In all her genres, Diane Duane is one of my favorite writers.
She spreads her talents around, too. She writes in multiple genres and forms—scripts to novels, tie-ins to original fiction, young adult urban fantasy to historical fantasy to science fiction to second-world fantasy. And whether she’s writing Y.A., as with her Young Wizards series, or Star Trek media tie-ins, she always brings an inimitable playful voice and a startling sense of “Yes; that’s right; that’s just like people.” to her work.
Some spoilers for The Romulan Way and The Door into Sunset.
She hits several of my reader kinks perfectly—her characters snark, and struggle, and have relationships that feel extremely authentic. I don’t just mean romantic relationships, though there’s that. But she’s a good enough writer, and confident enough in her characterization, that she doesn’t feel constrained to force fictional people to be consistent. Real people aren’t consistent, after all. They have trends, certainly; but very few people are completely predictable.
If we were, there would be no murders.
Likewise, her worlds are very like the real world in that they’re contradictory and chaotic. The people in them are products of their cultures, but never stereotypes, and never one-note. Her mad inventiveness makes me think she must be a hell of a player to game master for—the sort who weasels a way out of every trap that’s so damned clever you let them get away with it.
And the way her sense of whimsy informs everything she does, from fight scenes to love scenes to cultural studies of made-up people (Her original series Star Trek novelizations Spock’s World; My Enemy, My Ally; and The Romulan Way are generally considered among the best of the bunch, in part because of their insights into the histories of the alien races they address—which are also suitably confounding).
So I’d like to talk about one particular example of that wonderful chaos, which is my single favorite battle scene in fantasy literature. It’s in Diane Duane’s The Door into Sunset (1992), book three in the Middle Kingdoms tetralogy. (A sadly unfinished tetralogy; I believe Book 4, The Door into Starlight, is probably the current epic fantasy record-holder for Being Unfinished. And you know as well as I do that that’s saying something.)
The scene I love—the scene I often go back and study when writing battle scenes myself—is the literary equivalent of the storming Normandy sequence of Saving Private Ryan. Except it was published six years before Saving Private Ryan was released, and it’s high-medieval warfare with sorcery. And there’s no irritating steadicam shaking.
The scene, in cinematic terms, would be a single tracking shot. It follows the point of view of one of our protagonists, the usurped prince of a kingdom our heroes are trying to win back through a combination of sneakiness, politics, and force of arms, as he leads his forces into a pivotal combat. The scene is written in tight limited third person, stream-of-consciousness, as Freelorn fights, marshals his forces, retreats, charges, suffers under the fog of war, dodges frantically from one near-death experience to another, and discovers that he and his honor guard have been cut off from the rest of the army only when he hears his allies calling the order for troops to go and support him at bay.
If you like the way Joe Abercrombie writes fight scenes, it scratches the same itch, but it’s funnier.
And then there’s the scene in The Romulan Way where McCoy has to filibuster the Romulan senate until a horta eats through the floor to rescue him. And the most perfect talking shark in all of fiction, in Deep Magic.
Just read her stuff. You won’t be sorry.
Originally published in April 2014 as part of our Writers on Writing series.
Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Bear lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with her husband, novelist Scott Lynch. Stone Mad, the sequel to her novel Karen Memory, is available now from Tor.com Publishing.
Oh, the good stuff. *grin* Doctor’s Orders is the hands-down best McCoy characterization ever. And for me, The Wounded Sky was a revelation. I still wonder about that caterpillar.
But the Middle Kingdoms series is one of my absolute favorites, because it has that wonderful thread of joy running through it–unreasoning, crazy joy. Even if the idea of a fallible deity scares me spitless.
(Pssst…it’s Deep Wizardry, not Deep Magic. Wrong series. ;)
A point of clarification: Duane’s Star Trek novels are not “novelizations.” That refers to a book that adapts an existing story from another medium, e.g. a movie, a TV episode, a comic book storyline, or a video game. It’s turning someone else’s story into a novel, as the name suggests. (E.g. Gene Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Vonda McIntyre’s novelization of The Wrath of Khan, David Gerrold’s novelization of “Encounter at Farpoint,” etc.) What Duane wrote for Star Trek were tie-in novels — original prose stories that take place in the universe of a media franchise, newly created tales featuring the characters and ideas from that universe. Calling them “novelizations” implies she didn’t create the stories herself, but she did.
