BP 002 GTR Ch 01-02 10:00
Welcome to the Bassanda Podcast [Episode 002[
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 (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.
Over time, I began authoring fictional vignettes, set more-or-less loosely within the long 20th century–approximately, the American Civil War in the 1860s through the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s. And within that period, I began to imagine fictional characters the Rev and the Colonel might have encountered, and circumstances through which they might all have moved. In this, I was very much inspired by the marvelous historical fiction of George MacDonald Fraser, who borrowed the villain Flashman, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and whose brilliant conceit was to have the caddish, drinking, womanizing school bully grow up to be a caddish, drinking, womanizing Victorian soldier–and accidental hero.
That’s where the roots of the first novel set in this universe were laid. I was challenged by Fraser’s example, by the amazing stories out of history (the best stories, I realized, are actually the true ones). In future episodes of the podcast, I–and, I hope, some distinguished guests–will begin to “build out” the Bassanda universe, and what it (variously) means to all of us, and to those who’ve moved through its environs.
But let me tell you about THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA, starring the Colonel, the General, and an additional cast of dashing characters. The story is one of adventure, travel, combat, sorrow, loss, and victory, but it begins in Paris, in 1906…
The narrator is Cecile Lapin, a young woman from peasant stock in Normandy who, through good fortune, is studying oriental languages and ethnography at the Sorbonne with an American named Jefferson Habjar-Lawrence, a widower who comes from a long line of scholars and allies of Bassanda. “The Colonel” Torres is likewise American, from the far west, and he seems very long-lived; Cecile establishes that he has worldwide experience, but also that he seems to have fought in the American civil War, 50 years earlier. In the cafes, lofts, and back alleys of Montparnasse, she is drawn into a pan-European journey to deliver mysterious electromagnetic “documents” to Bassanda, to fend off a looming Tsarist invasion.
There are mysterious encounters on board the Orient Express, a handsome young assassin named Ismail, and a series of stops along the way. It begins with the Seven Samurai / Magnificent Seven “getting the team together” trope, takes on the character of a “hero’s journey” epic expedition, takes on some smugglers and pirates, and climaxes with an electromagnetic last stand battle in the Bassanda Alps.
It began as an assemblage of period vignettes and personae portraits, sifted together to fit the 1906 Edwardian/fin de siecle European vibe. I was interested in setting up characters–especially the Colonel and the General, who were based in certain real-life individuals, and the fictitious members of the team they assembled–who could be central or peripheral players throughout the Multiverse, because I already knew I wanted to work within this particular world’s parameters and frame. But I also knew I needed one or several precipitating events, and so there’s a murder, and a back alley street fight, and Cecile discovers that she’s a target for Tsarist agents, simply through proximity to the cause of Bassandan independence. Before the story is over, she’ll have been to places and experiences that she could never have dreamed possible.
**
NOTE for commentary:
Where Cecile came from; Eleanor Nesbit; “contingent capacities for joy”; giving people a better happier story than history did
Thinking about POV, gender, positionality
Hating the idea of “dead girl as catalyzing event”
Plotting and its challenges
Fight scenes: Robert Parker, Fraser, Zelazny, Ross Thomas, Richard Lester (swordmasters); “how would a woman fight?”
Hidden voyeurism: “true crime”
One thing I learned is that writing a novel should–along with everything else it entails–force you to confront not only your own writing limitations, but also the limits on your own perceptions and perspectives. If you don’t, you’re writing a diary.
FIND CHAPTER ONE HERE:
LINKS for THE BASSANDA PODCAST BP 002
Chris Smith SFF serial fiction: www.smithscribe.substack.com
Roger Landes: www.rogerlandes.com
Chipper Thompson: www.chipperthompson.com
Inspiration for Cecile Lapin: Evelyn Nesbit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Nesbit
Bassanda’s Contingent Capacities for Joy: https://www.elegantsavagesorchestra.com/bassanda-correspondence.html#EvelynJoy