Patrick Rothfuss

A gun unfired hurts my soul

I was listening to the latest episode of Writing Excuses, and Chekhov’s Gun is brought up at around 6:30.  Chekhov’s Gun is plotting advice from Chekhov (the boring old playwright) that basically says if you show a gun sitting on the mantle in your opening scene, then you better have that gun go off before the story ends.  Makes sense to me.  If you, as an audience member, see that gun, that’s what you’ll expect it to be there for.  It’s like a promise the author has made to you.  "Hey, this gun is going to matter!"  And an author shouldn’t make promises he can’t keep.  And I think it makes experiencing the story that much more fun.  You’ll be interested in how that gun will come into to play.  Who will get shot?  Will he or she die?  Who will shoot?  Why?  You’ll watch to find out.

But in this podcast, guest Patrick Rothfuss (author of The Wise Man’s Fear, which I’m still reading) says that he hates that, and that he thinks you might need to put a gun in there to mess with the audience; the audience shouldn’t know what to expect.  Otherwise it can be cliché.  You can read the setup and guess what’s going to happen.

What?  No.  You can’t guess the specifics of what’s going to happen, and that’s the fun stuff.  Plus, if you break that promise, you’ll upset most of the audience.  "You made it seem like the gun was going to be used, and it never was… so disappointing!"

Which is really weird, because at the end of the podcast, Rothfuss says that with drama you can know the ending and you can still be interested in the drama of the story.  Indeed, it’s true!  Otherwise we wouldn’t watch movies more than once.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Some philosophy of power in The Wise Man’s Fear…

I’m continuing to read Patrick Rothfuss’s huge novel The Wise Man’s Fear. (I’ve been an extremely slow reader this year… I usually finish one or two books a month. But this year I’ve only finished reading one in the last eight months. Terrible! But the wordcount for The Wise Man’s Fear is about a bazillion magillion frillion, so my slowness is somewhat justified.) Anyway, if you plan on reading the book and don’t want anything about it revealed to you, read no further.

There’s an interesting conversation between two characters about the nature of power on pages 380 to 382. (Chapter Fifty-six is entitled Power.) As a character says:

“There are two types of power: inherent and granted. Inherent power you possess as a part of yourself. Granted power is lent or given by other people.”

After talking a bit about them, he asks:

“Which do you think is the greater type of power?”

And he argues that granted power is greater.

Of course, it made me think: how would I answer the question? How would I talk to this man?

First, I have a problem with the premises, that there really are two types of power. I would argue that inherent and granted powers are just two sides of the same coin. Everything action you take requires both inherent and granted power. If I want to post this blog post, I must have an inherent power to know how to write, to know how communicate in a certain language. But I also must be granted the power of electricity and Internet access by other humans who chose to make such things available to me.

I suppose the question of “which is greater” is asking: “through which power can you accomplish more of you might wish to accomplish?” (Really “greater” could mean several different things, but this is, I think, the most obvious interpretation, yes?) But they depend on each other; neither is truly greater. You can’t work through a granted power without also relying on inherent power; likewise, you require granted power to exercise your inherent power.

In the book, the character makes a point that being part of nobility is a granted power, even though many people think it is inherent, as if one’s social status were in one’s blood. (A celebrity’s child? Queen of England, anyone?) But, the character argues, nobility is actually a power granted by those who agree to do what they say, probably in exchange for some sort of granted power they can use (to a lesser degree) themselves (like money or a higher social rank).

What the character does not seem to realize (or disagrees with) is that inherent power is required to use such granted power to any “great” degree. Therefore, I can not fully agree with his conclusion.

I guess I would agree with the character if he argued that granted power was the more “show-offy” power; our inherent power (or potential inherent power, at least) is much more similar to each other’s. But our granted power can vary immensely. Which leads some obsess over gaining granted power (social status, fame, fortune). But I still wouldn’t say that it’s “greater.”

