Recommended for Writers: Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum

The finest dystopian fiction of this century, books such as 1984, We, and Darkness At Noon, were written by authors who had glimpsed a broken world in the mirror. They had lived it. Once–and this was perhaps the true horror–they had believed in it. The Twentieth Century was the Century of Dystopia Triumphant…. of Fascist and Communist empires that heralded themselves as earthly messiahs of a new Golden Age, while delivering mass murder, mass terror, mass famine and war.

The Nazi half of the horror that was the previous century is well known, but the scope of the Communist nightmare is still little felt, at a visceral level, in the same way. This is one reason that the work of authors like Anne Applebaum are so crucial. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, is an amazing and sobering portrayal of totalitarianism triumphant.

Anne Applebaum writes nonfiction more grippingly than many lesser writers manage to write fiction. She writes and argues history as all history should be (but seldom is) written and argued. Her reasoning is logical, her organization is lucid, her prose is luminous. She salts the meaty heaps of evidence with personal vignettes that bring the tragedies, absurdities and ambiguities of the period alive. The history of genocide and conquest must always be in danger of fading to gray under the immensity of its own statistical weight. And as Stalin said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Applebaum returns human faces to the cynical mass murdering oligarchs who crushed Eastern Europe, whether as conquering foreigners or collaborating locals, as amoral psychopaths or feverish true believers.

Dystopia has become a hot genre lately, but not every dystopia is portrayed as convincingly as Panem. Likewise, many near future or far future science fiction or paranormal/contemporary fantasy novels set out to portray the conquest of nations by a hostile, dystopian human or alien force, but many end up falling flat because the authors haven’t read any actual history.

How does a nation that arrives not only as a conqueror, but as a liberator, impose its rule…and its ideology? Force is present, but not always naked; what clothes does force wear? Here is a real history of how several different nations all learned to march in step to the same tune, and how that was accomplished.

But while we’re on the subject of historically real dystopias, I must also recommend Anne Applebaum’s other books on Communism, especially Gulag and Gulag Voices (an anthology of first hand accounts which she curated).

Learn more about Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum.

Recommended for Writers: A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea

We all think we know what the Inquisition was, but for most of us, our knowledge of that period of history is hazy at best…and it comes entirely from second-hand and third-hand sources. Maybe a half-remembered high school year book or college course, but more like, some Hollywood riff or musical spoof.

If you’re a writer, or just a human being, and you want some insight into real evil, however, you should study history. Real history, not a watered down textbook, and definitely not Hollywood spin.

Current academnic books can be intimidating, and, well, expensive. Publishers often price the ebooks the same as the hard cover. I’ve seen some history ebooks that cost over $100, which is just crazy. However, don’t despair.One of the great things about the age of the ebook is that so many excellent older histories available for free or dirt cheap, since they are out of copyright. Often these older books are actually more legible and enjoyable to read than some of the postmodern bilge that sometimes emerges from modern academia.

A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea is one such work that is well worth the read. I bought my print version a long time ago, and it cost me a pretty penny, but I’ve noticed that you can now buy all three volumes for a buck. If you want a fascinating overview of how folk in the Middle Ages embarked on the frenzied hunt of witches, demons and heretics, this is a marvelous three-volume set.

As interesting as the persecutions are in and of themselves, it’s also worth noting that people of the Middle Ages, illiterate and isolated though they might have been, were not as stupid or credulous as we often assume. They did not necessarily rush into the persecutions as a blind mob; they had to be goaded there by centuries of propaganda and show trials. This makes reading about the Inquisition interesting to compare to thoroughly modern phenomena, such as the conquest of Eastern Europe by the Soviets. (So be sure and check out tomorrow’s Recommended books for writers as well.)

First of all, the Inquisition started much earlier than the Spanish Inquisition, and lasted centuries longer than most people realize. The incredible combination of pure evil and utter hypocrisy they exhibited during their reign of terror over a millennium of European history is impossible to exaggerate in even the most outrageous of fantasy villains. The Inquisition had roving targets: pagans, heretics, witches, Jews, Protestants, scientists and artists, but the methodology of terror transferred century by century from one persecution to another.

Henry Charles Lea describes the late medieval witch craze, in the third volume of his oeuvre A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages:

No one can read the evidence adduced at a witch-trial, or the confessions of the accused, without seeing how every accident and every misfortune and every case of sickness or death which had occurred in the vicinage for years was thus explained, and how the circle of suspicion widened so that every conviction brought new victims; burnings multiplied, and the terrified community was ready to believe that a half or more of its members were slaves of Satan, and that it would never be free from their malignant vengeance until they should all be exterminated. For more than two centuries this craze was perpetually breaking out in one part of Europe or another, carefully nursed and stimulated by popes and Inquisitors, Bernard of Como and Bishop Binsfeld, and the amount of human misery thence arising is simply incomputable. (p.509)

The Monty Python spoofs of how witches were tried was not exaggerated, but rather softened. Otherwise the joke would have been too horrid to laugh about. It wasn’t a matter of whether a witch floated like a duck, but whether she (or he) broke down and confessed during torture.

