Month: April 2011

Tales of Ancient Egypt

I visited my mom over Easter and, while I was there, I had the chance to look through some of my old books.   One of the titles I came across was Tales of Ancient Egypt by Roger Lancelyn Green.  A friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein, Green was a great popularizer of world mythology and folktales. Tales of Ancient Egypt was my first exposure to ancient Egyptian literature and his retelling of the Setna Khaemwaset stories captivated me.  The sense of wonder that that little volume evoked has remained with me through the years and I owe Green an enormous debt of gratitude since his work set me on the path that would eventually lead me to Evil in Thebes.

Since I first read Tales of Ancient Egypt, I’ve read more Egyptian literature than any sane person should.  I can now see how Green took liberties with his source material.  Sometimes he bowdlerized, sometimes he simplified.  Every once and a while, he embellished for dramatic effect.  But because he was aiming to capture the spirit of his source material rather than the precise details, his renderings are often much more pleasing to the casual reader than the scholarly treatments found in Lichtheim or Simpson.

So if you’re looking for an accessible introduction to the world of Egyptian literature but don’t want to get bogged down in a sea of philological footnotes and opaque scholarly commentary (though I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t enjoy those things!), I highly recommend Green’s book.

 

On infodumps

One of my biggest pet peeves is when authors clutter their work with excessive background information.  Few things irritate me more than having the flow of a story broken so the narrator can regale me with a mini-lecture on Egyptian temple decoration, the lineage of the High Elf Lords of Fantasia Minor, or the sewer system of Paris.  Even if I’m actually interested in the subject material, I resent having it dumped on me in that fashion.

Part of the problem is that these infodumps are almost always done by the narrator.  For me, narrators work best when they’re unobtrusive and it’s hard for them to be unobtrusive when they’re yammering on about  beekeeping in the Roman Empire.  Some writers try to avoid this by putting their infodumps in the mouths of their characters, but that gets dangerously close to “As you know, Bob…” territory.

Writers of historical fiction need to be especially wary of falling into this trap.  We do not have the luxury of writing in worlds that are readily understandable to our readers, so we’re always going to have to make more of an effort to set the scene properly.  But while it’s fine to spend some time explaining things that modern readers might not be familiar with, that doesn’t give us license to cram so many historical tidbits into our work that it looks like it was written by an 18th century antiquary.

Regular readers of my blog may wonder how I could enjoy Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell since it contained copious amounts of background information.  She could get away with it because she was deliberately imitating the style of 19th century authors.  As anyone who’s ever read Victor Hugo or Anthony Trollope will tell you, info dumps were all the rage back then.  Clarke also tended to confine her background information to footnotes, so if you didn’t want to read it, you could easily skip over it.

What do you think?  Do extensive background infodumps detract from a story, or do they make it richer?

Magically impotent pharaohs

Given the omnipresence of magic in ancient Egyptian society, it should come as little surprise that feats of magic are commonplace in Egyptian literature.  Their stories are filled with wise lector priests who can reattach severed heads, part the Nile, or send animated wax figures into Nubia to beat up a local chieftain.  But there is one person in Egyptian literature who never seems to work magic: the pharaoh.  In fact, in a number of stories the king is actually rescued from death or humiliation by the skills of a crafty lector priest.  This strikes me as odd.

Many of you have probably heard that Egyptian pharaohs were considered living gods.  But while Egyptian texts are quite clear that the king becomes fully divine after death, the nature of his divinity while alive is much harder to pin down.  The waters are muddied even further by the fact that kings such as Amenhotep III and Ramesses II seem to have been deified within their own lifetime and are in fact depicted making offerings to themselves.

Even if the Egyptians believed that their kings’ earthly divinity was strictly limited, that still doesn’t explain why he’s depicted as magically powerless in literature.  Lector priests aren’t in any way divine, yet they’re capable of working great feats of magic so it’s hard to see why the king couldn’t do so as well, even if his divinity doesn’t really manifest itself until after he’s dead.

It could be that this is all an accident of preservation.  After all, the existing corpus of Egyptian literature is doubtlessly just the tiniest fraction of what was originally produced.  Unfortunately, this fragmentation also makes it difficult for us to draw meaningful conclusions.  *Sigh*  On the plus side, it does mean that, as a writer, I have a lot of leeway when it comes to making up my own explanation. 😀

Rebecca Black, self publishing, and the rise of the eBook

Many of you have no doubt heard about Rebecca Black, the thirteen year old singer whose debut song “Friday” has become an object of near universal mockery on the Interwebz.  With lyrics like this:

Fun, fun, think about fun

You know what it is

I got this, you got this

My friend is by my right, ay

I got this, you got this

Now you know it.

it’s not hard to see why some people are calling “Friday” one of the worst songs of all time.

Black’s parents paid $4,000 for her to make a video with ARK Music Factory, which makes “Friday” the musical equivalent of the many self-published books churned out by vanity presses like iUniverse and AuthorHouse.  Since these companies get their money upfront, they don’t have to worry about pesky things like quality or marketability.

Recently, it has become something of a fad within the publishing world to forecast the imminent demise of literary agents and traditional publishers.  Pundits point to people like Amanda Hocking (who has become a millionaire by selling her self-published eBooks through the Kindle store) and claim that authors will eventually self publish all their work in eBook form.  It’s not hard to see why some authors find self publishing platforms like the Kindle to be an appealing alternative to traditional publishing.  Not only are you free to publish your story exactly how you want it without any editorial interference, but you can also get royalties of up to 70%.

While  eBooks will eventually relegate paper books to the status of collectors’ items, literary agents and traditional publishers still have a valuable role to play in ensuring some basic level of quality.  They’re actually making an investment in the author, so they have a vested interest in making sure that the author’s work is good, or at least marketable.  Granted, Amazon doesn’t charge you anything to publish via the Kindle, but they’re not exactly making an investment in you either, which is why they’ll still accept almost anything under the sun.  A traditional publisher also provides basic publicity services to help market your book.  If you’re self published, you have to do all that on your own and, contrary to what some people seem to think, social media isn’t a magic wand that you can wave and guarantee your book a vast readership.

As long as self publishing continues to be associated with the literary equivalent of Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” there will be a place for traditional publishers.  The switch to eBooks may provide a second chance for authors who were bypassed by traditional publishers, but easier distribution won’t automatically level the playing field.