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Scream and Leap -- Writing Destiny's Forge
The seed for Destiny’s Forge was planted
when I read Donald Kingsbury’s Man-Kzin Wars novella Survivor.
Survivor was told almost exclusively from a kzinti
point of view and gave us an unprecedented look into the kzinti
social system. From the standpoint of the series it was a
vitally important story and it remains one of my favourites
to this day. The Patriarchy Kingsbury paints runs on the
feudal system, and the disconnect between its politics and
its technology is severe. It is this disconnect which renders
the mighty Patriarchy vulnerable to humanity despite their
higher technology and unsurpassed combat skills. The premise
of the series to that point was that the kzinti lost wars
because they were overaggressive and thus easily tricked by
clever humans. Survivor shows us a more complex reality,
and explains that aggression as a logical consequence of the
Kzinti social structure.
Of course when Survivor came out I
immediately wanted to write my own story that dealt with the
gritty underside of the Patriarchy. First I had some work
to finish. Prisoner of War was done and I was well
into writing The Chosen One (published as Jotok)
and Windows of the Soul. My intent with Prisoner
of War was to write the closing chapter of the Man-Kzin
wars, the very last story (in chronological terms, not publishing
terms) possible in the series. One goal I had with the story
was to make exactly the point that Kingsbury was making, which
was that kzinti, like humans, were social animals. Scream
and leap as a strategy was driven far more by pressures internal
to the Patriarchy than by its effectiveness in battle. In
a very real sense it didn’t matter to the Patriarch if his
Heroes won their conquest or just died trying, so long as
they didn’t stay on settled systems to compete for wealth
and mates. The question of what to do with surplus young
males is a critical question for any polygamous society, and
the kzinti are very polygamous because kzinrette are nonsentient.
As such they are literal property and like all property they
tend to wind up belonging to the powerful. Because power
is something that tends to increase with age, young males
are left mateless unless they can do something to gain power.
In the Patriarchy, that something is to go out on conquest.
The question of victory or defeat is of vital interest to
the conquest fleets, but of total irrelevance to the power
structure. Combine this with the decades long lags involved
in organizing a war effort over dozens of light-years and
there will inevitably an almost total lack of central co-ordination.
Without central co-ordination the conquest fleets will be
little more than loose and shifting coalitions moving in the
same general direction. At every level they kzinti raiders
will cooperate only where they have to, because they are all
ultimately in competition with each other for the same prizes.
The goal with The Chosen One was
to explain a very intriguing premise of intelligent kzinrette
that Dean Ing set up in Cathouse the very first Man-Kzin
Wars book. Kit, Ing’s kzinrette heroine, gives us a glimpse
of a kzinti pre-history where kzinti females are as smart
or smarter than the males and hints that their change in intelligence
came about through a deliberate program of culling carried
out by the priesthood. The Chosen One shows the inevitable
result of this is the marginalization of the society. Even
on Earth there is a quite direct linkage between a nation’s
wealth and power and the amount of freedom its women enjoy,
and the fastest way to boost a nation’s productivity is to
invite it’s women to participate in the economy. (Societies
which disenfranchise other groups suffer as well of course,
but these groups are usually minorities whereas women are
actually a slight majority so the effect is less). The twist
in The Chosen One is that the marginalized tribal group
with its barbaric traditions that breed out intelligence in
kzinrette (and also telepathy, as is hinted at in Hal Colebatch’s
Telepath’s Dance and explored in detail in Destiny’s
Forge) wind up running the show. This happens because
the jotoki arrive and enlist the backwards tribe in their
war with the more advanced kzinti, gifting them with high
technology weapons, multiplying their numbers with forced
growth techniques and training them as mercenaries while somehow
believing that they can maintain control of the process.
We witness the founding of the Patriarchy here, and of course
the reader knows (though the protagonists don’t) that the
jotoki will wind up paying for their interference by becoming
the first kzinti slave race. I also got to write a story
without any human characters at all, which was an interesting
challenge, and my very own first contact story.
The last tale I had to finish before I started
working on the story seed that Survivor had planted
in my brain was Windows of the Soul. Unlike Prisoner
of War and The Chosen One, I wouldn’t be
developing any of the series backstory here. My goal with
Windows was to write a noire detective piece in the
style of Niven’s Gil the Arm. Windows was fun to write,
but it’s characteristic of me that I get more excited about
the next project than the one I’m working on now, and I really
wanted to work on my new story.
The plot that I dreamed up after reading
Survivor envisioned a kitten, eldest son of a kzinti
noble, who is forced to flee when his father’s rival attacks.
The young hero manages to escape into the ventilation system
only because he’s small enough to go where his pursuers cannot
follow. He would rescue his younger brother in the attempt,
and the two would grow up half wild in the wilderness. Eventually
they would return as adults to regain what had been stolen
from them. I had the structure for the opening scenes in
my mind and I had named my hero Pouncer – and that was all.
Other projects and the rest of my life intervened and for
several years Pouncer never made it out of my brain and on
to the page. That turned out to be a good thing. I had time
to polish my skills as a writer and to work with longer stories,
both vital to the book that would become Destiny’s Forge.
