Category: Fantasy

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Interview with Lynda Hilburn, Author of Blood Therapy

I asked my friend and author Lynda Hilburn to drop by and tell us about her books. Lynda and I share an interest in music and sound healing, higher consciousness, psychotherapy, and – vampires!

Would you please tell us a little about yourself?

I had to think about how to answer this. It’s not such an easy question anymore. On the surface, I’m a psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, tarot reader, energy worker, singer and vampire book writer. Years ago I would have added single mom, but my son is all grown now, so those challenges are no longer on the front burner. On a deeper level, I’m a seeker, a perpetual student, a devotee of crazy wisdom and an existential traveler.

Would you please tell us about your latest book?

My latest book is Blood Therapy, the second installment in the Kismet Knight, Vampire Psychologist series, which presents the ongoing tale of a Denver psychologist who stumbles into a hidden underworld of vampires. It blends genres, and can be widely categorized as dark contemporary fantasy with mystery, humor, romance, sex, metaphysics and a little horror.

What inspired you to write this series?

I’ve been a vampire fan since childhood (I blame Bram Stoker), but never thought about writing fiction myself until I met a young client in my private practice who spoke about wanting to join a non-human group. As she shared her desires, I began to notice similarities between her story and some of the vampire fiction I’d read. After she left, I thought about how amazing it would be to walk out into my waiting room and find a vampire (especially a gorgeous one) sitting there. I went home that night and started writing The Vampire Shrink (book #1).

How did you prepare to write about the book’s specific area or field of study?

That was easy. There wasn’t really any preparation. Since I’m a rabid fan of all things undead and a psychotherapist, writing about a psychologist who counsels vampires was a no-brainer.

How did you come up with your title?

I always liked the title Blood Therapy. It popped into my head a few years ago, and just seemed juicy. Luckily, my editor/publisher was agreeable. The title for The Vampire Shrink was a working title. I was very surprised when it stuck. My editor told me recently she thinks it’s one of the best titles, ever. Who knew?

What advice do you have for writers who have not yet been published?

The same boring advice everyone gives: write, write, write. I think writing is a “learn by doing” skill. At least it is for me. Don’t spend a lot of time reading “how to” books or attending endless workshops. Take what you learn from those resources and put your butt in the chair. Writing (if you want to make a living at it) is a job and it requires discipline and structure. There are more options available to writers today than ever before, so it’s truly a wonderful time to be an author. Remember that everyone benefits from good editing.

If your book were chocolate, what kind would it be and why?

LOL. Since it blends genres, I’d have to say it’s rich, dark chocolate, crammed with almonds, raisins, caramel, peanuts, and every other yummy treat found at the dessert bar.

What are you working on right now? What’s next for you?

I am finishing up the rewrite of book #3, Crimson Psyche, which I have to turn in within the month (ack!). After that I’ll start working on book 4, I’ll brainstorm another short story in Kismet’s world, and I’ll try my hand at another erotic paranormal romance. Plus the day job!

Thanks for having me!

Lynda Hilburn writes paranormal fiction. More specifically, she writes books about vampires, witches, ghosts, psychics and other supernatural creatures. After a childhood filled with invisible friends, sightings of dead relatives and a fascination with the occult, turning to the paranormal was a no-brainer. In her other reality, she makes her living as a licensed psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, professional psychic/tarot reader, university instructor and workshop presenter. Her first novel, “The Vampire Shrink” — which introduced us to Denver Psychologist Kismet Knight and a hidden vampire underworld — was released in the UK by Quercus/Jo Fletcher Books, Sept., 2011 and in the USA by Sterling Publishing [Barnes & Noble], April, 2012. Book #2 in the series, “Blood Therapy,” was published September, 2012 in the UK [plus the USA kindle version]. The USA print edition will arrive April, 2013. Book #3, Crimson Psyche, is due in the UK in 2013. Several other books are planned. “Undead in the City,” an erotic paranormal novella, “Diary of a Narcissistic Bloodsucker,” a satire/parody, “Until Death Do Us Part,” a humorous mini-story, “Devereux: The Night Before Kismet” are now available in e-form from all e-book outlets. Her short story, “Blood Song,” is part of the Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance anthology, April, 2009. For more information, visit Lynda’s website: http://www.lyndahilburnauthor.com

 

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#3–The Great Traveling Fantasy Round Table

Sylvia Kelso—In Gratitude for Fantasists

 

 “Barren crags and ancient forests, winds scented with honey, wolf, wildflowers, swift water so pure it tasted like the wind, deep snow lying tranquilly beneath moonlight, summer light cascading down stone under sky so bright it held no color. These he put into his making… Shapes he had taken in his long  life mingled together as swiftly as his body remembered them: the white owl in winter, the golden hawk, ferret and weasel and mink, stone, wind, the tree smelling of sun-soaked pitch, water thundering over stone, endlessly falling, the stag that drank the water … He remembered faces he had loved, of friend and lover, teacher and ruler, their eyes speaking his name, Atrix Wolfe, beginning to smile.”  (The Book of Atrix Wolfe,Ch. 23. p. 238)

The great shape-shifting mage Atrix Wolfe created a death-dealing spell whose ravages occupy most of the book. Here he finally creates a counter-spell, ranging through all the aspects of his life. It’s also a passage that typifies why Patricia McKillip, for me, is a gratitude among fantasists.

I like many fantasy writers, but few achieve permanent lighthouse status. A handful of small but telling oeuvres, Sheri S. Tepper’s Gameworld books. Ellen Kushner, E. R. Edison. Samuel Delany. Joanna Russ. Tolkien, of course. Unlike Tolkien, McKillip’s work never radically altered my outlook or my writing style, but even now, I wish it could. 

McKillip, however, has been around a while. Her fantasy novels run almost uninterrupted from The  Forgotten Beasts of Eld in 1974, up to The Bards of Bone Plain in 2010. Eld  won the World Fantasy Award, but nothing since has missed a nomination or finalist position in some award, if not a win. From the passage above you can begin to see why.

First and foremost, McKillip is the only fantasy writer I know who operates usually at the rare level of language Tolkien himself only achieved every so often, as when, describing Cerin Amroth, he used the commonest words – “ gold, white, blue, green, tree, grass, flower” and yet drew with them “shapes that seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived” [that moment] “and ancient as if they had endured forever” (The Fellowship of the  Ring, Book II Ch VI.) But in Atrix Wolfe here alone we have: “wind scented with honey, wolf, wildflowers,” “summer light cascading down stone”, “the tree smelling of sun-soaked pitch.” This passage is a major aria, so to speak, a cornucopia of life-images, but such examples appear everywhere. Simple words, often repeated, particularly words like “bone, wind, light.” Used mostly unadorned, but magnificently resonant.

