BEA Panels: Alternate History for Young Adults

Books, Column, Conventions | Clare | June 18, 2009 at 3:57 am

The BEA panel on Alternate Histories in Young Adult fiction was moderated by Jack Barton, who heads up teen programming at the New York Public Library. I excerpted and summarized. Cleverness belongs to the participants and mistakes to me.

Scott Westerfeld is the author of the acclaimed, futuristic Uglies series, in which 16 year-olds are required to undergo radical cosmetic surgery and become hedonistic Pretties. His new book Leviathan (to-be-released October, 2009) imagines a turn of the 20th century world after Charles Darwin discovered bioengineering.

Holly Black may be best known for co-authoring the Spiderwick Chronicles, but she’s also authored the Modern Faerie Tale series, and most recently, White Cat (to-be-released May, 2010) set in a current-day America where magic-wielding was an everyday trade until these “workers” were banned from openly practicing their craft in 1929, a la Prohibition.

Cassandra Clare first explored the world of Shadowhunters in her Mortal Instruments series, which began with City of Bones. Now, with Clockwork Angel (to-be-released in fall, 2010), she begins the Infernal Devices series by moving back to the Victorian era, where teen Shadowhunters face demonically-powered automatons.

Asked how his books reflect alternate history, Westerfeld explains one of the chief pleasures of alternate history is being able to recognize so much of the world as familiar with one jarring thing that’s changed. In Leviathan, the divergent point of history occurs during Darwin’s 1860’s, when, along with theorizing evolution, he discovers DNA. As a result, Darwin develops hybrid creatures, which become the backbone of the Victorian empire, and set the stage for Westerfeld’s tale to begin in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. WWI will, therefore, unfold in ways that are recognizable, but against the backdrop of these fantastic creatures’ existence, so a modern-day reader’s knowledge may predict some of the outcomes, but the significance and underlying meaning of events may be quite different. This novel also contains about fifty interior illustrations, drawn to resemble those of the period, researched from 1914’s Punch Magazine among other sources. It’s warm, familiar, line-rendered Edwardian-era magazine art, but from a different universe.

Holly Black also enjoyed exploring the contrast between the familiar and the strange, and wore gloves to the panel as an illustration of her novel’s point of divergence. In her alternate history, there’s a percentage of the population who possesses magic. With this craft, seven different types of cursework are possible, all of which are executed by a finger’s touch on naked skin. So, it’s become a cultural norm that everyone wears gloves. The lack of them is perceived as an open threat, like walking around with an unsheathed knife. Bare hands have become taboo, and though people may be ungloved at home, they’ve become unused to the sight. As strange as she may appear during springtime, in an indoor location, with demure leather gloves on, that’s the oddity of bare hands in the world of White Cat.

Cassandra Clare considers her history to be more secret, almost, than alternate. The Victorian era in her novel is as we know it, but there’s a “daVinci code-esque” plot to create automatons who can take over the world. The deliciousness of the question she poses in Clockwork Angel is whether this is the real history of 1878 that’s simply never been discovered or a truly divergent point.

To explain their reasons for tackling alternate history, Scott Westerfeld points out the joy and comfort of these half-remembered eras, especially as they touch the Victorian, because we tend to remember the good parts about them. Historical research is fun, from reading to dress-up. Holly Black remarks upon the pleasure of historical formalities, like her gloves, and what nice variety they provide from the life of a contemporary writer (and extremely informal being). Cassandra Clare was standing on London Bridge when she imagined a Victorian girl being chased across it by a clockwork monster, and the incongruity of the image was too appealing to forget.

Westerfeld and Black are specifically asked about the challenges, if any, of creating an alternate history after their previous inventions. Holly Black said her biggest challenge was writing about characters occupying a world that, to them, doesn’t seem noteworthy. Without the plot aspect of having her protagonist discover a hidden existence, for example, her new hero never thinks about the wallpaper of his life, making it tougher to integrate the stranger details into the story when he routinely ignores them. It’s certainly increased her respect for science fiction writers.

Westerfeld explains the “passage of disbelief,” the oft-told moment when a character realizes that Whatever is Real. (From Buffy, he recalls the example of Oz’s blasé acceptance of vampires when he realizes, in an instant, that they’re a reasonable explanation for a lot that happens in Sunnydale.) There’s something fun and different about writing an open fantasy, where everybody present is already used to the setting, or as in the Uglies world, where the experience is immersive. Tally isn’t wowed by the existence of hoverboards, for example, like a recently-thawed Flash Gordon might be. That saves the writer some time in Westerfeld’s opinion. What made it difficult for him, going back into history, was that the research was qualitatively different. Figuring out how hoverboards might work is speculative research, looking up information on magnets, etc., but finding out about zippers back in 1914 was so difficult. It’s not just the invention date, but finding out how widely and fast they would’ve propagated to a small town in the Ottoman Empire. That’s not on Wikipedia.

Cassandra Clare’s making faces, because she’s been doing tons of research to fulfill her goal of reflecting Victorian London as it was. For a year, she promised herself she’d only read books written in or about that era, and that’s all she’s read since last August, and it’s like being in a strange isolation tank. She does occasionally look longingly at other books, but she’s generally found it fun. There’s a lot of material out of copyright, but available online, so this week she’s been reading Victorian cookbooks, and reports that the recipes are absolutely disgusting. Holly Black found a different challenge in trying to figure out how her modern society’s practices have conformed around this one big change she’s made in the existence of magical tradesmen. Would it become customary to invite a loveworker to your wedding? How would it change how people date or formed families? Those societal ripples are hard but important to define.

