#I was thinking how A Companion to Wolves and the Dragonriders of Pern books have similar potential as AUs

[ereborne]

Book worm questions: 43, 44, 49, and 50 please :D

43) Title of a book you own that's in the worst physical condition you have. Explain what happened to it. Post a picture if you want: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey! Alas, I don't have it to take a picture of, because it fully disintegrated. It was an old printing, on the pulpy paper that yellows quickly and swells and curls in humidity, and I got it already second-hand and from an un-air-conditioned stall at a giant flea market, and then I read it a lot. The glue went out of the binding and it was just a collection of pages, and the front cover had already softened to nothing, and then one day I was rereading it and couldn't hold the pages together well enough to read it at speed anymore. Runner-up is Dragonlance: The Lost Histories: The Dragons by Douglas Niles, which is as you can see now two half-books and a free-floating front cover. I got it in 1998 and have read it multiple times a year every year since.

44) The book(s) whose stories have become part of your very makeup: I listed a bunch in my answer to carrionfourth, but actually The Dragons is another good answer, as is Key of the Keplian by Lyn McConchie and Andre Norton. I got them both at the same time, and grew up with them (I was six in 1998. they might not have been entirely age-appropriate, but that didn't matter, because what they actually were was a bribe. to keep my mouth shut, about something which I won't now disclose, because they were a damn fine bribe). Also the Dragonlance: Dwarven Nations trilogy by Dan Parkinson--all of them to some extent, but most specifically and vividly the scene in the second book, Hammer and Axe, where Handil the Drum collapses the caverns. The first time a book broke my heart.

49) Do you prefer hopeful, humorous, very emotional or darker books? It's very important to me that a story has a satisfying and happy ending (gotta be both) but I usually enjoy any sort of tone on the way there. Sometimes I'll be in the mood for funny or intense or agonizing or uplifting specifically, but I think more often it's the satisfaction I crave.

50) What kind of book have you never read but always hope to find at some point in the future? This one is definitely not something I’ve never read before but it is something I’m always looking for more and better examples of--people having mind-links with animals. I do want to see there be bleed-through effects so that the humans pick up more of their friend's instinctive behaviors and the animals gain more human perspectives, but I'm so so picky about how it's handled. Love how Tamora Pierce did it with Daine in the Immortals quartet. A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear came close but then really lost me at the end, but I love how I've seen fandoms use the setting as an AU. Oh, you know what. It's like a hyper-specific somewhat more violent daemons AU. I'm looking for something like His Dark Materials, but with more cool fight scenes and less religious undercurrents. All recommendations welcome!

[featherquillpen]

The principles of dæmons

I just read an absolutely fascinating essay about dæmons in His Dark Materials, or rather two installments in an ongoing blog series. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here. (Note: they are long.)

Based on a close reading of the books, Kathryn Rosa Miller argues that dæmons in His Dark Materials do not operate on the same principles that people assume they do. According to her, dæmons in HDM operate on the following principles:

Dæmons are companions – not in the sense of being cute talking animal buddies like the dragons in Dragonriders of Pern, but in the sense of a spiritual counterpart that just so happens to have an animal shape. Nonetheless, the books never go so far as to actually state that the dæmon = the soul.

Dæmon and human are connected in a way that goes beyond mundane physics, but it is in a very visceral, sensory way. They cannot communicate telepathically, but they can feel each other’s physical pain, fluttering of anxiety, heart-pounding excitement.

The shapes that dæmons take do not represent essential aspects of the human’s personality, but rather their role within the fictional society (servants, gyptians, Jordan scholars), and on a metatextual level, their role within the story (the Master’s raven dæmon and his role as an attempted assassin) – all based on symbolism in medieval heraldry and Renaissance art.

I would add to Miller’s analysis, re: the first point, that Pullman drew the name “dæmon” from “daimon,” the name given in Plato’s Apology to the inner voice of morality within Socrates that helps him decide which actions are right. 

I would also add a fourth principle: in the books, the settling of dæmons is explicitly linked to Adam and Eve’s Fall, and in the case of Lyra and Will in The Amber Spyglass the settling scene has sexual undertones, and an implication that their settling has to do with the awakening of romantic love / sexuality.

In future entries in the blog series, Miller intends to explain how the various adaptations of His Dark Materials have deviated from Pullman’s founding principles about dæmons. What I personally find very interesting in all of this is that fandom also operates on very different principles in all the dæmon AU fic I have read.

