The Elephants Out of Babel

One thought I had was to write these 8 Days away, but what is there to write? I believe I shall write about my writing.

Let me tell you, then, about a story I wrote. It was called The Elephants Out of Babel, and if I ever finished it and it was good, I would be o'ercome by joy.

So this began life as a terribly dull short story. Two men ride over a barren land, somewhere in the post-apocalyptic ruins of the American Midwest. As they travel they discuss religion, and are revealed fundamentalist Christians eking out a life as farmers. In the distance they spy a herd of elephants. One man is filled with rage: Once, he declares, such animals lived in zoos and performed for men's amusement. Now look how they roam free, while we struggle to survive!

But his friend thinks: Why don't we abandon our farms, and follow the elephants as free hunters?

Later they come upon a piece of ancient technology: Behold, a Re-Shaping Machine! Capable of sending out zillions of tiny nano-bots into the landscape, to reshape it and rebuild it according to our wishes!

But the man who would have hunted the elephants thinks: It was such technology that laid waste to this, God's earth. He murders his friend, and leaves the machine behind, goes home to his wife to take her off after the elephants.

***

You will have noted that this is rather dull, nor does it make a great deal of sense. Though somehow I did not myself see this when I showed it to Chuck Kinder, my writing teacher at the time, and he was...unimpressed, at best.

I put it away, and in the meantime, read two stunningly brilliant science fiction novellas, Brian Aldiss's story Hot House and Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds. If you can find them, you should read them; Hot House became the first chapter of a novel by the same name, and Galactic North is now the eponymous story in a Reynolds collection that has just been released.

And suddenly I realized why my story sucked: It was freaking boring! In Hothouse, we open with a whole world full of strangeness. The earth has stopped rotating, the sun is brighter, and tiny humans struggle to to survive in a world of sentient plants and gargantuan trees that reach as far as the moon. Holy Freaking Shit!!! that is clearly a million times cooler than a bland and stupid desert without even a fucking rabbit to look at. Reynolds' story, meanwhile, begins with a firefight--not a dumbass horse-back ride--and expands into a million-years-long journey across the galaxy.

Kablamm!!!

I returned to my Elephants story, and wrote:

The danger increased the closer they came to the City. Lightning spirits and black terrors abounded here; and even ordinary threats like fireweed and murderbirds seemed to increase in ferocity the closer to Babel they came.

I went on to describe a landscape where

Everywhere black glass flowers and shifting, luminous pattern-ground covered the landscape, while metallic insects of varying sizes scurried here and there. Off to their left a small herd of well-diggers clattered along on their segmented legs, pausing at times to extend their water suckers deep into the ground, swelling the great red balloons on their backs. Here there was no sign of organic life besides scattered stands of dandelions and, of course, the ubiquitous cockroaches.

Now, that is so much cooler than stupid boring nothing shit. (Also, I am pleased to note that, from this distance, I am considerably less impressed with the phrasing than I was then. This is a sign of hope!) The basic premise of the original story remained: The two men (now named Lot and Abram) travel across the post-apocalyptic landscape, find elephants and a re-shaping machine, and Abram kills Lot in the end. But with some differences:

• The landscape is much cooler. Machines have become self-replicating and have largely taken over from organic life, forming a new machine ecosystem. Things once weapons of war have become predators; a device formerly used as a crane is now a dragon. There are giant dandelions and cockroaches.

• Lot and Abram are coming from an agricultural village called The Parish, in fact the ruins of a football stadium, which Lot rules as the 200-year-old pastor of a religious cult.

• This time they went seeking the Re-Shaping machine on purpose, somewhere in the heart of a ruined city, that they might regain control over the world.

• Lot is in possession of a book called The Book, which is actually a few scraps from a very old Bible, recopied by him over the years. Lot and his Parish perceive their world as occurring after events described in Genesis and in Revelations, and take also the book of Revelations, the story of the Tower of Babel and the story of Soddom and Gamorrah to be descriptions of the same event: a nuclear war which annihilated an advanced civilization some 200 years before.
  

• Back at the Parish was a woman named Ki, and Abram loved her, and, oh dread, Lot raped her, though Abram does not realize this.

• Abram is captured and "eaten" by the gigantic dragon. Some robots come to "digest" him but, before they can, he is taken away by Gigantic Sentient Rats!! And he is brought before their Queen, who has wings like an eagle. And she breastfeeds him, and he is healed.
  

• Then Abram kills the dragon and frees the rat-people, and finds Lot, and kills him too! Then he goes home and calls himself Abraham now and leads all the people out of the farming community to live as hunter-gatherers.

