Once again I violate my ban against discussing those god-awful prequel movies that everyone else seems to think are Star Wars movies. I hope my own cardiac tissue will forgive me for this. I also hope you’ll bear with me if I nerd out for a bit. Now [insert deep breath here] please allow me to clarify terms:

• by Star Wars I mean the movie entitled Star Wars, later entitled Star Wars: A New Hope;
• by “Star Wars movies” I mean the first three;
• by “the first three” I mean the three that actually came first, in 1977, 1980, and 1983.

That said, what made Star Wars brilliant, and what made the Star Wars movies brilliant, was that the universe in which they took place was so much larger than what you saw on screen. Lucas establishes this beautifully in the cantina scene—which, for those of you who are either under 25 or not nerdy enough to know what I’m talking about, is the scene where Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker go into a bar full of aliens to meet Han Solo and Chewbacca. But you don’t even have to know who any of those dudes are. What you really need to know is that those dudes walk past, talk to, get in fights with, and happen to be the same room with members of dozens of different alien races, almost none of which ever show up again in any of the films.

Think of all the effort that went into the costume design for that scene. You’ve got to envision not just their anatomy but what they’re going to wear, what they’re going to drink, even how they’re going to drink (if you design strange mouths for them), what sort of weapons or musical instruments or wristwatches they’ll have (and, if you give them strange hands, how they carry their stuff), how their facial structures define what speech patterns they’re capable of, yadda yadda yadda.

On top of all of that you want some of them to look pacifistic, others to look malicious, others to seem stupid or panicked or drunk, and in making those choices you cause your audience to think a little bit about their cultures and dispositions. In other words, just by deciding to put that scene in your movie, you create scores upon scores of planets, languages, customs, civilizations, technological eras, and so on. Just by panning your camera through the cantina, you develop the world in which your characters live.

That’s why Star Wars blew audiences out of their seats. It wasn’t just the aliens; it’s the starships, the guns, the droids. None of them ever get explained; they just pass on by in the background, begging us to ask, “Where’d that come from?”

Now, is the cantina scene ripped off from Barliman Butterbur’s Prancing Pony? You bet. Is the whole Star Wars galaxy based heavily on Middle Earth? As sure as Glamdring and Sting glow the same color as Luke and Obi Wan’s lightsabers. But to paraphrase Picasso, good artists copy while great artists steal. Lucas was right to base his universe on Tolkien’s, because Tolkien’s has the same quality of seemingly infinite depth. We in the audience get the feeling that the storyteller could have followed anyone out of the Prancing Pony or the Mos Eisley cantina and taken us on an equally thrilling ride.

This pops up in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi too. Boba Fett isn’t cool because of his costume. He’s cool because the baddest badass in the galaxy goes out of his way to tell him, “No disintegrations.” He’s cool because not only does Han Solo know the dude by reputation but he’s actually afraid of him. (Don’t ask me who’s making that wimpy Wilhelm Scream off-camera just before Boba Fett falls into the Sarlacc pit. I don’t know; I just know it ain’t Boba.)

So, if you want to make a prequel movie to Star Wars, the one thing you absolutely must not do is make the world smaller. You can’t, for example, have Boba Fett show up. At all. And you definitely can’t make Boba Fett’s dad a hireling of Darth Vader’s boss, thereby transforming the coolest bounty hunter ever into a petulant whiner who went into daddy’s profession because he couldn’t come up with anything more original.

By the same token, given the hundreds of unique droids puttering around namelessly in the backgrounds of your first three films, you cannot have R2D2 or C3P0 show up in your prequel. Oh, and if you make the world-shrinking mistake of putting R2D2 in your prequel, you certainly can’t have him meet Obi Wan Kenobi, because Obi Wan’s very first bit of dialogue establishes that he’s never seen R2 before.

The alleged prequels have plenty of other problems too. They get the ending wrong, for instance. (Natalie Portman’s character doesn’t die.) But what I was talking about in my first post was the genius of the cantina scene for developing a richly textured setting with just a few sweeps of the camera. No dialogue! Just show us the cantina and we can see how much bigger your galaxy is than anything we’ve seen before.

