Guest Post

Guest Post: And Now For Something a Little Different – James Lovegrove on AGE OF GODPUNK

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Lovegrove-AgeOfGodpunkMy latest Pantheon book, Age Of Godpunk, is not like the others. For a start, it’s an omnibus of three novellas, not a novel. But it isn’t military-SF either. If anything, the three tales are urban fantasy. The themes are the same, though: gods and men and the interaction between them; the nature of belief; acceptance of and/or rebellion against divine authority.

I have to say that all three novellas are pretty personal, too.

They have a setting in common: the city of London. Now, London is a place about which I am more than a little ambivalent. On the one hand, I love to visit our capital and avail myself of the many cultural, culinary, retail and social amenities it has to offer. On the other hand, I’ve lived there at various periods of my life and never felt truly at home or comfortable. I’m from East Sussex. I belong near the south coast, in a county with hills and trees. After any trip up to the Big Smoke, I’m always happy – relieved, even – to return to fresh air and vistas.

So the Age Of Godpunk novellas reflect my mixed feelings about London. They also reflect my mixed feelings about belief, faith and religion. Each of them can be read on two levels. You can take the appearance of the various deities in them at face value, the metaphysical manifesting as real, literal beings. Or you can view them rationally and empirically, with the gods existing only in the minds of the protagonists, phantoms, fantasies, delusions.

More specifically, each novella touches on themes drawn directly from my own life. These are the most personal stories I’ve written in ages, if not ever.

Lovegrove-AgeOfAnansiThe first of them, Age Of Anansi, is about storytelling, which is the thing I try to do for a living. Anansi is the spider god of African tradition, a liar and a trickster, a woefully inept would-be adulterer, and more often than not the hapless victim of his own schemes – ensnared by his own webs. The tales told about him crossed the Atlantic in slave ships and came to America, where they mutated over time and metamorphosed into the Br’er Rabbit fables.

In Age Of Anansi, his spirit apparently possesses a stuffy London-based barrister who is then cajoled into attending a once-every-generation contest among trickster gods in California. In many ways the contest is like an SF convention, but with every attendee attempting to outsmart and outshine the others. So, just like an SF convention, in fact.

Lovegrove-AgeOfSatan2Age Of Satan sketches the life of a young man from school in the late 1960s to the present day. He believes he has sold his soul to the Devil, sort of by accident, but gradually learns that there’s more to the Lord of the Flies than the Bible would have us think. Although the character, Guy, is born about a decade and a half before I was, he attends an all-male boarding school, as I did, and he travels to Thailand, as I did. He’s kind of an avatar for my younger self, sharing many of the passions and anxieties I had while growing up.

As for the third novella, Age Of Gaia, it may be regarded as a sequel of sorts to my 1999 novella How The Other Half Lives, which was one of the first titles to be published by the wonderful boutique imprint PS Publishing. That tale was about a plutocrat who keeps a man locked in his cellar and brutally abuses him in order to ensure himself continued good fortune and enhance his already obscene wealth. Gaia features another plutocrat, Barnaby Pollard, who has made his billions from oil and coal, heedless of the environmental damage that fossil fuels cause. He meets a woman and develops a relationship with her that directly affects both his business and his attitude towards Mother Nature.

There’s a scene in the story which reimagines an event from my own childhood. I was perhaps twelve years old when a bypass was built, circumventing my hometown. The road was driven straight through a patch of countryside where I and my friends regularly played. We had regarded this place as ours, a rural sanctuary, a wild spot where we, too, could be wild. The people of the Highways Agency (or whatever it was called back then) didn’t know that, nor would they have cared if they had.

I took the road building as a personal insult and mourned the fact that fields and woods had been bulldozed and two lanes of tarmac laid down in their place. When something similar happens to the young Barnaby Pollard, however, I show him celebrating the event, applauding the arrival of speed and progress and not giving a damn about any lost greenery. It’s a formative moment in his life, a pivotal experience, which has ironic echoes later on in the story.

As a rule I try to avoid bringing myself into my fiction. I don’t consider my life to be that interesting, and anyway I prefer to write about the unreal and the fantastic, the things that aren’t as opposed to the things that are. Somehow, though, with these three novellas I just couldn’t help it. The personal crept in, almost without my realising. With hindsight, I think that’s one of their great strengths.

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Pantheon Series (Novels): Age of Ra, Age of Zeus, Age of Odin, Age of Aztec, Age of Voodoo

Age of Gaia will be published on September 12th 2013, by Solaris. For those of you in reach of London, Blackwells on Charing Cross Road is holding a launch event a week earlier, on September 5th. Jared Shurin, of the cult genre website Pornokitsch, will hold an evening in conversation with the author.

