Writing Fiction

Holiday Wishes

Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog.

But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself:

Download recipe_for_pulla.pdf

My old friend Merlin and I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday and a new year full of surprises that make you laugh.

More Good News for Pullman

Via The Star in Toronto: Board widens ban on fantasy novels. Excerpt:

The Halton Catholic school board has rejected the recommendation of its book committee and banned the children's fantasy novel The Golden Compass, as well as the subsequent books in the trilogy, which were not officially under review.

The board said the novels in author Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy are not in keeping with "the Catholic values that we are trying to teach children."

A majority of trustees felt the series was "not in line with our governing values ... so they chose to take it out of the library," board chair Alice Anne LeMay said in an interview. LeMay said she favoured the proposal to limit access to the books to those in Grades 7 and up.

The decision, made in a vote Tuesday, follows a move by the board last month to pull The Golden Compass from library shelves after a complaint. The board's elementary principals were also directed not to distribute a Scholastic flyer that had the book available to order.

The book review committee recommended The Golden Compass, now a major film, be returned to shelves and made available to students in Grade 7 and up.

The Golden Compass tells the story of a young girl's travels to the edge of another universe, where she's involved in a battle between good and evil. Written by Pullman, a self-described atheist, it's seen by critics as anti-religion.

And via Reuters, the Vatican itself chimes in:

The Vatican on Wednesday condemned the film "The Golden Compass," which some have called anti-Christian, saying it promotes a cold and hopeless world without God.

In a long editorial, the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, also slammed Philip Pullman, the bestselling author of the book on which the family fantasy movie is based.

It was the Vatican's most stinging broadside against an author and a film since it roundly condemned "The Da Vinci Code" in 2005 and 2006.

"In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events," the editorial said.

The film, which premiered earlier this month in the United States and stars Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is an adaptation of Pullman's acclaimed novel "Northern Lights".

The Vatican newspaper said "honest" viewers would find it "devoid of any particular emotion apart from a great chill."

In the fantasy world created by Pullman's trilogy, 'His Dark Materials', the Church and its governing body the Magisterium, are linked to cruel experiments on children aimed at discovering the nature of sin and attempts to suppress facts that would undermine the Church's legitimacy and power.

This is precisely the kind of response that will encourage kids to read the books and see the movie. Those of us whose books have never been banned can only watch with envy.

Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur!

Via The Star: Arthur C. Clarke at 90: Where's ET? Excerpt:

Science fiction writer Arthur Clarke listed three wishes on his 90th birthday Sunday: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings.

"I have always believed that we are not alone in this universe," Clarke said in a speech to a small gathering of scientists, astronauts and government officials at a ceremony in his honour in Colombo where he lives.

Humans are waiting until extraterrestrial beings "call us or give us a sign," he said. "We have no way of guessing when this might happen. I hope sooner rather than later."

The British-born author has written more than 100 sci-fi books, including "2001: A Space Odyssey." His fiction predicted space travel before rockets were even test fired and envisioned computers dominating ordinary lives.

On a different note, and just a day after delegates at a United Nations conference in Indonesia agreed to a blueprint for fighting global warming by 2009, he urged the world to consider switching to environment-friendly fuels.

"I would like to see us kicking our current addiction to oil and adopt clean energy resources," Clarke said.

I've been reading his novels since I was a very little boy, and I'm almost 67. For more than half a century, Arthur C. Clarke has shaped our imaginations, and usually for the better.

His last few novels, especially the collaborations, have been potboilers—but go to the early books, like Childhood's End and The City and The Stars, and he'll dumbfound you with his intelligence and vision and sensitivity.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur. Please don't go before ET calls. You're the one he'll want to talk to.

More about His Dark Materials

Having finished the trilogy with great pleasure, I've written a review, and The Tyee has published it under the title A Dangerous 'Golden Compass'?

A Late Conversion to Philip Pullman

I don't know whether I need to get out more, or to stay in more and catch up on my reading.

For years I've despaired about SF and fantasy as genres enslaved by industrial publishing. The names of authors and titles washed past me; I ignored them, assuming they were just more wretched examples of franchise pizza masquerading as Italian cuisine.

It took the pre-release PR of the film version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass to stir me from my pastoral torpor. After seeing the movie trailer, I dug out a copy of the book at a nearby library. I'd managed about 60 pages of the first Harry Potter novel before going into a coma, so I didn't have high hopes for yet another well-hyped Brit fantasy.

Now I'm maddened by having to wait until tomorrow before I can get to a bookstore to buy the whole trilogy. All I can do tonight is grade papers and feel sorry for myself.

I'm also maddened by the thought that Pullman's been around for years: The Golden Compass appeared in 1995, and it's taken a dozen years for me to catch up with him.

If you're already a Pullmanite, you know what I'm talking about. If you're not, you have a hell of an education ahead of you. This is a writer of superb literacy who regards children (and seniors like me) as a serious audience ready to grapple with huge issues that make us turn the pages.

The title of the trilogy is His Dark Materials—a quotation from Milton's Paradise Lost, which is one of the greatest science-fiction epics of all time. Shame on me for not remembering the line from my undergraduate reading.

Pullman drags the blind poet into the age of quantum physics and makes him comfortable there. Then he proceeds to lambaste the poor old guy, and two millennia of religious tyranny, while telling a story that will shut you up and keep you hyperventilating from first page to last.

It's amazing, ironic, and strange that a kids' fantasy trilogy should deal with truly life-and-death issues, while genteel "mainstream" fiction worries about trivia. The irony is especially sour in that the trilogy's been out for years, but only the movie has triggered a hostile response from sincerely stupid Christians who think Pullman is a menace.

For good studies of that response, see this article in the Los Angeles Times, and this one at BBC New Online.

For writers of science fiction and fantasy, Pullman offers a hope of escape from Tolkien's elves and dwarves. Yes, you can write fantasy in clear, concise, vivid English. Yes, you can create your own world instead of being a sharecropper in someone else's. Yes, you can confront life, death, and the meaning of both without breaking into giggles or purple prose.

But part of Pullman's genius is that he never lets you relax. As soon as you think Lyra Belacqua and her daemon are finally safe, he tightens the screws even more. To match his kind of writing, you're going to have to work harder than you ever dreamed. The only consolation will be that if you can write as well as Philip Pullman, but not like him, you have written very well indeed.

Cast your bread upon the waters...

The other day I got an email:
...even though you don't know it, I'm your pupil and successful too. I studied your Advice on Novel Writing and my first novel was published last week. Thank you. Margot Voet in Zutphen, the Netherlands.

Well, of course it's a delight to see that my suggestions have helped another aspiring novelist. Margot tells me her novel took two years to write. The title is De Heling, which in Dutch can mean both "the healing" and "the fencing of stolen goods."

Congratulations, Margot! May the novel do well, and may the next one do even better.