A lot of dæmonfic takes dæmons in a much more telepathically-bonded companion direction, more like dragons in animal-companion fiction – I seem to vaguely recall a Sherlock fic in which Sherlock is Mycroft’s dæmon, and quite clearly has a life and personality all his own, despite the mind-connection. Other dæmonfic is much more explicit about the dæmon as the soul, the inner essence of a person made physical. There’s also a lot of different ideas about the nature of the bond between human and dæmon, often going well beyond the visceral sensations described by Pullman, and nearly everyone has their own system (or lack thereof) for choosing what a dæmon’s shape should be and why. And most dæmon fics do not interpret settling as something that happens when you fall in love / sexually awaken.

The point I want to make is that fandom has been very transformative about the concept of dæmons, not just in dæmon AUs but in fanfiction of His Dark Materials itself, and much more transformative than we think we are – most of us stray rather far from what Pullman was originally doing. And that’s great! But I think that for those of us who want to do cohesive, in-depth worldbuilding of our own, we need to be clear about what principles our own takes on dæmons are based on.

So, in that spirit, here are the principles of dæmons I use in most of my dæmon AUs (Dæmorphing, Eudaimonia, Epifanía):

Dæmons are a physical manifestation of the soul. A human and a dæmon are effectively two halves of one person in different bodies – but they can be distinguished by representing different aspects of that one person.

Dæmon and human can feel each other’s emotions and read each other’s thoughts. They cannot, by default, share each other’s senses and subjective experience of the world, though they can learn to do so through meditation and the like.

The shapes that dæmons take reflect essential aspects of who the person is. This is more broad-ranging in childhood, eventually converging on a shape that speaks to who you are, deep down. This symbolism is based on the real-world behavior of the animal (wolves are cooperative, cliquish and territorial; cleaner wrasses are observant, manipulative, and fastidious.)

Settling occurs when a person makes a conscious, informed decision that significantly impacts the course of the rest of their life and defines who they are (e.g., leaving a toxic relationship, enacting violence for the first time, choosing to pursue a life of ambition.)

None of this is to say that these are the principles that all dæmon AUs should use; in fact, I use different ones in some of my other fics. They should change to suit the story they’re used for. I just think it’s productive to stop pretending we are doing things the exact same way Pullman is (because most of us aren’t) and start thinking about what our approaches are, and how it might suit our fanfiction to do it differently.

[star-anise]

Howdy! I just read The Goblin Emperor based on your rec and I really loved it. Got a case of that “the book ended” blues. Can you recommend any other books for someone who liked this one? (I.e., books of similar tone, themes, and approach to characterization? I have a hard time finding this kind of story outside of fanfiction!)

Part of the secret is finding authors who came out of fanfiction. :)

I think the first person I’d recommend is Lois McMaster Bujold--I haven’t read The Sharing Knife but everyone recommends it as a really cozy high fantasy story; her Penric books (beginning with Penric’s Demon) are high fantasy mysteries that still remind me strongly of the ordinary workaday places I know, as are the Chalion books set in the same world. 

Zen Cho’s work has the same sense of coziness and attention to detail: The House of the Aunts combines the portrait of a family with a believable teenage romance; Prudence and the Dragon is a wholly unique take on urban fantasy. The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life is a small, careful story about a lesbian realizing she can’t outrun herself. The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is about finding happiness in the margins of a story where people meant  to completely exclude you.

Oh! Rainbow Rowell’s novel Carry On is a bit of an epic urban fantasy with a M/M romance in it, but it’s actually metatextually kind of supposed to be fanfiction, so it has a lot of that really intense character-building, while also deconstructing how fucked up a lot of YA worlds subtextually are.

Dessa Lux’s Wolves in the World series is Kindle M/M romance, so there’s a lot of sex, but on the other hand it has really thoughtful relationships between damaged people, and turns A/B/O worldbuilding upside down and gives it a good hard shake with reflections on genetics, physical sex, their social constructions, and how much freedom we can win within them.

DUBCON TW: Previously Katherine Addison wrote under the name of Sarah Monette, and did another whump book, A Companion to Wolves, which was literally born out of a livejournal discussion between the coauthors about “Oh my god, the sex in Dragonriders of Pern is SUPER dubcon, no wonder everyone in that universe hates them taking child recruits.” It takes that issue on board with a main character very like Maia in a M/M scenario, and asks a lot of questions like: How can a society be simultaneously toxic and functional?How do you maintain autonomy and integrity in a system fundamentally based on compromising your ability to consent? 

But I, personally, wish I’d stopped reading after the first book; it ends with what feels like a tentative conclusion to these answers the characters can live with, and then the second book opens like “Nevermind, we lied, it’s all terrible, let’s get to the plot.”