Be sure to check out James Lovegrove’s website for more information on his novels and so forth.

Guest Post: “Caught in a Storm, Weather & Ancient Warfare” by William Napier

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Napier-BloodRedSeaJust back from a week sailing round Corsica and Sardinia. Gorgeous weather first four days, swimming, snorkelling, and a lot of cheap rosé. I read Alison Weir’s book on the Wars of the Roses. Highly recommended. Then, on Thursday afternoon, the sky turned black and a huge wind got up. We headed fast for what should have been safe anchorage in a north-east-facing inlet at Spalmatore, having been told the usual stormy August westerly was on its way… Big mistake. The storm came straight out of the north east, and the boat started to buck around like a wild mustang with behavioural issues.

We’d tied up to two buoys for extra stability but now the waves were broadside on, the boat rolling terribly, and we had to stagger out in the big swell and loose off one of the buoys so the boat could at least swing round and pitch into the coming sea.

Around 1am the storm broke and it was spectacular. Lightning over the mountains of Corsica that went on for a good two hours, truly retina-scorching, then hailstones the size of marbles. A full Mediterranean summer storm, astonishingly violent. The next day, the sky was blue again, the seas still pretty big but a fine wind and a whole day of brilliant sailing, the deck at 45° all the way.

At times during the night it had been genuinely frightening, as well as exhilarating. Danger survived always makes you feel more alive. But it also made me think how the old mariners, those who sailed the Mediterranean in Homer’s time, or the time of Lepanto, must have coped. No wonder they believed in monsters, prayed so fervently to their gods. We might have been badly chucked around for a while, but we had lifejackets, SatNav, radio. There was never any real danger. If you’re a writer, then all experiences, even the hard ones, are good material, and this was a powerful reminder of just how tough and courageous our sailing forefathers were.

During the Battle of Lepanto, in October, the weather was also pretty rough. Hard to imagine how the Christians and the Turks managed not only to control their galleys in those big seas, but handle the guns with relative accuracy as well. No wonder they had to come so close and fire at such close range. The result was the most terrible carnage, with a casualty rate on that single day, 7th October 1571, of some 40,000: a figure never again equaled until the First World War. And as for historical significance, I would argue that Lepanto’s was greater than either Hastings or Waterloo. The future of much of Europe, not just the Balkans, might have been far more Ottoman and Muslim had it swung the other way. It should be better known. 

And there are many reasons why we might remember the desperate bravery of the men who fought on both sides, from the dashing aristocrats like Don John of Austria, to the hard bitten captains like Uluch Ali, to those indomitable warrior-monks, the Knights of St. John, to the poor emaciated bastards chained to the oars down below. And our mild little summer storm last week was another reminder of that.

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The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea is part of Napier’s Clash of Empires series. It is out now, published by Orion in the UK. Here’s the synopsis:

1571. Chained to a slave galley in the heart of the Mediterranean, it seems that English adventurers Ingoldsby and Hodge might have finally run out of luck. But as former Knights of St John, they’ve survived worse, and while the men around them drop dead at their oars, they’re determined to escape.

By a miracle of fate, they find their way back to dry land and freedom – but unable to return home. With the Ottoman Empire set on strangling the crusading Christian power before it can take root, hostilities between East and West – Muslim and Christian – are vicious and deadly.

And as the sun rises on one day in October, five hours of bloodshed will change the course of history. Once again, the two Englishmen find themselves living on borrowed time…

Guest Post: “Language and World-Building” by Emily Croy Barker

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CroyBarkerE-ThinkingWomansGuideToRealMagicWhat sort of languages do they speak in other worlds? I gave some serious thought to this matter in writing my novel, The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic — and was intrigued and inspired to discover, in reading about the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, that the same question had helped spark the creation of Middle-earth itself.

Tolkien was 22 years old and a philology student at Oxford University when he encountered the eighth-century Old English poem Crist by Cynewulf. As Colin Duriez writes in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Making of a Legend, the poem included a couple of lines that Tolkien found intensely evocative:

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast

Ofer middangeard monnum sended.

“Hail, Earendel, of angels the brightest,

Sent over middle-earth to mankind.”

Tolkien was struck particularly by the name “Earendel,” which has roots in older, Germanic languages and which he called “euphonic to a peculiar degree.” It inspired him to write his own poem about a hero’s quest.