The language may be “simple.” The narratives are not. They deal with magic, and many shift between worlds, or between faerie and “earth” of some sort,  or between then and now. Joanna Russ once wrote, “Harlequins say it over and over. I only say it once.” McKillip often doesn’t even say it once. The reader has to sit up and work, as we used to say about cutting-out horses, to figure how we got from There to Here and where Here might be, and if Here is a dream or not. The novels following Atrix Wolfe are particularly good at these “twitches.” In Winter Rose, the shifts from wood to farm, from past to present, and between the enchanted hero Corbet Lynn’s doubled –sometimes tripled – realities are as fast and can be as bewildering for the reader as they are for the characters. Was that a dream? Or an event? Or symbolism? After 12 years and more than 12 readings for the similarly “shifty” The Tower at Stony Wood,  I am just now firmly figuring out what happened where and when and to whom.

This quality of enacting rather than just talking about interaction with other realities doubtless explains why McKillip doesn’t often appear on the popular awards lists like the Hugo.  For McKillip, you are better to be one of those who, to borrow Huck Finn’s review of Pilgrims’ Progress, like their statements interesting but tough.

There are other felicities peculiar to McKillip. Her characters are memorable and ever-differentiated, and they have charisma, yes, but Can Do Characters is only just up the writing pyramid from Can Spell and Can Tell a Story. As might be expected, McKillip can also do beautiful settings and thunderous events, but she is one of the rare fantasists who draws music deeply into her work. Often music is integrated with magic, as in the Riddlemaster trilogy that ended with Harpist in the Wind. There, though, music leans rather towards hand-waving: Morgon strikes smashing notes from the harp, or he “plays the winds” or other such nebulous events. Later, music becomes more immediate. Here are musicians talking in the kitchen in Atrix Wolfe.

“’Fanfares,’ they said, ‘first and second, and third, the one Lefeber wrote, and then, … with the second wine, the Silvan fanfare, which you always take too fast, and there is a rest between the second cadence –‘” (Ch. 7, p 84.) Magic has happened here, these musicians will sound for a king’s feast. But this is also the nitty gritty of playlists and squabbles over timing you find among real musicians anywhere.

Music provides the vehicle of magic in Song for the Basilisk and Bards of Bone Plain too, but these books include some of McKillip’s more wicked invented instruments. The small, red-mouthed bone pipe Caladrius finds in the wild and with which he eventually destroys the Basilisk, is both eerie and imposing. But the music magister Giulia  plays with a tavern group, using the “farmer’s instrument” the picochet. “’It has a square hollow body, a very long neck, and a single string. You play it like a viol, between your knees, with a bow’.” (Basilisk, 43.) When her bass-pipe player hands Giulia hers, he says “’Don’t break the windows with it’”(31.)

A similarly anarchic bagpipe appears briefly in Bards, and full length in the short story “A Matter of Music,” with the “lovely reedy cothone that looked like a cow’s bag with eight teats” and which its owner plays “only when she was asked.” The cothone and the picochet tie together McKillip’s knowledge and love of music and the will-o-the-wisp humor that flits through her work. Like Tolkien, she has a comic element as rarely seen as it is to be prized. It can even be black, as during the duel amid the treasure in the dragon’s tower in The  Tower at Stony Wood: “He caught a boot in the throat, that knocked him into a clatter of plate and some astonishing gold armor, filched, apparently while occupied, from a coronation ceremony”(Stony, Ch. 18.)

And then, a consummation not always to be found in notable fantasy writers, there are McKillip’s gender politics. Writing when second-wave feminism had already shown women writers how to change the masculinist narrative configurations of older fantasy, McKillip has no trouble making her women wizards, power-centers, decision-makers for the narrative, as well as heroines, victims and all the usual female roles. Even in Eld, wizardry is the woman’s power. Nyx in The Sorceress and the Cygnet is only one in the succession of such wizards, elemental powers, and even goddesses.

The Tower at Stony Wood is perhaps my favourite McKillip novel, having the most perfect version of all these characteristics: the language, simple yet achingly numinous. The magic, erratic, unexpected, fierce but also whimsical. The “women’s work” – weaving, sewing, embroidery – that composes the novel’s motifs, and the stunning reprise on “The Lady of Shalott,” no longer a passive victim in her mirror-cell. Most of all the fine balance between kings and knights and women of power,  from the triple goddesses who oversee the action to the woman whose magic compels peace between kingdoms: Sel, who as she says in the Gloinmere palace gate, is also “’the baker from Stony Wood’”  (Stony,Ch. 26, 269.)

Which raises my final cause for gratitude. Most high fantasy focuses on the nobility. But in her best novels, McKillip doesn’t just turn a farmer-prince into a world-ruler; she can take a baker,  and in Atrix Wolfe, an apparently mute scullery drudge, and transform them too into figures of magic and power. Best of all, she does it for women as well as men.

 Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.

Deborah J. Ross—Marjorie Torrey & Marjorie Fischer

In this season of appreciation, I’m aware of how many writers – some household names, others obscure – have gone before me and influenced not only my work but my life. The list of the legendary will surely illicit, “Oh yes, I loved that person’s work.” I love hearing stories of how the right book at the right time had lasting transformative effects.

I want especially to acknowledge two writers whose names I almost never see mentioned, yet who inspired me. Interestingly, they were both named Marjorie. They wrote two of my very most favorite children’s stories. Long before I could read for myself, my mother read them to me, night after night. For those of us fortunate enough to have memories of being read to as small children, those books retain a luminously magical aura. Sometimes, alas, they don’t stand up well to being re-read as adults. I have no doubt that some of those I treasured would disappoint me greatly. I find these two books as delightful today as they was 60 years ago.

 

Artie and the Princess, by Marjorie Torrey, Howell Soskin,1945. Marjorie Torrey was a writer and illustrator in the ’40s and ’50s, with 2 Caldecott awards and several successful mysteries under the pen name Torrey Chanslor. She was born in 1899 and seems to have dropped out of the literary scene some time in the ’50s.

I don’t believe my parents actually bought this book. It had a Christmas gift sticker on the flyleaf, now so peeled off as to be illegible, and an inscription from some folks we didn’t know. The binding’s all but disintegrated and many of the illustrations have been adorned with my own crayon scribbles. but the paper, thick and soft, has worn well.

Artie is a little dragon who lives with his parents in a forest. There’s something missing from his life, “little playmates his own age,” as his Mamma puts it. In search of friends, he wanders far off and comes to a beautiful mountain top.

   “Hello,” said a soft voice. And from the tall grass, quite near him, rose a little creature with blue eyes and pink cheeks and yellow pig-tails. She had on a red dress and a gold crown. She was exactly as tall as Artie himself (though not the same shape) and the prettiest thing he had ever seen in his life. So of course he knew hat she was.

   “Hello, Princess!” he said.

   The Princess rubbed her eyes. Artie guessed that she had been asleep. He was sure of it when she said:

   “You’re really true, aren’t you? You’re not a dream — you can speak!”

   “Why of course I can speak. Of course I’m real!” said Artie.

   Then he remembered all the strange things that had happened to him, and he thought, Perhaps I am dreaming!

   He grabbed the tip of his tail and pinched it, hard.

   “Ouch!” he said.

   “See?” he said to the Princess. “Now you pinch me, and you’ll be sure.” He held out his paw.

   The Princess took it, but she didn’t pinch it. She just nodded and smiled.

   “Yes, you’re real,” she said. “And I like you. My name is Princess Ann. but I’m called Pandy. What is your name, little Dragon?”

