BP 007 GTR Ch 13-14 [
Welcome to the Bassanda Podcast! I’m Chris Smith.
This is a space for riffing upon history and upon speculative fiction, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. Bassanda the mythical nation originates in the fertile musical and ancillary imaginations of my friends Roger Landes and Chipper Thompson (and you can find their links in the show notes). When, as a friend of the General and the Reverend, I was first playing with the idea of a fictional alternate-universe identity for my own TTU Celtic Ensemble, I realized that perhaps I didn’t have to invent a world, if the lads were willing to let me borrow Bassanda. They were, and here we are.
The first speculative fiction novel set in this universe, which is serialized at smithscribe.substack.com, is THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA.
This episode, number 7, takes off from Chapters 13 and 14 in GTR. By now we’ve already met the main POV characters, Cecile Lapin and S. Jefferson Winesap; as well as their fellow freedom fighters (and mentors) Ismail Durang; Algeria Main-Smith; Colonel Torres and General Landes. I should emphasize that some of this early stage-setting uses approaches I got from film writing, which–it seems to me–is of greater and greater influence in shaping how contemporary fiction writers think about prose: from precipitating event, to beginning in media res, and establish the cast of characters in Act I. By this point in the narrative I've introduced all these characters, something of their backstory, and something of the dynamics between them, and I’ve also provided one action sequence, and one catalyzing crisis. There’ll be more of that kind of information interwoven within the action as we move through the story but the basis of that task has already been accomplished. There are still distinctions to be made, especially between the Colonel and the General and their contrasting personalities.
Because they’re intentionally written as larger than life characters and so they also need to be humanized and, most importantly, they absolutely have to have flaws, Because otherwise they are boring and unengagingly perfect. We're going to recognize those crucial flaws in both of them over the course of the narrative, but that’s going to be accomplished mostly by showing anecdotal scenes, again mostly through filmic writing, because showing is better than telling.
I've said previously that in the kind of historical fiction I want to write, it’s crucial that the fictional characters should fit in a historically-engaged and -accurate fashion within the “real” events and experience and biographies of true historical figures. That, maybe, writing historical fiction can itself be a means of engaging with history, of understanding it better, of trying to learn lessons from the past which can perhaps apply to the future. So situating James Lincoln within the context of a New England progressive upbringing and education, giving him a biographical experience that involves graduate work at Harvard University and a home with his young family in Lawrence Massachusetts, later on giving his granddaughters experience at Tufts University and the progressives and writers they would have met there, and after the loss of his wife, giving them a Gullah nurse in Colette St Jacques, is all part of that historical fit.
I want to veer here, just for a moment, to talk about a character who is only referenced in the novel, and does not actually appear. That character is James Lincoln's deceased wife, Lucretia MacPherson, who we meet only in a passing reference to the mother of his children, and who is described as coming from the outer Hebrides and being endowed with the Second-Sight. Of course there is a narrative reason for that, because it helps to set up why the Habjar Lawrence children by themselves have some paranormal capacities. But it is also intended to give Lucretia her own identity and the sense that, in another segment of the Bassanda correspondence ,we might be able to delve into her earlier story as well. That part in the creative tasks in this kind of world building–making sure that each new piece of writing or scene or alternate historical event fits within the existing corpus of works–but it is also an opportunity to set some additional narrative hares running, in case there is time or space for inclination to go in those other directions.
You see it in a lot of prestige TV writing, in which, in a given season, the writer's room may set up several different sorts of narrative stubs to which they can return if they are granted additional seasons. Most recently, I’ve seen that set up very elegantly in the great workplace dramedy THE BEAR by Christopher Storer, in which one character–and those who know me will know why this particular character is my absolute favorite–has a brief moment with a peripheral passing character, but which also sets up the possibility of a Season 3 narrative arc for the two of them as a couple.
The same thing is going on here with Lucretia: maybe at some point she will get a separate narrative of her own set earlier in the chronicle, in a separate piece of writing, or maybe the fact that she comes from the outer Hebrides and possesses the second sight is simply a way to enrich the passing reference to the Habjar Lawrence children's mother. Here, I'm absolutely influenced by one of my other great inspirations in writing, the cartoonist and young adult book writer, who wrote several novels set in Long Island and upstate Maine starring a teenage boy named Steve Forrester. He didn't write them in a chronology of Steve's life–in fact, the first Platt novel I read was the sci-fi/horror novella called THE BLUE MAN, in which Steve is in his mid teens and which book scared the crap out of me when my brother brought it home. My favorite was Platt’s masterpiece SINBAD AND ME, about which I've blogged elsewhere. But there's another title, now sadly out of print, also involving Steve Forrester, in which a character from the Outer Hebrides, an old woman who lives in his neighborhood herself, possesses the Second Sight and some other paranormal capacities. So I think that Aurelia Hepburn, the old lady from Mull in the Hebrides, is in the background of the too-young deceased Hebridean bride Lucretia McPherson, as well.
Ch. 13 “Going to See the Professor” is a straight-up example of an Act I narrative hook in which a protagonist has to persuade a cranky old bastard to enlist in the cause. The examples are legion across all kinds of film, tv, and fiction writing, with Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi being perhaps the most obvious examples. But it's also an opportunity to deepen James Lincoln's character, to get more of a sense of the flavor and vibe of the 1906 Parisian Sorbonne setting, and to do a little more interweaving of James Lincoln's family relations into the reasoning behind his signing on for the adventure. Cecile brings him a copy of an obscure 1874 text called Mystics, Musicians, Warriors, and Dancers Of High Bassanda, and it turns out has been authored by a distant black sheep cousin. We set this up by having him behave impatiently towards Cecile and her feeling a certain sense of pique that he already knows much of the information and the characters involved with Bassanda. This provides more nuance on their relationship and his crankiness, and also provides a moment within the scene when his attitude can be pivoted and we see him shift from leaning away to leaning toward enlisting in the cause.