Instead of just borrowing the name “Earendel,” however, as a good philologist Tolkien worked out an equivalent in Elvish, the private language that he had been developing from Norse and Germanic roots. Earendel becomes “Eärendil” in Tolkien’s poem – and in the sprawling mythology that would eventually underlie The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

“…The name could not be adopted just like that,” Tolkien later wrote. “It had to be accommodated to the Elvish linguistic situation, at the same time as a place for this person was made in legend.” Elvish, he went on to say, “was beginning, after many tentative starts in boyhood, to take definite shape at the time of the name’s adoption….” In a foreword to The Lord of the Rings, he wrote that the legends and myths of Middle-Earth were “primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of ‘history’ for Elvish tongues.” For Tolkien, the creation of a fantasy world, its history, and its language were inextricably intertwined.

CroyBarkerE-AuthorPicCreating my own fantasy world, I kept that lesson in mind. In my novel, Nora, a graduate student in literature, wanders into an entirely different world, where she ultimately begins the study of magic. Before that, however, she has to learn the language.

Luckily, she’s able to pick up the basics of the common tongue, Ors, while under a translation spell. But it still takes her a while to grasp the nuances of the language and to develop real fluency, not to mention to lose the unfortunate accent that she accidently acquired while under the spell. As she masters Ors, she also learns more about the strange, often frustrating new world in which she finds herself. There are 12 different words for sheep. Given names in the ruling class are all patronymics. Women are supposed to speak slightly differently—more hesitantly—than men. Nora learns just what some of her new friends think of her when she overhears them referring to her with a pronoun used for inanimate objects, animals, or servants.

I want to be perfectly clear: In inventing a language, I was nowhere near as rigorous, analytical, or sophisticated as Tolkien was. There’s no Ors dictionary or grammar. But including just a few details of how the language worked added interesting texture to the world that I’d imagined.

It also helped me show how foreign this place initially seems to Nora. More than once, she’s frustrated because there’s no Ors equivalent for the English word she has in mind. For an academic like Nora, being suddenly illiterate is quietly terrifying. The first time that she even begins to feel at home in this alien world is when she picks up a child’s lesson book in Ors and realizes that she can teach herself to read.

Language is what we build stories out of. We can also use it to build worlds.

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Emily Croy Barker is the author of THE THINKING WOMAN’S GUIDE TO REAL MAGIC, published by Penguin US this month. To find out more, be sure to follow Emily on Facebook and Twitter.

An imaginative story of a woman caught in an alternate world—where she will need to learn the skills of magic to survive

Nora Fischer’s dissertation is stalled and her boyfriend is about to marry another woman.  During a miserable weekend at a friend’s wedding, Nora wanders off and walks through a portal into a different world where she’s transformed from a drab grad student into a stunning beauty.  Before long, she has a set of glamorous new friends and her romance with gorgeous, masterful Raclin is heating up. It’s almost too good to be true.

Then the elegant veneer shatters. Nora’s new fantasy world turns darker, a fairy tale gone incredibly wrong. Making it here will take skills Nora never learned in graduate school. Her only real ally—and a reluctant one at that—is the magician Aruendiel, a grim, reclusive figure with a biting tongue and a shrouded past. And it will take her becoming Aruendiel’s student—and learning magic herself—to survive. When a passage home finally opens, Nora must weigh her “real life” against the dangerous power of love and magic.

The novel has been described as perfect for fans of Lev Grossman’s Magicians and Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches.

Guest Post: “Post six. Sweet and Dandy: Toots and the Maytals (Chapter: Six days later – A conversation about Ska)” by Celine Kiernan

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Into the Grey is a ghost story about twin brothers, Pat and Dom Finnerty, whose lives are turned upside down by the loss of their home and by a subsequent haunting. The book has quite a few chills, there’s quite a bit of political history in it, much exploration of death and loss – but there’s also a lot of love and kindness in it, a fair few laughs and a lot of bravery. I thought I’d have a bit of fun with that side of the book on this blog tour, so these posts will be all about music! Why certain songs feature in the story, what they mean to me, what memories are associated with them etc . Into the Grey is set in the Irish seaside town of Skerries in 1974, all the songs featured are evocative to me of both that time and that (very real) place. As you will see, they all speak very much to the story, too, and to the characters and the rather desperate situation with which they find themselves entwined.

NOTE: I can’t say much about the final two songs for fear of spoilers. But here, for the penultimate track, Toots and the Maytals, Sweet and Dandy. Hell to the yeah. I dare you not to tap your feet. This is the start of Pat finding his ‘home sound’, his place—his voice I guess. It is also a restoratively happy sound in the wake of much darkness and loss.

Post Six

James slipped The Sensational Maytals from its sleeve and put on side one. I’d never heard music like it. It was like a blast of fresh air. It made me sit up straight. Don’t get me wrong, I liked music, all sorts, whatever I could get a chance to listen to. But from the minute “It’s You” started to play, I felt – I don’t know how to put it – I remember thinking, I’m home! I found home!