Had I written it when I first wanted to I wouldn’t have done
justice to the idea.
By the time I had time to write it the original
concept had grown considerably. This fit well with the next
literary challenge I wanted to take on, which was to write
a truly epic story. Pouncer was no longer just the son of
a noble but the son of the Patriarch. The coup that steals
the throne from him would trigger the collapse of the Patriarchy
and the final, genocidal Man-Kzin war. I planned on a length
of at least 160,000 words. Considering the fact that the
next longest Man-Kzin wars story is a novella of around fifty
thousand words (though The Children’s Hour was later
extended to book length) this was an ambitious undertaking,
to say the least. I pitched the idea to Larry and wrote up
an outline. The original plot involved humans only peripherally
and was confined entirely to the kzinti homeworld, but over
lunch at Worldcon he convinced me that I needed human protagonists
to make the story run, and that the action needed to move
offworld. He was right of course, and I began typing.
One of my favourite things about writing
is that it’s a journey of discovery. Many, even most, of
the elements in Destiny’s Forge weren’t planned in
from the start, they arrived as logical necessities as the
story grew and evolved. The story as finished bears only
passing resemblance to the outline I presented Larry with
when I started. What happens is that characters take on their
own lives and act according to their own demands while the
universe they live in grinds forward with its own inexorable
forces. Like a sculptor who merely releases a trapped statue
from it’s encasing rock, a writer simply reveals the story
that the characters live in the world they inhabit. That
has consequences when you’re trying to move a plot forward,
because frequently your characters don’t want to go where
you’d like to push them. The plot demands a traitor and so
you find one or create one, but once he’s in the book he stays
there. He haunts the story, lurking in the shadows with a
hidden blade until he finds redemption, destruction, or both.
In the meantime he leaps out at intervals to completely alter
the direction you want the story to take. To merely mention
him at the beginning is to entangle his fate with that of
entire worlds by the end. Put a man and a woman in a room
and you have to deal with sexual tension even if they never
touch. Make a prophecy and you commit yourself to its resolution
one way or another. Every story thread interweaves with every
other, and they all have to come together at the end. When
I started I was worried that I might not have enough story
to fill 160,000 words. By the time I got to 200,000 words
I was getting concerned that I might not get finished before
300,000. The book finished itself at 262,000, which certainly
meets my goal for writing a sweeping epic. I’ve had agents
tell me it was too long to sell, but every last word counts.
Larry Niven, who was quite happy to see Windows of the
Soul cut in half, took out only forty words when he edited
it.
A good example of this dynamic is one of
my favourite characters in the book, the black-furred Ftzaal-Tzaatz,
expelled from the notorious Black Priest cult for poorly explained
reasons. He is a consummate warrior of unassailable honour
and a dangerous adversary. His role in the book proved to
be central, though I hardly guessed that when I created him.
He is zar-ameer to his ambitious brother Kchula, a
role somewhere between bodyguard and grand vizier that falls
to the younger sons of noble kzinti houses. Ftzaal is smarter
than Kchula, and subtler. He has the power to seize the leadership
from his brother if he wants it, and it might be a good thing
if he did. At the same time, Ftzaal contains murky depths
that his sense of honour barely keeps in check, and how those
would play out if power fell into his lap is an open question.
I didn’t know until the very end whether he’d come down on
the side of good or evil. It was the infamous Hot Needle
of Inquiry that finally decided the issue, though I won’t
tell you how to avoid spoiling the surprise.
A related problem the book presented me with
was the question of the title. I wanted something that encompassed
the scope and cataclysmic nature of the story. The concept
of the forge was something that occurred to me early, implying
as it does violent reshaping through high heat and pressure.
In that I was simply borrowing the concept from a series I
had long wanted to do entitled the Forge of War. For
a developmental title I used Forge of Empire which
was a good enough label to use for talking about the book
to other people, but it simply wasn’t right for the simply
reason that the story spans the collapse of an empire and
not the building of one. For a while I worked using Empire
as the base concept for the title rather than Forge.
Crash of Empire was an alternative I briefly considered
but discarded as heavy handed and awkward. Empire’s End
and Empire’s Fall didn’t last much longer. I returned
to the Forge concept when I realized that ultimately
the book was about the characters and not the events. They
were the ones whose lives I was hammering out with anvil and
fire, they were the ones whose decisions would shape not only
their own fate but that of the worlds of Known Space. From
that moment the title could only be Destiny’s Forge.
Once I had the title, all I had to do was finish the book.
It took three years of effort, interspersed with other
projects, and it became almost a saga in itself. My life
is very mobile, and so I store my manuscripts online so I
can get access to them anywhere. As a result the story was
written not only at my own trusty and well worn desk but in
internet cafes and hotel rooms and friend's houses and in
army command posts in the middle of nowhere. It was written
on borrowed laptops and in university computer labs and on
library open access systems and basically anywhere I could
beg, borrow or steal access to a computer in my travels.
It has been an exciting journey. I hope you enjoy the results.
Paul Chafe
Kentville, NS
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