Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #51: Ethical Sorcery: "Avenging Earth"

The question of ethics is one that often takes odd directions. In C. S. Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength, he has a character he calls an "honest thief." This is a man who steals, knows stealing is wrong, does it, gets caught, and is ready to take the punishment for what he did; unfortunately, he is taken from jail to an organization that does not value human life, has no ethical base, and is willing to exploit and brutalize human beings (he is going to be used for medical experiments). Lewis is making the point that a thief who does something he senses is wrong but does it anyway to serve necessity or just because he decides to disregard the law, is better than an organization that has no sense of what is moral or ethical—that operates devoid of human decency and traditional ideas of right and wrong.

My story, "Avenging Earth" explores this same sort of question. It centers on two of my ongoing characters, Kathy Farisi and Alessia Bernini. The latter is a streg, a witch who practices "natural magic," magic that does not derive its power from evil but from nature and from traditions passed on from practitioner to practitioner from the Middle Ages on. Alessia and Kathy have become friends, though Kathy, recovering from an adulterous affair that broke up her best friend's marriage and damaged her life as well, is often censorious of Alessia and critical of her use of magic. At one point in this particular story, she castigates Alessia for using magic that caused a woman to suffer. Still, they maintain their sometimes shaky friendship.

Alessia Bernini, streg

Alessia finds Kathy at church. She has come to pray for a fifteen year-old girl named Alana, who has been blinded and has lost both her parents in a terrorist bombing. The terrorist is not a member of Al Qaeda or ISIS but is an eco-terrorist named Corey Allen. Allen bombed the home office of Paul Fusco's construction company because they were beginning to develop an area of land that Allen did not want to see developed. His wife and daughter happened to be visiting when the blast went off. Only the daughter survived but with the loss of her eyesight. While Kathy is praying, Alessia slides in beside her. They pray together and then Alessia says she needs Kathy's
help and wants to meet with her later in the day.

She finds out what her streg friend wants. Mr. Corsi, the head of the local Mafia, has paid Alessia a large sum of money to find Allen and to punish him for what he has done. (Fusco and Corsi were related, though Fusco was not involved in organized crime). Kathy has called together some of her friends to assist her in the ceremony she must go through to locate Allen, who knows no magic but who has power from his association with the earth and his innate grasp of its natural force. Kathy agrees. The ceremony frightens her and the other three friends. Alessia is battered by what she encounters but survives the ordeal, is able to locate Allen and give his location to the Mafia. Kathy asks if they will kill him. Alessia says he doesn't get off that easy.

Later, Alessia asks if Kathy will come with her as she does the spell that will be Allen's punishment. She agrees and watches with horror as Alessia casts her spell on him:

A transformation started at Allen's face and spread over his whole body, as if he had turned to dirt. For a second he looked ashy, like a mummy. Then his body broke apart and fell in a heap to the ground. Kathy gasped. Her heart felt as if it had stopped.

She heard a man’s scream.

The heap of dust into which Allen had collapsed resembled a human form. Suddenly the wind struck it, blow it into the air. Another scream rent the silence. She saw Corey Allen’s form, his face distinct in the swirling cloud of dust the wind blew violently into the water of the brook. After another pause, she saw a wave rise—a wave that bore Allen’s horrified, astonished likeness a second or two. She heard more screaming as the wave dissolved into the streambed.

Corsi says he is satisfied and asks if Allen will stay in this state of disembodiment and pain. Alessia tells him he will "as long as earth endures." Corsi is satisfied and goes his way. Alessia begins to sob. She has done justice. But to condemn a man to an earthly hell, where he will be transformed to elements and incessantly torn apart and assembled in other forms to be torn apart again, is something from Dante's Inferno. She asks Kathy to carry the suitcase full of money she has been paid for the job, and Kathy agrees. As they walk off to Alessia's car, they hear screaming from the wood. Alessia is crying. Kathy understands why her friend needs her, why she wanted her to come along. Doing what is right is sometimes wrong—or painful—or both at the same time.

The story appeared in a magazine called The Edge of Propinquity. It has an archive but says my story is missing, unfortunately.

A great story that is not missing is my novella Le Cafe de la Mort. You were astonished to find out your lover is the Angel of Death; more so when you find out she has been sent to Gehenna for violating angelic law; but even more when you are told you are the only one who can free her. 

 

For more titles, visit my Writer's Page.