That’s how much I loved it.

Guest Post: “Nine books, Six Years, One Stenwold Maker” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)

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In this guest post, Adrian Tchaikovsky looks back on the nine books in his Shadows of the Apt series available to date (the tenth and final book in the series, Seal of the Worm, will be published next year, by Tor UK).

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“Nine books, Six Years, One Stenwold Maker”

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

It seems a lot longer ago than 2008 when the first of the Shadows of the Apt books came out. Maybe it’s that the actual setting and a lot of the characters, most definitely including War Master Maker, came from a role-playing campaign I ran back in the early 90’s, and have been rattling about in my head ever since. But mostly I think it’s just the very different pace my life has had ever since the first book got taken up by Tor UK. “Roller-coaster” is a fair description: highs and lows.

Ten books. Ten books is a lot, frankly. Even nine books is a lot, and we’ve still got Seal of the Worm next year. A lot, but not unprecedented. Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Dead, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. A certain species of fantasy does lend itself to the grand and epic sweep of invented history. I don’t think that I could have told the story I wanted to tell in less. In fact it’s been a job to fit it in the space I’ve had.

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The first four books – Empire in Black and Gold through to Salute the Dark – are the story of the first war, covering Stenwold’s hard-won rallying of the disparate Lowlands cultures to fend off the Wasp-kinden’s advance, and at the same time the equally key political tangle of the Imperial court, and the covert struggle for dominance between Alvdan and his unassuming sister.

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Books five to seven are set between the wars: the Lowlands falls apart, the Empire makes the political and technological adjustments that will allow it to return to the campaign. Most importantly, several characters have their moments of forging and testing: Cheerwell in The Scarab Path, Stenwold in the Sea Watch and Tynisa in Heirs of the Blade.

Heirs of the Blade nearly sunk me, in fact. As well as Tynisa’s adventures in the Commonweal, this turned out to be the pivot-point for the whole series: here was where the stories from the previous volumes came to be tied up, and the foreshadowing for the next came to loom. No other book in the series gave me quite as many fits, or got edited and shuffled about so much. One entire subplot just had to be cut entirely because it was less than essential, and because by then the book was very long.

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And then we hit the final leg: the Empire, in fact, striking back, starting with the blitzkrieg of The Air War, and continuing with the new War Master’s Gate that has our man Stenwold on the cover and in the title. Readers who have followed the series to date will know that since Salute the Dark the books have followed two different plotlines – the political/technological (“Apt”) line through Sea Watch and Air War, and the mystical (“Inapt”) plot of Scarab Path and Heirs. Well, War Master’s Gate is where it all comes together. It’s just about the whole gang back together again in one volume (if not one place): Stenwold, Che, Tynisa, Thalric, Tynan, Seda and the new characters from the Air War. Everything comes together; everything falls apart. There will be blood, magic, killer war machines, characters will die like flies (or, indeed, Flies). And then, after the smoke clears, there will be the Worm.

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The first nine books of the Shadows of the Apt are out now in the UK, published by Tor (War Master’s Gate is published today, in fact). The first four novels in the series are published in the US by Pyr Books.

For more information about the series and the author, be sure to visit Adrian Tchaikovsky’s website and follow him on Twitter. Naturally, of course, what you really need to do – if you have only recently been introduced to this author – is go out and buy the series! And I need to catch up! With the final book on the horizon in 2014, I think I may actually be able to catch up, if I read roughly one every month or two…

Who else has read some or all of the Shadows of the Apt? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments thread, below.

Guest Post: “History & Riyria” by Michael J. Sullivan

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Long-time readers of Civilian Reader will know that I’m a big fan of Michael Sullivan’s Riyria Revelations series (re-issued by Orbit Books in 2011-12). To celebrate the release of a prequel duology – The Crown Tower and The Rose and the Thorn – the author has penned this piece on the historical influences on his series, and the decisions he made on how to approach and incorporate these influences into his fantasy world and narrative.

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HISTORY & RIYRIA

A good deal of invented-world fantasy is based on history. While much of this may be due to writers imitating other authors who came before them, there is a very practical reason for this: familiarity. When creating a world you’d rather not do it from scratch. Even the best chefs have used frozen pie crusts or stock broth. It just saves so much time and effort and allows you to focus on the more important aspects – the story.

