But Iron — Cold Iron — is master of them all.
— Kipling
From the kindling of the first fire to the latest breakthrough in computer design, each technological advance opens new levels of play in an age — old game for the mastery of Life. Calling Man's struggle for control over his environment a "game" is no idle figure of speech. Ours is a species of players as well as makers. Indeed, these two intertwined qualities describe humanness. Laughter and reason alike set us apart from beasts.
Work and play are meant to reinforce each other. Sundering them is a measure of human imperfection the wages of original sin, some say — and their union is a sign of Eden's innocence. Yet no matter how tragically estranged labor and leisure become, we still dimly feel that matters should be otherwise and wish our work could be joyful as child's play.
Slow-paced primitive societies take time to harmonize work and play. Each new way of working has to be played about so that it can be thought about sanely. Myth and ritual put technology into context, make it "user friendly."
Consider the discovery of fire. It brought Early Man far more than light, warmth, protection, or any merely practical advantage. Fire became the focal point of the community, acquired symbolic meanings, participated in ceremonies, appeared in heroic tales, even received worship. Though we harness vaster energies now, echoes of the ways cavemen worked and played with fire resound in us at every sulking of a match.
Likewise, tool-shaping, agriculture, metal-crafting — all the basic innovations — were transformed through playful celebration. These human activities became holy because making and playing were seen as divine operations. In some cultures, the world a creator-god has made is a battlefield for contending supernatural powers. In others, existence is a game the Absolute plays with Itself throughout eternity. The patterns also hold in Judeo-Christian contexts: Holy Wisdom plays beside Yaweh when He lays the foundations of the earth and Christ the carpenter has been symbolized by a clown.
Speculative thought moves beyond imagery to ponder the ethics of work and play. What limits — if any exist on the ways we may shape matter? If a thing can be made, should it be made? How far can the quest for mastery go and by what means? If Life is a game, what are the rules? Does the outcome matter, or are victories as hollow as defeats? Who are the players and what are the pawns? Are the competing sides really different or ultimately the same? Is some supreme referee keeping score?
Fred Saberhagen is genuinely comfortable with these questions. He believes that human acts have meaning and that we can compete for an everlasting prize. His grounding in traditional Western values gives his writing the staunchness of ancient and hallowed stone.
Saberhagen's technical expertise and mythic instinct equip him to fabulize reality and rationalize fable. Scientific data quicken his imagination: he can find a story in a squash seed or a spatial singularity. His innate feeling for archetype transforms specific facts into universal images. Thus in The Veils of Azarloc (1978), outre astrophysics provides a unique metaphor for the blurry barriers Time wraps about us.
Examples abound in his popular berserker series (Berserker, 1967; Brother Assassin, 1969; Berserker's Planet, 1975; Berserker Man, 1979; The Ultimate Enemy, 1979; and The Berserker Wars, 1981). The berserkers are automated alien spacecraft that begin as deadly mechanisms but swiftly become symbols of Death itself. These ravening maws of Chaos, these "demons in metal disguise" are today's answer to the scythewielding Grim Reaper of old. "They speak to our fear of mad computers and killer machines with jaws that bite and claws that snatch." The general pattern governing the wonder-war between Life and Death is embellished with allusions to particular myths (an Orpheus sings in a cybernetic Hades) and legendary historical incidents (a Don John of Austria fights a Battle of Lepanto in space).
While Saberhagen's hard sf can soar into metaphysical realms, his fantasy has a matter-of-fact solidity about it that leaves no room for disbelief. This quality is admirably demonstrated in his Dracula series. These novels (The Dracula Tapes, 1976; The Holmes-Dracula File, 1978; An Old Friend of the Family, 1979; and Thorn, 1980) condense the murky haze of folklore and gothic romance surrounding vampires into premises that can stand the light of day. The Count's ascerbic character and occult gifts are made all the more convincing by the strictly authentic settings (Victorian England, Renaissance Italy, contemporary America) through which he moves. Furthermore, as an unforeseen player in sundry power games, the Count is an agent of rough justice and a witness to some higher law governing all creation.
Fact and fancy are complimentary categories for Saberhagen because, as indicated above, his art depends on disciplined exchanges between the two. Since both possible and impossible worlds have their technologies, either applied science or practical magic, technological issues are prominent in Saberhagen's work.