There's also another factor here, which illustrates something I find particularly rewarding in writing the Bassanda material, because both the Habjar-Lawrence name and the title of this book come from Brother Chipper Thompson’s writing. Having multiple world builders Involved in this way takes a little bit of tact and a good deal of bookkeeping, so that you don’t lose track of what’s been written or agreed, but it also provides wonderful energy when nuggets of ideas get passed back and forth, and then riffed upon. That’s the Roger Landes metaphor of Bassanda as a kind of literary jam band, and it’s a good one. You’ll be able to hear a conversation with both the Colonel and the General, about the earliest, earliest roots of Bassanda in a future podcast episode.
Ch. 14 is “Notes on Ismail Durang” from the [Dictionary of Bassandan National Biography; interpolations by Winesap, c1985]
Ismail Durang is a very very important character in this narrative, even though we never see his POV, because he has to be both deadly and also tender, and he has to work as both a comrade and also the love interest of our main character Cecile. He was another who I did not want to make Anglo, especially given that, in order to function that way for Cecile, he was going to have to be at least sometimes heteronormative. His back-story is drawn from some of the personal attributes of a real world friend of Bassanda. I was mostly looking for someone whose physical type fit the fictional outline I had for Cecile's love interest. But I did what novelists should do–though they sometimes don’t– and I went to this friend of Bassanda and asked his permission to use elements of his experience and skill-set. Fortunately, he was amenable, and once again here we are.
I wanted Ismail to be good with edged weapons and I needed him to have reasons for hating the Tsarist interlopers. If you're going to write a killer but you also want to make him a lover, you've got to give him motives for the killing that he does, and they’ve got to be decent ones. And ideally, you need to give him both reasons for his violence but also consequences for its aftermath. Ismail therefore needed to be deadly but also to be human. And, so, giving him a family history of mistreatment at the hands of the Russians both fit the narrative’s (and Cecile’s) needs, and was perhaps an opportunity to take some swipes at historical interlopers who don’t , in my view, deserve much gentleness.
This is a character which was written separately from and in advance of the Great Train Ride narrative and so when it came time to flesh him out, he already had a persona and physical appearance and a set of attributes. Beyond that, it was important to show that there could be some family relations between Ismail’s own biographical chronology and various characters scattered throughout the Correspondence. It was also important to give him experiences in Bassanda, Europe, and North America, and to explain how he came to be involved with the Brethren on one side and James Lincoln Habjar Lawrence on the other. There was a period of time, before I began writing novels based in the Bassanda Multiverse, when I was building all the Correspondence as interlinked articles within a giant online wiki–which is a great way to organize and cross-reference world building information. Unfortunately, about 4 years ago wikispaces went, as my Irish friends would say, tits up, and all those wikified html files became so much digital dross. So a lot of building Ismail’s web of connections within the Multiverse came back to keyword searches for names, places, and–especially–dates when his story might need to intersect others.
But it was also necessary to foreshadow some potential losses and to suggest for both characterization and also continuity reasons that there might be some forks in the road of Ismail’s future. Does he live or die? How efficacious is his deadly violence and how terrible might be its consequences? How could I use those questions–those scary variant scenarios–in a way that simultaneously built narrative momentum, but also fit within the known-world of “real” history and of the Multiverse?
Here the Rift phenomenon is a useful tool because it makes it possible to have conflicting reports of Ismail’s life and possibly of his death present in the Correspondence and to address those conflicts, not by resolving them but by making it clear that there might be parallel Rift realities. In turn that led to a deepening and enriching of the correspondences implicit within Rift Theory. Because maybe “Rift collisions” might carry within them the possibility that the Rift traveler’s timeline—her or his lifeline itself—could “crash” or “collide” with another variant, and that in turn provided lots of additional narrative flexibility and elbow room. I’ll have lots more to say about that and about Ismail’s future in the upcoming conversation–a great one!--with my colleagues in the Bassanda steering committee.
CLOSER:
This is the Bassanda Podcast, a place for riffing upon history, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. Each week, we recall chapters in the Correspondence, and we talk with guests, from the Multiverse and beyond, about world-building and imagination. You can find us on your podcast app, and also on Twitter / Threads, and Bluesky: search #BassandaPodcast, send to BassandaPodcast@gmail.com, or find me @ChrisSmithMuso. I’d love to hear from you, and I’ll talk to you again soon.
LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE
THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA: https://open.substack.com/pub/smithscribe/p/gtr-ch01
Ch 13 “Going to See the Professor” https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-168
Ch 14 “Notes on Ismail Durang”
https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-9a9
Kin Platt:
At Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/118250.Kin_Platt
At bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/contributors/kin-platt
CJS appreciation of SINBAD AND ME, from 2007/2015
And, if you’re especially interested in the long out-of-print THE MYSTERY OF THE WITCH WHO WOULDN’T, drop me a message @ChrisSmithMuso, and I’ll see if I can provide some breadcrumbs…
NOTES for THE BASSANDA PODCAST BP 006
Chris Smith SFF serial fiction: www.smithscribe.substack.com
Roger Landes: www.rogerlandes.com
Chipper Thompson: www.chipperthompson.com
SOUNDING HISTORY: www.soundinghistorypodcast.com