Tremontaine, a serial fiction project set in the world of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, is coming to the end. Racheline Maltese of the Tremontaine Creative Team gives her thoughts and reflections.
After four seasons, Tremontaine, a serial fiction project set in the world of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, is coming to the end. As someone who has worked on it since the beginning, since before it was even definitely a real thing, this is filled with feelings both of sadness and success.
While serialized narratives in the U.S. are often framed as lasting as long as an audience is available – what season is Law & Order currently on? – like many nerds, I watch a lot of British television, where shows are far more often designed as finite. Getting to the end really only means a story has lived a good life as great fiction. For Tremontaine, getting to the end was always inevitable because from the very start it had a built-in deadline.
Specifically, wrapping up a story like Tremontaine is uniquely complex in part because it is set before the published work in which it finds its origin and focuses on one of that story’s most important figures. So despite having created significant new story and world building, it’s important that as we leave the world of Riverside – as Ellen’s books about an unnamed city in an unnamed land are often termed – we also leave it untouched. The writing team must, without declaring it all a dream, find a way to wipe the slate and make room for Richard and Alec and the politics of another decade in the place that never was.
So the question, from the first moment of this season’s writers retreat, was how we were going to do that. We’re a dark lot, so there was a certain desire for cataclysm. But cataclysm leaves scars – on buildings and on people. What could happen, and how could it happen, that a reader would not expect to see the leavings of it in a book that takes place later in the fictional timeline but came first in our own?
In the end (picture several days of frustration, lox and bagels, and a ton of junk food), we chose to focus how the series would end in our understanding of the setting itself as character. Great cities, old cities, eternal cities are all places that rise and fall and rise again. They endure the unthinkable, the unlikely, and the unanticipated. And they take that in, work a nearly hidden magic, and turn it into myth.
For a place like Riverside the unthinkable, the unlikely, and the unanticipated could, in the end, only come from one source – the river which surrounds it, the river, which gives life and destroys and gives life again as it sees the need.
So as we say goodbye to Tremontaine with difficult losses, mystical secrets, wonderful adventures, and the sort of happily ever afters only the very best rogues and scoundrels ever get, we hope readers will fall in love one more time with a place that yes, we are leaving, but that we all get to visit again and again and whenever we want because such is the magic of living with stories as writers and readers.
Now… would anyone like some chocolate?
–Racheline Maltese
The Tremontaine Creative team were:
Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner’s paying jobs have included folksinger, book editor, national public radio host (Sound & Spirit/WGBH), writing teacher (Clarion, Odyssey, WRX, Hollins Child.Lit.MFA), audiobook narrator (all three Riverside novels for Neil Gaiman Presents) and pilgrim at Plimoth Plantation. Her Riverside novels begin with Swordspoint, followed by The Privelege of the Sword (Locus Award, Nebula nominee); The Fall of the Kings (writter with Delia Sherman) and a growing collection of short stories. She lives in New York City with Delia Sherman, no cats, and a whole lot of airplane and theater ticket stubs she just can’t bring herself to throw away. You can find her online at ellenkushner.com or on Twitter @EllenKushner.
Delia Sherman
Delia Sherman is the author of numerous short stories, as well as the novels Through a Brazen Mirror and the Porcelain Dove. She has judged the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, The James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She has taught SF and Fantasy writing at Odyssey: the Fantasy Writing Workshop, the Clarion Science Fcition & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, the Hollins University Graduate Program in Children’s Literature, the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, and workshops at colleges and science fiction conventions all over America. You can find her online at deliasherman.com or on Twitter @delisasherman.
Tessa Gratton
Tessa Gratton has wanted to be a paleontologist or a wizard since she was seven. After traveling the world with her military family, she acquired a BA (and the important parts of an MA) in Gender Studies, then settled down in Kansas to tell stories about monsters, magic, and kissing. She’s the author of The Blood Journals Series and Gods of New Asgard Series, co-author of YA writing books The Curiosities and The Anatomy of Curiosity, as well as dozens of short stories available in anthologies and on merryfates.com. In addition to Tremontaine, her current projects include The Queens of Innis Lear coming in 2018 from Tor. Visit her online at tessagratton.com or on Twitter @tessagratton.
Racheline Maltese
Racheline Maltese is a performer and storyteller focused on themes of loss, desire, and fame. With Erin McRae she co-writes the Love in Los Angeles LGBTQ+ contemporary romance series from Torquere Press and the Love’s Labours comptemporary gay romance series from Dreamspinner Press. From tentacle monsters that rule the New York City Subways to lesbian werewolf bodyguards in 19th century Rome, her short fiction is about the practical problems caused by fantastical events. Racheline also writers plays and poetry, and her non-fiction on all things pop-culture has been widely published. You can find her on Twitter @racheline_m.
Karen Lord
Barbadian author and research consultant Karen Lord is known for her debut novel Redemption in Indigo, which won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award, the 2010 Carl Brandon Parallax Award, the 2011 William L. Crawford Award, the 2011 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and the 2012 Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Best Debut), and was nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. She is the author of the science fiction duology The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, and the editor of the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean.
Joel Derfner
Joel Derfner is the author of Gay Haiku, Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever and What Ended Up Happening Instead, and Lawfully Wedded Husband: How My Gay Marriage Will Save the American Family. (Are you sending a theme?) Musicals to which he has composed the score have played in New York, London, and various cities in between (going counterclockwise). He lives, alas, in Brooklyn, along with his husband and their small, fluffy dog. You can find him online at joelderfner.com or on Twitter @joelderfner.
Liz Duffy Adams
Liz Duffy Adams created Whitehall for Serial Box. She is a playwright whose neo-Restoration comedy Or, has been produced over 50 times, including Off Broadway at Women’s Project, Magic Theater, and Seattle Rep. Her post-apocalyptic play Dog Act was published in “Geek Theater,” Underwords Press 2014, and produced by Flux Theatre Ensemble in New York among other places. Honors include a Lillian Hellman Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, Will Glickman Award (for Dog Act), and a New Dramatists residency. You can find her online at lizduffyadams.com