   Artie said, “My name is Artemus Peter Edward Adelbert Jehosophat Dragon. But I’m called Artie.”

   “Well,” said Princess Pandy, “let’s play, shall we?”

Looking back, thinking about the tense, lonely child I was, Artie and Pandy were exactly the friends I longed for. I drank in every moment of their play. Of course, all does not run smoothly for our friends. The problems (a rude, vengeful cousin Prince Otto and his equally arrogant father) are countered with gentle strength as Artie (and later his parents), who remember how to fly and to breathe fire in defense of those they love. As an adult, I can throw around terms like empowerment, but for a child, a friend who was not only playful but protective struck all the right emotional notes. Artie may have had the physical might, but it was Pandy’s unerring sense of fairness and generosity that taught him how to use his strength wisely.

Red Feather by Marjorie Fischer, with illustrations by Davine; Modern Age Books, 1937. My favorite childhood books all came from someone else. This one had my brother’s name on the inside cover. He was 11 years older than I, my half-brother, and lived with his mother rather than with my family, so I suspect there is an interesting story in how I happened to come by the book, but not one I ever knew. I must have been older than I was when I got Artie and the Princess, for I made no attempt to colorize the illustrations. The book would be considered a “chapter book,” 151 pages long, with lots of pictures but lots of text, too, with lovely spoken rhythms for reading aloud.

Red Feather is a changeling story. The usual scenario is that the fairies exchange one of their own babies for a human child, only in this case, the swap is interrupted. The resemblance is so close that when they return, they can’t tell which is which. It makes a difference because the fairy child is nobly-born and the human child is destined to be the scullery maid for the Fairy Queen. In this world, only mortals are any good at housework. We follow the one the fairies take back, and like most children, she feels that she doesn’t belong, she can’t do anything right, she longs to be somewhere else. It’s a variation of the “prince-in-hiding” Harry Potter “special-child” theme.

   “When my mother finds out that the scullery maid she has planned so long to get may be a fairy instead of a mortal, she will punish all of us,” said the little lad.

   “That is so,” said Michael. “she has spent days over ancient books of magic, and she has found that no fairy ever dusted as well as a mortal.”

   “I was with her when she planned the changeling,” said another fairy. “‘How difficult it is to get good servants,’ she said to me, and then she made this plan.”

   “She must never know,” said Michael. “we must all vow never to breathe to a fairy soul that we could not tell one baby from the other.”

   “And now take one of them and let us be gone.”

   “Aye, take one of them.”

   Amanda had stepped back near the fireplace, and now the honest warmth of the wood fire seemed to spread deep inside her.

   “I will not have my child a scullery maid,” she said, and a real tear ran down her beautiful face.

Re-reading the story, I think of a time when categories of books were not so rigid. The story begins like a fairy tale, “Once upon a time,” and in slow stages becomes a love story, a coming-of-age story, a story about longing and isolation, a journey of self discovery and personal power, all with a gentle understanding of each character. I went through a period of not being able to read it without wincing at the way “fairy” has changed — certainly, a beautiful young man with long, flowing hair dressed in tights who admits he is a fairy means something quite different today than it did in 1937, and I myself had to grow up enough to be easy with sexual connotations so I could read the book entirely in its own terms.

An interesting historical perspective comes from the Publisher’s Note: “The two major barriers that have stood between writer and reader have been the high cost of new books and their narrow channels of distribution. MODERN AGE BOOKS have overcome these obstacles. By the use of modern, high-speed presses manufacturing costs have been drastically reduced… and by using magazine distribution channels, new books, for the first time, have been made easily available to everyone.”

Wherever you are, Marjorie Torrey and Marjorie Fischer, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Deborah Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV’S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA’S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

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#2–The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Guest Blog – November

In part two, Chris Howard celebrates the work of Terry Pratchett and Valjeanne Jeffers talks about three Cherokee writers, William Sanders, Thomas King (a personal favorite) and Daniel Heath Justice. Enjoy.

Chris Howard—Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is one of the biggest names in fantasy literature.  He’s a bestselling author in the UK and US. His books have been made into movies and translated into dozens of languages.  He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire, he was knighted, he’s won the Carnegie Award, and he has early-onset Alzheimers.

            Instead of looking broadly at Pratchett’s extraordinary accomplishments and uncertain future, I want to narrow the focus to one accomplishment, Pratchett’s gift of an entire world—a fascinating, complex, and fundamentally comic place called Discworld.  He has given it us to explore in dozens of books, so I’m also going to try to convince those who have not walked the streets of Ankh-Morpork or the forests under Überwald to take their first step.

Like a lot book series in fantasy, science fiction, and literature in general, we may have to find our own way in.

For me it started with the Guards—Guards! Guards!

I didn’t begin reading Pratchett with the wizards and the Colour of Magic, the first in the chronologically written order of the books.  I began with Sam Vimes and the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork, and somewhere around forty books later I can look back on all the reading and re-reading of Terry Pratchett’s work and realize I never left Discworld.  I just have to hear the name Weatherwax, Vetinari, the snapping shutters of the clacks, or anything off the list of Abominations Unto Nuggan, and I’m there.  It’s like I went on a two-week Hawaiian vacation in the early ’90s, and years later discovered that I had apparently settled down just outside Honolulu.

Talking to Pratchett fans, it’s clear everyone has a favorite story series in the Discworld books, the Witches—especially Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg (but don’t forget Tiffany Aching and the Wee Free Men), Rincewind and the Wizards, Vimes and the City Watch books—with Lord Vetinari, mostly looming in the background, occasionally stepping in to shift lives and cities and wars toward what usually turns out to be a promising outcome.

And it all began in front of a mysterious door on a dark street, in the pouring rain, in the great city of Ankh-Morpork:

            The figure rapped a complex code on the dark woodwork. A tiny barred hatch opened and one suspicious eye peered out.

            “The significant owl hoots in the night,” said the visitor, trying to wring the rainwater out of its robe.

            “Yet many grey lords go sadly to the masterless men,” intoned a voice on the other side of the grille.

            “Hooray, hooray for the spinster’s sister’s daughter,” countered the dripping figure.

            “To the axeman, all supplicants are the same height.”

            “Yet verily, the rose is within the thorn.”

            “The good mother makes bean soup for the errant boy,” said the voice behind the door.

            There was a pause, broken only by the sound of the rain. Then the visitor said, “What?”

            “The good mother makes bean soup for the errant boy.”

            There was another, longer pause. Then the damp figure said, “Are you sure the ill-built tower doesn’t tremble mightily at a butterfly’s passage?”

            “Nope. Bean soup it is. I’m sorry.”

            The rain hissed down relentlessly in the embarrassed silence.

            “What about the caged whale?” said the soaking visitor, trying to squeeze into what little shelter the dread portal offered.

            “What about it?”

            “It should know nothing of the mighty deeps, if you must know.”

            “Oh, the caged whale. You want the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. Three doors down.”