Think about how much exposed metal and how much bloodshed you’d have to have in your city to come up with a word like bloodrust. So much blood is been spilled so often, and so ubiquitously, and cleaned up so seldom, that you have to name this phenomenon you see blooming all around you.

Bloodrust. It’s perfect. It describes exactly what it is, without a single extra word of description from Miéville. He drops it in a single sentence and then moves along, leaving us to wonder how the bloodrust got to be there. And when we ask ourselves that question, we discover volumes of information about the world Miéville has created.

Drive-by shooting is equally elegant. A monstrous event, to be sure, but the term has a lot to say about the neighborhood (and the country, and the culture) in which it happens. Only people who shoot each other tens of thousands of times a year need to discern this kind of shooting from that kind of shooting.

The fact that the American medical establishment needs to distinguish between the overweight and the obese is another commentary. So is the fact that the Japanese have the word karōshi—“death from overwork.” Another Japanese favorite of mine—again, monstrous but fascinating—is shokushu gōkan, or “tentacle rape.” Only in a society obsessed by erotic art and porn will you find an established vocabulary word for something like this. (And this one goes back centuries; shokushu gōkan is the subject of woodblock prints, not just Wandering Kid movies.)

As a storyteller, there are few talents more important than word choice. I find it interesting that cultures engage in some pretty sophisticated word choice too.

Take the story that frequently goes by the name “The Tale of the Two Dreamers.” A man has a dream of treasure hidden in a far-off city and, well, here’s a fairly basic, public domain version, from E.W. Lane’s translation of the Arabian Nights. (Go ahead and click; it’s really short. Just come right back, OK?)

You can find a moral in it. You can take it as pure narrative confection. You can diagram it as a really minimal variant of one of those Joseph Campbell hero’s journey stories.

Notice it’s not even an Arabian Nights tale proper. Lane brings it up in an endnote to one of his chapters. The first time I read it, though, it wasn’t even Arabian, but an Eastern European Jewish story, and the cities were Prague and Warsaw rather than Cairo and Baghdad. With a little Googling, I turned up a version where the two places were Somerset and London, and a reference to another version with a couple Dutch cities.

The choice of cities can vary. The bit you need is the dreamer’s sense of being out of a known, safe space, adrift in a place where simple actions can have unpredictable, dangerous results. Every detail is part embellishment, part essential.

The way the ending twist isn’t just a twist, but is thoroughly integrated with what’s come before, makes the story feel well-shaped. If a couple of details are dropped in early about the dreamer’s house (like the garden with its well and fig tree), and those details can reappear in the dream that’s told to the dreamer when he’s far from home, and it’ll feel a little like home when we meet them again at the story’s end. In the course of a story, it isn’t just the details that build up, but the connections, reflections, echoes…

(Which reminds me: in a future post there’s a story I want to tell about a bicycle in a forest in a theater in Paris and really good pie in a town in another forest, and about how sometimes the important thing is how the details don’t link, but this sentence itself doesn’t really link to what I’m supposed to be talking about, so I’d better leave it for now.)

“The Tale of Two Dreamers” came back to me recently in Alberto Manguel’s anthology Black Water, where Manguel notes that the tale was adapted and retold by Jorge Luis Borges. So I had to track down Borges version which, it turns out, is one of the retold stories in his first book, A Universal History of Infamy.

An aside–OK, another aside–A Universal History of Infamy is a lot of fun. It’s Borges retelling stories that have caught his imagination, and sketching odd characters from history. It’s got just one original story, which serves as a snapshot of the moment when Borges the reader evolved into Borges the reader, an embodiment of Austin Kleon’s exhortation to “Draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.”(See point 3 in Kleon’s How to Steal Like an Artist.)

Anyway, Borges’ version of “The Two Dreamers” is a good one–better, in many ways, than Lane’s, and the difference is largely in the details. Part of this may be that Borges is working from an additional source, but I have a hunch he’s embroidering a bit on any and all of his sources. If not, he’s certainly selecting and polishing his details with care. (Or perhaps Lane simply doesn’t include enough details, or the right details, or doesn’t polish the details he does use to their best sheen?)