In fantasy you could rework everything. You could do away with leaders or councils and run anarchy. People might not need to eat or drink, but instead soak up sunlight to survive. Of course you might not have a sun either. Instead you might have geysers that emit vapors that must be absorbed. People in the new world might not believe in trade, everyone could subsist entirely on what they alone find or make, hence no economy. There might be no day and night cycle, no seasons, no linear time at all as we know it. There might be no sexes, or there might be five different ones and reproduction could require the coupling of at least three different participants. Anyone of these would be a lot for an author to explain through all of its inevitable ramifications, but all of them and all the others one would need to invent to establish a completely alien world entirely disassociated from our own would both consume massive investment of words and likely bore even the most patient reader to tears.

A good story with lousy worldbuilding is still a good story, and fantastic worldbuilding with a bad story is still a bad story.

As a result authors of invented-worlds like to use preconceived ideas already conveniently built in the minds of readers. Characters will use swords, bows, spears and shields, or flintlocks and powder kegs. No need to explain why or what they are. Day and night, summer and winter, years and hours, can all remain the same, because these basic building blocks aren’t worth altering unless that is the focus or theme of the story. Eighty percent common knowledge and twenty percent invented, and readers will have little problem jumping right in and enjoying this “alien” world you “created.”

History is also a great guide for such things as economic and political systems and also work as justification, guides, and proof of plausibility. When I was in art school a friend who was in the photography program scoffed at my efforts to painting still-life. “Why bother when you can just take a photo?” My response was that I wanted to be able to paint what couldn’t be seen, what he could never fit in his viewfinder. Before I could do that I had to master painting what was visible, so I could use that knowledge when I invented what wasn’t and still make it look just as believable. By utilizing the same rules of reflection, shadow, proportions and light, I lend credence to the incredible. This same idea applies just as assuredly to writing fiction.

When I first conceived of the Riyria Revelations, I did so while reading a college text book on Western Civilizations. I studied medieval and renaissance history, which threw off dozens of ideas that I jotted down. The missus dominicus – the agents of Charlemagne – became the basis for the sentinels in the world of Elan. Royce had some roots of his character grow out of a biography on Edward, the Black Prince of Wales. The Church of Novron and the monasteries of Maribor were inspired by the cradle-to-grave dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and the Benedictine and Franciscan orders. The Theorem Eldership came from the secret orders of knights such as the Knights Templar and the Illuminati. The lost empire of Novron was pulled from the Fall of Rome. The elves and dwarves were redefined from the Tolkien-esque tradition into something resembling the minorities of the Dark Ages. Dwarves who once long ago had their own homeland and kingdom were, in the time of Royce and Hadrian, universally disliked, distrusted, and forced into ghettos, but still sought for their uncanny skills. Jews faced similar problems in the post Roman era. In this way, the major themes of ancient life helped provide much of the framework, while the lesser known details provided inspiration for unique set pieces.

I didn’t stop there, however. I mixed and matched. Elan isn’t Earth, so I had no reason to limit myself unless I felt the need. For example, there are potatoes that historically came from the New World and were unknown in Medieval Europe. The same is true for tobacco. Sailing vessels were not at all like the great ships of the Age of Sail – the age of Nelson – but I liked the romance of a three mast ship plowing waves. I just excluded gunpowder and cannons. I loved the imagery and characterization that powdered wigs provided and so tossed those in, but kept armor and the joust from centuries earlier. I used modern military ranks because I wanted to avoid explanations of such basic concepts.

In total, I made specific and personal choices concerning what I would keep accurate and what I would change. There was no standard I followed beyond my personal taste of what I thought would make a wonderful reading experience. I wrote Revelations to be the sort of book I wanted to read, the sort of story I couldn’t find on any shelves. Equal parts realism, heroism, and simple prose so nothing stood between the reader and the story. I felt fantasy had begun taking itself too seriously and in its lofty goal of becoming a Genre Worthy of Respect, forgot the date that brought it to the dance. I felt too much of fantasy had left out the fun, the humor, the sheer blast of joy that comes from taking an arduous journey with someone you come to love and the sweaty fingers that turn the pages as they face the final showdown. This for me has always been the best of fantasy: not the worldbuilding, or the lessons in humanity, but the emotional blowout that for me, only fantasy – free of the baggage of the real world – can provide. This is what divided the books I carried with me, the ones I remembered fondly decades later, and those I forgot I ever read.

Regardless of whether fantasy is historically consistent, dark and cynical, or idyllic and heroic, all that matters is that the story and characters are good enough to make readers laugh, cry, and feel a terrible sense of loss after the last page is turned.

