|
||
| Home Page :: About Sword & Sorcery :: Catspaw |
|
Sword & Sorcery
Flashing Swords
Pitch Black Books
|
Dermanassian, the desert elf, has proven to be one of the most popular characters featured at Flashing Swords, and that shouldn't come as a surprise, for S.C. Bryce is a careful crafter with a vivid imagination. Bryce seamlessly blends old and new concepts to create something original, and knows how to deliver a good action tale. Several weeks ago Bryce was kind enough to sit down with me and discuss Dermassian, writing, and other matters of interest.
Howard Andrew Jones
Who are your biggest influences?
This is a very interesting question. You’d think it’d be easy to answer, but it’s not. I’ve not deliberately worked into my writing any particular author or style. All the same, it’d be hard to deny the influences of giants like JRR Tolkien and Michael Moorcock, or favorites like Katherine Kurtz, even if the influences aren’t conscious.
Oddly enough, I think Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may have influenced me quite a bit. It’s one of the first books I remember reading where the author so dramatically used the environment to convey mood.
Many bits and pieces of my personal experiences work their way into stories. For example, my brother was the model for a character who needed to be both endearing and irritating.
Where do you find your inspiration?
Ah, a much easier question! I obsessively watch documentaries. I don’t care what the topic is really, I’ll watch anyway. It amazes me all the crazy things that have actually happened in this wacky world. For me, there’s no such thing as a boring documentary.
I also read a lot of magazines, mostly my alumni magazines, Discover, and National Geographic. There’s always something fascinating in them. Plus it’s an entertaining exercise to create a storyline or situation that would link disparate articles. At least one story came out of this exercise. In contrast, I find the books I read to be less directly inspirational.
Lastly, travel. I try to make the environment a strong presence in my fantasy stories. I’ve been lucky – I’ve probably been to two dozen or so countries on various adventures, including hiking in the Andes and the Amazon. So I’ve been lucky enough to experience some of the environments and cultures that are cobbled together in my stories.
What do you like about the genre you write in?
I’ve written stories with horror, science fiction, and humor elements. I tend to like writing heroic fiction or sword and sorcery best.
The general format of heroic fiction is usually simple: often it’s the loner just struggling to get by.
Within that general format, there’s genuine flexibility. It can incorporate elements of many genres (even science fiction, by analogy if nothing else). There’s room for courage and cowardice, divine obstacles and trivial ones, self-reflection and social commentary.
I think also that heroic fantasy appeals to a more primal instinct, a kind of common denominator that many people can relate to — or could if they gave it a chance. Despite all their disadvantages, these heroes have an ability that many of us lack in our own lives. We trudge to our little square offices; they fight to protect their individuality. We hop in our cars to sit on the highway; they wander fantastic lands, traverse wild seas, and blink into other planes of existence. We worry about offending the boss, the secretary, the in-laws; they form and adhere to their personal codes of honor.
They have a freedom to act that many of us feel we lost as part of our social contract. For me, part of what makes these characters heroes is their fight for self-determination against all odds.
Your character Dermanassian has caused some controversy amongst some readers that a lot of people might not know about. Would you care to share the kinds of comments, both negative and positive, that you've received?
It’s very strange. Almost exclusively, negative comments relate to role-playing games. On one hand, there are those that complain that the Dermanassian stories don’t slavishly follow RPG rules. I’ve received outraged comments from readers that a Dermanassian story didn’t follow the rules of whatever game they play. I have, for example, been specifically instructed that “elves don’t do that,” a miniature dragon cannot be called a dragonet because everyone knows it’s a wyrmling, etc. On the other hand, there those that complain the stories do slavishly follow RPG rules. Their evidence is pretty much limited to the fact that Dermanassian is an elf; they ignore everything else.
What both these arguments forget, I think, is that speculative fiction and its archetypes pre-date RPGs.
I’m surely not the only person who’s run into these sorts of comments. I think it’s generally reflective of one of the major downsides RPGs have had on the speculative fiction community. Certainly I agree with the sentiment of Rob Santa’s SFReader.com essay.
There’s a place for RPG-based fiction, to be sure, but it’s not what I’m trying to achieve with the Dermanassian stories. I think that will only become more evident as the series progresses. The stories are increasingly dark and the environments and characters increasingly peculiar. I’ll bet, however, there will always be someone to inform me, “Demons (or whatever) can’t do that!”