This passage shows the comic side, but it doesn’t take long to realize the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night are going to overthrow the government, and they’re going to use lies, terror, and chaos to do it.  Sure, it’s going to involve a dragon summoned with the use of a stolen magic book, a puppet king, and there’s also some potential human sacrificing, and an orangutan who happens to be a librarian seeking the lost book.  But it’s also about reviving or staying true to your sense of justice.  It’s about a directionless, drunkard city watch captain, Vimes, who discovers that it doesn’t matter how low a man has fallen he can’t lose the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and he can always climb back up and make things right.

That is the brilliance of Terry Pratchett.  He has taken the “map is not the territory” concept to unique and beautifully detailed levels, applying his own map of Discworld to our territory, our world, our changing cultures, environment, and advances in technology.  Through the eyes, hearts, and minds of Vimes, Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and all the other Discworlders we see and feel and contend with their hopes and fears, the rise and decline of civilizations, gender and race inequality, with shared controversies and acts of courage, with everyday hostility and kindness.

And Guards! Guards! is just one book out of about forty, eighth in the sequence, and to many Pratchett readers—I include myself—the stories only get better as you go along. If I had to pick three for desert island reading I would go with Going Postal, Night Watch, and Monstrous Regiment.  With so many amazing books it’s not easy to choose, but I think I would stand by those three.

If you’re not already a Pratchett reader, have I convinced you to pick up one of the books?

Don’t blame yourself.

I fail miserably every time I attempt to explain Terry Pratchett’s books to someone who has never heard of Discworld, Granny Weatherwax, the Ramtops, or the notion of belligerent cheese—like the Lancre Blue, which has “to be nailed to the table to stop it attacking other cheeses.”  I have tried to explain the clacks—the long distance semaphore-based communications system that in some ways mimics modern technologies like email and the Internet, including a thriving hacker subculture, the business of operating the systems, and the struggles around who controls it.  I quote funny lines, or try to explain the footnotes, the disc and the elephants all on the back of Great A’Tuin, or that Jingo is about prejudice and war, and Wyrd Sisters is about propaganda and the good or evil influence that words can have on history and even reality.

As Terry Pratchett’s books have grown in worldwide popularity, the problem of having to explain these things has diminished, even if the difficulty remains.

It is Pratchett’s ability to weave serious and sublime themes into blended fabrics of rough cloth, Klatchian silk, and silly string.  In every Discworld story you will find an astounding complexity, cleverness, imagination, and poignancy bound together with humor—and I mean serious laugh out loud while you’re reading by yourself comedy.  That’s also what binds Pratchett fans together.  All of us live in Discworld to some extent, and the only thing I can say to those who don’t is pick up Guards! Guards! Or Wyrd Sisters, Going Postal, or The Wee Free Men.  Start somewhere.  Just take a walk through Pratchett’s world.  I dare you to come away with the same view of this world, because every Discworld book has some alchemical mixture of those enduring Pratchett elements: painfully serious, brilliantly silly, but most important, simply and universally human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld

Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books)
and half a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. In 2007, his story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of other books, blogs, and places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

Valjeanne Jeffers—A harvest of Native America Fantasy

The month of November is reminiscent of orange-ringed harvest moons, piles of flying leaves and succulent dishes… For some it calls to mind the Norman Rockwell moment frozen in time when Pilgrims and “Indians” sat down to dinner in a picture-perfect afternoon of brotherly love, peace and thanksgiving.

I instead envision Native American writers moving through the stacks of speculative fiction. So I thought it would be particularly apt in November to showcase the harvest of Native American SF/fantasy that I recently became acquainted with: The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, written by Cherokee author William Sanders, Green Grass, Running Water by Cherokee author Albert King, and The Way of Thorn and Thunder by Cherokee author Daniel Heath Justice.

The Ballad of Billy Badass is a literary protest of the crimes against Native American peoples woven into a tale of a battle against preternatural evil. In Green Grass, Running Water fantasy and myth are humorously used to explore the middle ground between the modern and the traditional. And The Way of Thorn and Thunder is a high fantasy journey that address the destruction of Indigenous magic and culture by conquest– a journey which has been described as just as epic as J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings.

Thus, Sanders, King and Justice use science fiction and fantasy quite brilliantly to create a dialogue between past and present… sociopolitical dialogue which is perhaps even more effective because it is spoken through the mouths of their characters.

Writing is transformative. We transform the past and present through the power of written words whether through our characters’ raucous laughter, cries of rage, lonely voices in the wilderness, or sobs of melancholy. In doing so we inform the future. This is just as true of science fiction/fantasy authors as of any other genre. As writers, we give birth to ourselves and our experiences–often making statements about the world around us whether we intend to or not. This, I believe, is our greatest harvest. Our gift, our offering to the world.

Unquestionably it is something to be thankful for.

Valjeanne Jeffers is a SF/fantasy writer and a graduate of Spelman College. She is the author of the Immortal series and The Switch II: Clockwork (this volume includes The Switch I and The Switch II). Valjeanne has been published in numerous anthologies including: Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology and Steamfunk! (in press). She is also co-owner of Q &V Affordable Editing. http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com

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The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Guest Blog

Welcome to the Great Travelling Round Table Fantasy Blog. This month, we in the northern hemisphere have been celebrating harvests and thanksgiving feasts while our friends down south have been watching their crops grow strong and green under a strengthening sun. Both of these give us thoughts of gratitude and plenty, so we thought we talk about the greats of science fiction this month. In the first installment, Carole McDonnell pays homage to Lord Dunsany, Andrea Hosth to Andre Norton, and Warren Rochelle to Ursula K. LeGuin.

Carole McDonnell—Lord Dunsany

November is harvest and gratitude month, so the travelling tour is about the bounty of our favorite fantasy writer, or the best ones, or the best known ones. The one’s we’re grateful for—that make us read fantasy.

I suppose if gratitude is about fairness, I should begin (in all fairness) with the homegrown storytellers. My grandmother, my grandfather Uncle Bertie, my uncle Winston, my aunt, and my mother. When I was growing up in Jamaica –in the city but especially in the country– there was no electronic entertainment. My There was maybe a TV but it was turned off pretty early. And there was also radio. But for the most part, those dark nights were spent with books, my mother’s favorite English authors, or someone telling a riddle or a story. I especially loved riddles because they showed a logic –a game– that the mind had to struggle to understand.

Books, themselves, were few and far between and my mother, coming from an oral culture, could repeat the beginning of her favorite novels — her favorite authors being Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.

On my own I discovered Shakespeare. Hamlet is fantasy, right? I also discovered Edgar Allen Poe. And without trying to, I ended up memorizing the opening of the Tell Tale Heart. I especially liked Poe’s gothic worlds where the psychological and the fantastical met together in a surreal world of unreliable narrators.

But the story that took my heart away and that opened worlds for me was Lord Dunsany’s Ghost. Readings of this story can be found here among other stories in the librivox collection 004 and here read individually at Miette’s Bedtime podcast http://www.miettecast.com/2006/03/21/the-ghosts/.

Sure, I loved The Sword of Welleran, and the world Welleran inhabited, a rich world like all of Dunsany’s worlds. But the craft, the suddenness, the weird paradox of believer in ghost/non-believer in ghost…the sheer science of the epic fantasy battle. It was as if the narrator of Ghosts was fighting against what he sensed was the unreliability of the world and he was not going to allow himself to fall into it.