Cassandra Clare’s asked why she felt inspired to reach even further back into the history of her Shadowhunters with this new series. She confesses that this Victorian series was the one she actually conceived first, however, she began by writing the contemporary one, because she decided it would be easier to refine her demon-hunting world’s rules when not also trying to do a huge amount of historical research. But as her Shadowhunters became very good at using modern technological tools, like cellphones and computers, to accomplish their work, she thought it would be interesting to uncover how they managed without them.

The moderator points out that these authors crossover multiple genre boundaries, such as historical, scifi/fantasy, even horror, and wonder whether they start with setting or character first. Scott Westerfeld agrees with Samuel R. Delany, noted critic and scifi author, who says that science fiction is the genre in which setting is the character. Scifi authors start with world-building and then move onto to determining the best person’s eyes to use for looking at it. He says if you ask scifi readers for the plot of their favorite books, they don’t start with the plot, they always start by telling you the setting. “It’s a planet where….” From Westerfeld’s literary background, as a result, he always starts with setting.

Holly Black started by wanting to retell the classic fairy tale of the white cat, but needed a magical transformation at some point, and through its evolution, her story ended up including grifters and organized crime. Westerfeld points out that Black’s curseworkers are, in practice, like the Mafia. Everyone knows about them, but they exist in an underground because of the magic ban, much like Prohibition led to the rise of the major crime families in our real world. Cassandra Clare starts with characters and world-building at the same time, lots of scattered ideas that she has to work to make cohesive. She knew she had clockwork monsters and Victoriana and a girl who could shape shift into anything, so out of those random images and background, she tries to mesh it together into a sensible plot.

Though her story’s contemporary, Holly Black did do a lot of research on cons and con artists and different kinds of organized crime. One of Westerfeld’s favorite things was figuring out the story of one of his protagonists, who is the teenage son of the assassinated archduke, which is a neglected part of history. So in trying to find out what it would be like to be a privileged teenager in Austria at that time, he found a history about the wealthiest family in Austria at the time, which would parallel the archduke’s in class. An interesting thing he learned was that, unlike now, the most desirable age to emulate was forty, not twenty. As soon as a young man was able, he’d grow a full beard and carry a cane with his sober suits, because men in their 20’s were considered far too rash and undependable to be trusted with any important responsibility. It was such a different view from our era that it was a fascinating switch to make in the novels. Research provides these great ideas.

The moderator asks whether and how the authors go about planning their series to include the aging of the characters and further plot developments. Holly Black’s new series will be three books, probably. Cassandra Clare’s was supposed to be two, but as it became clear it wouldn’t fit, turned into three. She tries to determine that by first following the natural arc of the story and the subplots within it. Westerfeld originally planned his new series as a trilogy, too. Everyone seems to write trilogies, he said, and then sometimes you get a fourth book from the concept. Clare remarks that trilogies are as natural a form as beginning, middle, and end. The fourth books comes because the publisher pesters you. Westerfeld’s Leviathan series will have four books, but the fourth will be a full-color guidebook to the world, something like the Spiderwick Field Guide.

[Holly Black leaves for another, unfortunately overlapping appearance.]

The moderator asks who the authors would be if they could go back in time themselves. Cassandra Clare loves learning the exciting things from history, but a lot of people also dropped dead from un-fun things like cavities in their teeth. Most people in the Victorian era were desperately poor and lived in very lowly circumstances, but she might be willing to go back to a time after the development of antibiotics and surgical anesthesia, like the 1950s. If she could take all the great stuff back with her to the Victorian era, that might be okay.

Another problem with those eras, notes Westerfeld, was how horribly racist, sexist, and classist they were, which makes it funny how we romanticize them. Trying to address some of that, another of his protagonists is a girl pretending to be a boy so she can serve on an airship like her balloonist father. If he could go back himself, it would be fun to be alive when people traveled by ship rather than planes, taking a fun week to Europe versus six horrible hours. A ridiculous mode of researching this series involved flying back home to Sydney, where he lives with his wife, Australian author Justine Larbalestier. The cheapest way involves around-the-world tickets, but theirs timed out before they could complete one of the legs, so he suggested taking a boat. They took the Queen Mary II from London to New York. He was seasick a bit, and had to bring a tuxedo, and it taught him how much of that life would be making sure you have an adequate wardrobe and the skills to knot a bowtie in a rocking cabin. The daily life’s infrastructure today might involve updating the Facebook page, but they had to handle their cravats and shaving mugs.

The moderator asks whether writing ever gets easier, and Cassandra Clare answers that after only three books, she isn’t sure yet. The big advantage is that having successfully completed a book, she tends to believe she can probably do it again, though this latest project of hers is so different from what came before that sometimes she wonders why she took it on and how she’ll ever finish. Challenging one’s self with new goals keeps the process fresh, but it means there can never be complete confidence in one’s powers to accomplish them.

Westerfeld agrees that it’s not that his skills are so much better now, but that his confidence is better. He still stretches himself as thin to write a novel, but the inevitable times when his self-assurance and direction evaporate last for ten minutes rather than ten days. The part of the brain that knows he can do it recovers faster, or his wife reminds him that his latest episode of foolish dread isn’t any more rational than the previous ones. Cassandra Clare opines that Holly Black would’ve said—if only she’d been present—that writing out of a place of fear is healthy and helps keep a writer going.

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