“Because some stories just have to be told”…
I liked this slogan from small-press publisher Black Opal Books the moment I saw it. The Barbara Tuchman quote on small-press publisher Penmore Press’s website also inspires me: “Books are the carriers of civilization….” Yes, I’ve published with both Black Opal and Penmore, but I’m just leading into the theme of this post. They represent different ways to express that theme, something that motivated me to begin writing my stories and putting them “out there” about fifteen years ago.
Maybe that theme is a meta-theme—one that rises above all adages and platitudes about storytelling and explains why fiction entertains and informs us and why we need it as human beings. We have been telling stories since prehistoric times. Storytelling makes us human. Yes, books are the carriers of civilization, but storytelling was an essential stimulus for its development.
When I was in junior high (middle school for people on the East Coast and Mid-America), I was already looking for a career, something I could imagine doing for many years and not get tired of it. One possibility was anthropology or archaeology. I checked out all the books on those subjects our public library had and read most of them. Besides concluding that the subjects were too complex because human beings are complicated and then opting for math and the so-called hard sciences instead, I also learned how the storytelling tradition grew over time and civilized us (and even created cultural revolutions in some cases!).
It all started with oral tradition, of course. I revisited that in Sing a Zamba Galactica, the second book in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (all three books are now sold together in an economically priced bundle). The ETs who human beings encountered on the planet New Haven in the 82 Eridani star system are very strange, and they have an even stranger language, Buzzspeak (the human name for it, of course—they also have an underwater language that contains sonar images). These ETs are superb storytellers. They essentially communicate via stories. The human colonists on New Haven need the help of an AI to judiciously translate and edit those stories into Standard, humans’ language in the future (a descendant of English, Mandarin, and other languages).
I didn’t dwell much on the sociology of those ETs the humans end up calling Rangers (why the name? that’s part of the story!). Although the ETs’ appearance is strange, their culture is beaver-like. And they have a difficult time being alone outside their clans, but they manage. (In particular, the trilogy shows this numerous times, and A. B. Carolan continues to show this in The Secret of the Urns and Mind Games, the latter due out soon.) But they always communicate among themselves by telling stories; that’s how Buzzspeak works…and it’s how they think.
It’s how I think too. Although I’m an ex-scientist, my love for and use of language wins out over experiments, data and its analyses, and equations. And, as the Black Opal Books motto states, I must tell my stories just like those Rangers do.
Good fiction is good storytelling. That’s a tautology, of course. I’m afraid some fiction writers don’t realize that truth, though, and often wander off in culs de sac. They have many things to worry about these days, of course, besides their stories: creating a polished manuscript, editing, and book promotion. But we should never lose sight of the story.
Our readers have it easier. They can just read a story and decide whether they like it or not, not all that different from our prehistoric times when some tellers of good stories became revered, others not so much. Or the Rangers’ clan mothers who often rose to that exalted position by being the best storyteller in the clan.
But readers also have a responsibility: helping to carry on the storytelling tradition by reading the stories that are told. And by teaching their children to be readers. That’s a corollary of the Tuchman quote.
This symbiosis between readers and writers is more than a business for the latter—it’s carrying on with an important human tradition. A lot of what makes us human will wither and die unless we preserve this tradition.
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Comments are always welcome!
Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection. Epic sci-fi but also personal at the character level, with interesting characters, including strange and complex ETs, this trilogy moves from a dystopian Earth and solar system dominated by multinational corporations and their mercenaries, to far into the future and the establishment of an interplanetary trade union. All these books are contained now in an inexpensive ebook bundle, available on Amazon and Smashwords and all the latter’s affiliated retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, Walmart, etc.).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
