Category: Guest Post
author post
The Two Tolkiens
by - April 7th, 2011
Epic fantasy is back. Peter Jackson brought out an unprecedented work of filmmaking with the Lord of the Rings films. HBO is rolling out Game of Thrones based on the books of George RR Martin, the man dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine. The publishing industry is generating a huge number of similar titles by people like Pat Rothfuss, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, and – putting too fine a point on it – me, many of which are showing up on the bestseller’s lists.
The faux-Medieval world of dragons and knights seems like an odd genre to have caught our collective attention, but I think you can gauge a cultural moment by its guilty pleasures. The same way that our huge romance industry tells us something about our fears about love, and urban fantasies like True Blood and Anita Blake tell us something about our discomfort with femininity and power, the knights and orcs that got us laughed at in middle school are attracting literally billions of dollars. That means something interesting has happened.
We as a culture are anxious about something, and these particular stories comfort us. They say something that we, the audience are willing to pay a lot of money to hear but from a distance that we can stand to hear it.
In particular, our two Tolkiens are telling us that we’re tired of war. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
My Top Three: Historically-Influenced Fantasy Settings
by - March 25th, 2011
Recently, I posted about the influence of history on fantasy and that got me thinking about some of my favourite, historically influenced fantasy periods. Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana would have to be right up there—in fact I think it was the authentic, Italian renaissance setting of the opening sequences that helped me fall in love with the story. And the basic premise of the story is straight from history—the divided peninsula of little kingdoms which fail to see the danger of encroaching empires until it is too late. Kay plays with this in Tigana, but basically France and the Holy Roman Empire—with the Turks a very real threat as well—were both encroaching on Italy during the Renaissance period.
I have always loved the stories of 5th century BC Greece—Thermopylae, Marathon and Salamis; the Peloponnesian war; and the Anabasis, the march of the 10,000 out of Asia Minor. I also love the older, more legendary stories such as the siege of Troy and Theseus and the Minotaur, which are both at least semi-historical. I particularly enjoy a fantastic twist on these tales, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand and David Gemmell’s Macedonian duology, Lion of Macedon and Dark Prince. With Bradley, I liked the way she told the old tale of Troy from the perspective of the women, just as she did with the Arthurian legend in The Mists of Avalon. In the Lion of Macedon, I was fascinated by the way Gemmell focused, not directly on Alexander and his father Philip, but on the general Parmenion. Parmenion is relatively unknown by comparison, but there is some historical weight to the view that it was his military genius that brought about Philip’s victories, which effectively conquered all of Greece. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
The Enterprise of Alchemy
by - March 24th, 2011
Alchemy is a knot downright Gordian when it comes to finding an entry point for the young scribe trying to introduce his readers to the subject. One solution is to tackle the problem as Alexander would, but this in turn leaves us with a conundrum every bit as frustrating as the one we began with—instead of a compact but impenetrable knot of information, we now have countless loose, frayed ends that are just as likely to take us nowhere as they are to reveal how the intricately assembled whole came to be.
Perhaps the best approach, then, is to do as I have done and open with an overly convoluted and essentially imperfect metaphor for the problem—the encryption of meaning in complex symbolism that references the historical, the mythological, or the biblical is, after all, an essential part of the European alchemical tradition. How else to accurately pass along your wisdom without it being exploited by the unworthy? Read the rest of this entry »
author post
Here’s to you, Mr Harrison…
by - March 22nd, 2011
When I was young, and I mean really young, my mother caught me reading the newspaper. That I could was just one of those things, like having brown hair and sticky-out teeth. I’m reliably informed it was something to do with the Rhodesia crisis (something you kids will have to look up for yourselves) – what it was isn’t important, but the fact of reading early, and apparently spontaneously, is. Fast forward a few years, and we’d moved towns and schools. So while most of my classmates were ploughing through their graded Ladybird books, I was pretty much left to my own devices. I have no recollection of what I read then. All sorts of stuff probably. But I do remember this: at some point (I must have been about nine) I was shown a rack of books and told to choose one, it didn’t matter which.