His concern for making is matched by an enthusiasm for playing, perhaps because his personal hobbies include chess, karate, and computers. Whether mental, physical, or cybernetic, games are a recurring device in Saberhagen's fiction.
His gaming principles can be deduced from the berserker series. Indeed, the berserkers themselves were invented to serve as the antagonist that a games' theory ploy defeats ("Fortress Ship"/" Without a Thought," 1963). Although most of the battles are fought between computers ("faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing"), one killer machine is undone by joining in a human recreational warsimulation game ("The Game," 1977). Direct personal combat still retains its place — Berserker's Planet features a rigged tournament of duels to the death and dialectical clashes abound. As the series expands, its military campaigns grow more complex, ranging across time as well as space and employing psychological and spiritual as well as physical strategems. The initial struggle for survival gradually unfolds into a conflict of vast cosmic import.
No compromise is possible between the opposing players. The berserkers are "as near to absolute evil as anything material can be." Resisting them requires total mobilization and eternal vigilance since no victory over them is ever quite perfect or complete.
The cause of Life turns enemies into allies but alliances change to emnities in the camp of Death. Yet the contending sides are not homogeneous: humans use thinking machines and berserkers incorporate living tissue. The cyborg hero of Berserker Man becomes humanity's paladin without denying the machine side of his nature. In the long run, Life may be more at risk from treachery by the living than from attack by the unliving. The berserkers' "goodlife" servants are worse than their masters because they freely choose and bleakly enjoy their perversions. These worshipers of destruction are but one particular expression of sentient beings bent toward sin. Before the berserkers came to be, Evil was.
Turns of play proceed by ironic reversals of fortune. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Pawns have a way of becoming kings — and vice versa. Unable to penetrate the councils of the light, darkness often falls into its own malicious snares. Even when it wields planet-shattering weapons, Evil can be defeated by a child, an animal, or even a plant. Eucatastrophe, the unexpected happy ending, is always possible when the game is bravely — and skillfully played.
The stakes could not be higher. The very nature of the universe is being put to wager of battle. Is existence a circular parade of ants? ("What did it all matter?" asks one villain. "Was it not a berserker universe already, everything determined by the random swirls of condensing gas, before the stars were born?") Or is it a march towards a glorious destination? Defeating Death's legions vindicates the evolutionary potential latent in every bit of Life.
Likewise, human art, love, holiness, even humor and personal quirks can transcend the laws of probability that govern berserkers. Machine intelligence cannot grasp why "the most dangerous life units of all sometimes acted in ways that seemed to contradict the known supremacy of the laws of physics and chance." Capacity for growth and choice is humankind's passport to a paradoxical space-time region — and a boundless future — barred to its unliving foes.
Unto what purpose was the match held? Perhaps to let Life win its laurels under fire. Virtue untried by adversity is meaningless. Moreover, the game does not end where it began. Neither players nor field will ever be the same again. Evil has only improved what it sought to annihilate. The berserker wars are but one set among the contests being played out instant by instant until the end of time. Yet whatever the odds in Death's favor, Saberhagen stubbornly proclaims that Life will wear the victor's crown.
The same ground rules obeyed in the berserker series reappear in all Saberhagen's fiction because they express his personal — and highly traditional values. Length and continuity permit some especially engrossing refinements of play in The Empire of the East (1979), the revised one-volume edition of a trilogy originally published as The Broken Lands (1968), The Black Mountains (1971), and Changeling Earth (1973).
Ingenious though he is, Saberhagen has never been wildly innovative. His strength as a writer lies in seeing old concepts from new angles and employing them with unswerving thoroughness. Empire is a monument to these qualities. It rests on that venerable fantasy premise, "a world where magic works." In the version pioneered by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt in their Incomplete Enchanter (1942), magic totally replaces science. However, in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away (1978), magic is being supplanted by science. Works like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (1971) and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series show the two kinds of knowledge co-existing unequally in realistic twentieth century settings, but series by Andre Norton (Witch World) and Marion Zimmer Bradley (Darkover) set them at odds in archaic alien societies.
