To Hell and Back

A Few Notes on Danny Valentine's World

Hopefully, after five books I have earned enough indulgence to provide a few notes. I am at least confident that those uninterested will flip past these pages. After all, who reads these things? Besides grammar junkies like me, that is.

I have often been asked about Danny and how she occurred to me. I've answered that question elsewhere. Another source of constant comment and query is Japhrimel and where he came from.

To be honest, he wasn't supposed to be more than a one book character. Really, in the book I set out to write, he double-crossed Dante and left her holding the bag, infected with a demonic virus. The rest of the series he was pretty much a foil to her humanity, sort of a Mephistopheles. Then he had to go and fall in love with her, and develop wings. Which just goes to show you can't trust a demon. I realize now with twenty-twenty hindsight that Japhrimel was actually informed by the legends of the Nephilim, angels who fell in love with human women and fell (supposedly) from grace as a result, fathering huge progeny while also teaching humanity «forbidden» arts such as sorcery, city-building, and medicine. I had heard this legend for years, although my only clear memory of it is in Madeline L'Engle's Many Waters. I suppose when you study metaphysics and the occult you can hardly get away from all sorts of odd stuff. I'm only glad Japh didn't take after Cthulu or Aiwass. Or, say, old-school vampires — the type that suck your blood out through your toenails or nostrils.

And people say mythology is boring.

I have always been of two minds about legends and myths. One part of me looks for the psychological truth hidden inside. The other — the ravening storyteller, no doubt — likes to play the what if game, with lots of sauce. How can I invert this legend? How can I play with this story? What makes it work? How can I tinker with the engine?

So Japhrimel dug around in a vast mass of scholarship, research, half-forgotten legends, and references from books devoured since my high school days, and came up with a coat made of whole cloth — demons instead of angels falling, and the consequences of those unions. Many Gnostic and occult traditions hold that nonhuman intelligences taught humanity «forbidden» arts against the will of a God who wanted only slaves, an act of compassion and defiance both sides paid dearly for.

I remember calling Japh a Promethean figure once, and it amused him so much I had trouble getting any actual work out of him for weeks.

Then I killed him, and that might have taught him a lesson if he hadn't known I would be bringing him back. Damn demon.

So Tierce Japhrimel, like every good character, rummaged through the dustheap at the back of my mind and came up with something wonderful, something I took as a writer takes these sorts of things — a gift not to be examined too closely in the heat of creation, for fear of the magic draining away.

Danny's world was another fish entirely. She was very definite about what had happened historically and what was going on now in her world, and had very strong opinions about both. Some things I had often thought about what would happen if individual spiritual experience was no longer co-opted by «organized» religion, what a relatively clean hover technology would mean for transport of goods and people, what might be the likely ending point of fundamentalism in the twenty-first century — were about what I'd expected. Other things, like the fear of psions and the pop culture and day-to-day government administration of a world six hundred years in the future, were a surprise.

Please note, dear Reader, than I am in no way implying Danny's world is a utopia, dystopia, prognostication, or social commentary. I am fully aware that any imagining of the future says more about the imaginer than the imagined, so to speak. I strove for logic and a historical tone where I could, and had fun where I couldn't. Like, with slicboards. I mean, come on. Flying skateboards? Even after Back to the Future's many reruns, flying skateboards are still cool.

However, I like to think that I've read enough history, both for schooling and for fun, to say with some certainty that people throughout the ages are largely the same. The issues that resonate with a regular-Joe type of person in my own time are largely the same issues that would resonate with a regular-Flavius Roman, or a regular Han Chinese. We all worry about those damn kids today and food and shelter, and the approbation of our social set; and where the world is going. We survive, and when we have room left over from survival we create, and we raise our kids and laugh and cry and grieve.

Not too long ago I was in a pediatrician's waiting room. There was a Ukrainian family (at least, I think they were Ukrainian) and a Hispanic family, each chattering away in their respective languages, the kids either playing or sticking close to Mum or Dad or Grandma if they were feeling poorly. I remember a glance of total accord exchanged between two mothers from different continents — a glance I had no trouble deciphering — when one child ran around in a circle making an airplane noise. The slight smile, lifted eyebrows, and rueful love in the expression was universal.

It is that moment I think of when I say the word "history." Often we forget, when studying other cultures or even our own, that people are pretty much the same the world over, with the same basic needs for food, shelter, love, and art. The diversity of cultures does not detract from that one glance shared between mothers — a glance no mommy, from the earliest furry human to whatever cyberpunk age comes next, would ever have trouble translating.

But I digress. Hey, it's an appendix. I suppose I'm allowed.

Danny's world probably says more about me and my own position as a reasonably literate middle-class citizen of America at the turn of the twenty-first century than it does about whatever future will be slouching along toward infinity six hundred years from now. The influences feeding into the world of psions and the Hegemony are many and varied-from a long list of music I've listened to, like Rob Dougan, the Cure, the Eagles, and Beethoven; movies like Blade Runner and Brazil, not to mention The Matrix and Life of Brian, and Kill Bill where Danny got her katana; books like From the Ashes of Angels and The Devil in Love, not to mention The Club Dumas and LJ Smith's The Forbidden Game series; and the history books that are my touchstone and, to some degree, Dante's as well. Her love of the classics springs from my own unrepentant and unabashed love for the same works, books that survive because they touch something deep in the soul. Livy and Shakespeare and Milton and Dumas and Gibbon and Sophocles and…

You realize I couldn't begin to list all the different influences that shaped Danny's world, any more than I could list every influence that shapes my own. Still, I am conscious of them, an underground river feeding whatever well I dredge up stories from. I am neverendingly grateful that I live in an age and a cultural-social position where I have access to a truly stunning array of human knowledge and the leisure time (however harried by deadlines and children and cats) to sample this great buffet largely at my own discretion. I am even more grateful that I am in a position to do the thing I love and was made for, telling stories.

Danny and Japhrimel's story is finished now. I don't know if I'll ever go back to their world. I don't know if I told their story the best way possible, but I told it as best as I know how. I enjoyed every goddamn minute of it. (Even revisions.) I am glad I did it.

Even if Japhrimel pulled a doublecross on me, and even if Dante is a difficult and unlikeable person sometimes, and even if I imagined a world that says more about me and my time than it ever will about the future. I had a Hell of a time.

I can't wait to do it again.

When I do, dear Reader, you're invited to come along. The story is in the sharing, after all. It would be right bloody useless if it wasn't.

The only thing that remains to be said is, thank you for reading. I hope you had a good time.

And flying skateboards are still cool.