Of all Dunsany’s works, Ghosts — for me– has stood the test of time. OR the test of rationality. OR the test of faith. When I first read Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

I loved it but found some of it too much. The language was too ornate, almost overdone. Now, I can make it through the language of Elfland…and there are moments where Dunsany’s tendency to indulge beautiful language bores me or annoys me because it is excessive. I also have found myself balking at his easy disdain of Christianity, something I  tolerated or ignored in the past but which now irks me because I sense an overbearing meanspiritedness in it. The story is beautiful but it’s hard to love a story that subtly –or not so subtly– sneers at one’s religion.

But Ghosts will always be a favorite.  Listen to the story here at  Miette’s Bedtime podcast http://www.miettecast.com/2006/03/21/the-ghosts/  and see if you don’t fall in love with it.

Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/

Andrea Hosth—The Greats of Fantasy, Andre Norton

I expect everyone has a different definition of who a “great” of fantasy is, and part of the basis for that definition will be the circumstances in which the writer was encountered.

For instance, I read all the Harry Potter books and enjoyed them thoroughly (except, perhaps, Harry Potter and the Extended Camping Trip), but J K Rowling doesn’t fall into my own personal set of “greats”.  I’m well aware that my reaction of “Hey, those were some fun books, a bit like The Books of Magic, and a bit like Witch Week – Hermione was cool, and Snape is nicely grey, but boy did Draco’s character arc turn into a damp squib,” falls far short of the sheer veneration awarded by a generation where a Potter book was a major event, a shared coming together which no other book or writer will ever offer.

All of which is a long-winded caveat to note that “great” is a highly subjective term, and that when I approached this subject and tried to find some objective standard of “greatness”, the most I could come up with is “really loved this, will go back for more and more and more”.  So what fantasy writers are great to me?  And why?

Almost always it comes down to “girls doing stuff”, but I’ll talk about a writer whose books were often an exception to that rule.

Andre Norton, although she was acknowledged as a Grand Master of both Science Fiction and of Fantasy, rarely shows up these days on lists of “Greats”.  Her books, ranging from the Witch World series, her magic books for children, and her many space novels, aren’t held up as examples of brilliant and lyrical writing, or complex and searching psychological portraits, or extrapolations of advancements in technology on what it means to be human.

They’re kick-ass adventures though.

Sheer adventure – the grip of the story, the need to know what happens next – a writer who can serve that up over and over will catch me every time.

Along with adventure, Norton gives us an eerie, almost alien voice, and outsider protagonists whose predicaments and dogged endurance make you want them to find some place to call their own.  Norton’s story are full of people trying to find their place – refugees, outcasts, and the different.

Norton’s influence is all through my work.  I repeatedly write time-displaced people, alone, needing a place to call theirs.  Her effortless blend of science fiction and fantasy may well be why a spaceship showed up in my very first high fantasy attempt.  The idea of Forerunners permeates my world-building.

And I love trying to put together a plot which keeps drawing the reader to find out what happens next.

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com

Warren Rochelle—Thank you, Ursula K. Le Guin

One of my former students recently told me that while she appreciated Ursula K. Le Guin and understood her place and significance in the pantheon of American science fiction and fantasy, she just didn’t care for her work.

Sigh.

Clearly I have failed her.

Or—seriously—the student didn’t connect to Le Guin’s fiction as I did, and as I still continue to do. Her loss (and I thought she was such a nice person …). For me, Le Guin, is one of a small number of writers who changed my life and profoundly influenced my own fiction and my teaching. As I have written about this influence in more detail in another essay, “A Wave in My Mind” (Paradoxa 21 (2008): 293-309), I want to focus on just one particular node or point of influence in this thank-you essay, the power and strength of storytelling, especially as it is concerned with the Other, the “not-us,” and why I think this matters, and thus, why I am grateful to Ursula K. Le Guin.

Le Guin argues, in her oft-quoted essay, “Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” that . . . “the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have no societies that did not tell stories” (The Living Light 7 (Fall 1970): 112). She uses this tool in Earthsea Revisioned (Cambridge, MA: Children’s Literature New England, 1993) to examine a particular story, that of the Hero and the Quest, or the Monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, and suggests it can provide even greater understanding of the human condition if the myth is reinterpreted and reimagined.

In the traditional Monomyth, “The hero is a man” and “the hero-tale has concerned the establishment or validation of manhood. It has been the story of a quest, or a conquest, or a test, or contest. It has involved conflict and sacrifice” (7).  And it is about men—and in the Western European tradition a white man. In the first three books of the Earthsea cycle, while using the traditional elements of the myth—the public quest, conflict and sacrifice, the public grail, and so on—Le Guin, through Ged, asks what if the hero is a man of color and all the villains, white? What if the hero is the Other, one of society’s Outsiders? In Tehanu, the fourth Earthsea novel, she goes a step further: the hero of the novel is a woman and one without overt power, who performs her tasks in private, on a far smaller scale than that of the first three novels. What, then, if the hero is Othered by gender? What assumptions and beliefs are challenged, and questioned, what is learned about human experience and the human condition through these challenges and questions?

In The Dispossessed, Shevek and Bedap are friends and they love each other as adolescents. Separated by time and circumstance, they reunite in Abbenay, the main city on their world. This friendship is reaffirmed; trust is re-established, in this reunion, through sex. Bedap is primarily homosexual; Shevek, heterosexual. But on Anarres, the taboos and boundaries we accept as givens don’t exist. That Bedap and Shevek can express their feelings physically is unremarkable. The Other that both men would be in our society doesn’t exist.

That Le Guin has included these challenges in her fiction, that she demands her readers see the Other as human, as themselves, is one key reason that I am grateful for and to this writer.  She deconstructs the Other and Otherness and what remains is our common humanity. As a gay man, I am, to many, Other—alien, not human, not us.  While Le Guin is not the only writer of fantasy or of science fiction to challenge the Others we have constructed, she is the one whose stories resonated—and still resonate—for me. I saw myself; I was present and accounted for.

So what? In the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explains why this matters: “But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.” Fiction is a lie that tells the truth. I tell my students in intro creative writing that, above all, they must tell the truth, even as they make up their stories. Through the metaphor of fantasy, Le Guin is telling the truth: there is no Other, except for those we construct ourselves out of misconceptions and ignorance and fear.

For doing this, for telling this truth in fantasy, I will always be grateful to Le Guin.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010). He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. He is currently at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and a collection of short stories. One of the collection’s stories, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published Queer Fish, Volume 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, http://pinknarc.com) in October 2012.

Website: http://warrenrochelle.com

 

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Great Fantasy Travelling Round Table Guest Blog #5 — Borders of Fantasy

Welcome to the Great Fantasy Travelling Round Table

Our topic this month is The Borderlands. Where are the boundaries of the fantasy genre? When does it become something else, like mystery or literary fiction or magical realism? What are the borders between fantasy and reality, or is reality just plain magical?

