Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

November 2009

"The Mystery of Magic Part IV: Journeyman"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Classic Science Fiction has always been of the Action-Adventure genre. With a few notable exceptions, the lead character in an action-adventure plot must be of an age to go on a first adventure, which means to exit known space and go see what’s over the horizon. "Adventure" is to go outside your comfort zone and find that discomfort fun!

Action genre requires the main character to solve a serious life or death, make or break problem by acting in an aggressive and relentless or at least persistent style.

To fit both these requirements, the author must find a character at the age of emerging from apprenticeship and entering the journeyman phase of training.

As mentioned in last month’s column, the journeyman magician is one who has learned all he can from supervised experiences and must now seek to apply skills unsupervised but without high expectations from his clients.

The Journeyman goes from Master to Master seeking new skills, new experiences, and new problems to solve, but the Master does not hang over the Journeyman’s shoulder. The Master sends the Journeyman to solve challenging problems within the Journeyman’s skills.

Journeyman is both a stage of life and a stage of Wisdom development, even perhaps an Archetype. And it is often the stage at which a person’s own "story" happens. It’s the exciting years before settling down to raise a family.

The Journeyman’s story is forever popular among the young, but in the last decade the burning torch of popularity has shifted from SF to Fantasy. In the column Resnick & Malzberg Dialogues, in the Dec-Jan. 2009 issue of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Resnick and Malzberg trace the rise in attendance at Dragoncon ( a Media, gaming and fantasy convention in Atlanta) against the fall of attendance at Worldcon, held in different cities each year, both in the summer.

They trace the shifts in popularity because "If our readers won’t follow us, we must follow our readers." And they say, "The historical Western novel, which was still a viable category in the mid-sixties when I entered publishing, has in practical terms died." And, ". . . the narrative of vampirism – a kind of transmogrification of the horror novel – is undead and flourishing, expanding in all media."

In classic SF, which may go the way of the Western, the main character is a Journeyman in the Craft of Science. The story of the Journeyman is still vastly popular, but Science is not.

Star Trek is the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, whose personal philosophy was Humanism. In the original series, stories about encounters with mystical beings generally ended with any whiff of God presence being a hoax, or just science so advanced it appeared to be magic.

That school of SF is alive and well and flourishing. S. Andrew Swann has given us PROPHETS: Apotheosis: Book One, the start of a new series in his universe where humanity produced a plethora of human beings from animal genetic materials. The resulting species don’t get along too well on Earth, and 200 years later have spread among many star systems with a devastating history of warfare.

Prophets fills in the background between series with long stretches of exposition, and the point of view leaps about disrupting the emotional build needed to enjoy good mysticism and Mystery. It’s a puzzle-story worth reading, and likely re-reading as it illustrates Roddenberry’s "God is an evolved Machine" view of the universe very clearly.

Swann also provides us with the Masters interacting with the Journeymen, some of which are nearly immortal or centuries old but still major players on the galactic scene.

Linnea Sinclair (Rita Award Winning author) has a new novel in her saga of Alliance Admiral Philip Guthrie and Rya Bennton, to whom he knows he must not be so attracted. Not since Helen of Troy has a love affair so shaped the destinies of civilizations.

Sinclair’s two main characters are Journeymen Warriors clearly soon to become Masters.

Of course, in warfare, the Master is the one behind the desk back in the Capital, not the field operative. Note how so many adventure stories take the Old Man out into the field for one more adventure where his experience can finesse a problem away without so much brute force.

For rip-roaring classic SF complete with ancient alien civilizations and interstellar politics, plus a plot driven by an original scientific investigation, you’re going to love Jack McDevitt’s The Devil’s Eye which is "an Alex Benedict Novel" – again part of a series. Set in space, this series has a detective who is an antiquities dealer with a woman Assistant, Chase Kolpath. So we see the Master cultivating the talents of the Journeyman and getting perhaps a bit closer than one might expect in a plain SF novel.

The closeness of the Relationship between Benedict and Kolpath is tightly woven into the mystery plot, which is very similar to that in Mercedes Coffin and Flipping Out which I reviewed in this column in August 2009.

Robert J. Sawyer has used setting tricks from Urban Fantasy to put his story in modern day Toronto and Japan. But he’s applied them to an SF story of Artificial Intelligence dawning in the World Wide Web which has the emotional impact of Buffy fighting demons from another dimension.

WWW.WAKE is a marvelous story of a 15 year old girl, born blind with an obscure disorder of the optic nerves and the computer scientist in Japan working on a solution for this problem. Sawyer weaves in Chinese censorship of the Web, and a convincing narrative from the AI perspective.

Caitlin is a complete Master of her blindness, totally web savvy, and as the daughter of a physicist, possessed of a brain capable of mathematical tricks few humans can match. She is, however, 15, and right at that threshold of Journeymanship into Life.

In Medieval times, 15 was marriage age as well as the age at which young men struck out to learn from many Masters, seeking Mastership themselves. Caitlin has that kind of maturity we seldom see in modern 15 year olds possibly because life has already been hard for her. Now she is offered one more chance to gain sight via a computerized implant, and she herself decides to take that chance.

At first the disappointment is crushing, but she bargains with the Japanese doctor to give her more time for her brain to learn to see. As a result, she is offered a dangerous experiment, reprogramming her implants. She takes it, but instead of sight, the change gives her perception of the World Wide Web – a visualization of it in color which she can only guess is color. At first disappointed, she soon embraces this visual perception. Adventure is fun!

What I like best about this novel is Sawyer’s casual dropping in of various bits of history that I know, and other bits of current fact that I haven’t paid attention to.

Sawyer’s explanation of Jagster for example, the open source search engine rivaling Google and thus not easy to find using Google, is a marvel. Eye openers on Chinese politics and insights into research into communicating with Chimpanzees and other primates, make this novel an eclectic reading SF fan’s delight. It’s dedicated to Helen Keller.

And lastly, look closely at the series I’ve mentioned in the March 2009 column here, the novels of Crosspointe by Diana Pharaoh Francis. The new one, The Turning Tide, is mostly about new characters, but set in the same world and advances the story of Crosspointe by giant leaps.

Crosspointe is an island in a sea surrounded by lands inhabited by potential enemies and threats. The sea itself is laced with magical material which they call raw Spawn. When this material touches normal organic material, it creates voracious monsters. But some humans survive the touch of Spawn to become magicars with special talents to use the ambient magical power rife in this world.

This is a fantasy series, ostensibly, but it treats the magic as science. The Turning Tide shows us a sculptor, Fairle, a Journeyman metal smith whose Master has died. Oddly, she served her apprenticeship with this same Master.

The story opens with Fairle being declared a Master in her own right. But then her real talent is revealed, and to activate that talent, she must be exposed to Spawn and become a Majicar. Crosspointe’s very existence depends on her attaining this new Talent and mastering it.

But she is a Master Metalsmith who has attained a Soul Level Initiation of Self Mastery. Five men try to manipulate her life as an Apprentice Magicar and not all live to witness the resulting destruction.

The Apprentice follows the Path of Discipline (Saturn); The Journeyman the Path of Mars, Initiative; The Master perhaps the Path of Jupiter, Beneficence & Wisdom.  See December 2009 column.