Last First Snow AMA Roundup

parenthood, protest, voice actors

First off I’d like to thank everyone who joined us for the Last First Snow AMA yesterday! We had some great questions, ranging from voice acting to parenthood in the Sequence to weightier questions of protest and redemption. I’ve excerpted a few of the answers here; you can read the rest over on r/Craftsequence.

I’ll start with the question that hit me personally the hardest:

“Would you write Temoc differently as a new father?”

Oof. Here comes u/BravoLimaPoppa off the top rope. (brb gotta cue up Mountain Goats' "Beat the Champ") Really asking the easy questions today!

I wonder if I'd have the guts to write the parts of this book that touch on Temoc's relationship with Caleb, now that I'm a father. I think... I think it's mostly right, at least it's right on the compositional level even if I'd handle some of the details differently. It's just even harder to bear now than it was when I wrote it.

It's much easier to say how I'd write Caleb differently. Caleb in LFS suffers a bit (to my eyes, on re-reading) from my not having spent enough time around young kids to really dial in his age, as much physically as emotionally. I spend a lot more time around kids now and there are a few things I'd change. It's not a huge flaw--since of course every kid is different and it's so common for kiddos to be old for their age in one way & young in another--but I'd bring a lot more personal experience to it now.

But on the harder question... I draw this tension with Temoc in LFS between his life as a private citizen with his family, and his life as a Historical Figure, as an Eagle Knight. An aspect of that tension that’s not quite there is how wonderfully, deeply complicated and involving and challenging life as a parent can be. How complete an awareness it demands, how easy it is to forget that you’re dealing with a little person. Most of us, I think, can go days without appreciating the complete and profound humanity of each other person we encounter, that they have a complete perspective all their own. I mean, of course we don’t! Our brains would melt out our ears. But as an aware, engaged parent you really have to accept the independent existence of this other being—and try to model them, as well as you can. Parenting, at least to me, feels like having gained… mantis shrimp eyes? Like you can see a whole different primary color.

So the tension for Temoc isn’t just that he feels a duty to his family and a duty his people—and he likes being with his family more, so in a twisted way it’s his family that he has to give up. There’s also the peculiar seductive way it can seem easier to be a world-historical icon, an Adult In the World Playing a Role, than it is to be trying to understand this wonderful, strange, full human being who loves and depends on you and also really wants ice cream now, or can’t get into the car.

But that core sense of, well, fuck, the world is an awful mess, it seems like you have to be strong to survive, I’m your Dad and I’m supposed to help you and I don’t even know if I’m strong enough to get through this, and a lot of what I have that seems to count as strength in the world comes from some pretty awful stuff and I don’t even know if that really is strength or if it’s what matters at all, but what else do I have to give you than this broken thing I am? Christ, I hope I’m finding a better answer than Temoc does! But I feel it, man.

from u/Gnobpie:

Hi Max, and thanks for being here! Last First Snow is one of my favorite books maybe ever, and of course a very sad one. Two questions if you’ve got the time:

Temoc trying to change his religion’s practices to reconcile it to the post-human sacrifice rules of Kopil’s Dresidiel Lex is very moving, and its ultimate failure is heartbreaking. As always, fascinated by how religion works in the Craft-verse. Given enough time and change in practices/beliefs among the faithful, could the replacement of literal human sacrifice with symbolic sacrifice actually change the nature of the Quechal gods? For that matter, could the desert peoples’ beliefs about Kopil being a trickster god somehow change him in some way, or is he too different from a god (being a formerly human if very powerful craftsperson rather than an emergent consciousness of a cultural collective)?

The Kopil we see in LFS (and Deathless: the City’s Thirst) is much more violent, quick to anger, and intolerant than the Kopil of 2SR and later. I have always read Kopil as clearly an idealist of a kind, and someone who sees himself as the hero of a story in which Enlightenment-esque values replaced pre-modern values of bigotry, hierarchy, human sacrifice, caste, superstition etc, but as of LFS he is still willing to commit brutal atrocities in pursuit of his goals. How does he reckon with what he’s done between the Skittersill rising and 2SR with the result being the sadder, less bloodthirsty character we see later on? Does he see himself as a hero, and does that self conception factor in?

Thank you so much. I'm glad the book connected with you. I felt it very deeply as I was writing.

1. I think Temoc's approach could work, and was working. But that kind of cultural change takes a long time, and the challenge he faces in Last First Snow (and we all face in our own lives) is that events don't stand still. A common lament in the later years of the western Roman Empire, I'm told, was: "if only we could get two good Emperors back to back!" (and they sort of managed it for a brief period, with what Ada Palmer calls the "good gay Emperors"--but then you got Commodus). Cultural change is slow and hard and necessary work and it's so often outrun by history. As for Kopil: haha, maybe it is changing him in some way!

2. I share your reading on Kopil. He was also shaped by coming to leadership during the God Wars, a time of atrocities--not that that excuses any particular atrocity!--and one of his tragedies here is that the Rising and in particular the Major's sacrifice slips him back into the groove of God Wars decision-making and stakes. It's a moment of profound psychological regression for him, and he has all the tools he needs to start acting like he's back in the Wars again. (A friend who served in the US Infantry talks forcefully about how damaging and dangerous it is to bring military concepts, training, equipment, personnel etc into policing functions--the two jobs' objectives, in his mind, are so different as to be utterly toxic to one another.) I think that realizing what he's done at the end of LFS--and Elayne severing ties with him--that triggers long and deep thought and maybe some confrontation with his own failings. What makes him a fascinating character to me is that he's sort of a damped oscillating function--aware, at least as of 2SR, of his own failure modes and trying to correct them, but also often failing to do so and falling into the depths again. I think he still sees himself as a hero--sort of--but he also sees and understands the monstrosity and enormity of himself--even as he thinks he's necessary.