One in particular caught my eye. It had a man in a spacesuit on the cover which, as a child fascinated by the Apollo missions, was a big draw. And that was pretty much it for the next thirty-odd years. That book (and I’ve finally tracked it down – the 1976 Puffin edition of Spaceship Medic, by Harry Harrison) quite literally changed my life. Soon I was on the hard stuff: Clarke, Asimov, the Heinlein juveniles. Anderson. Pohl. Herbert. Aldiss. Anything with a spaceship on the front, and these were the days when Bob Foss was king – those spaceships were huge.
What fed my peculiar addiction was that my mum used to help run the village WI jumble sales. Before the doors had opened, the book stall had been scoured and any likely candidates picked off and paid for. Now – my mum’s not exactly a speculative fiction fan: she was going on the look of the book. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
Aunt Teagan and the Iceberg Factor
by - March 21st, 2011
When you write a book, you’re only ever showing the important bits. Seems obvious, right? The boring stuff, the stuff that isn’t intimately bound in the narrative, the stuff that doesn’t just leap off the page, or drive home some essential truth about your characters or the world they live in, you leave out*. But it’s still there, in a way.
What you see on the page is a result of winnowing out a hell of a lot of material. Some of it great, some of it exciting to write, but they’re ultimately scenes*, and situations that didn’t serve the story. The thing is, even though they’re gone, they still sit beneath the story, submerged, they’re the nine-tenths of the iceberg – the research, the history, the backstory – that give the bit the reader sees the extra weight.
Like Aunt Teagan in my Death Works books. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
When Should The Waltz End?
by - March 17th, 2011
A series, like all good things, must end. In a perfect world, it would do so not sooner, not later, but just exactly where it needs to.
I’m not going to lie–this is an incredibly difficult feat to pull off. Finding the proper place to end a series is a lot like crawling around in a pitch-black room with a lamp’s plug, looking for a socket. While the room is flooding. And carnivorous eels are swimming in. Plus, lasers. And explosions. Even James Bond would have a bit of trouble with this. (Although Daniel Craig’s Bond, much as I love him, would probably be a terrifically bad writer. I don’t think he’d take editing well.)
A series needs to end for the same reason books need to end–because a successful story must have structure. A story starts out with a situation in equilibrium, something happens to disturb that equilibrium, the consequences are explained in rising action leading to a crisis, and the story naturally ends when a new balance is reached. Within each scene and chapter, this principle is also at work; there is an arc to each character and each sentence. And, of course, a series has its own arc; it naturally wants to settle into a new balance.
Finding that moment is difficult for a number of reasons. A good series ends at the right moment, leaving the audience satisfied but also wanting. If a story is a seduction, the series is the relationship, and you want it ending amicably. (Being recently divorced, maybe I shouldn’t use that metaphor. Oh well.) Read the rest of this entry »
author post
Humanity’s Fire Casting Couch
by - March 17th, 2011
As I’ve said elsewhere, writing a book is a bit like making a sculpture from the inside. You have a plan, an aim, and as you progress you have some notion of how it should appear to an onlooker when its all done. Except … creating something as big as a novel can have unintended consequences and many of those consequences reside within the minds of readers, an arena that we writers can only hope to influence in exactly the way we’d like.
Yup, reading is an interactive activity – the reader creates much of the world of the book within their own head, and much of that inner creation depends on the writer’s facility with evocative prose with all its cues of description and plot and character and dialogue…
Sometimes writers play games during the writing process – for example, while writing the Greg Cameron character I half-imagined him being played by David Tennant, on the cinema screen of my mind. Theo Karlsson I saw being played by Sean Connery (yeah, I know, Sean is Scottish and Theo is partly Swedish, but if SC can do a Russian sub commander then he’ll do for Theo). Kao Chih always struck me as a younger Jackie Chan, while Robert Horst could have been played by Joseph Cotten….or Rutger Hauer. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
Tangled Webs
by - March 16th, 2011
Sir Walter Scott, in Marmion, wrote “Oh, what tangled webs we weave/when first we practice to deceive…” That’s a perfect description of the fiction writer creating imagined worlds. We invent layers of pseudo-reality, webs intricately connecting myriad details and worked into patterns that give the reader a sense of reality. But writers are humans with embarrassingly short memories when it comes to which minor character left on a voyage two chapters ago–or in the previous book–and thus is not available to hand the protagonist an important message. We’ve forgotten…but readers (some readers anyway) will notice and gleefully (or angrily) point out the mistake.
