NanoWriMo revisited: About the Bantolith

Back in November, when I was writing Government Joe must Die,
one of the parts which caused me most frustration was the little
episode on the Bantolith. I wanted the Bantolith to not speak, yet
still run his little domain with perfect ease, using nonverbal cues to
communicate his orders and wishes to the people on the station. The
descriptions I used left me deeply unsatisfied - his communications, by
opening doors, shining lifts, discouragingly cold blasts of air, seemed
very crude. But I couldn't quite put my finger on why, or how I could
do it better. Tonight I was suddenly struck with why this was such a
difficult problem. I wanted the Bantolith to manoeuvre people by
non-verbal methods, by misdirection and subliminal cues, by appealing
to them at a basically subconscious level. That's a difficult thing to
write about in a book, especially when you favour dialogue over
description. Essentially what you're writing is, almost by definition,
of the conscious rather than the subconscious. I wanted the Bantolith
to use the sort of tricks that that guy Derren Brown used on TV, the
sort of pseudo-magic which we don't even notice, where cues are fed to
us in the background, only to impel us at some later point, in what
appears to be a free-willed action. That's a tricky thing to write
about - how do you talk about the was the Bantolith operates, when the
cues happen a long way back from the actions, and they're things you
probably - no, not probably, absolutely definitely - did not notice in the first place? They are fundamentally disjointed. That's really gonna screw up your narrative.



I guess the only way to cope is by post-hoc explanation, but I really, really hate doing that.



I'm starting to understand, too, how much potential richness there
could be in that little caricature of a universe I dreamt up. Titan in
particular could easily have a gothic richness to it - ancient,
powerful, immensely wealthy, the fat spider loitering at the edges of
the web of Saturnine moons. There's a lot of potential there for
digging into some rich seams of history, as well as money and power.
And the cold, closed asceticism of the Triumvirates, rich in their own
way but always overshadowed by the golden disc of Titan. The
Triumvirates could be very interesting, socially. Socio-politically.