“The inquisitor was formally instructed never to declare him [the witch] innocent.” (p. 513) The names of witnesses were suppressed; if the accused was given counsel, that person was appointed by the Inquisition and threatened with being accused of a witch as well if he actually defended his client; the Inquisitor was allowed to falsely promise clemency if the accused publically confessed, but after confessing, the accused was duly burned anyway.

It wasn’t just a matter of guilty until proven innocent, as in secular law at the time: There was no innocent.  

Formally endurance of torture might be regarded as an evidence of innocence, now it was only an additional proof of guilt, for it showed that Satan was endeavoring to save his servitor… 

One new infallible sign was the inability of the witch to shed tears during torture and before the judges, though she could do so freely elsewhere. ….Still with the usual logic of the demonologist, if she did weep it was a device of the devil and was not to be reckoned in  her favor.

…Equally frivolous was the pretense that the punishment of burning was merely for the injuries wrought by the witch, for we shall see that in the case of the Vaudois of Arras the convicts were burned as a matter of course, although attendance upon the Sabbat was the only crime with which most of the sufferers were charged. (p. 514. 516)

Henry Charles Lea’s work covers three volumes, about five hundred pages each, describing case after case of maniacal persecution for charges so ludicrous that even people at the time could not believe most of them. To the modern mind, that is sometimes what strikes us most: that the punishment was so brutal though the crime was completely imaginary.

On the other hand, for a fantasy writer, the amazing powers attributed to witches, demons, werewolves and so on are tempting material to mine for magic systems. And that gives us an opportunity which more prosaic minds seldom ask: suppose witchcraft were real—would that have justified the excess, the lies, the confiscation of property that paid for it all, the ongoing tortures and genocides of the Inquisition?

Of course not.

That is exactly why I think some form of Bad Guys in White are an important component of Epic Fantasy. Their presence reminds us that self-righteousness is not the same as being right.

Also read The Bad Guys in White, Part II.

Learn more about A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Charles Lea.

The Bad Guys in White, Part I (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

(This post will contain spoilers for The Unfinished Song, so if you haven’t read up to the end of Book 6, you might want to come back to it later.)

I love thoughtful email from fans. I hope one of my correspondents won’t mind if I use her email comments as the inspiration for my post today. After an insightful analysis of The Unfinished Song epic so far—and some rather startlingly accurate predictions about where the heroes would go next—she noted that Xerpen is far too evil to be, as he is, technically, on the same side as Dindi and the good Aelfae. In fact, since Xerpen has started using Death Magic, allying with him against Lady Death may be a huge mistake.

I cannot argue with that. Yet Dindi may still have to try…

Interestingly, there was no Xerpen in the earliest versions of the story. He arose because I realized such a power would always arise in such a situation. Look across history and you’ll notice that whenever a great trouble or problem comes up, one of the reasons it’s so hard to solve rationally is that some people fixate on an irrational solution that’s even worse than the problem. Or they are so fanatic and excessive in their zeal to destroy evildoers that they become evildoers themselves, though they are blind to their own faults.

Edward Cote, a writer friend of mine (I was also the cover artist for his book Violet Skies; if you would like to hire me for cover art, contact me to find out about availability) described these guys as “the Bad Guys in White.”

In the Wheel of Time, they were called the Children of the Light.  In Sword of Truth, they were the Blood of the Fold.  They show up in even the otherwise refreshing Ice and Fire, as the Sparrows.  

This trope is perhaps even more standard in fantasy gaming, where a villainous organization is doubly useful as an implacable foe for the player characters.  The Iron Kingdoms has the Protectorate of Menoth.  World of Warcraft has the Scarlet Crusade.  The Eberron D&D setting has both the Church of the Silver Flame and the Blood of Vol, either of which could arguably fit the description.  Several faction based games have an almost generic “Crusaders” type faction.

Even the trappings of the Bad Guys in White are quite constant.  They usually literally wear white, often along with red or gold.  They always make a loud show of piety and hatred for anything they consider heretical or evil, which almost always includes any kind of magic, even what the good guys use.  They typically have a military structure, complete with rank, heraldry, weapons and armor.  There is sometimes an order of Inquisitors within the larger organization.  They almost always practice hypocrisy, murder, theft, and torture, sometimes even genocide.

He points out that in this incarnation, they’ve become a bit of tired cliché. Let’s give the Spanish Inquisition a rest.

