Ayo visto lo mappamundi

 I've been reading a pair of works by two extremely talented authors--and both of which have problems (IMHO) with the same issue, though in nearly completely opposite ways.

One is Alan Moore's (and Kevin O'Neill's) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. It's something like a side-jaunt, or maybe a companion volume to a series which started out as a supergroup of Victorian adventure characters but now seems to explain just about everything in terms of the super-universe of fictional characters. The Black Dossier volume isn't easy going--there's all manner of prose pastiches that can be daunting and, in one case, as he takes on Kerouac, nearly impenetrable. But it's intellectually dense, meticulously thought out, and as ambitious as you're ever likely to see. In contemporary comics, there's Mr. Moore riding through the night, and then there's everybody else.

The other is the book The Smoke Ring by Larry Niven. For a very long time, Niven's been close to the ideal combination of thoughtful scientific speculation, good story sense, and delightful imagination. (The two reasons I find it hard to hate Tom Clancy are 1) his love for the Macintosh and 2) his unbounded admiration for Niven.)

Moore's and O'Neill's vision goes beyond just a shoehorning in of every adventure, romantic, comic-book, -strip and A- and B- movie reference imaginable, to a magickal vision of all the characters of fiction having a real being that breaks (even if only by 3-D glasses) the bounds of paper, parchment, celluloid, nitrate and magnetic stock to be Real in a new, wild yet legitimate sense. It's colossally audacious, and turns what could be the biggest "find the twelve rabbits in this picture' exercises ever concocted (at least since Finnegans Wake) to something stronger and more evocative. Banish all thoughts of that Bruckheimer movie--surely the Howard the Duck of the early 21st century--and cleave to the real stuff. 

It's an altogether admirable work, and yet--and yet, if this is to be an apologia por vita fabula, some things began to bother me about this summa. 

While the vision of the Blazing World is an immense vista with multiple hints as to its Escher and blivit multidimensionality, it's a place crowded to bursting with figures. Back in the unblazered world of the league, though, the War of the Worlds happened, but was dealt with, and the events of Orwell's 1984 did occur,but only lasted a few years and was pretty much confined to England. And something in me balked, especially at the latter. It is true, I realized, that the events could have been just that localized and temporary, yet still look global and eternal to Winston Smith. Nonetheless, said the little voice, is that the best use to which Orwell's fiction could be put. Is Wells's vision of a world laid waste and humbled really served well by making it a brief upheaval best characterized as 'abortive'?

If you don't count the Marvel and DC universes, LoEG has two antecedents I know of: The first, the construct of Phillip José Farmer who, in his books Tarzan Alive! And Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic life, created a genealogy of adventure characters, linking Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, the Shadow, James Bond and many others into one great system. The other and slightly more obscure one was John Myers Myers' Silverlock, which created a magical land where characters of fiction lived, but surprised me into appreciation by including figures like Manon Lescaut along side Robin Hood--and using it to muse somberly about the meaning and fate of man.

Farmer's play (and I have to take a second to pay tribute to a real multidimensional and audacious writer--in addition to his fictional games, he's written daringly sexual sf and stylistically daring work. He's not only the real writer of Kilgore Trout's published novel Venus on the Half Shell, but he also ghost-wrote a story by Trout's favorite sf writer, Jonathan Swift Somers III.) resonated so widely because there really was a deep connection between the figures he talks about. Why shouldn't G-8 and his Battle Aces foil a plot by Fu Manchu?  Why shouldn't James Bond and the Shadow meet? I mean, doesn't that sound cool? I mean, the way Bertie Wooster meeting Cthulhu doesn't?

The point is that in addition to building characters, fiction writers build worlds. They don't have to look like Middle Earth, Dune or Gormenghast--it can be something like Blandings Castle or John Updike's suburbia or Charles Bukowski's endless chain of barrooms. They can borrow a an off-the-shelf world--in the same way one can yank out several standard characters from the box in back marked Teen Angst and Cynical Artists. It's an important and, I put it to you, coeval and coequal part with building heroes and antiheroes.

Which brings me to the Smoke Ring. It's a sequel to The Integral Trees, a novel that created an exceedingly strange and fully realized world, arising, it always seemed to me, out of the discoveries about the dynamics of Jupiter's  volcanic moon Io. Niven sets up a torus of gas in rotation around a neutron star, creating an ecology whose natural state is that of free fall, with nothing like earth or sky. He built an environment of enormous trees shaped like the integration extended 's'. And then he peopled it with a bunch of flavorless characters whose adventures were almost totally determined by interesting aspects of the created world. I read The Integral Trees when it came out--and have waited with the sequel until now. I've even reread some of my favorite Niven sooner than this. And regrettably the balance has not shifted.

Both figures and worlds participate in fiction. Science Fiction, Fantasy, satire and comedy all use their worlds for important purposes--while romance, adventure, tragedy and drama focus more strongly on the figures. It's purely my personal preference,I think, that I've always been far more excited by a map than a portrait--and so may be just an idiosyncratic objection to Alan and Kevin's Blazing World. Would I not far rather see a vast pan dimensional manifold of worlds to wander in--even ones like the Ingsoc Airstrip One or the Updikean air-conditioned nightmare? 

The answer is clearly 'Stop! you're BOTH right!" Because even if it's the standard Adventure Universe or the Standard Plucky Young Gel that satisfies you repeatedly, the best is when the two interact. 

Before I started musing in this direction, I asked the question, "Would Walter Mitty show up in the Blazing World?" And the prospect of a Walter Mitty in a world where he meets Allan Quartermain is kind of ludicrous, kind of distasteful, and kind of meaningless--because Thurber's tale is really as much about its world as much as the figure of Walter. And the idea of Updike's Rabbit meeting James Bond is not even all that amusing--as big a pointless exercise as Tess of the D'Urbervilles meeting Dracula. Sidney Carton meeting the Scarlet Pimpernel is another story--but that's because the worlds sit comfortably together. And Dan Dare in the Smoke Ring might actually improve both.

Ultimately, I think we have ask What's All This Then with as much dedication and irresponsibility as Who We Are.  I think the background of the trading card--collect them all!--needs to be paid attention to. Because just as Alan and Kevin have set out a great pluralistic vision to the second question, we might well need a pluralistic answer to the first.

Because sometimes what we need is a hero--and sometimes what we need is a map.