I talk about discovering what I really write. Deborah J. Ross discusses crossover novels. This month also includes a discussion of one of my former writing professors, Fred Chappell, writer of poetry and literary fiction from Warren Rochelle. Carole McDonnell declares writers of magical realism should believe in magic—except even people who believe in magic don’t believe in the same kind of magic. Sylvia Kelso ends with a series of great quotes and discussion of the problems of classifying genre, plus an excerpt from a #wip.

Theresa Crater – How I became a Mystery Writer

My first novel had just been published and OMG was I excited. I drove to the closest bookstore to see it on the shelves. I’d been practicing my visualization beforehand. You know, going to the shelf and placing your finger between the two books yours would be shelved with. So I head over to the fantasy section, go to C—look for Crater. It’s not there. I go to the bookstore computer, check for my title – to find it in the mystery section.

What, mystery? I go over there. It’s on the shelf right beneath Dan Brown, who’d just come out with The Da Vinci Code. I thought, “Sweet!” as my students say. “It’s really fantasy, but this works.”

I’ve since discovered that it really is a mystery. I threw in the towel and changed the banners on my websites from fantasy to mystery. Even after my bad guy turned out to be a supernatural being. Is the second one in the series fantasy because of that? But what’s the difference between fantasy and mystery?

Where it’s shelved in the store, mostly.

Bookstores sort of invented fiction subgenres to handle customer flow. The figured out people read types of books fairly reliably, so instead of shelving them all alphabetically, it helped readers know where they westerns were so they wouldn’t brush shoulders with the literary fiction readers. Well, not really, but if a reader can browse the types of books they like all together in one section, they’re likely to buy more.

Mysteries are plot driven. Clues, miscues and then a final discovery. They don’t usually include elements of the fantastic. Except lately. With the upsurge in fantasy books and films, the fantastic is creeping out of its ghetto and invading even the high-brow literary world.

Where does that leave writers who create a story that has a strong mystery – but don’t all stories have an element of mystery to them, like what’s going to happen – with elements of the fantastic, like ancient temples, visions, and Egyptian goddesses (called Neters, my Egyptologist partner is going to say to me). Lots of folks write between the borders of genres. That’s how we get paranormal romance or alternative history.

“Know your genre,” screenwriter and teacher Robert McKee admonishes. “Know the conventions of your genre.” One of the first rules of writing. My critique groups asks, “But what genre is it?” about my latest. It’s important because I need to know who to approach to publish it and how to market it. I tell them it’s a mystery and they look skeptical. Why? It has visions in it. Paranormal stuff.

“Does anybody else write like this?” they ask. I start reeling off a list of writers, then realize they all write thrillers. Mine’s not fast enough to be a thriller. Can you write a cozy thriller? I don’t think so. Depression descends. Wait, it’s a paranormal cozy mystery. Yes, that’s a real subgenre.

Geez, isn’t this a little nuts? Is it a good story that’s well written? Will readers buy it? Why all the hoopla?

Like I said, bookstores.

But wait. The publishing industry just reported that more eBooks were 31 percent of the market 2011. Close to $2 billion (yeah, billion).

What’s that got to do with genre? Shelving. EBooks don’t get shelved. The computer analyzes what you buy and suggests similar books, not just based on genre, but other tag words as well.

Bob Dylan said it best. “Oh the times they are a’changin’.”

Theresa Crater has published two paranormal mysteries, Under the Stone Paw and Beneath the Hallowed Hill. Under her pen name Louise Ryder, she’s published GLBT and metaphysical fiction, God in a Box. Her recent short fiction includes “White Moon” in Ride the Moon and “Bringing the Waters” in Aether Age:  Helios. She’s published a baker’s dozen of literary criticism and one lone poem. http://theresacrater.com

Deborah J. Ross – The Borderlands of Fantasy

To begin with, fantasy itself comprises a borderland. Sometimes it’s between waking and sleep, or sleep and dreams, or our wildest wishes and our most stoic resignation. Good fantasy includes elements of magic or the supernatural as part of its essential world-building. This implies a world that bears some resemblance to our own, whether it involves human beings and our cultures, familiar animals (horses, wolves, cats), spoken languages, medicine or music, cities or villages, histories, or the principles of warfare. Fantasy often includes adventure and romantic elements (with or without Romance), and much of it is set in a lower-technology culture than our own, giving it the sensibilities of historical fiction. (I once found Katherine Kurtz’s “Deryni” books shelved with Historical Fiction in the public library.)

Crossover genre fiction blends elements from more than one established, otherwise clearly-defined genre. Often this involves grafting elements of one type of fiction onto another: a detective solves a mystery in the Wild West; elves and unicorns play out their drama in Central Park; characters find true love on a space ship. One of the most interesting aspects of these blendings is that rarely is the reader in doubt as to which is the root genre and which is the graft. Paranormal Romance does not read like fantasy with a love story; much military science fiction is military fiction that happens to be set in space, with alien rather than human adversaries. This is not, of course, a hard and fast rule, but it does explain why certain crossovers appeal to certain readers: the heart of the story, its driving energy, remains the love story or the heroic quest or the solving of a mystery.

Many readers adore crossovers, me among them. Part of the fun is “having your cake and eating it, too.” Wouldn’t it be grand to take the cool bits from each of the genres you love and mash them all together in one book? Such an exercise must be approached with care, lest the result be a mish-mosh without center or structure. What makes one type of fiction work may be antithetical to the ground rules of another. The defining reading experience of a police procedural, for example, does not readily share equal emphasis with that of an epic fantasy. The scales, the stakes, and the focus are different, and rarely is it possible to maintain both sets of expectations in a way that one does not dominate and that results in a satisfying read.

In the example I gave earlier, the core of a paranormal romance is the establishment and escalation of romantic and sexual tension between two characters; they may go on adventures and have to wrestle with supernatural forces or destroy magical gadgets, but the central question is the resolution of their mutual attraction; the plot structure, like that of other Romances, often involves misunderstandings or some other obstacles to their relationship. In contrast, a story like Kate Elliott’s marvelous “Spiritwalker” series includes a love story, but in no way is that the primary interest of the heroine and hero. In Jennifer Roberson’s “Sword Dancer” books, the attraction between Tiger and Del is ever-present, but it is only one aspect of their complex relationship, and each must pursue his or her separate goals as well. I mention these two because although solidly within the fantasy genre, they also appeal strongly to Romance readers without being Romance.

Recently we’ve seen a series of novels that take an established time period, set of historical events, or style of novel, and introduce magical elements. I am thinking of books like Naomi Novik’s “Temeraire” series (Napoleonic Wars with dragons), Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour In Glass (Jane Austen with magic), or Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (a very different take on Jane Austen with magic). Much of “alternate history” could be said to be history-with-a-twist, whether it is time travel, science fiction, some frankly fantastical element, or simply history going in a different direction (Harry Turtledove’s Ruled Brittania, in which the Spanish Armada did not sink but went on to conquer England).

Lastly, I wonder if the appeal of crossover stories to the community of fantasy readers reflects a broader phenomenon, which is that these readers tend to venture outside the genre. I think we’re more likely to find fantasy lovers who also read mystery, for example, than we are to find mystery readers who seek out fantasy. If my speculation is correct, we are likely to see the crossover phenomenon continue (for which I offer many cheers), but within the context of fantasy and science fiction, rather than any other genre.

