Rehabilitating “The Master’s Oath”
Thinking about the “new project” I mentioned in my last post, I’ve gone back to re-read the final complete draft of The Master’s Oath.
I usually describe The Master’s Oath as my “first complete, mature, original novel.”
I specify it that way because it wasn’t the first novel I ever wrote; that was a rather juvenile swords-and-sorcery piece that I produced when I was about twelve, and no, that one isn’t remotely salvageable. I also distinguish it from the next five novels I wrote, all of which were fan-fiction and therefore not fully original work. The Master’s Oath was entirely mine, written as an adult with all of my skills fully developed, and it was the first such novel I ever managed to finish.
It’s a novel about a White American man (or at least he thinks he’s American, at the start of the story). He’s a U.S. Army veteran who is recovering from serious wounds, suffered in action in the field. Since leaving the military, he has been living comfortably at home, but his existence has gone hollow: no life-partner, few social contacts, no occupation other than watching his investments tick over, no purpose.
One day, he discovers that he is not American in origin. In fact, he isn’t from our world at all. He comes from an alternate-history Earth, one in which things went differently starting in the twelfth century, and where Hermetic magic rather than technology is the foundation of civilization. He accepts an invitation to travel to this other world, where he is welcomed and elevated to the aristocracy. Naturally, this doesn’t work out well for him, but that’s where the story comes from.
The Master’s Oath is a fairly political novel, probably the most overtly political novel I’ve ever written. It’s about democracy as opposed to aristocracy, justice as opposed to elitism, knowledge that everyone can use as opposed to esoteric occult insight. It’s about a man coming to terms with his own inherited privilege and deciding to do something positive with it.
It is also – and this is where I realized how problematic the current draft of the story is – about race in America.
The alternate-historical kingdom where my protagonist ends up is geographically placed in the southeastern part of North America, and it’s temporally placed in the mid-19th century. It’s culturally French rather than English, but that doesn’t evade the central issue. It has all the same original sins as the real-world United States: imperialism, genocide, chattel slavery, and white supremacism.
As a White American author, I have to be really careful how I approach a story like this one. There’s the technical problem of writing with tropes that will alienate a big chunk of the potential audience if badly handled. There’s also the moral problem that arises from the possibility that I’m exploiting the historical experience of others for my own benefit.
So The Master’s Oath has been sitting in my limbo pile for years, and I’ve often said that it will never be published, that it isn’t actually publishable.
And yet, and yet . . . I poured a lot of myself into that story, a lot of the things I believe and that are important to me, more than most of my other fiction. It’s decently well written, with (in my humble opinion) an interesting protagonist, a neat action-adventure plot, and a ton of world-building detail. Going back and reading it now, I see some things I would rewrite if I wanted to take the time. Would that be enough to mitigate the technical and moral issues with the current draft?
It would be nice to have another full-length novel in my catalog, and this one would take much less work to release than writing a new one from scratch.
It’s a conundrum. I need to wrestle with it some more, and maybe seek out some fresh perspectives.
