Readers - email exchange with Angeline Adams 4_12_6

this is the third and final part of an email exchange that I had with Angeline Adams which she has kindly allowed me to put on this site...

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Angeline: Hi Ricardo, I finished The Standing Dead at the weekend and I wanted to share some more thoughts. I was very impressed by and immersed in it, both for itself and for the way it shows the inverted other side of the world I got to know in The Chosen.

Ricardo: that, of course, is one of its primary purposes...

Angeline: I think I meant to tell you before what I meant about the different tones of the two books - I think in the main, that comes from Carnelian. In the first book he's deeply affected by culture shock; sky-sickness for the mind.

Ricardo: *grin* that's a good way of putting it...

Angeline: The images of that book overwhelm both him and the reader who's living inside his head - the closest thing I can compare it with is how it felt to sit in the cinema and be plastered to the back of my seat by the visual and aural impact of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. There's this part where an enormous, spectacular parade is travelling through these soaring cathedral-like buildings, and on a cinema screen the effect is incredible.

Ricardo: *grin, again* it was that exact scene that blew me away... and it the very kind of thing that I was trying to evoke in The Chosen...

Angeline: Carnelian experiences unexpected and terrible things in this second book, but it feels as though something of the original shock of the world outside the island being physically revealed to him is wearing off. There's a dreamlike atmosphere in the first book which here is replaced by a more intuitive feeling of Carnelian being connected to the world around him which he's having to learn to live in.

Ricardo: I think you may well be right... though I wasn't really aware of this when I was writing it. I think you will find the 3rd book even more grounded in the way you describe...

Angeline: Also, the society he joins is strongly intuitive and matriarchal as opposed to the legalistic patriarchy of Osrakum, a contrast I enjoyed.

Ricardo: and one that I don't recall many people picking up on... and, again, my subconscious hard at work...

Angeline: As for the events of the second book, I have to say that I can't remember the last time I felt so horrified or uneasy after reading fiction, which I'm sure was your intention.

Ricardo: indeed... You might find this hard to believe, but there are people who have written to me and said that they didn't care what Osidian had done, they still were wholly on his side?!?!

Angeline: I realised the ultimate social goal of Osidian's manipulation when he encouraged the Ochre to enslave the Bluedancing - this was the fatal moment when he truly steered them towards moral disaster by giving them someone over whom to exercise power and feel superiority.

Ricardo: absolutely

Angeline: This was when I realised that he intended to mould their society into a microcosm of Osrakum. As Rem says, he decided that if he couldn't be there, he would recreate it around him.

Ricardo: that's another very interesting way to look at it... Another, complementary, way is to see that he is using the skills he knows and, in so doing, because the skills are powerful and subtle, by expressing them, he creates a microcosm of the Commonwealth in the Earthsky...

Angeline: He'd already been subtly encouraging division within the Tribe for some time, but solidifying their fear and dislike of the Bluedancing into a structure of bondage was a step which, once they had taken it, they couldn't un-take, because doing so would mean admitting the extent to which they had betrayed their gods, their forebears and their identity.

Ricardo: indeed... they project their disgust of themselves onto their victims...

Angeline: It was easier to feel anger and resentment and to demonise the Bluedancing than it was to turn that recrimination inwards to the people whose actions had caused the other tribe to depend on them - their own selves.

Ricardo: oops... should have read this first...

Angeline: Now I'm wondering if Quyan society became what it was in much the same way - one tribe with advantages and a charismatic, self-promoting leader convincing themselves that they had the right to break existing ethical rules, and later rationalising this as their having been Chosen by a higher power... much as the Ochre warriors refer to themselves proudly as the Master's first tribe within what is to become a conquered Plainsman nation. Ominous.

Ricardo: hmmm... ominous indeed... In one of my more recent progress reports I talked about the fractal nature of SDC - where the same sort of structure repeats itself all over the place but at different scales and sizes...

Angeline: Oh my God. I've just looked at your website and found the section where you have pictures and explanations of specific things in each chapter of each book. This is an incredible resource; the kind of thing people in most fandoms would kill for, or spend ages researching for fan sites.

Ricardo: I hoped that would be the case... not entirely sure it is working...

Angeline: Wow. You know, this is the sort of thing that should be mentioned with an explanation of what's there in the introduction to the third book (and inserted in future reprints of all three);

Ricardo: absolutely. I got very irritated with my UK publishers when, after I made a big fuss about this, they published a version of The Standing Dead which omitted the url!?!