Prudent writers put all the salient details down in a notebook or separate computer file and refer to this often. When I wrote the original Paksworld books (UK | ANZ), I had notebooks containing all sorts of useful details. I knew that someday I’d write in that universe again, and I kept “everything.” When I started the new series of books, I knew I had the old notebooks and the old maps. I knew that until I tried to find them.
The notebooks, on the bottom shelf of the east wall of my work room…weren’t on that shelf when I looked for them. The master map, stored flat on the old drafting table under a protective cover…wasn’t there when I lifted the cover. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
The Grand Symbiosis: Fantasy & History
by - March 11th, 2011
On March 3, The Heir of Night’s (UK | ANZ) release day, I mentioned the relationship between epic fantasy and momentous events—and their often catastrophic consequences for the individuals and societies swept up in them. Sounds like history, doesn’t it?
It’s certainly hard to argue that the relationship between fantasy and history is not a very close one. There’s straight out alternate history; epic fantasy tends to draw extensively on the medieval period, while steampunk prefers the 19th century, which was the great mechanical and engineering age; and there’s a respectable number of fantasies that draw on the Greco-Roman era, with a notable overlap into the Arthurian cycle. Most historically informed fantasy draws on European history, but there are a few notable exceptions, such as the Empire of Tsuranuanni in Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts Empire series, C. J. Cherryh’s The Paladin, and Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, where the influencing historical periods are medieval Asian. Alternatively, Orson Scott Card’s drew on the history and folklore of colonial and post-independence North America for his Alvin Maker series. Read the rest of this entry »
author post
You should be reading Kate Griffin.
by - March 9th, 2011
I don’t have as much time for reading as I used to, these days. Day jobs and deadlines aren’t exactly conducive to being well-read, even though the folks at Orbit keep me nicely supplied whenever I do my periodic “Hi guys how’s the kids here’s a manuscript by the way any new books OK don’t mind if I do mooch a few” visits to their HQ in midtown. But despite my disconnection from the new/hot/now book scene, there are a few books and series for which I will stop, drop everything, and read myself blind. One such series is Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift novels, of which the third, The Neon Court, is out now.
Whenever I try to browbeat others into reading these books, I’ve been using “the Dresden Files if written by Neil Gaiman” as my pitch — but frankly that’s doing a disservice to the Dresden Files, Gaiman, and Griffin all at once. The setup is similar to that of the Dresden books on the surface: each book chronicles the adventures of a much put-upon modern magician just trying to go about his life in an urban setting. The urban setting in this case is London rather than Chicago, and the magician in question is not a wizard, but an urban sorcerer. There are wizards too in Griffin’s world, note — and warlocks, and prophets, and the kinds of magic users who can’t be described because they don’t fit neatly into any recognizable paradigm. But amid this wildly diverse set of magically-gifted (and sometimes -cursed) people, urban sorcerers stand out because their power comes, to put it simply, from their love of city life. Urban sorcerers can’t sit still during rush hour. They feel its surge and ebb in their blood, far more powerfully than any natural rhythms. They talk to pigeons, weave spells out of the fine print on subway tickets, read portents in graffiti. And though their ancestors include druids and shamans and all the natural magic users made famous by history and fantasy, these days they become powerless in the green boondocks beyond a city’s exurbs. The life they need, to thrive, is of a grittier, wilder sort. Read the rest of this entry »