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Also on CR: Reviews of The Viscount and the Witch, Theft of Swords, Rise of Empire, and Heir of Novron; Interview with Michael J. Sullivan, Guest Post on Gritty vs. Heroic Fantasy 

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Riyria Revelations US

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Riyria Revelations UK

Guest Post: “How a Cult Tried to Get Me” by Koethi Zan

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Koethi Zan is the author of The Never List, which was published this week by Viking. To celebrate the release of the novel (and in advance of the review), here is a guest post from the author…

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ZanK-NeverListUSWhen I was eighteen years old, my college roommate and I were lured into a cult. It isn’t what you might imagine. We didn’t move to a commune somewhere in Texas with some charismatic leader who had a cache of weapons and multiple wives. They were much too sophisticated for that. They drew us in slowly with very innocent “study sessions” that were part self-help, part group therapy, and part meditation class.

It started with my college boyfriend’s parents who had been involved with this “philosophy study group” for many years. They urged my boyfriend to go so my roommate Ann and I decided we’d tag along. We were up for anything and curious about what we’d heard.

There were five of us at the first session, one of whom was a stunningly beautiful girl about my age. She had an ethereal quality about her and was very close to reaching the next “level” in the study group. I was convinced my boyfriend would end up in her group too—without me. I had to get to the higher level too, and fast.

Like many cults, this one had a mystical text, a dynamic long-dead leader, and an almost corporate organizational structure. They were practiced at the slow seduction. Their main scripture contained a bizarre and complex cosmology that made no sense whatsoever. We studied only a page or two each week, carefully dissecting its strange logic and arcane symbolism. I was getting nowhere with it.

Study sessions began with a long meditation, in which the teacher would ask us to focus on each individual body part until we felt it tingle. I had a hard time sitting still that long. Then we would work on our main objective: learning to be “present in the moment.” Each week we would leave with specific tasks to practice: upon entering a room, look at the ceiling, or eat meals using the non-dominant hand. Eventually, our sessions involved learning the art of bookbinding, which seemed a bit odd, but I mildly enjoyed that part at least. It reminded me of being in the Girl Scouts. All in all, it seemed harmless enough.

Then, just as Ann and I were getting bored with the whole thing, we were informed that we had reached a high enough level to go to a special weekend “retreat.” An important leader from New York City would be presiding. The group had bought a house that needed work, so naturally there would be “work sessions.” We were flattered. We went.

ZanK-NeverListUKThe first thing they did was set us to work scraping the floors of the house—for hours. That was a mistake. Not my cup of tea. Next we had an extensive presentation about the cosmology. I was bored out of my mind. Then after lunch, we were instructed in special “movements” at a school gym they’d rented out. We would hold out our arms and spread our legs, and then, in time with ominous chords of piano music, we would have to jump suddenly into the next position. I was starting to freak out a little.

Up until that point, no one had mentioned money to us. They were clever enough to know we’d see that as a warning sign. But back at the house that afternoon, I overheard the fancy leader from New York City pressuring a young member to make his contribution. That was just about the final straw. So when, in our next session, we were seated in rows for an hour-long meditation session, I feigned illness and was excused to the other room. I realized I had to get out of there. I tried to signal to Ann through the doorway, but she was in a deep state of meditation.

Without telling anyone, I slipped out the front door, hoping Ann would figure it out and follow me when she finally opened her eyes. She did, and we reunited back at the dorm that day to celebrate. Needless to say, we never got to the next level.

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The Never List was published by Viking this week in the US (top image), and will be published in the UK in August 2013 by Vintage (second cover). Here’s the synopsis…

NEVER GET IN THE CAR

For years, best friends Sarah and Jennifer kept what they called the ‘Never List’: a list of actions to be avoided, for safety’s sake, at all costs. But one night, they failed to follow their own rules.

NEVER GO OUT ALONE AFTER DARK

Sarah has spent ten years trying to forget her ordeal. But now the FBI has news that forces her to confront her worst fears.

NEVER TAKE RISKS

If she is to uncover the truth about what really happened to Jennifer, Sarah needs to work with the other women who shared her nightmare. But they won’t be happy to hear from her. Because down there in the dark, Sarah wasn’t just a victim.

NEVER TRUST ANYONE

There were four of us down there for the first thirty-two months and eleven days of our captivity.And then, very suddenly and without warning, there were three.Even though the fourth person hadn’t made any noise at all in several months, the room got very quiet when she was gone.For a long time after that, we sat in silence, in the dark, each of us wondering what this meant for her and for us, and which of us would be the next in the box.

Guest Post: “The Yesterday That Never Was” by Aidan Harte (Jo Fletcher Books)

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Today, I bring you a guest post by Aidan Harte, author of the historical fantasies Irenicon and The Warring States. Here, he discusses how authors perceive and play around with the historical periods they can write in…

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THE YESTERDAY THAT NEVER WAS

AidanHarte-AuthorPicFantasy and Historical Fiction are in essence extreme forms of Travel Fiction. They take us to destinations that can’t be otherwise reached. Historical Fantasy is a hybrid for brave souls looking for untraveled paths in unmapped lands. Its terrain is more expansive than it was – as the world tilts, reorienting itself to an Eastern pole, the West is no longer the default setting.