Bah-duh!!!!!! This was a 9,000 word novelette. And a bit of a hit in my fiction seminar at the time. And structurally unworkable, having as it did a dragon on page 2 and a four-page flashback on page 12. Also, more than a pinch of incredibly heavy-handed would-be anarcho-primitivist morality.

I rewrote it again. And again, and again, over like 2 years, adding and taking away and adding more, until now it is 17,000 words long.

I opened this time before the journey begins, introducing the Parish, its structure, its way of life, leading up to Lot and Abram going on their journey.

***

The Introduction is about the most convoluted and ridiculous thing I have ever written.

First, Abram is in a cornfield, weeding his crop. Then he realizes: the crop is infested with things called needleworms! These are nasty bugs that can kill you dead by exploding. They start bursting in the corn, and Abram realizes he's in trouble, lots of trouble, because only sinners let bugs get in their corn.

So, he has to go and tell his Uncle. His Uncle gets really mad. Only instead of there being time for anything to come of this.....BAM! The Parish is attacked by AN ARMY OF FLYING ROBOTS!!!!! Holy Freaking Shit!!!!!! Abram runs away and hides in the deepest basement he can find.

...And who does he meet there?? But, A GIRL!!!! And somehow she is really really smart and really tough (he's kind of a complete pussy at this point) and remarkably similar to girls that I like to have sex with. She decides they better go fight the robots, and somehow she has a spear. He's scared but he follows her. They come upon a robot about to kill Michael, a leading warrior. But the Girl kills it instead while Abram hides!!! And THEN, out of nowhere, PASTOR LOT who has been missing for seven years returns, and the Uncle who yelled at Abram before is with him, and tells Abram "You didn't get out of trouble just cause we were attacked by robots and you talked to this chick and the Boss came back just in time to save us, boy." End Scene.

Next Scene: Abram is chained to a rock. They decided to put him outside the wall for the night cause he was bad. He's probably gonna die. But then they take him inside. And take some of his blood. And PASTOR LOT adopts Abram as his son, cause Abram has good blood. Next Scene: We're in church, and Lot announces that Abram is his kid, and they're going to go on this journey out to the City, to reclaim the World from Satan and his Machines. And it only took a whole bunch of absurd coincidences to get us to this point!!

***

Wow.

So this story, begun as a heavy-handed morality play, now has life as a Series of Kind of Stupid Events.

Is it worth salvaging? What is left? What do I see in it; What do I want no more to do with?

I like:

• The idea of the future world where all these relics of past technology (biological, nanotechnological, etc) now run around causing trouble;

• The theme of breaking free of the control of religion, security, childhood dependency, and discovering your own voice;

• The structure of the Hero's Journey in general;

• The bit about The Book, and how it was used.

Do I like anything else?

Abram/Abraham is too much of a type, a cipher. He's the Boy Who Becomes A Man and The Kid With the Destiny. Blah, boring. We're all boys who become men, sort of; doing it because I Have A Destiny is retarded. (No, you don't. )

Okay, so then there's Ki (that's the girl). The character of Ki is The Tough Chick In The Patriarchal Society. But since she has no power whatsoever, she's really just The Weak Girl That Boys Fight Over, in Tough Chick guise. Boring, boring, boring.

The character of Lot is somewhat interesting. Mentor and Evil Wizard. 200 years old, clinging to a destroyed past, clearly a genius, clearly a madman....and also, for the vast, vast majority of the story the only one with any agency.

***

This is quite a lot. Is there enough to go on, here?

....I don't know. Clearly all of Act I has to go. Clearly the character of Ki has to go or completely be rearranged. This is a Hero's Journey story, and in those stories Boys have adventures with Jungian archetypes and learn to be Men. Do I want to write that kind of story? Do I really actually like that kind of story?

I do.

But if I'm going to write a Hero's Journey, it needs to reflect the kind of journey I'd like to see a hero take. I don't like Heroes who become kings in the end; I'm not interested in nostalgia for monarchy nor in the statement that to be Men means to be Authority. I'm not interested in Heroes who get princesses at the end, and then they get married: I like my characters too much to ever make them get married. They can get laid, and should, but, no wives, for godsake.

So what we need is a new beginning. And a new Call to Adventure: the "Your blood is good!" thing from Lot to Abram is stupid. And a new resolution: the basic idea of Abraham leads everyone out of the Parish stays, but I think 85% of them are not going to be elephant hunters. (The other 15% will, cause that's still pretty cool.)

All right, I think it's either time to stop blogging about writing and start writing, or at least time to post this and do something else.

....Does anyone else have any ideas?







Cantar, arder, huir, como un campanario en las manos de un loco.
Triste ternura mía, qué te haces de repente?
Cuando he llegado al vértice más atrevido y frío
mi corazón se cierra como una flor nocturna.