Babylon Blues Interview

In the stories that aren’t out-and-out wish fulfilment, I identified many flaws and mistakes that should have gotten the characters crippled, killed, or at least severely disadvantaged. Only a tiny minority of authors met my requirements: deep worldbuilding, incredible magic, ferocious monsters, believable characters and character development, and of course, the judicious application of overwhelming firepower. I wanted to take these tropes for my own stories, to build upon the ideas that inspired me.

I also encountered Shadowrun. Shadowrun was a science fantasy tabletop RPG, set in a futuristic world where magic, spirits, cybernetics and megacorps run rampant. My first exposure to it was in primary school, when I borrowed two of the tie-in novels. The stories didn’t stick, but the tropes and concepts did. When the Shadowrun Returns CRPG was released, I was reminded of my childhood, and dove deeper into the lore and the tropes, appropriating them as necessary for my work.

But the catalyst for Babylon Blues proper came from, if you can believe it, a song: Tokio Funka.

The song describes a Tokyo of corruption, decadence and chaos. Gangs of young men swinging katanas and wreaking havoc everywhere they go, drug abuse, open prostitution. Then came these lines:

“okappiki babiron yowaki mono abandon” / “In this Babylon of thief-takers, abandon the weak”

The Biblical Babylon was the greatest, wealthiest and most powerful city in the world. But it was also a city of corruption and degeneracy, the symbol of rejection of the Christian God.

Another line also stood out:

“sakase yo hana o ukiyo wa setsuna” / “Bloom, flowers, the transient world is but a moment”

This is a quintessentially Japanese Buddhist line. Ukiyo means ‘floating world’, a reference to the urban lifestyle of the Edo period, and the pleasure quarters in particular. The nation was finally united and at peace. The samurai had hung up their swords to become civil servants. Merchants pursued profit with single-minded focus. The arts flourished — but so did vices, especially prostitution.

Ukiyo is also a homophone for ‘sorrowful world’ in Japanese. The world of suffering from which Japanese Buddhists sought liberation.

Pleasure and glamour are transient. But so, too, are suffering, sorrow, and degeneracy. Even the ukiyo, too, is transient. All phenomena must end — even the reign of archdemons.

From these lines Babylon came full-formed. Babylon is Las Vegas and New York, Shinjuku and Kabukicho, Patapong and Paris, and every city of lust and wealth and tech rolled into one. It is a city that rejected old faiths and values, and in their place openly worships demons. It is an unholy marriage of ukiyo and Sin City.

My interest in military affairs began with the thrillers I read in my adolescence. Nuclear submarines, main battle tanks, attack helicopters, howitzers, all the high-tech weapons of war that visited death and destruction when let loose. But my interest in tactics began when I read Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, which pitched a NATO counterterrorist unit against groups of terrorists all over the world. Then I picked up a condensed version of Sun Bin’s Art of War (not to be confused with Sun Zi), and my interest in strategy and maneuvers began in earnest. I learned that master of tactics and strategy spelled the difference between life and death, victory and defeat, and no amount of fancy hardware could make up for poor strategic acumen.

Shortly after that, when I delved into genres outside thrillers, and certain lesser thriller writers of poorer repute, I noticed a distinct lack of tactics and strategy. I saw characters making no end of stupid mistakes, even though they should know better. It was annoying, to say the least. These were the kind of mistakes that would lead to the death of the characters and the ruin of nations.

Once you have eyes to see these mistakes, you cannot unsee them. You cannot close your eyes and pretend they’re all right. If nothing else, an entire generation of readers who have served in the military will excoriate you. Thus, he who writes fiction where the art of war is of vital importance cannot neglect his studies into the various manifestations and fields of the art in his own art.

Fantasy settings without nukes and drones and other long-range weapons technologies require up-close engagement with enemies and danger. There is no instant-win button — not for the good guys, anyway. In every battle, fought so close you can smell the enemy’s breath, a hair’s breadth divides life and death, and skill at arms is paramount. There is an intensity in combat that cannot be replicated in sci fi settings. In this proximity, there is room for valour and glory, for the individual to shine — and for the adulation of the audience, in this case, the reader.

This same combination of wish fulfillment and intensity applies to every aspect of life in a fantasy setting. Instead of cold cities filled with towering skyscrapers, you have towns filled with warmth and people; instead of expensive but mass-produced technology, you have sorcerers and magicians and wizards who can perform miracles; instead of a humdrum world that seems to shrink with every increase in knowledge, you have a magical world waiting to be explored.

You can see this in lots of modern fiction. Subversion is celebrated, antiheroes have no standards, villains are either flat or lack contrast with the alleged heroes, there is no higher purpose for the heroes beyond simple survival or a paycheck or other selfish reasons.

By rejecting notions of objective good and evil, everything necessarily becomes corrupt. There are no lines that cannot be crossed, no standards to live up to, no higher purpose and no reason to look beyond the self. Every hero must be flawed and broken and damaged, every villain is simply a worse version of the hero. And this is celebrated and continues to be celebrated in modern SFF. Everything melts into a shade of grey.

You’ll notice this in the clear-cut moral conflicts, villains who are clearly evil, action-oriented heroes who try their best to be good and purposeful. Even in stories that are out-and-out bad guys versus even worse guys, you’ll a kernel of moral goodness in the antiheroes. They only target criminals worse than themselves, they hunt down the most vicious predators in society, they have a code of ethics, etc.

Even thrillers written by avowedly left-wing authors still adhere to a semblance of moral precepts. The bad guys get their due, the good guys (eventually) win, and the day is saved.

He is a samurai of the streets, who strides the world with sword and gun, ready to defend the innocent. A Christian knight who confronts evil wherever it lurks its head. He is a master of the Way of hand, stick, knife and gun. He knows he can’t defeat the abominations that haunt Babylon with sheer brute force alone; he outsmarts them, employs unorthodox tactics, comes at them where they least expect him.

You’d expect him to be a hard man. But he’s not. He’s soft — but not ‘soft’ in the sense of weakness. He is relaxed and receptive, smooth and graceful. Fighting with him is like grappling with an empty jacket. He just disappears, and the aggressor falls into a sudden void — and the end comes soon after.

He is also a man grounded in faith. Not the ignorance of children or the desperate grasping of zealots, but a deep understanding and acceptance of the underlying laws and principles of the Universe, having experienced them in his martial arts training and elsewhere. He knows that the Universe is more than just a man with limited knowledge and reach, and instead of trying to brute force his way through problems, he lets his ego dissolve and places his complete trust in the Universe — and in God.

He is a Christian in the mystical tradition, one who seeks direct experience of the Divine. In his spiritual path he is also a bridge between East and West, embodying the fundamental teachings of Christianity while engaging in the deep meditative and psychological work of Eastern traditions.

Yuri Yamamoto is a man. But he is also a myth and a mystery wrapped up in an enigma.

The pulse-pounding action, authentic combat and gear, and grittiness of military technothrillers, and the horrifying monsters, incredible magic, and deep worldbuilding of urban fantasy.

It is also a story of valour and virtue. It is about doing the right thing the right way and standing fast to the truth even if the whole world turns against you.