I understand where he’s coming from—no one wants to read  or write cliché— but I can’t agree that the Inquisition or Templars should be deemed exhausted sources of inspiration. (In fact, one of the book I am recommending this month is Henry Charles Lea’s oeuvre A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages.) 

I quite like the category “Bad Guys in White”; I don’t think we should try to avoid those kinds of characters. Just…as with any villains… take them one step deeper than the cliche, make them new and real and frightening again.

One way to do that is to study history. Fiction characters who are modeled on other fiction characters tend to be weary shadows, stereotypes. Fiction characters who are modeled on our own deepest experiences, or upon historical people, tend to have much more heft and originality.

When I thought about what motivated a person like Xerpen, I wondered, first of all, how much backstory I should even delve into. Vashti Valant argues in her guest post later this month that it isn’t always necessary to know the backstory of a villain. Sometimes, indeed, the inscrutability of the villain’s motives makes him all the more frightening. The unknown is so much scarier than the known.

But I realized that since Xerpen was an Aelfae, and at one time the companion and lover of Vessia, it would reflect poorly on her if he had been a crazed, genocidal psychopath the whole time she knew him and somehow she never noticed. Therefore, I did want to show a series of experiences befell him that changed him from the man she knew into a very different creature. I also realized that his core values never changed. He believed in a good world, in a better world, in a perfect world. The world, he reasoned, had been perfect without humans, and so only without humans could it be perfect again. He is, in short, a True Believer, and like other true believers, he combines the best of motives with the worst of methods.

I drew inspiration for Xerpen’s rise to power as the War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth from the Cattle Killing movement of the Xhosa. The Xhosa were desperate because their way of life was being threatened by British colonists. Then a young prophetess and her uncle, a prophet in his own right as well as her interpreter, arose promising to cast out the British. If only they would heed the prophecy, they could restore their way of life and restore their dead to life. Could the Xhosa be blamed for thinking that prophet was one of the Good Guys, there to save them from the villains, the British imperialists?

And yet, the fanatics lead their people to destruction more swiftly than the British could have contrived.

The Aelfae are in a similar position vis-a-vis Humanity. In fact, in some ways, the Aelfae are even worse off. For they once were immortal, not only in their dreams, but in their real lives. And now they are all but extinct. But of course, in Faearth, where magic is real, there is no question but that a real Resurrection of the Aelfae may be possible. The question is how is it to come about and at what price?

For Dindi, the other challenge is how to offer her own help to the Aelfae as a viable alternative to Xerpen. Or… even worse…  as Lady Death becomes more ruthless and gathers more allies, Dindi may find that she must accept Xerpen as a temporary ally, even knowing that he will betray her at the first opportunity.

Also read The Bad Guys in White, Part II.

7 Most Underrated Villains (Guest Post by Jack P.)

7. Dr. Tolian Soran (Star Trek)

Number 1 – he killed Captain Kirk. Number 2 – see number one. Think about it, Kirk has faced open war with the Klingon Empire and everything the galaxy has to throw at him and won. This is the guy who finally ended him.

6. Jean Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg. And bonus, his gun. (5th Element)

Zorg is evil for the sake of evil. He works for Mister Shadow, the Ultimate Evil, and is willing to destroy all life on Earth to prove a philosophical point. Oh, and that hairstyle? Pure evil.

5. Jabba the Hutt (Star Wars)

Jabba always gets left off Greatest Villain lists because he got strangulated by Princess Leia and died, but think about it. This is a gangster who’s criminal empire was so powerful, even the Empire wouldn’t mess with it. When Darth Vader considers you a threat, hey, you’re kind of a big deal. Even people who aren’t sci-fi fans know exactly what you mean when you say Jabba the Hutt.

4. Nudar (Futurama)

Nudar is the leader of the alien nudist scammers on Futurama. They were so good at using tiny tidbits of personal information and tricking people into giving them, they took over the entire planet. Their organ the ‘sprunjer’ engorges in the presence of valuable information. That right there is one powerful nude villain.

3. Bugger Queen (Ender’s Game)

The Bugger Queen is underrated b/c she is unknown throughout most of the novel. Ender’s Game focuses on Ender, and his fight to defeat the bugger race, the Formics. She controls her entire species telepathically, overriding their own individual wills. While she is not overly antagonistic against other races, she is willing to kill anyone and everything in order for her species to survive, even some of her own kind.

2. Tash (Narnia)

Tash is the Devil to Aslan’s Jesus. Though the Narnia movie series ended after the 3^rd installment, here’s hoping the Final Battle ever makes it to the big screen, so Tash can be seen in all his unholy glory. He has 4 arms, a beak, and the head of a horse. He steals the souls of the magical creatures and humans alike, and has an entire civilization of people who worship him and basically leads to the complete destruction of Narnia.