Anyone writing Historical Fiction must accomplish two, unfortunately contradictory, things:

1. Immerse the reader in another era.

2. Keep him from drowning in it.

The same onus falls on the writer of Historical Fantasy but he has an extra challenge – after building a believable world, he must test it to breaking point by introducing unbelievable elements. Happily, that’s not as difficult as it sounds. Privately, each of us believes that everyone who died before we were born was a sucker. They don’t know what we know and we can never forgive them for it. Just as the untraveled believe absurdities of foreigners, we patronise to people imprisoned in the past’s dusty mausoleum in a way we’d never treat those lucky enough to cohabitate the same point in time and space as us.

All this is to say that the average reader, whatever he tells himself, really has no trouble believing that citizens of olden times were credulous as slow-witted children. Given that, the introduction of supernatural elements is a doddle. Dragons are only marginally less improbable than the Charleston. Our condescension is not altogether without wisdom. The fact is that people living in pre-scientific societies did not delimit the supernatural from the everyday as rigorously as we Moderns. The average medieval chap would be surprised to see a unicorn, but not nearly as much as you – I’m assuming that you’re not reading this blog from an explored tract of the Amazon.

ClarkeS-JonathanStrange&MrNorrellIn the end, the fantastical elements in any novel are distracting fireworks that count for little if the bedrock of character, plot and storytelling is absent or faulty. The art is to find an intellectual and emotional connection between the reader and the past. I’ve praised Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell before, but some things bear repeating. Susanna Clarke inhabits her chosen milieu completely. Her infectious wit and generosity draws us helplessly in. The manner she treats the squabbling magicians bursting into Regency England as kindred spirits to the Romantic poets is inspired. It’s not the spells we remember so much as the awkward double act of Strange and Norrell, the noble manservant Stephen and the masterful Duke of Wellington.

That effortless marriage of voice and subject was a continuing inspiration for my Wave Trilogy, although the tone is very different. Irenicon and its sequel The Warring States are set in Etruria, an Alternate History Italy. The most challenging part of realising this medieval world was not creating the mysterious Waterfolk, or the flamboyant martial arts, or the baroque arch-villainy of Bernoulli. All that was pure imagination and came easy. What I really sweated over in the first book was rendering the conflict that was tearing the small town of Rasenna apart. It wasn’t that I lacked inspirational material; anyone perusing a history of medieval Italy will find conflict aplenty, but all the research in the world doesn’t help when you can’t see the living people underneath. You have to be able to smell their breath. It took me a while to understand why the Guelphs and Ghibellines keep quarrelling. The minutia of titles, dates and details obscured the human passions. The truth is that it wasn’t an abstract quarrel for primacy between the Holy See and the Holy Roman Empire that kept the city-states boiling. The factions’ banners were pretexts, vaporous as the shadow battles over “hinge issues” that animate the election years of our democracies. What was and is at issue was power. Who holds it. Who wants it. Once I realised that, realising the inherent drama was easier, though I still had work making a world of guilds, priests, contessas, and strange Italian names inviting to modern readers.

Harte-WaveTrilogy-1&2

This business of making readers at ease can be taken too far. The past remains another country. The average medieval person had views on morality that make the Taliban look easy going. Saints and relics occupied a space in 14th century Italy filled by iPads and smart phones today. I’ll buy just about any anachronistic mechanical contrivance in my Steam Punk novel, but nothing jars more than Victorian characters with the mores of 21st century hipsters. Why ever leave the sofa if we’re all the same?

We travel to experience the world’s variety but some contemporary authors, certainly those writing Literary Fiction, tip toe and genuflect around the issues of race, gender and age. This is patronising in a terrible new way. The joy of traveling is to see strange sights, people we’re not used to, smells that make us dizzy, flavours that make our tongues beg for mercy. Victorian authors, God bless their jodhpurs, had none of this pusillanimity. When Ryder Haggard had a yarn to spin, he waded into the unknown with aplomb – sensitivities be damned – and readers love him it.