Deborah J Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV’S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA’S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities. http://deborahjross.blogspot.com

Warren Rochelle – The Borderlands of Fantasy: Between Here and There

The fiction of Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina, and the author of numerous books of poetry and fiction (and one of my grad school mentors) is inspired by and draws upon, often extensively, his boyhood in the mountains of western North Carolina and the folklore and tall tales of the region. Back in 2004 I wrote an essay on Chappell’s semiautobiographical four-book cycle, “The Flashing Phantasmagoria of Rational Life: The Platonic Borderlands of Fred Chappell’s Forever Tetralogy.” In the Forever or Kirkman Tetralogy, which begins with I am One of You Forever (LSU Press, 1985), Chappell presents a fantastic world “in which a man’s beard, freed from restraints, fills a house to overflowing,” and “a boy is taken by his mother to see the Wind Woman, the keeper of sounds of the hills . . . Ghosts are a present and troublesome part of reality” (“Flashing,” More Lights Than One 186). Alongside the fantastic is the mundane: people falling in love, practical jokes, family tragedy. As Fred explained to me in an interview, “‘the exaggerated and the mundane’ coexist, they ‘shake hands and [are] friends’’ (186).

Or, in other words, “the rational and irrational are not separate.” The world of Fred’s fiction operates in the borderlands between the fantastic and the mundane, borderlands have echoes in Plato’s philosophy. Yes, Plato does condemn poets for using their imagination in Book X of the Republic and advocates their expulsion, but his philosophy wasn’t static: it grew and changed organically over time. Throughout his philosophical discussions, he uses allegory and myth to express ultimate truths. The Phaedrus, the Myth of the Charioteer, with the soul being drawn by both the white and the black horse, the rational and the irrational, clearly demonstrates that that both are needed; both are essential.

It is here, in these borderlands between the fantastic and the mundane, the rational and the irrational, that I find myself as a writer. My first novel, The Wild Boy (which happens to be science fiction) is set in the ruins of 22nd-century Greensboro, NC, after the human race has been domesticated by ursinoid aliens. Fantastical, of course, but I was living in Greensboro while writing the story, and I deliberately grounded the plot in the real Greensboro. My characters walked down real streets; they prowled in what had been real steam tunnels beneath the UNCG campus, based on maps I had obtained from the campus police, and my own subterranean explorations. My next two novels, Harvest of Changelings, and its sequel, The Called, are deeply rooted in the Triangle region of central North Carolina where I grew up. My heroes—public school children—are chased by monsters down the lanes of I-40; they take sanctuary in the church in which I grew up; they attend the public school where I worked as a librarian. The dad of one hero is a public school librarian. I also draw liberally from Celtic myth and from the indigenous stories of the Cherokee of western North Carolina. And there are fairies, werewolves, black and white witches, and dragons and centaurs. My current novel-in-progress, The Werewolf and His Boy, is set in Richmond and Fredericksburg, Virginia—and I live in Fredericksburg and spend an inordinate time in Richmond.

All right, the question, then is why—although I have given some of my answer already in my discussion of my essay on Chappell’s fiction, but let me elaborate. As Ursula K. Le Guin has said, the fantastic reveals truth—through myth, through metaphor and allusion, through story. All fairy tales are true. Tim O’Brien makes the argument in The Things They Carry that there is story-truth and happening-truth, and the first is often used to fully explain and make sense of the second. I discuss in my essay on Chappell his argument in his essay, “Fantasia on the Theme of Theme and Fantasy,” that “fantasy shines a light on the ‘normal side of things’—because of it, we can see more clearly the world as it is . . . That our reality is, in addition to perceived phenomena, one of metaphor, is essential to our understanding of ourselves.”  Like Plato, like Chappell, like Le Guin—and, I would venture to guess, many other writers of the fantastic—I believe to be fully human, we need the rational and the irrational.

According to Martha Nussbaum, in her introduction to The Bacchae, there are “two universal tendencies or propensities in human life, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The former is the ‘tendency to move and act in accordance with irrational focuses,’ and the latter, ‘to approach the world with cool reason, carving it up and making clear distinctions . . . [A] full human life needs fluidity between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.” As it is, too often, according to Thomas Moore in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, we try to ignore the Dionysian, the fantastic; rather, “we need to recognize our need to live in a world of both fact and imagination” (201).

We dream, we are awake. We live in a natural world; we live in the supernatural. Magic is real; science is true. This is where we live, in the borderlands, between here and there, and it is in fantasy that we can explore our homeland.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story “The Golden boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010). He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. http://warrenrochelle.com

Carole McDonnell – Magical Realism and Magic

For me, there is nothing more annoying than someone who writes magical realism and who doesn’t believe in magic. I got introduced to magical realism and natural supernaturalism in college when I read Latin American fiction.  The Latin American form of magical realism is not merely evocative metaphor (although it often is only that). But it is combined with a desire to honor the folklore old grannies  and uncles told to children on their knees. For authors such as Julio Cortazar, Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there is a healthy respect for the underlying magical mystery of everyday life, the honoring of a culture’s oral storytelling, and a desire to sacramentalize (in the Roman Catholic sense) the world by showing Life and Mystery embodied in the predictable routines of life. For me, true Magical Realism is full of mystery and questions about the nature of life.

Of course there have been authors such as Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw” who combined both so every once in a while there are movies such as “Take Shelter” or books that play with the principle of uncertainty. “Is this character cracking or is the world not as closed and rational as we think?”   But I suspect James actually was writing a ghost story. If he did not believe in ghosts, he set his unbelief aside and created a story that is both psychological and metaphysical thriller. For many American writers, however, magical realism is simply a way to use metaphor to show the internal workings of the mind. Thus there is a distinct borderland between magical realism that looks outside of man’s mind towards the unknown universe, and magical realism that shows the psychological complexities of the unknown human mind.

I suppose it’s a combination of growing up in a Bible-believing church and growing up in Jamaica. Whether it’s a testimony of a healing in a church service or a ghost story on SyFy, Discovery, or Biography Channel, or someone seeing Sasquatch or some other cryptozoic creature, I take my supernatural stories at face value.

I once had the pleasure of listening to my friend, Sharon McGuire, relating an evening where her friends were telling each other about the supernatural events that had happened to them. The Haitian girl believed in shapeshifters because she had seen them but utterly disbelieved in vampires and considered them silly. On the contrary, the Romanian girl believed people could turn into wolves because she had seen them but thought the Haitian girl’s anecdote was ridiculous. I love stories like that.

I recently heard that the writer Victoria Laurie writes ghost stories because she had a ghost encounter when she was in high school. I like stories that open up the world. As Einstein said, “the mysterious is the most beautiful thing in art and science.” As Shakespeare wrote, “there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of in your {rationalistic} philosophy.

So, with my love of the supernatural, I tend to dislike when a writer is simply using the surreal to describe emotions or aspects of a closed universe…and I generally will go along. After all, the surreal is useful for explaining life in all its aspects. But I would rather a dream in a story have supernatural resonances than be the outworkings of worried synapses or the result of an underdone potato. I would rather have Scrooge be visited by three spirits and be acted upon by supernatural agencies in the world that are beyond his ken, than chock up the night to repressed guilt or buried memories. That’s just me.