Where Lane gives us “a man of Baghdad,” Borges gives us a man whose name we eventually learn is Mohammed al-Maghribi.

Where Lane’s dreamer’s dream has “a person” who appears with the message to go to the other city, Borges’ dreamer’s dream features a soaking wet man who pulls a gold coin from his mouth before delivering his message. The unexplained drenchedness and miraculous coin prime us so that the message, equally pithy in either telling, arrives with more force.

And instead of the captain of the guard simply describing a house “of such a description” with a garden “at the lower end of which is a fountain,” Borges gives us a list with treasure-hunt momentum: “a house in Cairo in whose yard is a garden, at the lower end of which is a sundial and beyond the sundial a fig tree and beyond the fig tree a fountain and beneath the fountain a great sum of money.” (Borges translated here by Norman Thomas diGiovanni.)

Much later in life, Borges retold the story as part of a lecture on the Thousand and One Nights (recorded in the book Seven Nights). Even compressed to near-synopsis, his telling of the story kept its sundial, fig tree, and fountain, essential embellishments pointing the way to the essence of the story that’s hidden treasure-like beneath the all the shifting details.

Lesson four: By making relationships unique, detailed, and specific, you can reveal volumes about your characters and about their world, and you can do it without a whole lot of fluffy text.

Perdido Street Station gives an example of this right out of the gate, in the relationship between two protagonists, Isaac dan der Grimnebulin and Lin. Isaac is an obese human polymath; Lin is a sculptor and a khepri, which is to say a red-skinned humanoid alien with a huge beetle for a head. Not a beetle’s head; a beetle, complete with headlegs, headwings, and headbody.

These lovebirds are already worth getting to know. It’s almost impossible to imagine being sexually attracted to a partner so alien from one’s own physiology. I want to keep reading just to figure out what the hell they see in each other.

I love the fact that Lin, a khepri, took on a name that is pronounceable by humans, easy to ascribe a gender to, and yet alien. (We already have Lynns and Lynnes, but my first association seeing the name Lin in print is with a Chinese surname.) Isaac’s name is evocative too (and in a much more subtle way than, say, Rowling’s Remus Lupin or Lucas’s Salacious Crumb). “Isaac” contains historical and religious significance, and “dan der” sounds a lot like “van der” (making me envision a northern European), and yet I’m thinking of pet dander too, something flaky and allergenic. So far his name sounds familiar, but anyone named “Grimnebulin” definitely ain’t from around here. We expect grim and nebulous things from a Grimnebulin, but we’re not beaten over the head with the idea. (George Lucas, take the hint! No more character names like Sleazebaggo, okay?)

Miéville describes these two by contrasting them, a technique I’ve used too, and one I find valuable. Lin is lithe with bright red skin, as if all her skin had been stripped away and she is just naked musculature. This could have been a gory description but in her case it’s sexy; Isaac’s the point of view character here and she just got out of his bed.

Then we see Isaac, who is fat like a blimp is fat (taut skin), therefore definitely not fat like a sack of potatoes is fat (blobby, knobby, and apt to spill out over his belt). A vivid image for me is of his many gray body hairs sticking straight up from his blimp-taut skin. I’m thinking, How can she stay with this guy? She’s sexy; he’s a hairy blimp. Eww.

Of course, then we get to see her fully, with that beetle of a head. Eww. Now I’m thinking, how can he be with her?

See how much tension Miéville has generated already? The only thing that’s happened is Isaac has watched Lin get out of bed. Two paragraphs, and I’m engrossed.

Then they eat breakfast together. This turns out to be utterly perfect as a vehicle for describing exactly how alienating they are to each other. She can’t talk, so they need to communicate by sign language—easy if your head can clutch your food in its own claws; not so easy for people who need their hands to eat. So Isaac has to deal with a lot over breakfast: apart from having to juggle his food, his drink, and his conversation in the same fumbling hands, he also has to watch his girlfriend’s mandibles rip and tear at her food in a way no human being could ever get used to.