From u/HiddenSchools:

I am always a huge fan of how you write your female characters, so I want to throw a spotlight on a couple of them here. Obv I adore Elayne, so for once I'm NOT going to ask about her.

Mina - did you have a sense of Mina's character, her background, how she met Temoc, how she raised Caleb when writing 2SR? When she and Temoc tell Elayne how they met, I get major Evelyn-from-the-Mummy vibes and I need more!

Chel - she gives so much heart and a different perspective to the story, I'm really glad you made her a major POV character here. Having a non-Craft-or-priest perspective feels fresh and important generally, but particularly here when the plot revolves around a grassroots uprising. Did you deliberately choose to develop a POV character in this way, or did it arise naturally as the story came together?

Dana Garabaldi - such a brief scene, but I love how fully realised Dana is. As a sister to a disabled brother, I'm always moved when I reread by her dynamic with her brother and how she soothes him (also how Elayne apologises for scaring him). I don't really have a question about Dana, but wanted to highlight how important she feels to the story and the world of Dresediel Lex.

Kapania Kemal - love seeing her and Bill play such a role. In terms of naming convention, did you deliberately decide that Mal's surname was matrilineal? Was there any culture-building thought behind this?

I have been saving this question because I really like it and want to answer it as a treat. So thank you!

Mina: I feel so sure of her character now that it's hard to remember how much I knew about her while writing 2SR! She showed up very strongly on the page from the first scene in LFS--and as a true Xennial I adore the 90s Mummy and Rachel Weisz's Evelyn is a sort of core movie memory for me, so she's absolutely prominent in the mix for Mina, along with Marion Ravenwood and, I don't know, maybe Calvin's mom from Calvin & Hobbes? One thing I love to do while writing, is sketch out other books that I would love to write but don't have bandwidth to tackle right now, in other characters' backstory. Teo and Zollan's wacky 90s action movie, for example. Temoc's and Mina's big romance is right up there.

Chel: Thank you! I love her and she's one of the great tragic figures of the book for me. One of the real dangers of writing a social-movement book in my eyes is focusing on Big Players. You get this in typical fantasy too: "Oops, all aristocrats!" It's so easy to just write "mob" or "crowd' and get on with it. I wanted life in Chakal Square to have real texture, I wanted a sense of how the movement fit together from the perspective of folks on the street, why they were there and what they wanted to achieve and how their plans and desires changed as the situation changed.

Dana: <3 Thank you. I'm so glad that worked for you. I was struck by her too on re-read; I knew she was there but I'd forgotten the details of that scene. "The world of Dresediel Lex," exactly--it was important to me that this book feel like it was happening in a real city.

Kapania: I did! I don't think the Ke name is always matrilineal; Bill (as you might guess from the name) is either not ethnically Quechal or from a more "westernized" family, and they're both somewhat hippie-granola soup kitchen organizer types; Kapania's family name is important to her, more than his is important to him, so that's the name they passed on to their kiddo. Poor Mal, man. They were good parents!

When you were writing LFS, were there historical or real world events that helped inspire you?

And the Skittersill uprising hits way harder these days with what's going on in Ukraine and Gaza. Any thoughts on that?

And I know you have no control over the narrators of the audiobooks, but … If you could pick a voice for Temoc, who would you have?

The Skittersill Rising isn't Tian'anmen--or the Lhasa protests of 2008--but I lived through the second at a very distant remove, and I spent a lot of time right around Tian'anmen for a span of six or seven years, and... well. I have a deep and committed belief in the power of people united to change their world for the better. But the world of post-industrial violence, where small groups can command massive force without concern for the desires of wide swaths of their own public, changes the playing field and perhaps the whole project of democracy in deeply unsettling ways.

As for Ukraine, and Gaza and for that matter present-day Los Angeles--and speaking as a writer here, I'm not an expert in any of these areas and material conditions and potential strategies and outcomes both matter and differ: I recently saw Jo Walton remark, about her Farthing series (about a fascist 1950s, with a Lindbergh presidency in the U.S. and a fascist government in the UK), that it was her dearest hope to one day live in a world where the books no longer seemed topical. I feel that way about Last First Snow--at least in some particulars. We live in a time when manipulative tyrants lie and twist reason to justify the atrocities they commit to secure their grip on power as they understand it--sometimes with complete and cynical understanding of their own actions, sometimes because they are trapped in their own nightmarish hall of mirrors. We also live in a time of great courage and heroism and resistance. Both projects, of atrocity and freedom, are very old. In some ways they are very simple and in others very complex. For all my fears, I have more faith in the virtues and endurance of the project of freedom.

Slipping with relief from the sublime to the ridiculous and talking about audiobooks for a second: if I were doing an animated Craft Sequence, I would want to find actors from the closest relevant ethnicities in our world, but the voice that I hear in my head for Temoc shifts between Kevin Conroy's Batman and Keith David's, um, Keith David. You didn't ask about Kopil, but Tony Jay's fantastic work as Shere Khan on the old Talespin cartoon is 100 percent the vibe.

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There’s a good deal more on the AMA page itself. I love doing these and they wear me out—it’s like a whole blog tour in a single day! I’m going to go ice my forearms and watch some cartoons.

Take care of each other, friends. Happy reading. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.