Guest Post: KV Johansen on The Last Road
Off the Map: How Small Things Create Depth in Space and Time by K.V Johansen I’ve always been fascinated by maps of places both real and imaginary. Blame The Hobbit and Shepard’s endpapers for The World of Pooh. But it’s not the map that gives a world its breadth and depth; that sense of space, and of time, too, in a story is created in other ways. Middle-earth, a place and a collection of myths and legends and epics never quite finding a final form, had been evolving for years before The Hobbit was sucked into it and what had started off as a children’s fairy-tale adventure struck roots down into something deeper, to grow into the unexpected, The Lord of the Rings. That sense that there is so much more off the map, casting long shadows into the story, is what gives The Lord of the Rings a part of its power. In 1955 readers had no way of finding out anything more of Beren and Luthien, of Gondolin, of Morgoth, of Ungoliant or Thingol, Elbereth or Erendil, beyond a few references: a song, a poem, the narrator’s mention of “some say …” as though of course you, like the characters, will have some faint familiarity with these ancient tales. Readers, before the publication of The Silmarillion, didn’t know that those stories existed as more than a whisper in the author’s mind, and for the story at hand that didn’t matter. What mattered was that their shadows were cast into the present action, the shape of them touching and affecting the unfolding story, and that those fragments and references gave the world a history, an internal frame of reference known, in various forms appropriate to their experience, to the characters.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Planet of Exile
Today on Mining the Genre Asteroid, I take you to a Planet of Exile. Last time on Mining the Genre Asteroid, I discussed Ursula K LeGuin’s first novel, Rocannon’s World. This time out, I stay in LeGuin’s Hainish universe and take a look at another early novel of hers set in that verse, Planet of Exile (1966). I look at how this novel extends and builds upon Rocannon’s World, and how it lays foundations for more of the Hainish universe. It is also a rather nifty “under siege novel” that keeps the strengths of character and worldbuilding we saw in Rocannon’s World.
Guest Post: Julie Czerneda on Genre Flipping
Today on Skiffy and Fanty, The Gossamer Mage author Julie Czenerda talks about flipping between SF and Fantasy in her writing.
Book Review: The Devil’s Guide to Managing Difficult People by Robyn Bennis
The Devil’s Guide to Managing Difficult People is an urban fantasy that deceptively starts off as a lighthearted take on a relationship with a supernatural being and eventually turns into a meditation on deeper explorations of a character’s pain, personality, choices, and mistakes. It tempts the reader with the fun and goofiness of its initial premise and gradually sucks the reader into a study of the main character and their history in a deep and sometimes painful dive. This latest book by Robin Bennis leverages and leavens Bennis’ droll sense of humor seen in the Signal Airship series and turns it onto a fantastic urban fantasy story.
Book Review: A SECRET GUIDE TO FIGHTING ELDER GODS edited by Jennifer Brozek
The return of the Lovecraft mythos to fiction and popular culture has been a burgeoning tendency in modern day fiction and culture. From Charles Stross’ Laundry Files to plush Cthulhus, the idea of the Mythos is more well known in popular culture than ever. There has also been a surge and rise in the popularity of YA as a subgenre, with teenagers and young adults navigating some rather perilous territory. It makes sense to me that the perilous territory that YA protagonists face might include encounters with Deep Ones, the Dreamlands, Ghouls, and the other terrors inherent in the Mythos. In addition, many of the stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre are centered around familial concerns — learning one’s heritage, coming to terms with it, rejecting it, or even being possessed by it. Of course, such family dramas can underpin many YA stories, too. Thus, in A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods, editor Jennifer Brozek marries these two concepts with a selection of stories from a wide range of authors. Like any anthology, the quality and interest of an individual story and author varies for me. Some of the stories stood out for me and showed the promise and possibilities of the form. Overall, I found that the authors and the stories embraced and lived up to the challenge of introducing YA protagonists and themes into the Mythos. The Mythos, upon reflection and after reading these stories, seems to me now like a natural sub-subgenre of fantasy for YA writers to consider.
Book Review: THE RAVEN TOWER by Ann Leckie
Ann Leckie is best known for her space opera work in The Ancillary series, a series that uses a first person point of view, pronouns, scope, and perspective to give a fresh and literary spin on that subgenre. I’ve highly enjoyed Leckie’s work in this arena and was excited to discover that she has an interest in writing fantasy as well. In her new novel, The Raven Tower, a second person point of view and experimentation with narrative and protagonists support an interesting turn for the author into fantasy novels. In a world very similar to our own — save that there are Gods — conflicts between city states and other polities run very much like they did in our Earth during the bronze age. Rulers strive for temporal supremacy over important resources and locations alike. Having the favor of a God or two is the “killer app” of warfare and conflict on this world, but when both sides have powerful Gods on their sides, conflicts become more subtle, more complex, and longer lasting. A key strait and a pair of cities on either side provide a venue for men and Gods to war against each other. And the Strength and the Patience of the Hill, a humble God from the far north, watches and patiently waits, even as They (for that is the God’s preferred pronoun) are inevitably drawn into the conflict. It is the God’s story, as refracted into the human protagonist Eolo who provides much of that action that is the heart of Ann Leckie’s story in The Raven Tower.