In making us note the ripping and tearing, we readers are forced to realize that surely Isaac’s eating habits—hell, even his eating physiology—is just as icky to Lin as hers are to us. So why are they together?

The question becomes even more pressing when they leave his apartment: they dare not walk arm in arm like lovers, nor even walk close enough to allow others to suspect intimacy. Inter-species romance is strictly forbidden in New Crobuzon. Because of their relationship, Lin and Isaac are aliens in their own city, and even if they weren’t, they’re aliens at their own breakfast table.

And yet they’re perfect for each other. Lin is an artist and an outcast; Isaac is an Edison-like genius and an outcast. They’re both deeply sensual, Isaac because he’s a profligate and Lin because she’s an artist . (I don’t think it’s an accident that Miéville chose clay as her medium; everyone remembers the sexy scene from Ghost, and to make it hotter still, Lin’s oeuvre involves liberal use of her mouth and, well, other bits.) In dating Lin, Isaac enjoys a certain bad-boy chic (Miéville’s words), and in dating Isaac, Lin enjoys a certain worldly, avant-garde air.

I find it staggering how much Miéville reveals about his characters and their world through this one tiny window. And no sappy dialogue! Neither of them ever has to say, “I love you.” The bare fact that they struggle with every conversation means they must be head over heels for each other. And look at how much else we know: there are humans and intelligent nonhumans on this planet; they commingle but they are not to date or marry; therefore there are strict social divisions; therefore there are people minding these divisions; therefore Isaac and Lin’s world is not safe for them.

It’s a tricky thing, choosing just the right details—vexing enough to make you want to give up, in fact. It’s a hell of a lot easier to give up, to just tell and not show. In that sense reading Miéville is downright depressing: he’s just better at this than the rest of us. But as I always say, pessimism is the new optimism.

(And surely clearing the bar he’s raised for us is easier than falling in love with a woman with a beetle for a head. Yeesh.)

The new 2011 Taurus SHO comes with one of two engines: the standard 3.5-liter V6, which they advertise at 18 mph city/28 mpg highway, and the 3.5-liter “EcoBoost” V6, which they advertise at 17 mph city/25 mpg highway. That’s right: designating an engine as “EcoBoost” reduces fuel economy by 11%.

I see an entire new world of science fiction possibilities opening up, one in which new technologies become increasingly heavier, clunkier, and less efficient. For years we’ve all been wondering when we’ll get the jetpacks envisioned by SF writers of decades past. Now we know the answer: with the geniuses behind “EcoBoost” technology leading the charge, we’re lucky to have motorized vehicles at all. Perhaps next year’s Taurus will actually be a mechanical bull.

As soon as the credits rolled in Episode II, allegedly of the Star Wars film franchise, I said Episode III would have to be the greatest sci-fi story of all time. Somehow III’s script would have to explain how the sleek, super-high-tech world of episodes I and II would degrade into the blocky, dirty tech level of episode IV. Natalie Portman flies around in a shiny, dagger-sharp spin-off of a SR-71 Blackbird. Carrie Fisher flies around in a boxy hunk of junk. Even the handgun technology needs to retrograde a few hundred years. The guns in the new pretenders are all trim, streamlined, Star Trekky things, whereas the guns in the real trilogy are all big and cumbersome. (Hell, Han Solo’s is actually a modified German WWII pistol.)

At last we have an answer: the Galactic Empire put all its starship and small arms engineers through internships at Ford Motor Company. I can see the ads now: “Are your droids capable of laying down blazing fields of fully automatic laser fire while protected by their own self-generated force fields? Don’t worry! The Wizards of EcoBoost can have them tottering around like humans in bulky costumes in no time. Before you know it, they’ll be incapable of overcoming so much as a flight of stairs, and any backwater bumpkin with a crowbar will be able to dismantle them in no time.”

Thank you, EcoBoost Wizards, for filling in this gaping plot hole between the real Star Wars films and the new pretenders. Your next assignment: explain to me how I’m supposed to believe Darth Vader can possibly have come out of Little Orphan Ani.