Saberhagen's Empire takes place in a post-catastrophe North America whose culture is vaguely medieval. Wizardry dominates this demon-ridden age while the rare bits of technology surviving from the Old World are objects of superstitious awe. Sometimes Old and New can unite, as in the temperamental person of the djinn technologist, a being as maddeningly literalminded as a computer, who must be properly programmed to perform his magic feats.
The novelty of the situation is why magic has become feasible. There was no thaumaturgic breakthrough. Instead, the very nature of physical reality has been fundamentally altered by the doomsday weapons used in a past global war. The probability of occult phenomena occurring has increased enormously. "Since the Change it could scarcely be said that anything was lifeless; powers that before had only been potentialities now responded readily to the wish, the incantation, were motivated and controlled by the dream-like logic of the wizard's world." Meanwhile, the likelihood of certain physical reactions and technical aptitude itself have correspondingly declined. Or as the author himself remarks, "We are not justified in assuming that all physical laws are immutable through the whole universe of space and time."
But no matter how much else may change, the craving for mastery endures. Whether engineers or wizards build their war gear, conquerors will be conquerors still. The tyrant of the age is John Ominor ("The AllDevourer"), Emperor of the East, a man far wickeder than the demons he binds to his will. Not long before the story opens, Ominor's armies consumed the last independent bit of the continent, the Broken Lands along the West Coast. But before his world dominion can be perfectly secured, rebels calling themselves the Free Folk challenge his despotic rule. Aided by a quasimaterial power named Ardneh, they fight their way up through the feudal hierarchy, from satrap past viceroy to confront the Emperor himself.
Each volume of the trilogy has a different source of mythic inspiration. As the text itself explains, The Broken Lands is based on an Indian myth concerning the god Indra and the demon Namuci. The gods (devas) and demons (asuras) of India are the opposite poles of the same transcendent nature. Each side continually struggles to amass enough spiritual energy to subdue the other. Indra the Thunderer; god of storm, war, and fertility; rider of the white elephant Airavata; Guardian of the Eastern Quarter of the Universe; once swore an extravagant oath of friendship with the powerful drought demon Namuci. Later, he slipped through a loophole in the terms to slay the complacent demon. (Georges Dumezil's Destiny of the Warrior exhaustively analyzes this episode as a key Indo-European myth.) In other adventures, mighty Indra also slew Trisiras, a triple-headed hybrid of god and demon, and Vritra, a cosmic dragon who had impounded the waters of life.
Saberhagen works some clever and selective transformations on this raw material. Indra's discus-shaped Thunderstone appears as a practical device for making rain or war. The oath becomes a prophecy of retribution by Arneh, the mysterious presence who can manifest himself in persons, places, or things. Namuci is the East's cruel satrap Ekuman, leigeman of demons, and the sea-spume that kills him is fireextinguisher foam. The instrument of Arneh's justice is a youth named Rolf who has a natural affinity for technology and the courage to ride the atomic-powered elephant to victory.
The Black Mountains borrows motifs rather than specific incidents from mythology and arranges these in opposing pairs to render the next great battle between East and West. Defeated Easterner Lord Chup, "the tall broken man," is wounded and healed, slain and reborn, degraded and redeemed so that he at last stands tall and whole — on the Western side. Som the Dead, an inhuman man, is annihilated by a godlike beast, the immortal Lord Draffut. (These two fantastical characters seem to echo every remembered tale of animated corpses and kindly nature spirits — the Nazgul king and Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings spring to mind. Nevertheless, they are strikingly original creations.) Rolf's twin quests for his kidnapped sister and for the hidden life-principle of the demon Zapranoth end in the same place, resolved by the familiar fairytale device of the separable soul. Ultimately, demons prove as vunerable to men as men are to demons.
Ardneh's World (the retitled Changeling Earth) reveals the secret of that being's identity. As the war front spreads out to its widest expanse, the distinctions between the two sides reach their sharpest contrast through the use of mythic prototypes. Like the ancient battle Indra the Generous fought with Vritra the Enveloper, this is a duel to the death between mankind's Advocate and its Adversary. The personifications of Defense and Aggression meet in mortal combat.