Or, to get religious on you, as Jesus says in Matthew 16:26:

What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world [granted power] and forfeit his life? [inherent power]

(Though I guess if I wanted to get really religious, I could argue that all inherent power is granted by God in the first place!)

Anyway, I hope the points of the conversation will end up playing into the plot; philosophy is always more interesting (to me) when it affects character decisions. We shall see…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Some comments on The Wise Man’s Fear…

I’m reading The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, only on page 150 of about 1000, so this will take a while. Unfortunately it’s due back at the library soon, so I might just have to buy it because I doubt I’d be willing to stop reading once it’s due. It’s an addicting book.

Anyway, I just want to make some comments about a couple passages… I’m only on page 150, so I doubt there’ll be any drastic spoilers, but if you’re planning on reading the novel yourself and don’t want anything at all revealed to you, go away now.

So there’s this crazy professor teacher in the novel named Elodin, and as class starts he makes his students tell him an interesting fact. If he already knows it or finds it boring, they have to keep going until they come up with something interesting, or admit defeat. This sounds like a pretty fun game, but only really if you’re the teacher and get to be the “interesting decider.” If I ever had a teacher that really did that, I wouldn’t like it… I’d feel used and abused! And I’m somewhat wary of these romanticized student-teacher relationships that crop up so much in fiction.

Anyway, here’s one of the students’ facts, from page 132:

“You can divide infinity an infinite number of times, and the resulting pieces will still be infinitely large,” Uresh said in his odd Lenatti accent. “But if you divide a non-infinite number an infinite number of times, the resulting pieces are non-infinitely small. Since they are non-infinitely small, but there are an infinite number of them, if you add them back together, their sum is infinite. This implies any number is, in fact, infinite.”

“Wow,” Elodin said after a long pause.

Um… what? Elodin shouldn’t be impressed by such foolish logic! It sounds like a middle-schooler who just discovered the concept of infinity. Infinity is not a number, you cannot do math with it. There’s no such thing as “an infinite number.” Fool! Elodin should reprimand him!

Later on, some characters are trying to explain to another character how the novel’s magic system works (a certain magic called “sympathy”), on page 148:

“Heat, light, and motion are all just energy,” I said. “We can’t create energy or make it disappear. But sympathy lets us move it around or change if from one type into another.”

Is motion really energy? Doesn’t he mean acceleration? I guess you could still say something in motion has kinetic energy, but that implies that it was accelerated at some point. Perhaps, since we live in a frictionful gravity world, motion and acceleration can be thought to be same, since if you’re not constantly accelerating, friction due to gravity will bring you to a stop. Anyway, this magic system seems to obey the first law of thermodynamics; good enough for me.

But then…

“I can see how heat and light are related,” [Denna] said thoughtfully. “The sun is bright and warm. Same with a candle.” She frowned. “But motion doesn’t fit into it. A fire can’t push something.”

“Think about friction,” Sim chimed in. “When you rub something it gets hot.”

…

[Kvothe talking:] “It’s a good example. The hub of a wagon wheel will be warm to the touch. That heat comes from the motion of the wheel. A sympathist can make the energe go the other way, from heat into motion.”

So a sympathist can basically break the second law of thermodynamics? That’s fine, I don’t quite believe in it anyway. But… why explain the relationship between heat and motion with friction? The heat from friction isn’t really directly caused by motion, it’s caused by countless atomic collisions from opposing electromagnetic forces. (You’re not going to get much heat from static friction, are you?) I would explain heat and motion more thermodynamically: heat is motion, the non-uniform motion of countless particles. Of course the heat from a fire can push something, it’s just hard (if not thermodynamically impossible) to get enough energy directed at something specific to make that possible, so we tend to use it’s energy more indirectly, like using it to create steam, or taking advantage of the potential difference in density between the heated material and the surroundings (like the heated air in hot air balloons).

Then again, I’m not a scientist… and on page 149 a character says:

“There’s a special kind of thinking called Alar,” Wilem said. “You believe something so strongly that it becomes so.”

So I can’t be too picky. All is fair in fiction.

By S P Hannifin, ago