1. Captain Hook (Peter Pan/Hook)

Everyone thinks of Captain Hook as the bumbling, one-handed, crocophobe, but no one considers who he really is. This is a pirate who has no compunctions about waging war on innocent children. Tiny little children. He has a sword AND a hook hand. At one point, even in the original play, he attempts to kill Peter Pan by poison. In Hook, he goes ahead and even kills a child on screen (Ru-Fi-OOOOO). Bangarang to that, Captain.

The Villains in a Cozy Mystery Series (Guest Post by Mathiya Adams)

Three classic villains types from the Noir Detective genre: the Master Criminal in the posh suit, the weasel minion, and the femme fatale. (From the Maltese Falcon)

When Is An Anti-Hero TOO Anti? (Blog Post by Tara Maya)

I’m all in favored of the tortured, haunted, even monstrous, hero. Let him have a bloody past, terrible urges, even a streak of demon. But I do have a limit how dark I can tolerate my Dark Heroes.

Occasionally, I come across a hero or heroine that simply crosses the line from sexy wicked to ewww-yuck-wicked.

For example, I read a Paranormal Romance with the premise of a Romeo and Juliet story about a werewolf woman in love with a vampire hottie. Awesome. Right?!

Opening scene: she hunts and kills a human. No remorse, no particular effort to explain if this was normal for her or not, certainly no guilt or debate about, you know, killing and eating a person. The vampire then captures her and uses his vampire powers of “persuasion” to “seduce” her into bedding him. Excuse me, how is that not rape? A few chapters later, the vampire goes out and kills a couple, because this is how he makes a living. He doesn’t seem to know or care why his employer wants the couple dead… and guess what, neither does the author. We never learn. He also drains their blood, because, you know… vampire. At this point I was mostly skimming, but I gathered that the werewolf serial killer and the vampire rapist-assassin eventually realized that even though they come from different tribes of monster, they loved each other, and they lived happily ever after.

Uh… wtf?!

I couldn’t believe I was supposed to cheer that two monsters were now bonded through mind-rape and the power of a mutual appetite for amoral killing. I mean, sure, maybe if werewolves and vampires were real, and had the appetites that they are supposed to have, this is exactly how they would behave. But the dirty secret of the monsters in Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance is they are not really supposed to be monsters. Not on the inside, not in their code of honor, in their moral conduct. They are actually supposed to be heroic.

I’ll be the first to confess that this is a matter of taste and maybe personal ethics. Some writers genuinely want to challenge our traditional ideals of good and evil. Some writers have different ideals of good and evil. Some writers simply want to explore a wide range of human existence and their protagonists are not even meant to be heroic. Some writers despise heroes, and let it show.

If you want to start a debate in a Fantasy fan group, bring up Lord Foul’s Bane. Some readers love it. Others hate it. I’m in the hated it group. Sorry, that rapist anti-hero crossed the line for me, and I wouldn’t read further. On the other hand, I was enthralled by the gorgeous strangeness of The Birthgrave, and devoured it in one sitting, unable to put it down. At the end, though, I felt a disquiet that billowed into dysphoria, because it struck me that the heroine had begun and ended the story completely amoral. The cruelty underlying her conduct and her entire world didn’t sit well with me. Tanith Lee is a fantastic author, but I approach her works with caution. My tastes simply run along clearer streams.

At least, however, it was clear that both Tanith Lee and Stephen R. Donaldson knew exactly what they were doing when they chose the anti-heroes they wrote about. They wrote the stories they set out to write. They weren’t under the illusion that they were writing about likable, honorable heroes in the traditional mold, but about twisted, tortured souls.

Too often, lately, I have read books (yes, usually by indie authors; let’s be honest) that exhibit no such self-control or self-awareness. It’s as if the writer expected you to react to her vampire hero as if he were Edward or Angel, a redeemable, even shining, hero, unaware that she had failed to give her hero any redeemable or shiny qualities whatsoever.

If you choose to write a truly amoral character or very dark protagonist, that’s one thing. But if you are striving to keep most readers on board and not create an anti-hero who is no better than a villain, you should keep in mind certain rules of thumb for Likable Anti-Heroes. Here’s a checklist:

Does he/she exhibit any awareness of being a terrible person/monster?

Does he/she feel any guilt for terrible actions?

Does he/she start out one way (more brutal) but gradually learn a different way (less so)?

Is the hero/heroine pitted against a villain whose actions are even more heinous?

Is the hero/heroine forced by some outside threat or master to do terrible things–and does he/she rebel eventually?

Is the hero/heroine driven by some internal curse/affliction/addiction to do terrible things–and does he/she overcome it eventually?