The Demon-Emperor Orcus bears the Latin name for both Hades and its ruler. He is an Old World hell bomb turned New World hell-lord. (In the Mahabharata, demonic Vritra looks uncannily like a nuclear explosion's mushroom cloud: "He grew, towering up to heaven like the fiery sun, as if the sun of doomsday had arisen.") The malevolence of Orcus is sordid. This haunter of waterless places is not Milton's glamorous rebel but Meredith's bully who cringes away from starlight. Ominor, once his servant but now his master, chained him away beneath the earth for a thousand years. Now like Satan or Loki, the fiend bursts forth for the day of wrath and falls like lightning on his foe.
Ardneh, like Orcus, has a substance "only partially subject to the laws of matter." But he was born of benevolent technology as the consciousness of a defense system that "damped the energies of nuclear fire" and "freed the energies of life." (His home base may have been SAC Headquarters in Omaha.) Although he is the actual author of the Change that transformed the world, he denies being a god. Perhaps a more appropriate title for the Archdemon's counterpart is Archangel like an angelic power, Ardneh "is where he works." By sacrificing himself to annihilate Orcus, he brings victory out of defeat while the Western army retreats to win the day.
This paradoxical resolution recalls major triumphs in the berserker wars and even the Pascal mystery. It is, the capstone of all the paradoxes and ironies that shape the story. Draffut destroys Som the Dead by trying to heal him. Blows wound the one who struck them; spells rebound on the one who cast them. Tiny flaws widen and small kindnesses expand to undermine the mightiest citadels of evil. The weak can prove surprisingly strong and the strong, shockingly weak.
Westerners, even Ardneh himself, resist temptation but Easterners sink ever lower in depravity by freely chosen stages. Refusing one shameful order pivots Chup against the East. The Western cause draws persons together but the East, that "society of essential selfishness" is hopelessly divided against itself as each member scrabbles for more influence. Absolute dominion as an end in itself brings scant satisfaction to him who wields it. At best, Ominor finds mild distraction in sadism.
The white-clad supreme tyrant is "the most ordinarylooking" of the nine 'Unworthies' who sit on his council. His manner is as banal as his first name and his capital on the site of Chicago is nothing like Sauron's, its charm being marred only by a few impaling stakes among the flowerbeds. Sheer untiring wickedness has raised this apparatchik above the direst demons in malignant force.
Exotic Lady Charmian, on the other hand, is supernally fair but eventually boring as she slithers from bed to bed. Her monotonous scheming inevitably brings about the very opposite of what she sought to achieve, at her father Ekuman's court, in Som's stronghold, and among the leaders of the East. Although she is mired in her rut of malice, her husband Chup still claims her. The same stubborness that saved his own integrity may yet undo the effects of her childhood pledging to the East. Chup's regeneration stands for the transformation of his troubled world. But the future of that world belongs to Rolf and his kind. As in The Lord of the Rings, the major figures on both sides disappear, leaving the world to men and to powers they can control. However, magic will not entirely vanish here, although technology will slowly revive. Having won the contest for mastery, men can now make of their lives what they will, whether by sorcery or science — or both.
But what happens to that bright-seeming future? It develops its own kind of darkness. Two thousand years after Empire, power games continue in The Book of Swords. But "game" is no metaphor here for plot turns are actually stages in a formal game being played by beings who call themselves gods and simultaneously fit into a wider contest between entities that may be playing through these gods. That action begins in the Ludus ("Game") Mountains signals the artificiality of all that follows.
Game-oriented sf has almost become a sub-genre of storytelling. Saberhagen has written some himself, such as those berserker stories cited earlier and his novel Octagon (1981) which focusses more on the players than the game being played. (A version of the latter is now commercially available.) Original games that act both as story subjects and symbols appear in Philip K. Dick's Solar Lottery (1955) and The Game Players of Titan (1963) and in Samuel R. Delany's Fail of the Towers (1970) and Triton (1976), to cite but a few examples. Other sf writers incorporate familiar games such as chess. In "The Immortal Game" by Poul Anderson (1954), a computer activates robotic chesspieces but The Squares of the City (1965) by John Brunner moves real human beings around on a sociopolitical grid. Andre Norton's Quag Keep (1978) is based on Dungeons and Dragons while Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes (1981) brings an adventure game to life and The Saturn Game by Poul Anderson (1981) demonstrates the risk in playing an improvised mental game too passionately. Many sf stories have been converted to role-playing simulation games, for instance, Starship Troopers, adapted from the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Several periodicals including Ares, Dragon Magazine, Sorcerer's Apprentice, and The Space Garner serve the sf gaming audience.