I’m happy to say that virtually all the comments I receive are positive. And I’ve become friends with some of the regular readers.
For whatever reason, this issue has not come up at all with any of my other stories. I assume it’s the elf thing that causes the crisis.
What inspired your creation of Dermanassian, as opposed to any other hero?
Dermanassian was not only my first serial character, but featured in one of my very first stories. I think I started “The Gray Mist,” back in 1998 and it was published in 2000.
I liked the idea of working with fantasy archetypes and trying to do something different with them. Hence the elf, but the desert elf from a subterranean trading city. Hence the “last of his kind,” but because all the others went crazy and killed each other in a massacre and his survival was due to a congenital defect. His sorcery tends to be limited and dark, although it gets less limited and more dark as the series continues.
I’m kind of an introvert by nature, so I’m sure that had something to do with choosing a lone, contemplative character rather than a duo or other group. I’m not sure I could sustain witty banter for any length of time, if at all.
Some seem to believe that sword-and-sorcery is anti-feminine, or, at the least, that it caters to adolescent males. What's your opinion?
It’s true that sword and sorcery is anti-feminine and caters to adolescent males. It’s also true that it’s not and it doesn’t. Like most things, sword and sorcery is what people make of it. It can be funny or poignant or creepy or hack & slash or cautious or hell-bent or anything else.
Chauvinistic elements within S&S get a lot of attention. In my opinion this is to the detriment of the genre and, I suspect, a big reason why many venues, editors, and readers reject sword and sorcery wholesale.
Yet whatever sword and sorcery’s defining characteristics are, anti-feminine and catering to adolescent males don’t have to be among them. It seems that there has always been a small cadre of female characters and female writers. Even male writers are producing memorable female characters that are tough, realistic, and feminine – your own Elise comes to mind.
As we move into the future, I hope S&S will continue to shed its negative aspects while emphasizing and re-envisioning the positive ones.
For some time, while you haven't exactly kept your gender a secret, you haven't advertised the fact that you're a woman. Why have you done that, and why "come out" now?
Well, I suppose that’s related to the previous question.
I’m still very sensitive to one of the reactions that Kate Mulgrew got when it was announced she would captain “Voyager” in that Star Trek series: “It’s gonna be ruined because of the chick!”
For a variety of reasons, you’d think that speculative fiction fans would be among the most open-minded. But I don’t think that’s true. I read an article a few years back in a trade magazine that blasted the speculative fiction community for this very problem.
Bearing this in mind, I wanted the opportunity to have my stories be seen for themselves, without the stigma of having been written by a chick.
As for “coming out” now, I think the gender thing has been an open secret for awhile. Plus, I simply don’t care anymore. Maybe it’s old age.
What have you been reading recently?
I’m just finishing The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Carnifex Press’s Clash of Steel series. Strangely enough, I’ve been reading lots of young adult fiction and children’s fiction recently. There’s a purity of story-telling there that can be refreshing. I’m also up to my eyeballs in magazines. I’ve made a promise to myself to re-read Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov this summer, so I’d better get to it.
What writing projects are you currently involved in?
I’m very excited about having “A Long Night with Five Mothers” in Pitch Black Books’ Lords of Swords 2, coming soon. My four-part Dermanassian novella, “Rise of a Necromancer,” is in Flashing Swords. This year, I’ll have a story, a revised version of the Dermanassian story, “The Burning River,” printed in Greek. Also on deck is my horror story, “Let the Black Earth Take It All,” in an anthology to be released in 2007.
The critique groups at SwordAndSorcery.org, which I moderate, are still growing.
In the non-fiction universe, I’ll continue to write essays as a contributing editor to SwordAndSorcery.org. Additionally, I have an essay, “Power Plays: Explorations of Social Power in Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Adventures” coming out in a book on Leiber later this year.
working in sword and sorcery and its related genres, go to the
Sword and Sorcery Interview Page .
|
Sponsors
Purchase
Lords of Swords Sword and sorcery at its finest!
Support S&S.org
Prism Quarterly
Fantasy Poets and Writers Needed PitchBlack's
Cynosure Store |
 |
| Contact the Editor |
| Friday, May 16, 2008 Copyright 2008, SWORDandSORCERY.org |