin.
Your post on Machiavelli and atheism is really interesting – in that context the 2013 book Machiavelli by Robert Black would be of interest to you…
Best regards, Michael Sanfey, IEP/UCP Lisbon.
Reply from Ada:
Michael,Thank you for writing in to express your enjoyment of my blog posts. I think your criticisms of Machiavelli are interesting and largely fair, and my own opinions overlap with yours in many ways, though not in others. I agree with you completely that there are inappropriate tendencies in a lot of scholars to praise Machiavelli inappropriately as a proto-modern champion of Democracy, republicanism, pluralism, modern national pride etc., all of which are characterizations are deeply inappropriate and also deeply presentist, reading anachronistic values back into him. But there is also a tendency, dominant earlier in the 20th century, to villify Machiavelli too much in precisely the same anachronistic and presentist way, characterizing him as a fascist or a Nazi and reading back into his work the things that were done in the 20th century by people who used some of his ideas but mixed them with many others. My way of approaching Machiavelli focuses above all on trying to distance him from the present and place him in his context, to show that he is neither a modern hero nor a modern villain since he isn’t modern at all. The question is separate, which you bring up, of how much to blame him or criticize him for opening up the direction of reasoning which led to later consequentialism, and also to fascism which certainly used him as one of its foundational texts. Here I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of historical blame at all, particularly when it’s blame over such a long span of time.

I tend to think of thinkers as toolmakers, or inventors of “intellectual technology”, innovators who have created a new thing which can then be used by many people. New inventions can be used in many ways, and in anticipatable and unanticipatable ways. Just as, for example, carbon steel can be used to raise great towers and send train lines across continents, it can be used to build weapons and take lives, so it is a complex question how much to blame the inventor of carbon steel for its many uses. In this sense, I do believe we can see Machiavelli as a weapon-maker, since the ideas he was generating were directly intended to be used in war and politics. We can compare him very directly to the inventor of gunpowder in this sense. I also see him–and this is much of the heart of my critique–as a defensive weapon maker, i.e. someone working in a period of danger and siege trying to create something with which to defend his homeland. So, imagine now the inventor of gunpowder creating it to defend his homeland from an invasion. Is he responsible for all later uses of gunpowder as well? Is he guilty of criminal negligence for not thinking through the fact that long-term many more people will be killed by his invention than live in his home town? Do the lives saved by gunpowder throughout its history balance out against the lives saved in some kind of (Machiavellian/consequentialist) moral calculus? I don’t think “yes” or “no” are fair answers to such a complex question, but I do think it is important, when we think about Machiavelli and what to hold him responsible for, to remember the circumstances in which he created gunpowder (i.e. consequentialist ethics), and that he invented other great things too, like political science and critical historical reasoning. The debts are complicated, as is the culpability for how inventions are used after the inventor’s death. So while I join you wholeheartedly in wanting to fight back against the distortion of Machiavelli the Mythical proto-modern Republican, I also think it’s valuable to battle against the myth of Machiavelli the proto-Fascist, and try to create a portrait of the real man as I see him, Machiavelli the frightened Florentine.

More beautiful ceramic Madonna hands, from Berlin.
More beautiful ceramic Madonna hands, from Berlin.

I do know Bob Black’s Machiavelli book, but disagree with some of his fundamental ideas about humanism itself – another fun topic, and one I enjoy discussing with him at conferences. He’s a challenging interlocutor. There is a very good recent paper by James Hankins on Academia.edu now about the “Virtue Politics” of humanists, which I recommend that you look at if you’re interested in responses to Black.

Best, Ada Palmer, University of Chicago

More from Michael:
First, I want to thank you for this fantastically detailed and brilliant response…  I’d like to “come back at you” on consequentialism and some other points:
* Regarding your point about Machiavelli not being modern at all, I see what you mean, albeit you do say of Machiavelli in the post on atheism that “he is in other ways so very modern”. Leo Strauss certainly thought he had a lot to do with the introduction of what we know as “modernity”.
* When you seek to balance the need to fight against the Proto-republican myth and against the Proto-fascist myth, the first of those “myths” enjoys immeasurably wider currency than the second, and I ask myself, why is this?
*  On the “intellectual technology” point below, and its being essentially neutral, in this case I wouldn’t agree with you, because we are not talking here about an object like gunpowder, it’s actually concerning something much more important. In ethical terms, Machiavelli took transcendent values out of the equation. As you put it, Machiavelli created “an ethics which works without God” – except that it doesn’t work!!!
* Machiavelli has had a questionable impact in regard to “realism” in International relations. You mention in one of the posts that he backed an alliance with Borgia so as to protect Florence, agreeing to offer money and resources to help Borgia conquer more – a very good example of Machiavelli‘s undoubted sympathy for imperialism.
PPS  On the question of Machiavelli being an atheist or not, I really was fascinated by that part of your Ex Urbe writings.  I’ve concluded that, whatever about him being an atheist or not, one could certainly describe him as “ungodly” would you agree?
Quick response from Ada:

I think “ungodly” does work for Machiavelli depending on how you define it; it has a connotation of being immoral–which does not fit–but if instead you mean it literally as someone who makes his calculations without thinking much about the divine then it fits.

Teach yourself German! "Schweinerassel," a ceramic bottle in the shape of a pig. 2nd century!
Teach yourself German! “Schweinerassel,” a ceramic bottle in the shape of a pig. 2nd century! I had fun in Berlin, and this year’s Renaissance Society of America conference there was one of the best academic conferences I’ve ever attended.

A supplementary comment on “Intellectual Technology”:

I find “intellectual technology” a very useful concept when I try to describe what I study.  Broadly my work is “intellectual history” or “the history of ideas” but what I actually study is a bit more specific: how particular kinds of ideas come into existence, disseminate, and come to be regulated at different points in time.  The types of ideas I investigate–atomism, determinism, utilitarianism–move through human culture very much the same way technological innovations do.  They come into being in a specific place and time, as a result of a single inventor or collaboration.  They spread from that point, but their spread is neither inevitable nor simple. Sometimes they are invented separately  by independent people in independent places, and sometimes they exist for centuries before having a substantial impact. When a new idea enters a place and comes into common use, it completely changes the situation and makes actions or institutions which worked before no longer viable. I compare Machiavelli’s utilitarianism to gunpowder above, but here are some other examples of famous cases of technological inventions, and ideas which disseminated in similar patterns:

The Bicycle and Atomism

Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design for a bicycle in the Renaissance, and may have seriously tried to construct one, but afterward no one did so for a very long time. Then many other factors changed: the availability of rubber and light-weight strong metals, the growth of large, centralized cities and a working population in need of inexpensive transit, and suddenly the bicycle was able to combine with these other factors to revolutionize life and society in a huge rush, first across Europe and then well beyond.  We have moved on from it to develop more complex technologies that achieve the same function, but still use it and develop it more, and even where we don’t, and cities would not have the shapes they do now without it, and it is still transforming parts of the world it has touched more slowly.  Similarly atomism was developed and used for a little while, then languished in notebooks for a long time, before combining with the right factors to spread and rapidly transform society and culture.

The Unity of All Life and Calculus

Newton and Leibnitz developed Calculus independently at the same time. Similarly, both classical Stoicism in Greece and Buddhism in India roughly simultaneously and independently, as far as we can tell, developed the idea that all living things–humans, insects, ancients, people not yet born–are, in fact, parts of one contiguous, interconnected, sacred living thing.  This enormously rich and complex concept had a huge number of applications in each society, but seems to have been independently developed to meet the demands for metaphysical and emotional answers of societies at remarkably similar developmental stages.  The circumstances were right, and the ideas then went on to be applied in vastly different but still similar ways.

Feminism and the Aztec Wheel

Aztec wheeled toyFor a long time we thought the Aztecs didn’t have the wheel.  More recently we discovered that they had children’s toys which used the wheel, but never developed it beyond that.  Which means someone thought of it, and it disseminated a bit and was used in a very narrow way, but not developed further because what we think of as more “advanced” or “industrial” applications (wagon, wheelbarrow) just weren’t compatible with the Aztec world (largely because it was incredibly hilly and didn’t have the elaborate road system Europe developed, relying instead on human legs, stairs, and raw terrain, which were sufficient to let it develop a robust and complex economy and empire of its own.  The wheel became more useful in the Americas when European-style city plans and roads were built).  Similarly Plato voiced feminism in his Republic, arguing that women and men were fundamentally interchangeable if educated the same way, and people who read the Republic discussed it as a theory among many other elements of the book, but didn’t develop it further (again, I would argue, this was at least in part because the economic and social structures of the classical world depended on the gendered division of labor, particularly for the production of thread in the absence of advanced spinning technology, which is why literally all women in Rome spent tons of time spinning–spinning quotas were even sometimes required by law of prostitutes since if there was a substantial sliver of the female population employed without spinning Rome would run out of cloth.  Feminism was better able to become revolutionary in Europe when (among other changes) industrialization reduced the number of hours required for the maintenance of a household and the production of cloth, making it more practical to redirect female labor, and question why it had been locked into that in the first place).