As for the Door into… series, I liked them, but I could never figure out how to pronounce “Herewiss.”
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I’m still angry with Diane Duane over The Big Meow. She put out a storyteller’s bowl. Took in money. Left the Feline Wizards in limbo. Wrote other books instead. All those people she screwed? “Sorry about that. Sucks to be you.” (I paraphrase) Yes, she eventually finished the book. It took her years. It still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
For contrast, look at Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Fledgling. Their publisher, Meisha Merlin, screwed them financially. So they put out their bowl. Promised an episode each time the bowl was filled.
Once a week, a new episode. Written on the fly and without a net. If they missed a date, they explained what happened. Then, business as usual. Fledgling was promptly finished and Baen bought it. Each contributor got an autographed hardcover copy. Contributors rightly trusted them when they wrote Saltation the same way.
They never came close to insulting their supporters. Let alone screwing them over.
That is not the way Duane did it.
Oh yes, her Star Trek novels are among the best. I haven’t read anything else by her because I’m just not into medievalish fantasy, but she definitely writes the most wonderful aliens. Although as much as I like her Romulans, I find the aliens in The Wounded Sky and Doctor’s Orders even more intriguing.
As someone who lives in Central Europe, I also love the fact that Kirk spends his holiday in Ireland in Spock’s World and McCoy visits a friend in Switzerland in Doctor’s Orders.
@1/Quill: Caterpillar?
@4/Jana: Duane’s Young Wizards series is not medieval, it’s young adult urban fantasy set in contemporary New York City and elsewhere. It’s got a lot of a science fiction flavor to it as well, with a magic system that feels like an advanced science and in some cases can be accessed by computers, and a lot of interaction with aliens, sentient cetaceans, and the like. (The culture of the “alien” dolphin character in TNG: Dark Mirror was a direct lift from the culture of the Earth cetaceans in Deep Wizardry.) It’s often compared to Harry Potter, but it’s been around longer and I like it even better. Its characters are kids learning to be wizards, but they learn through on-the-job field training that has major stakes for the universe.
The Feline Wizards series, whose third volume commenter #3 was complaining about, is also in the Young Wizards universe and has awesome cat heroes.
There’s also Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, whose main character is from a parallel Earth chronologically and technologically contemporary to our own world, but with more magical laws of physics. It’s sort of Law & Order in a reality where justice is a tangible divine force that manifests openly, although it crosses over into a number of other parallel worlds with their own differences, including our own. It uses the same concept seen in Dark Mirror of different universes having different “ethical constants” that make one intrinsically more prone to evil than another. One thing you find in reading Duane’s overall body of work is her use of recurring themes that give her work a unified feel even when she works in different genres and eras.
@Jana: In The Wounded Sky, the Enterprise crew goes through a ‘field’ of alternating entropy/anentropy, which manifests as people’s inner natures showing on the outside. The ‘caterpillar’ was part of one crewman’s inner life; as I recall it was following him around and asking for dessert. You’ll have to ask the author what particular tie-in it was supposed to represent, as I was also unsure which book/tv show she was referencing. Ms. Duane uses pop references in her books; it’s not unusual to run across Star Wars, Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Who, and others.
Deep Wizardry is the Bestest Most Beautiful And Perfect Novel EVAR, says me, though I like some of the other Young Wizards books far less.
@5/Christopher: Hmm, science fiction flavour and interaction with aliens – that does sound good. I’ll keep it in mind. At the moment I have all the teenage heroes I want in real life.
@6/TheMadLibrarian: I remembered Uhura’s animals, McCoy’s radiance, and Kirk’s armour, but not the caterpillar. Thank you!
Lifeboats is unbelievably funny, and yet incredibly moving all at once.