 

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #36: First Vampire Tale, "Prima Noctis"

Actor Jack Palance as Dracula

 Vampires are always a fascination. They become popular and then people get tired of the films and books. In the 1930s you had the Dracula films. They faded after a while. Then, years later, Twilight came along. Despite its immense popularity, especially with the young, a lot of writers hooted and jeered both at the films and at the books. (I only saw one of the films and read one of the books and thought they were, really, not that bad.) But vampires bounce back. Not surprising, since they are the undead! You can't kill vampires, and the genre seems undying as well!

One of Buffy's many vampire enemies

At that time in my writing career I had not done a vampire story. I decided to give it a shot, maybe because Buffy was still on TV and Twilight was all the rage and because of the fascination vampires pose. For example, what would it be like to live forever if the prices of doing so was to kill people so you could renew your eternal life? A vampire character in one of my later stories laments to her mortal boyfriend, "How can God let something like this [becoming a vampire] happen to us and then hold us responsible for it?" Maybe this is a question we ask whether we believe in divinity or not. How can we be morally responsible when we weren't asked to be born, don't understand why we do unethical things, and feel we're doing wrong but can't help it? These questions are perpetual. Maybe that's why the vampire myth is so popular. They cope with these questions as a point of their very existence.

And there is the question of ethics. Are vampires completely evil? The old ones, like Dracula, were. They were evil creatures driven by a desire for blood and had no good traits whatsoever. The novel Dracula and my favorite vampire movies, Taste the Blood of Dracula and the made-for-TV movie of Dracula with Jack Palance playing the lead role, presented this sort of vampire:  evil, driven, with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. But soon Ann Rice's Interview With a Vampire came along and we saw conflicted, anguished, morally ambiguous but not evil vampires. The same was true for some of the characters in Buffy. These things play into my first vampire story, "Prima Noctis."

Heston in The War Lord

Prima Noctis means "first night" and refers to the idea that a nobleman in medieval times had the right to take a peasant girl's virginity to "begin her life." This custom is essential to the plot of an old movie called The War Lord with Charlton Heston; if you saw Braveheart, it is a part of that film as well. Now, I must play myth-buster here. Prima noctis is completely fictitious. Never happened, not in the Middle Ages or anytime. It is something modern people made up. Ancient kings used to accuse other kings of it, usually to get their people up in arms and on their side when an invasion threatened them:  "If these people conquer us, they will take your virgin daughters on their wedding night!" they would say. But it was an untruth. Still, it makes for good stories.

  

In my story, an English noble named Berwyk rules an area of Scotland and has instituted prima noctis. The Scots respond by not getting married. After three years with no weddings, however, the people tell them there will be a marriage and he will take his privilege. They have a great feast. The young people are married, but Berwyk notices a lot of the Scots are wearing necklaces of garlic (a local custom he had not noticed, he thinks). And the married couple look a bit a pale, as if they had not been out in the sun. The wedding takes place at moonrise. His servant-woman/mistress warns him about the Scots:  “They have one foot in the world and one in the kingdom of darkness. They dance with the dead and kiss the very Devil’s ass.” Berwyk laughs at her

When he takes the woman up to his chamber, he quickly finds out she is a vampire. She bears her fangs and, he sees, her vampire bridegroom has gotten into the house and killed and feasted on the blood of Amaryllis, the serving woman who tried to warn him. The Scots have set him up.

Berwyk knows about vampires and flees to his room, where he has, on the wall, a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin. Vampires will flee from the cross and from other holy objects. To his horror, those items are gone from his bed chamber where he hoped to enjoy the body of the woman married that day. The Scots have sneaked into his room and removed them, leaving him at the mercy of the vampire couple. He fights them, but his weapons are useless. The bride he had hoped to "swyve" ends up not with hymeneal blood on her body but with his as she kills him and drains his vital life. Prima noctis turns out to be something the English knight never dreamed it would be.

Ethics come into play in this story. Vampires are evil, but in this case they are doing good by serving as the instruments of justice. Are right and wrong so easy to define? Vampire tales, at least the newer ones, suggest they are not. In the yin and yang of the universe, there is a bit of evil in good and a bit of good in evil.

The story appeared in a journal called Infinite Windows, closed down now, with no archive.

If you want to read one of my vampire stories, I would suggest The Angel from the Dead from the (also shut down) journal Roar and Thunder. This journal maintains an archive and you can read the story there. I'll have a new vampire novel, Sinfonia:  First Notes on the Lute, coming out next year.