Angeline: a lot of people don't necessarily think to check authors' websites, perhaps being used to the basic ones provided by publishers which have maybe a picture and a brief bio and a list of books. I also enjoyed reading all the interviews. The oldest one has that stuff about seeing the Masters as vampires, which I'm embarassed to say hadn't occured to me - embarassed because I find vampires and their symbolism very fascinating and read a great deal about them. But really, it makes perfect sense.

Ricardo: *grin* dear oh dear, are you in danger of losing your goth credentials? ;O)

Angeline: Vampires are parasites; their goal is to hide in plain sight among their host species and feed off it without killing that host: every aspect of that can be applied to Masters. Their way of life is conspicuous, but seeing their faces is death. They take just enough from the peoples they leech off to populate their households and legions, but not so many that those peoples become extinct. And - the preoccupation with blood is one thing I did pick up on - the significance and usage of blood, running the gamut from literal to symbolic, is everywhere.

Ricardo: I think at some point I became aware, while writing it, of this sort of parallel... but, I don't really think it was a major influence on my thinking... though who knows...

Angeline: I do wonder when all the gold and jewels will run out. The Rainbow Stair alone must be the culmination of years of quarrying.

Ricardo: *grin* indeed

Angeline: The Masters' entire manufactured world resembles the Amber Room of the Tsars.

Ricardo: but on a so much larger scale...

Angeline: So where is it all coming from? No, I don't expect an answer to that; I know you're keeping the details of the third book under your hat. But this is one of the things that intrigues me, particularly since The Standing Dead has forced me to appreciate the literal physical and personal cost to the peoples from whom the slaves and soldiers are drawn. And precious stones, like slaves, don't just come out of nowhere.

Ricardo: the economic underpinnings of the Stone Dance have been carefully worked out... and, like so much else, are indicative...

Angeline: Then again, they also don't exactly go anywhere - the bulk of them are decorating permanent buildings, and I get the impression that new-build is unusual since the population of Masters would have to be relatively stable, regulated as it is by the culture of marrying for power.

Ricardo: yes, you're right...

Angeline: As for the marumaga, presumably children conceived between concubines and Chosen Lords are subject to the whims of their fathers

Ricardo: completely

Angeline: - I'm sure the Wise know how to terminate a pregnancy if it is determined that the household won't need an extra servant in eight years' time.

Ricardo: they do... One thing of note is that the Wise are actually recruited from a flesh-tithe imposed on those marumaga born in Osrakum...

Angeline: Perhaps jewels used in the making of clothing can be re-used when clothes need replacing. Overall, the Chosen consumption of precious metals and gems might be like our consumption of fossil fuels: something which causes deficiencies which will only be noticed when the society is already too entrenched in its habits to deccelerate quickly enough to save what resources are left.

Ricardo: an interesting analysis, madam... ;O)

Angeline: I think the sartlar must be the miners of this world; we've seen them producing salt already (incidentally, how did it get to be so valuable - were the kind of geological processes which lead to salt deposits forming uncommon in the Three Lands? and is most of it just hoarded rather than being consumed?).

Ricardo: this aspect of their economy is based on sound historical precedent. Until relatively recently, most salt was produced from sea water in much the way described at the beginning of B1 (The Chosen)... Even in societies close to the sea, this made salt expensive... (thus the fact that the money paid to roman legionaries was called 'salt money' or salary)... In places remote from the sea... as much of sub-saharan africa... salt was extremely valuable... and even today, it is made in large quantities in morocco and traded across the sahara... in even recentish times, for gold...

One of those strange but delightful coincidences (with which the books are littered) was that when I carried out an in depth analysis of the economy of the Three Lands (which if I remember rightly took much more than a month) I discovered that salt was worth its weight in bronze to an accuracy of less than 1%... *grin*

Angeline: But I am intrigued by the sheer amount of precious materials that the Masters consume. It's interesting that with all the emeralds and sapphires and things, the most precious of all is something we in our part of the world have not had a shortage of - iron. I'm reading about it on WikiPedia now, and I found this interesting snippet: Because meteorites fall from the sky, some linguists have conjectured that the English word iron (OE _sern ), which has cognates in many northern and western European languages, derives from the Etruscan aisar which means "the gods". Did you know this when you decided that in Vulgate it would be called "sky-metal"?

Ricardo: not that specifically... What I based it on was that the Ancient Egyptians at one point had iron but entirely harvested from meteorites which they found in their western deserts. It was only much later that iron was obtained from haematite under high temperatures... In the Three Lands, all iron is obtained from meteorites... and, as such, is far rarer than gold. Additionally, its chemical properties perform an important religious function in their civilization... You will find that it is another of the themes running through the book... with its identification with blood...