Bassanda Podcast Ep 5
BP 005 GTR Ch 08-09 [
Welcome to the Bassanda Podcast! I’m Chris Smith.
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.
The first speculative fiction novel set in this universe, which is serialized at smithscribe.substack.com, is THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA.
For GREAT TRAIN RIDE, the principal 1906 POV character is the ethnographer Cecile Lapin; the corollary 1980s POV character is the scholar and Vietnam combat vet S. Jefferson Winesap. At intervals, many other voices are heard, especially in the dossier materials derived from the vast trove of the Bassanda correspondence, but Cecile’s and Jefferson’s are the eyes through which we see. Other key characters on the 1906 team who unite to deliver ancient electromagnetic Documents to Bassanda are the scholar and widower James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence; the assassin and bodyguard Ismail Durang; the explorer and writer Algeria Main-Smith; and the Brethren, two long-lived, North American-born Friends of Bassanda: Colonel Torres and General Landes. Along the way, we also meet smugglers and assassins, chemically-reengineered monsters and anthropoid mountain peoples, and one particularly vicious, recurring psychopathic villain.
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Chapter 8, “The Return of the Brethren,” is another of those chapters that popped out as a more-or-less free-standing piece, before I ever conceived the full narrative of GTR. But it also followed on from the psycho-active “Classic ‘52 photograph” section. I wanted to ratchet-up the intensity of the supernatural/spec fiction experience that Winesap, the 1980s POV character, was experiencing through that photograph. I knew that I wanted Winesap as a key narrator, but I also needed him to be looking back upon events which he thought were 70 years in the past. There’s a little bit of classic “weird fiction” vibe in this scene, set in the halls of Miskatonic University–which is borrowed from Lovecraft, though Lovecraft’s intentionally-creepy horror is very far from my desired wheelhouse.
On the other hand, it was only after I determined that I wanted Winesap as part of the narrative that I realized that there might be a branching-then-meeting parallel timelines elements. And it was only after that realization that I concluded I needed to change Winesap’s fundamental identity–that I couldn’t have an Anglo cis woman and an Anglo cis man as the two principal narrators (see the previous pod’s discussion about juggling my own white cis male identity and the undesirability of such an identity as main POV–and also, the pitfalls that arise if someone like me tries to write from other identities). In this respect, making him a combat vet deepened him, I thought–though in all honesty I’m not dead sure that I did enough to show the past trauma impacting his present life. But, on the other hand, I think it did deepen his character’s turn, two thirds of the way through the narrative, when he finally accepts that he’s going to go to war again, but this time of his own volition.
I can’t really remember the sources for the trope of “time-traveling fictional characters suddenly arrive into the space where someone has been reading about them,” but I think there’s probably some Zelazny and some Fritz Leiber in there–especially a key scene in Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber. I do know that, as very often happens for me in the writing, I can picture the mise-en-scene, as clear as a bell. In a previous episode, I mentioned that I struggle with plotting–that’s one of the reasons why I’m taking more time before launching into the 4th serialized Bassanda novel–but on the other hand, I recognize that one of my strengths, along with world-building and dialog, is that I can visualize scenes. It’s almost as if, once I have the picture of Winesap sitting in his professor’s library at Miskatonic, after a summer thunderstorm, I can see the scene unspooling in my mind’s eye. I found that to be true in authoring and staging theatrical shows, also, like DANCING AT THE CROSSROADS, PLUNDER, and YONDER (and for that matter, our annual Solstice concerts): I’d have the picture in my mind’s eye, and the job would be to author a narrative (implicit or explicit) that would string those scenes together in a logical and satisfying fashion.
Also, a hugely important plotting and worldbuilding breakthrough, one that made this chapter and indeed the whole Multiverse possible, was an idea that I believe originates with the Reverend Colonel Chipper Thompson, one of the three members of the Bassanda steering committee. I do believe it was the Colonel who came up with the idea of “Rifts”: geographical locations which represent ruptures in space-time, and which can–by accident or intent–provide those who enter the opportunity to move across distance and eras. Though some SFF writers are meticulous about the logic of their time-travel (which is actually much more confusing and self-contradictory than quantum distance-jumping), I’m not one: I prefer letting the Rift phenomena be unpredictable and arbitrary, though, as the Multiverse has expanded, it’s become not more complicated, but richer and more useful.
I believe it was myself, building on the Colonel’s original insight, who suggested that Rift travel had an accumulative effect: that the more humans (or, for that matter, pieces of technology: see the electromagnetic locomotive called The Beast, introduced in this chapter) experienced Rift jumps, the more they could (a) control that travel, and (b) extend their own longevity–because, if you’re time-traveling, do you even age? All of that is implicit in this chapter, but its implications–and the pattern of the Rifts themselves–continue to reach across the Multiverse and through the novels, and to lead to new and unexpected places (Rifts are very important in NEW WORLD A-COMING, the 3rd Bassanda novel, at the smithscribe site).
Chapter 9, “Notes on Algeria Main-Smith,” is a very, very early free-standing piece… a strong inspiration for which came from an image of Dorelia MacNeill, who was the mistress and common-law wife of the experimental British painter and proto-back-to-the-lander Augustus John
These were Brits (among others) who, at the tail end of the 1890s, were seeking alternatives to the (rather effete-seeming, to me) politenesses of Edwardian fiction, painting, and Decadent symbolism. Avant garde painters and writers like MacNeill and John–along with folklorists like Maud Karpeles and Olive Dame Campbell–intuited, sometimes not very clearly, that there were certain kinds of wisdom in rural and folkloric traditions that the new 20th century might desperately need; though, admittedly, they did it from positions of considerable unexamined class and economic privilege.
More significantly, in the story of Algeria’s early adventures in the east, with her companions Colette St Jacques and Master Li-Bao, there is a bit of an influence from one of my absolute core texts, Peter Mathiessen’s The Snow Leopard, and the idea of going to the mountains to seek clarity in the wake of grief. Colette recurs in THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE, and she plays a very, very important role in the loves of both Algeria, and of Professor Habjar-Lawrence’s children.
I should also acknowledge, I suppose, that Algeria Main-Smith is actually an anagram of the name of a person rather close to me
CLOSER:
This is the Bassanda Podcast, a place for riffing upon history, 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. Each week, we recall chapters in the Correspondence, and we talk with guests, from the Multiverse and beyond, about world-building and imagination. You can find us on your podcast app, and also on Twitter / Threads, and Bluesky: search #BassandaPodcast, send to BassandaPodcast@gmail.com, or find me @ChrisSmithMuso. I’d love to hear from you, and I’ll talk to you again soon.
NOTES for THE BASSANDA PODCAST BP 006
Chris Smith SFF serial fiction: www.smithscribe.substack.com
Roger Landes: www.rogerlandes.com
Chipper Thompson: www.chipperthompson.com
DANCING AT THE CROSSROADS: African American and Anglo Celtic dance meetings in the New World: https://www.dancingatthecrossroads.com/
Plunder! Battling for Democracy in the New World
YONDER (site-inspired immersive theater): www.yondershow.com
SOUNDING HISTORY: www.soundinghistorypodcast.com