Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

Recommended Books

August 2003

"He Who Maps It Owns It"

Part II

"Vampires and the Quest Map"

The Vampire Files: Cold Streets by P. N. Elrod, Ace HC, Jan. 2003

The title "He Who Maps It Owns It" is a line from the Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda episode, "Deep Midnight’s Voice" discussed here last month.

Last month we discussed gravity, time travel and the structure of the universe. This month we add the human spirit to that mix. OK, so it doesn’t have to be "human" – but the vital spirit is necessary for either mapping or owning to occur.

What is a "map?" You all know what a road map is. You all know how cartographers map a wilderness, and how those first maps often cost many human lives. But do you really know what a map is outside the context of geography?

Mapping is a mathematical process. It is a method of creating a symbol that corresponds to something real, but is in fact not that real thing. Because of those invisible correspondences, dowsers can use a paper picture that represents a geographical area to find things – people, or water, or oil.

In other words, mapping is a field of magic, and it is based on mathematics – like most magic is. The mathematical part is external, physical, part of the structure of the universe – i.e. objective. The magic part is internal, psychological, mental, and largely emotional – i.e. subjective. It is the mental image held with the inner eye that connects the vital spirit with the external, objective reality.

Map it, and you "own" it – i.e. you have power over it, and you can use it to your own purpose, or sell access for a profit.

What has the structure of the universe and the nature of mapping to do with vampires?

I think all fiction is a kind of "mapping". It is a mapping of the human spirit’s quest for meaning in life – which is a good description of all art.

If you can map the human spirit’s quest for meaning in life, you will then "own" that quest, you will have command of it, you will have power over it. And you will be able to tap into the power of it.

Over the last decade, we have seen a veritable army of writers rewriting the vampire myth, changing the parameters of the curse, explaining how primitive peoples completely misunderstood what they had encountered.

I’ve done exactly that in my October ’03 release, Those of My Blood now available on amazon. In my fantasy vampire stories, The Dorian St. James Saga, I have postulated out that the myth is all wrong. Vampires were not caused by a curse – they originated as the result of a blessing. ( http://www.simegen.com/jl/  for info)

Why do we read and write vampire novels? What is so fascinating about a vampire that we have to rewrite the myth to tell more and more stories?

The vampire is either immortal or very long-lived, i.e. a time-traveler.

The vampire is utterly dependent on the living, and completely vulnerable part of the time.

The vampire can survive more intense torment than any human and remember every moment of it.

And now we come to the main way the concept of the vampire in fiction has changed recently. The vampire can grow, change and learn – i.e., the vampire lives.

Today’s vampires, who are not simply the Evil Menace in a horror novel, are complex creatures able to love, and thus able to quest for the meaning in life or existence.

Perhaps we read and write the vampire tale because within these starkly defined parameters of long-life, dependence, vulnerability and indelible memory of torment and suffering beyond human endurance, we are better able to "map" the road to spiritual growth, a road that has changed over the last century, and thus our myth has had to change.

Two of my favorite writers have new novels in their series. P. N. Elrod gives us The Vampire Files: Cold Streets. Here the story of Jack Fleming’s adjustment to existence as a vampire in 1930’s Chicago takes a twist and starts to race along. He suffers terrible blood loss and comes to afterwards with the knowledge of what he did to survive. Traumatized, shattered, he can only rely on his human friends who apply the human remedy – they force him to confront the reality behind that memory by taking him to the scene of the event.

The book ends with Fleming in a totally new mental "place." He is now a completely different person.

Laurell K. Hamilton gives us the 11^th Anita Blake novel, Cerulean Sins. It does not appear to show her main vampire character, Jean-Claude as growing. But his vampire associates who remember him from before he bonded with Anita do see change.

In this series, Anita Blake is the one who changes, but that is often because she has taken on the characteristics of the magical-beasts and creatures she hunts and kills. Through the complex plot twists of the previous 10 novels, Anita has acquired traits of werewolves, weretigers, and vampires, without actually become either were- or vampire. Each of these traits has caused her vast difficulties, forcing her very rigid and uncompromising self-image to change.

Now she is now having a hard time recognizing herself. One of the characteristics by which she defined herself when we first met her was her standards for choosing who she would have sex with. Over time, she’s had to make some compromises in her standards.

Now, because of her magical ties to the Vampire of the City, Master Vampire Jean Claude, and other things that have happened, Anita is having twice daily episodes of sexual esurience as compulsory as a vampire’s need for blood. If she refuses or attempts to control these seizures, she will find that she has done it anyway, indiscriminately. With time, it is expected these seizures will abate. Meanwhile, she must deal with it while solving preternatural crimes and saving lives. This book is about being a victim of one’s own sexual appetite, about being out of control when you are in fact a control-freak.

AfterImage and Immortal Image by Jaye Roycraft are two novels in an eminently readable vampire Universe . These books are a prime example of reconstructing the vampire myth to map the spirit’s quest for the meaning of life in the 21^st century. These novels are essentially romances with a main character who is a vampire.

Here vampires can interbreed with normal humans and produce a strange kind of half-breed, a dhampir – with the uncanny ability to detect vampires. Each of these two novels has a different protagonist. In AfterImage, the protagonist is a young Gypsy woman named Marya Jaks who is the daughter of a dhampir. Each year during the teens of a dhampir, the vampire Enforcers interview the teen, and finally at maturity decide if the child is to be allowed to survive. Marya is allowed to survive because her judge is pissed at his superiors, and because he is taken with her.

In Immortal Image, the main character is a vampire Enforcer, Revelin Scott, who was a minor character in AfterImage. A human woman whose brother has been sucked into a vampire-run cult surrounding a Vooduin Queen demands justice from the vampire Enforcers. Scott goes under cover into the cult. Together they must fight their way out of the trap and deliver justice.

Neither romance is routine or predictable. It is clear what each of these characters sees in the other. These are not so much "romances" – where there seems to be no reason for how the characters feel – as "love stories" where it is quite clear that these couples belong together.

Which brings us to Dancing With The Devil by Keri Arthur. This is a vampire-detective romance, a genre-mix somewhat similar to Jean Lorrah’s Blood Will Tell (also most highly recommended).

Keri Arthur puts her human woman psychic detective between two vampires who are locked in a centuries old conflict.

Ultimately, it takes a wild gamble of senseless trust to counter the motive of revenge. Everyone involved walks away from this battle with scars, scars that even a vampire can’t heal.

How much of yourself are you willing to give, how much danger will you brave, what stakes are you willing to put up, to help another person, whether you think they’re innocent or not?

With such questions we map the right hand path and the left hand path in the quest for the meaning of life.

And what we have mapped, we own.