FromHellThe sense of discovery is part of Historical Fantasy’s continuing appeal. It’s increasingly hard to imagine life Before Google, that benighted era we left behind in 1996. The world BG was a world where ignorance, speculation and rumour were the rule. The past is a place where the most fantastical things are routinely accepted. If an unmapped world could contain Australia and the Americas then why not unicorns and dragons too? The most ambitious Historical Fantasies pull us over the borders into the unknown. Peter Ackroyd (in Hawksmore) and Alan Moore (in From Hell) take the reader on tours of two very different Londons and make a convincing case that doers of dreadful deeds make their own reality. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian can be read as Historical Fantasy. Its setting is clearly the 1850’s Mexican borderlands but the villainous Judge Holden – polyglot, immortal, alchemist – is an ogre direct from the Grimm’s fairy tales. Or perhaps he’s just a flamboyant fraud. Or perhaps he’s a figment of the narrator’s imagination. McCarthy’s expansive, elusive prose allows for many interpretation.

At its best, Historical Fantasy pits its constituent parts – History and Fantasy – against each other. That inner tension, that vast uncertainty, is why we love it. Ultimately none of us are quite as sure of ourselves as we pretend to be. How pleasant to go somewhere now and again, where absolutely nothing is certain.

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Aidan Harte’s IRENICON and THE WARRING STATES are both out now, published by Jo Fletcher Books in the UK.

Also on CR: Interview with Aidan Harte, Excerpt of Irenicon

Guest Post: “SEEDS IN THE DESERT” by Peter Liney (Detainee Blog Tour)

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Liney-DetaineeI’m not exactly sure when THE DETAINEE started to take shape in my mind. For a long time I had this notion that I wanted to write a book about the human spirit, about the fact that, no matter how dark the situation, given hope, we always find a way to survive. Like those seeds that lie dormant in the desert, year in, year out, waiting for rain, and when it comes, suddenly burst into the most beautiful of life. Or the victims of kidnapping, political prisoners, those held for no reason and often under the most appalling of circumstances, where do they find the will to survive? To wait for the arrival of that shower of life-giving rain? Continue reading →

Guest Post: “My Favourite Novel” by Robert Goddard

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I’m very pleased to share with you this quick guest post by author Robert Goddard, whose latest novel – The Ways of the World – was published yesterday, by Transworld (details at end).

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My Favourite Novel: THE MAGUS by John Fowles

Fowles-TheMagus1977I first read The Magus shortly after it appeared in its revised 1977 edition, following original publication in 1966. Part of the appeal of the book then was probably to do with me being just the right age to be intoxicated and enthralled by its hallucinogenic mixture of psychological thriller and searing memoir. Beyond that, though, there’s the energetic lyricism of the writing. That’s what I relish most when I look back at it now.

The book works on the reader rather as the shimmering Aegean setting, the twin femmes fatales of June and Julie and the tormenting figure of the magus of the title, Conchis, work on the narrator of the story, Nicholas Urfe. First there is seduction, then there is mystery, then there is torture and finally an enigmatic resolution. No one part of the structure convinces as fiction without the others.

It is a brilliantly sustained piece of work.

Would that I could say the same of John Fowles’ writing career. After The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), there was a slow and disappointing decline into virtual unreadability. I went to a talk by the great man once, in Exeter, some time in the mid-1980s. Alas, all that met me at the venue was a sign reading ‘John Fowles is unwell.’

‘John Fowles is depressed’ might have been more accurate, as I discovered when I read his diaries, published a few years ago, following his death in 2005. It’s probably best to know as little as possible about a writer you admire. Their personalities are apt to disappoint.

So, forget the writer. But enjoy his work. Anyone who hasn’t read The Magus has something to look forward to. I envy them.

By Robert Goddard

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Goddard-WaysOfTheWorldRobert Goddard’s latest novel, The Ways of the World is out now. It is, I believe, the first in a new series. It is very close to the top of my TBR mountain, so hopefully you’ll be seeing more of it on the blog in the near future.

Here’s the synopsis…

1919. The eyes of the world are on Paris, where statesmen, diplomats and politicians have gathered to discuss the fate of half the world’s nations in the aftermath of the cataclysm that was the Great War. A horde of journalists, spies and opportunists have also gathered in the city and the last thing the British diplomatic community needs at such a time is the mysterious death of a senior member of their delegation. So, when Sir Henry Maxted falls from the roof of his mistress’s apartment building in unexplained circumstances, their first instinct is to suppress all suspicious aspects of the event.

But Sir Henry’s son, ex-Royal Flying Corps ace James ‘Max’ Maxted, has other ideas. He resolves to find out how and why his father died – even if this means disturbing the impression of harmonious calm which the negotiating teams have worked so hard to maintain. In a city where countries are jostling for position at the crossroads of history and the stakes could hardly be higher, it is difficult to tell who is a friend and who a foe. And Max will soon discover just how much he needs friends, as his search for the truth sucks him into the dark heart of a seemingly impenetrable mystery.