In sum, there is a concreteness to the ideas whose movements I study, a distinct and recognizable traceability. Interpretive analyses, comparative, subjective analyses, analyses of technique, aesthetics, authorial intent, authenticity, such analyses are excellent, but they aren’t intellectual history as I practice and teach it.  I trace intellectual technology. Just as the gun, or carbon steel, or the moldboard plow came in at a particular time and had an impact, I study particular ideas whose dissemination changed what it was possible for human beings to do, and what shapes human society can be. It is meaningful to talk about being at an “intellectual tech level” or at least about being pre- or post- a particular piece of intellectual technology (progress, utilitarianism, the scientific method) just as much as we can talk about being pre- or post-computer, gunpowder, or bronze. Such things cannot be un-invented once they disseminate through a society, though some societies regulate or restrict them, and they can be lost, or spend a long time hidden, or undeveloped. Elites often have a legal or practical monopoly on some (intellectual) technologies, but nothing can stop things from sometimes getting into the hands or minds of the poor or the oppressed. Sometimes historians are sure a piece of (intellectual) technology was present because we have direct records of it: a surviving example, a reference, a drawing, something which was obviously made with it. Other times we have only secondary evidence (they were farming X crop which, as far as we know, probably requires the moldboard plow; they described a strange kind of unknown weapon which we think means gun; they were discussing heretics of a particular sort which seems to have involved denial of Providence).

One last excellent sculpted hand, again from my conference trip to Berlin this year.
One last excellent sculpted hand, again from my conference trip to Berlin this year.

I realize that it would be easy to read my use of “intellectual technology” as an attempt to climb on the pro-science-and-engineering bandwagon, presenting intellectual history as quasi-hard-science, much as we joke that if poets started calling themselves “syllabic engineers” they would suddenly be paid more.  But it isn’t a term I’m advocating as a label, necessarily.  It’s a term I use for thinking, a semantic tool for describing the specific type of idea history I practice, and linking together my different interests into a coherent whole.  When I spell out what I’m working on right now as an historian, it’s actually a rather incoherent list: “the history of atheism, atomic science, skepticism, Platonic and Stoic theology, soul theory, homosexuality, theodicy, witchcraft, gender construction, saints and heavenly politics, Viking metaphysics, the Inquisition, utilitarianism, humanist self-fashioning, and what Renaissance people imagined ancient Rome was like.  And if you give me an hour, I can sort-of explain what those things have to do with each other.”  Or I can say, “I study how particularly controversial pieces of new intellectual technology come into being and spread over time.”

In that light, then, we can think of Machiavelli as the inventor of a piece of intellectual technology, or rather of several pieces of intellectual technology, since consequential ethics is one, but his new method of historical analysis (political science) is another.  We might compare him to someone who invented both the gun and the calculator.  How do we feel about that contribution?  Positive?  Negative?  Critical?  Celebratory?  I think the only universal answer is: we feel strongly.

See more thoughts on this in the follow-up post: Intellectual Technology–A Promoted Comment.

Salve!

The Arno just before Dusk

Since the number of people who have asked to receive my e-mails from Italy keeps growing beyond my ability to keep track, I’m finally going along with those of you who suggested that it would be simpler to post them online.

This year’s Italian adventure was brought to you by the letter Φ, the number 1417, and the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Institute for Italian Renaissance Studies Fellowship.  Generous support from wealthy, art-loving Harvard alums enables a few early career scholars every year to come to Florence to conduct research on history, art history, musicology etc., using not only Florence’s various libraries but Harvard’s own Berenson library with its collection of primary and secondary sources in English and other languages, not to mention its famous lunches and private vineyard and olive groves.  Scholarship is indeed a tough life.  I am here to conduct research on classical philosophy in the Renaissance (more on that later), so most of my time will be spent in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana and other collections of rare books and manuscripts that contain early (now out-of-date) attempts to summarize the lives of ancient philosophers about whom we know little now, and knew less back then.

I have two earlier batches of Ex Urbe e-mails, from earlier research trips, mainly in 2005-2007.  Over time I hope to polish and post the old letters here as well.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you all enjoy!