Lesson three: invent new compound words to create meaning, deliver imagery, and develop a world.

There’s a neighborhood in New Crobuzon called Riverskin. What does that name conjure in your imagination? I see a filthy ghetto with an even filthier canal cutting through the guts of it. For me oil and scum and detritus are gangs fighting a turf war for ownership of the water’s surface.

Now how about Bonetown or Flyside? Those are neighborhoods in New Crobuzon too. In these neighborhoods you can go up to the roofworld, and swooping menacingly above the roofscape are the slake-moths, snuffling up psychoscents and jonesing for dreamjuice.

Perdido Street Station is chock-full of neologisms like this. The psychosphere is home to psychonauts like the slake-moths, who can recognize you by your mindprint. There’s a drug called dreamshit, a weapon called a rivebow (wielded by intelligent, ambulatory cactuses, no less!), a phenomenon called quasivoltage and another one called bloodrust.

Think about how much it says about a city if its residents have to invent a word like bloodrust. It speaks volumes, doesn’t it? In fact, I think it says so much that I’ll have to contemplate that in a later post. In the meantime, though, I’m going to think about the worlds I’m creating in my fiction, and I’m going to see what kind of neologisms people in those worlds are going to come up with. Sorry, China. I’m stealing that one from you.

Wow.

Anyway, so there’s a part one. Read it or this post is just one long non sequitur.

Lesson two: If you want to make your settings real, develop a poet’s ear for detail.

First, what is “a poet’s ear for detail”?  It’s a bit like pornography: hard to define, but you know it when I see it.  A critic said of another one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth McCracken, that “Only poets have the same obsessive concern with language that philosophers do, and McCracken is clearly a poet.”* Being a philosopher by profession, I thought this was quite a nice thing of him to say. Then I realized that my only “short story” published at that point came in at an elephantine 15,000 words, which is something like 25% of a McCracken novel. That’s when I realized I have to work on this obsessive concern thing.

Miéville’s got it down pat.  I can’t offer you a representative selection of examples from Perdido Street Station because they appear two or three times on every stinkin’ page. New Crobuzon, the city where his Miéville’s story is set, is described so vividly that I want to wash my hands after reading. I’ll share one example of what I mean:

“Rain began to fall, quite suddenly. It was sluggish, huge drops falling indolently and breaking open, as thick and warm as pus.”

New Crobuzon ain’t Honolulu. Rain doesn’t fall like pus in Honolulu. The first time it rained on me in Honolulu, the sun was shining and the sky was nearly cloudless. I thought, If I open my mouth, I’ll only be the tiniest bit surprised to find Hawaiian rain tastes like pineapple juice.

This sentence alone tells me so much about Miéville’s fictional city—and the jerk has the audacity to have a sentence like this on every single page. Or two sentences. Or ten. It depends on how much he wants to show off.

So instead of getting jealous, and instead of wondering where is the justice in a universe where so many people get to have so much talent while the rest of us have to work so damned hard for every scrap we can come by, go read Perdido Street Station and see if Miéville can help you learn how to distill just the right details.

*Props to Geoffrey Stokes, who wrote that for The Boston Globe.

The movie starts by introducing Andrew. A plane is going down, and everyone on the plane is screaming and crying and praying except for Andrew, who looks kind of distracted and tired. The snack cart tumbles down the aisle toward us. Andrew adjusts the little airflow thing above his seat. We think, what the f*ck is wrong with this guy?

That question looms large for most of the movie, soon accompanied by is he ever going to pull himself out of this zombie existence? It’s a strangely riveting question, and it takes a very long time for the answer to develop. Whether or not he’s going to be able to emerge and actually start feeling something–and what will happen to him if he does–makes up a story arc that takes us from the very first moment of the movie to the very last. But a single story arc doesn’t generally keep us interested for that long if there aren’t smaller-scale things to interest us along the way.