However, The Book of Swords intends to pioneer new territory. Aside from the reading pleasure it gives, this trilogy is being written to provide the data base for an intricate new computer game that will uniquely combine both adventure-text and interactive features for play on a microcomputer. As of this writing, the designing has not yet begun. Until it is marketed, interested readers may amuse themselves by analyzing the "playable" elements of the story. (For example, the chase scene in the Maze of Mirth obviously lends itself to rendering in computer graphics.) The quick reversals of luck, the brisk introductions, removals, and translations are appropriate for a game scenario. The tendency for the characters to draw together in small teams suggests multivalent strategic possibilities in the war for possession of the enchanted swords.
"The swords made by the gods are beautiful things in themselves," observes one character, "Whatever the purpose behind them may be." They are also wonderfully versatile plot devices. The ease with which they can be confused and the restrictions on their use multiply dramatic possibilities. (Saberhagen shrewdly builds drawbacks as well as benefits into his magic.) Although the full Song of the Swords inventory may not be destined to actually appear in the trilogy's text, a dozen artifacts is an ambitiously large group. (Series that use as many as six talismans are rare, one example being Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising pentalogy.) Nevertheless, twelve is the traditional number of completeness and is thus an appropriate count for a pantheon.
Although Saberhagen categorically denies a schematic purpose, by curious coincidence, his list matches twelve major divine powers. These can be most conveniently discussed under their classical Greek names.
Coinspinner, giver of blind luck, belongs to Tyche, the fickle goddess of fortune. Its natural opposite, Doomgiver, the instrument of all-seeing justice, belongs to Zeus in his role as universal judge.
Dragonslicer, exemplifying the heroic use of force, fits Apollo, slayer of the monster Python. (Celestial heroes who kill cthonic dragons are common in both Indo-European and Semitic myth, for instance, Thor versus Midhgardhsormr or Baal versus Yam.) But Shieldbreaker expresses purely brutal might and thus belongs to Ares.
Farslayer is as futilely vengeful as Hera raging over the infidelities of Zeus. On the other hand, the Sword of Mercy suits Demeter, the Earth-Mother who presided over the deathand-rebirth mysteries of Eleusis.
The Mindsword that beguiles the inner self recalls triple-faced Selene/Artemis/Hecate, stern Lady of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. However, Sightblinder's deception of the senses is one effect Dionysus produces while wandering the world unrecognized. (The ecstatic god is a more sophisticated version of the crude, conniving Trickster who looms so large in African and Amerindian myth.)
Despair, constraint, and utter sterility surround Soulcutter as they do the dead-god Pluto. But Wayfinder elates, liberates, and enlightenment as does cheerful Hermes in his capacities as god of travellers and master of occult wisdom.
Stonecutter, the Sword of Seige, is no more resistible than Aphrodite, goddess of love. (One is tempted to read unwitting double-entendres into this sword's stanza.) Its natural counterpoise is Townsaver, a weapon befitting the armored virgin Athena Polias, protector of her city.
Thus the swords can be assigned to six masculine and six feminine principles. (Grouping the weapons into equal positive, negative, and ambiguous sets is left to the reader's ingenuity.) Since the above assignments were not consciously intended by the author, there is no reason to expect correspondences between the swords and deities seen in this book. Hermes has nothing to do with Dragonslicer except deliver it and Vulcan matches with none of the blades he forges. The supposedly divine players may have chosen their roles by whim, but their twelve playing tokens represent fundamental categories of experience.
The neatness of these comparisons and the associations they evoke offer the strongest possible demonstration of Saberhagen's innate feeling for myth. It is a matter of instinct with him, not rote learning. (As he modestly explains, "My reading in mythology has been sporadic at best.") Nevertheless, it lays a sure and true foundation under his fiction. The great mythologist Mircea Eliade might have been describing this situation when he observed that mythic images "act directly on the psyche of the audience even when consciously, the latter does not realize the primal significance of any particular symbol."