For a Christmas stocking stuffer I would suggest ShadowCity. A dark world, an unwilling savior, an old lover who follows her in and gets caught up in unbelievable danger, and a maenad who is a slave fight the darkness, which has grown to dangerous levels. In a dark world, the light within is all you have. 

 For additional titles, see 

my Writer's Page. 

Science as Religion: The Day the Earth Stood Still

A film that teaches we should worship Science is a classic sci-fi tale—I should perhaps call it an iconic film—titled The Day the Earth Stood Still. Released in 1951 (remake done in 2008), and still a great film to watch, it portrays American society just after World War II and gives a glimpse of the reaction to that era that cost millions of lives and ushered in the atomic era with the threat of global destruction—the Cold War. Most significantly, it advances the idea that salvation for the human race rests in the hands of Science.

Many have seen the film, so I will make my synopsis a quick one. A humanoid alien comes to Earth, landing in a flying saucer on the mall in Washington DC near the Washington monument. There is panic. Tanks and troops immediately surround the spaceship. The door opens and a creature emerges. When he produces what might be a weapon, one of our soldiers shoots and wounds him. When this happens, an eight-foot robot appears. A visor on his head opens and he emits a ray that destroys the weapons of the troops (though he does not kill anyone). The wounded alien gives him orders in their language and he desists. The army whisks the man off to a hospital.

His name is Klaatu. He is an alien from an unnamed planet who comes to earth on a mission. Not allowed to meet with world rulers, he escapes the hospital and stays in a boarding house run by a war widow, befriending her son, who leads him to a scientist. But the manhunt tracks Klaatu down and he is killed. Gort, the robot, retrieves his body and brings him back to life. The scientist arranges for a group of scientists to meet with the revived Klaatu. He warns them that other plants are afraid of Earth now that the people there have developed atomic weapons. If Earth does not achieve peace, the planet could be “eliminated.” He flies off into space.

Klaatu is very much like Jesus.

He comes from beyond the Earth, like Jesus. He is also a healer. What the solider who shot him mistook for a weapon was really a device that could cure cancer. It is damaged when Klaatu is wounded and rendered inoperable. And he is exemplary in his behavior. He is kind, thoughtful, polite, compassionate, and fair-minded; this is in contrast to most Terrans (and they are mostly men) who are violent, stupid, and crude. He is a paragon of virtue and intelligence. He has power. The Earth “stood still” refers to his demonstration of his power by shutting down all electricity and gas locomotion on the planet for half an hour. And, most of all, he dies and is resurrected.

All of this, of course, is due to Science, not the power of God or any other supernatural entity. Technology enables him to cure cancer, do the “miracle” of shutting down the Earth, and also brings him back to life. Science has done even more than this, we find out.

Gort, the robot, is example of how technology has brought salvation to his planet. There, Klaatu says, his people created “a race of robots” who function independently of humanoid control and keep order and peace. They are peaceful, but if they sense wrong (in the form of war or aggression), they destroy the perpetrators of such ventures. Thus peace has been achieved, on Klaatu’s planet at least, through the instrumentality of Science.

The scene at the end is fascinating. The scientist Klaatu met gathers a number of other scientists together. They stand in front of his ship. They are of many races and some of them are dressed in native costume, suggesting a universality of the human race. Light from the ship bathes them—rather like the light of God that shone on Moses. He delivers a sermon to the assembled scientists that tells of his own people’s salvation through creating a race of robots to police them. He warns them of the dire consequences of Earth’s current course (Judgment Day might come if we don’t change our ways) and then, like Jesus, he ascends—he flies off into the sky. Someday, he will return.

So Science will save the human race. It was, of course, the thing that put the human race in danger in the first place. Still, if properly used, as Klaatu’s people used it, it can save the human race from destruction. One might say the film was a call to the moralistic use of science and technology. Still, Science as surrogate religion is the main theme of this film.

Cardassians--not a good race of beings

For writers of sci-fi, I would suggest this is too pat an answer. Science is subject to human morality. If humans are immoral, science and technology will be used for immoral purposes. Rather than lauding the scientific method as the fountainhead of all truth and thinking—as I have heard many people say--that someday science will explain everything (as if that would cure our problems), speculative writers need to focus on the morality and ethics of the human race. What would make science a benign and not a malevolent thing? The moral disposition of those who are working with it could bring technology to good uses. This leads me to believe that ethics and morality, and how and why people are good, should be a prominent theme in speculative fiction.