In this case, the smaller-scale things are what I would describe as gradually escalating weirdness–weirdness that in some ways gets more comforting as it gets stranger. I certainly wouldn’t have imagined that such an approach could possibly be adequate to keep interest and enjoyment up in a movie, but (at least for me), boy does it. I think the “comforting” part is important, too: weirdness for its own sake, or disturbing weirdness, wouldn’t serve the same purpose at all.

One thing the movie does marvelously and uses to contribute to this gradually increasing weirdness is introduce characters, one after the other, who are sharply defined and immediately engaging–and for the most part these are throwaway characters, people who delight us in three minutes of screen time and then are gone. From Kenny the obnoxious-partier-turned-policeman to the Medieval Times knight who’s dating his friend’s mother to the guy whose job is to make sure no one interferes with a vast chasm hidden in a junkyard, and on and on. Watching this movie, you get the idea that the world is populated with strange and fascinating people, places and moments, all of which keep getting stranger and more fascinating the more you look around. And this process of gradually escalating weirdness, while it’s just plain fun, also seems to bring us along on Andrew’s journey of waking up. The world seems more and more alive as the movie progresses.

So there is a plot, although a strange one. It helps significantly that we slowly get a series of unexpected revelations about why Andrew is the way he is in the first place, so that the same plot is simultaneously going backwards to the source and forwards to how things turn out.

The more I consider the structure of this movie, the more annoyed I am at Zach Braff. He’s already quite a good actor: is it really necessary for him to horn in on my favorite art (writing), especially in such an effective way?

My guess is that Braff was not trying to follow prescribed principles of story structure, but rather only his own passions and interests. I could be wrong: maybe there’s a way to actually plan a movie like this by thinking about three-act structure and story arcs and scene and sequel and other techniques. Certainly any number of magnificent stories have been written with those principles in mind. Ultimately, though, the life in the story seems to come from a marvelous tension between pain and joy, between turning away and leaping in.

If you’re interested in writing, Perdido Street Station is more than a great novel; it’s a writing workshop.  Miéville can teach you volumes about writing with élan, but I don’t want to go on for volumes here.  Instead, I want to encapsulate a few of the lessons I learned from Miéville, with references to specific turns of phrase.

Lesson one: If you want to write gripping fantasy or science fiction, inundate your reader with the bizarre.

In the first paragraphs of Perdido Street Station we already see a building dribbling mucus.  That one goes up into the sci-fi firmament right next to Heinlein’s dilating door: it tells me volumes about what I’m looking at in just two words.  Not only do I know that humans didn’t build this building, but I can guess that it must have been intelligent insectoids.  (If you had the same guess, you’d be right.)  Since this building stands beside ordinary brick-and-mortar cousins, I know humans and aliens live in close proximity to one another, and most importantly of all, I know this city is a slimy, gritty, stinking, disgusting place to live.  How could it not be if its buildings dribble mucus?

By the end of chapter two we’ve encountered khepri, refflicks, and pterabirds pulling rickshaws; we’ve seen lumbering constructs, intelligent badgers, and the Remade; we’ve seen buildings and artwork made of khepri spit and flying baskets that run errands for you.  By the end of chapter three we add to the list the vodyanoi, their water sculptures, and a garuda.  Don’t know what these are?  It doesn’t matter.  Everyone in the world of Perdido Street Station knows what they are, and that makes the world real for the reader.

The list keeps growing, by the way, and it keeps getting weirder, until you meet beings so strange that not even the inhabitants of Miéville’s world can comprehend them.  And that doesn’t make things harder to understand; it throws the utterly bizarre into sharp contrast with the so-far-so-good-I-can-dig-it-bizarre.  If you can get your head around the cactus warriors, the wyrmen, and the ambassador from Hell, it’s really saying something that no one can sort out what the hell Mr. Motley is or understand the motivations—or even the physical and metaphysical existence of—the extradimensional Weaver.

In a nutshell, lesson one is it’s okay to think of your otherworldy setting like one big, long, panning shot through the Mos Eisley cantina.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then A) I’ll bet you a shiny nickel you’re under 25, and B) go watch Star Wars.  Maybe I’ll post later about why the cantina scene alone makes the real Star Wars movies so much better than those awful pretenders claming to be prequels.)