Parabolas of Science Fiction

2. Dancing with Scheherazade: Some Reflections in the Djinni’s Glass

24 ) ) ) ( work at it as best we can. It has to do with timing and delivery, the intricacies of verbal and nonverbal placement and tension, and with knowing what to give, what to withhold, what to state outright, and what to imply. Within the eons-old meritocracy of storytelling, writers proceed much the same way. Whether they possess an innate gift that sets them apart or have to work doggedly at the craft through imitation, perseverance, and judicious self-editing, they too discover what to give and what to omit. If they’re truly smart about it, and take care to pay attention, they learn from the masters to a greater or lesser degree, come to sense what is needed, and learn the difference between the facts and the spaces between the facts, the tension and power created by rhythms and the simple visual effect, and the shape and form of words, heeding (as does this writer at least) the advice Jack Vance gave during dinner in Oakland at Christmas 1995: “Words, words, words are the enemy of the writer.”1 As a writer working in the field of what is called science fiction (sf), fantasy , and dark fantasy, I have often gone on public record in interviews as listing among my key formative influences the rich and evocative work of Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith, J. G. Ballard, and Ray Bradbury. These authors not only render decay and faded glory in a curiously appealing way but also have the gift of putting words into narrative patterns that are both resonant and apposite. Just as Surrealists like René Magritte knew to pair lyrical, evocative, and stronglycontrasting namings with strikingly disparate images—the wonderful A Littleof the Bandit’s Soul (1960) readily comes to mind—they are in effect using a literary equivalent of the mystique of the chance encounter prized by Max Ernst and other Surrealists to create a heightened sense of intense, even exquisite, seeing—what can often be a recognition of something barely grasped yet somehow understood . 2 Dancing with Scheherazade Some Reflections in the Djinni’s Glass terry doWling Some of us are good at telling jokes; some of us aren’t and have to dancing WitH scHeHerazade ( ( ( 25 As storytellers they are also masters of the donnée—the “given”—facts that work as presumed knowledge and vividlycreate a sense of time, place, and a locus mirabilis: narrative décor not of this time and place. As well as citing these four writers as being central to the cast of my own creative enterprise, I inevitably take pains to remind the overzealous that Philip K. Dick sits in that number as well, as do Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, and, in latter days, Ian McDonald, C. J.Cherryh, and GeneWolfe, again writers who, through their great gifts with language and intuitive understanding of word dynamics, cadences, placement, and apposition, achieve an energy on the page, a connectedness with words where those words do not get in the way of story, and who often use their skills to create pangs of longing for something never before experienced. Before ruining the insight-on-process value of such a list of influences by mentioning others, let me add that the language, cadence, and delivery lessons taught by the first four writers just now named, as well as their ways of approaching story, have always been crucial to my own process as storyteller. Other influences include William Shakespeare and visual artists such as Magritte, Ernst, Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, and Paul Delvaux—with their own potent blending of light, landscape, and evocative décor, perception, conception, and immanence—and also include appropriate songwriters, poets, and musicians. The parabolic method, to call it that—working according to wellestablished themes and tropes that allow the writer to springboard into something richer, fuller, and of its time—underscores my own fiction, from the alien invasion Wormwood stories to what I like to call my tales of appropriate fear, both in themes employed and referenced and even in proven techniques for staging and delivery, techniques like using (but not overusing) appropriate cadence and euphony when creating patterns of text, for instance, or employing givens to help create a sense of place, a confidence of delivery, and what can only be called a narrative élan. In my own work you will readily find such genre standards as the alien invasion, the planetary romance, the first contact story, the galactic empire, even the...