I’ve decided to include the title of the book under discussion in the title of each post. Numbering them didn’t make much sense on reflection. It is not my intention to only write about books by white males, but three books in and the authors have all been white men. Oh well. I do read more widely, but it’ll take a few more books before that’s evident. Meanwhile…
I first came across William Barton in a role-playing games magazine. It was probably an issue of Different Worlds, published by Chaosium (the originators of Runequest), some time in the early 1980s, since he contributed frequently to that magazine. He usually wrote about Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game published by GDW, and I’ve been a fan of Traveller for around four decades. It wasn’t until many years later I connected William A Barton of Different Worlds with William Barton the science fiction author. In fact, I’ve a feeling he made the connection himself to me, back when we corresponded for a couple of years.
William Barton the science fiction writer published eleven novels between 1973 and 1999, four of them co-written with Michael Capobianco. He continued to appear in Asimov’s SF Magazine until 2008, but for the last decade or so he has been mostly self-publishing his work — not just novellas and short stories that appeared in Asimov’s, but also re-worked versions of previously-published novels, as well as completely new novels. Among the latter is Crimson Darkness (2014, USA), the first in a projected nine-novel series, Venusworld. To date, three books have been published, the last in 2018.
Venusworld began life as a schoolboy project by Barton and Capobianco, inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels, and originally set on Venus — but after they realised ERB had claimed that world too, it became “Venusworld” and an entirely invented planet. The two worked on it for several years before dropping it. Then Capobianco told Barton he was no longer interested, and Barton picked at it for several decades… before eventually writing the opening novel and publishing it in 2014.
The first thing to note is those childhood origins have long since been buried under the work Barton has done on his world-building in the decades since. The second is: those decades have resulted in incredibly deep world-building.
Crimson Darkness is a first-person narrative, told by Älendar Vexh-nem, heir to a throne that no longer exists — and not just any throne, but the throne of the Antimony Empire, which until a decade or so earlier had ruled most of two continents. Vexh-nem now lives the life of a fabulously wealthy wastrel. He’s not precisely rich, since the Antimony Empire did not use currency but had a slave economy — it’s his position which gives him supreme privilege. He is aware of this, and of the inequalities built into both imperial economy and culture, and it is partly his discomfort which has led to his life-style.
Many of the old imperial nations have gained independence — and some of them are still culturally, and economically, imperial — but a political movement, called Klarism after its founder, has over the last few years been taking over more and more of the old imperial provinces. After a war council with the leaders of some of the imperial provinces, Vexh-nem decides to accompany some soldiers north to see the fighting with the Klarists.
Threaded into this narrative are flashbacks detailing Vexh-nem’s life and wanderings in the years prior to the war council. Which includes a lot of sex. And a lot of discussion about the sex act. Certainly more than is common in science fiction works that are not specifically about sex.
Venusworld was settled by humans millennia before, but much of its early history has been lost or is now just myth. There are a few alien races who share Venusworld with the humans, some friendly, some unknowable and hostile; and there is an entirely alien biosphere. Some Earthly animals are present too, albeit in a somewhat changed format — dogs, for example, are the size of horses and used as riding animals (they can also talk). Cats are considered mythical — but Puss in Boots does make a very odd cameo at one point..
Barton makes no concessions to his reader. It’s not just the constant references to Venusworld’s history and mythology — Vexh-nem is interested in both—or its flora and fauna; but also the many languages spoken on the world. Vexh-nem’s other major interest is languages, and he frequently reflects on their linguistic similarities and etymologies. Barton has put a lot of work into the conlangs he’s created for this series, and Crimson Darkness includes appendices on each of them. It took me a while before I spotted one language was based on Romance languages, which made it almost slightly intelligible, and even allowed me to spot a number of puns Barton had embedded in it. Vexh-nem’s “native” language I thought at first to be inspired by Mandarin, but the appendices reveal it’s actually based on Japanese. Readers familiar with that language may well find puns embedded in the conlang too.
I freely admit I found Crimson Darkness a slog at first — the narrative flips backward and forward in time, the alien vocabulary, the references to past historical and mythical events (some of which are clearly important to the series’s story arc), the geography (there are maps, but they’re not very good), even the actual physical structure of Venusworld… It is a planet, larger than the Earth, but the sky has a ceiling — and the highest mountain range on one continent actually reaches this — but no one on Venusworld knows what lies beyond this “element”…
Happily, around a quarter of the way in, it all starts to come together. And when Vexh-nem heads north to the battle-front, the story not only picks up pace but the world-building takes a fascinating turn as Vexh-nem begins comparing his way of life with that of the northern nation he passes through, where they have “jobs” and “wages” and other concepts foreign to him. They’re also in the middle of an industrial revolution, as Venusworld has just discovered the steam engine.
Crimson Darkness is only available as an ebook. There’s supposed to be a website, with more information on the conlangs, history, geography and biology of Venusworld, but at present it consists only of holding pages. Which is a shame.
There’s an argument to make here about self-publishing. Barton is not the only author whose career I follow who turned to self-publishing to keep their back-catalogue available, or indeed to publish new works. In science fiction, self-publishing seems to be dominated by derivative, poorly-written mil sf and space operas — but there are also self-published works that simply would not be commercial enough, or are, for a major imprint, too unlike the books they already publish. Some of these have later been picked up by big publishers and proved very successful — Wool, The Martian, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (and, to be fair, none of those three are actually good books) — but…
Crimson Darkness, the entire Venusworld series I suspect, would be a hard sell at the best of times. It’s a big novel — 200,000 words, or around 650 pages in paperback. Its deep world-building will appeal to many— immersion is popular in genre works these days — but the narrative constantly comments on it from Vexh-nem’s perspective, and that level of analysis can be off-putting to some. Crimson Darkness is a novel that requires intellectual investment by the reader (an unpopular requirement), its focus on conlangs will likely not win fans, and it has, well, pretty bad cover art. But if it had not been self-published, I would not have been able to read it.
I’ve been a fan of Barton’s writing for many years. It’s been a strange, and decades-long, journey from reviews of Traveller supplements in role-playing game magazines to a self-published multi-volume science fiction epic. Sturgeon’s Law famously states that 99% of everything is shit, and while the law was coined in reference to science fiction published by commercial imprints, it applies just as much to self-published science fiction — which is not, as popular wisdom would have it, 100% shit.
We’ve all heard of those science fiction writers whose books grew increasingly bloated and clumsily-written as the writers became more successful, suggesting their early acclaim was chiefly down to good editors. Yes, there’s an irony here — a published science fiction writer now self-publishing a nine-volume series, the first book of which is 200,000 words… and here’s me singing that book’s praises. But it’s those qualities which would make Crimson Darkness unattractive to a major imprint, or would have likely been edited out, which are actually the book’s strengths.
So it’s hard not to be grateful self-publishing has proven so successful over the past decade or so…