True, we have yet to see a mermaid pop up in the Hudson River, but if a writer depicts such an event, I want to believe the writer actually believes seductive sirens/succubi actually exist — and isn’t using fish-tailed sea denizens as a symbol of heaven knows what.

One of my favorite Bible verses is “Lord, rend the heavens and come down.” And I love St John’s Apocalypse. Why? Because they promise a time when life –in all its magic and strangeness– will be seen for what it is; they promise an unveiling. For me, magical realism and natural/supernaturalism are subtle reminders that human minds don’t really know what the world is made of.

Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildeside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnel.blogspot.com

Sylvia Kelso – Fantasy: Borders and Crossovers

Since we’re all writers, we can all talk about the publishing side of borders and crossovers, but a couple of us are also academics (just as well only a couple). So I’ll start with some well-worn theoretical dicta about genres and borders.

Quote 1, Roland Barthes’ famous dictum from  “The Death of the Author,” that “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” Hence no single novel, whatever, can be purely “original.”

Second, the parallel claim of a Russian structuralist (whose name I have lost) that all genres begin as cadet branches from another genre – therefore, except for some legendary Big Bang single ancestor, all will have elements of another.

Quote 2, Jacques Derrida’s sweeping, “Every text participates in one or several genres … yet such participation never amounts to belonging,” and hence, to demand purity of any genre is “a madness” (“Genre” 212; 228).

Practically, it’s impossible to work without labeling and categorizing texts of any sort. Damon Knight’s despairing, “SF is what I say when I point to it,” only throws the burden of labelling back on the pointer’s experience of texts he/she understands to be SF, and that was decided by someone else’s understanding of … Indeed, Samuel Delany, always an alternate thinker, argues that “The generic mark … is always outside the text,” for example on the bookstore shelf (“Gestation” 65). Amazon’s “Readers who bought this also bought,” is a very fluid and highly practical bookseller’s way of managing this, geared toward another sale, of course.

Genre borders, are most likely then, a matter of general but implicit consensus. Brian Attebery devised a very neat method to demonstrate this. Back in the days when “Fantasy” meant high fantasy, he sent some readers a list of novels and asked for a rating, 1-10, on the nearest to “real fantasy” (I paraphrase slightly here.) Satisfyingly, the centre or highest score of his “fuzzy set,” came back as The Lord of the Rings.

Publishers and smart authors play into this implicit consensus with the choice of cover and even the font.  Genre borders are also policed, again implicitly, by readers and academics both. Long and fierce have been the academic squabbles over Star Wars as either fantasy or SF, or even “film SF,” as one academic editor insisted.  Readers, too, can dispute a text generic siting, and/or vote on the matter. Samuel Delany’s Dahlgren, one of the most astonishing experimental novels in any genre, was published as SF, and was a resounding flop. Readers voted with their wallets in (relative) droves.

At present the bewildered publishing world is confronted with genre borders more permeable than water. When Diana Gabaldon’s best-selling Outlander series first appeared, nobody knew where to classify it. Historical fiction? No, it had time travel. Fantasy? Well, um, not exactly a secondary world, historical detail far too heavy. SF? Nup, the science was hand-waving at best. There were mutters of “time romance” from those who had met the term in other minor specific, but those examples never escaped the esoteric ghetto.

Gabaldon, au contraire, is now shelved in the “best-sellers” genre, defined by one agent’s web-site as lacking any marker except sales. But with Gabaldon’s sales, novels like this are suddenly big-time. My own Blackston Gold duo, tentatively marketed as “contemporary fantasy” got snapped up by a nameable agent on a friend’s mere whisper of “Gabaldon.”

Then there’s “paranormal romance” – a meld of horror and “romance” in the usual generic sense of the word. Came out of nowhere and is flourishing like the green   baytree.  For how long, who knows? Mutters of No Vampire are appearing daily in specific indie presses’ Call for Subs. On the other hand, there’s Twilight, and now Fifty Shades of Grey … While there’s money, publishers won’t let the Fanged Ones leave.

There’s little new to say about this seething cauldron, present or future. Let me finish with a crossover, a form not discussed theoretically, but practiced in earnest by Hollywoodin movies of the Godzilla –Meets-Tarzan type. I’ve noticed a tendency in thrifty authors to do this by combine characters from two different series, for instance, Dana Stabenow’s latest, Though Not Dead.  But the best crossovers happen in current fanfic.  Here’s a third-gen descendant of Bridget Jones’s Diary, combining two cinematic hot-sites in a single exuberant text.

 

FIC: The Very Secret Diary of Captain Jack Sparrow (PG13, 1/1 if you’re lucky)
AUTHOR: Gloria Mundi , Poor Napoleon and Ladymoonray.
PAIRING: Errrr. None, really.

Day 1
Arrrr.
Day 2
Storm is finally over, after what seems like days at the wheel. (Gibbs says this is because I spent days at the wheel.) Too much cloud cover last night to determine current position. Sailing north with land to the east. Do not recognise coast – not Florida anyway, as entirely devoid of chimp-like politicians and sparkling castles, and cannot think of other north-south coast between Port Royal and New Orleans. …
Could be Portugal, if badly lost. Or Blackpool, if very badly lost.
Arrr.
Day 3
Cotton’s parrot sighted smoke to north. Well, actually squawked “Where is the horse and his rider?”, but Gibbs assures me that’s what it meant…

Day 3, later:
….
Huge armada assembled here at river delta. Most of larger ships (50 or so) have black sails; as usual, the Black Pearl is inspiration to all. Inspiration does not go as far as raggedy sails with huge holes, but we gave that look up ourselves, due to lack of forward motion …

Day 3, still later:
Interesting. This fleet hails from somewhere called Umbar. Never heard of it, and can’t find it in Mercator’s New Atlas of World Conquest, or A-Z of Caribbean, so is obviously local name for some perfectly ordinary place. Key West, perhaps. Or Morecambe (see Very Badly Lost possibility above).
Anyway, pirate armada call themselves corsairs, but am not fooled; they have black ships with black sails, crewed by ugly, overweight disfigured men with exotic accents. Perhaps ‘Umbar’ is actually Gateshead…

Pirates heading upriver to sack some city called Minas something. Cannot find this on the map either. (Memo to self: ask to copy their charts.) Have said we will join them, as long as we get an equal share of any loot, plus expenses. Will have Gibbs forge receipts…
Day 4:
Hmph. Always suspected crew were weasel-gutted cowards but did not expect to be proved right so comprehensively. They have deserted, every one of ’em, just because a ghost army turned up and swarmed over the ship. You’d think they’d never seen the walking dead before. And this lot are much prettier than Barbossa’s mob. In or out of moonlight…
Rest of fleet similarly affected. Fat pirates leaping overboard, marooning selves on delta islets, screaming, drowning, etc. Am Captain Jack Sparrow. Not scared of ghosts. Not going anywhere.
Am also pissed and incapable of walking, but that’s not the point!
At least do not have to share the Rum any more.
Day 4, later:
May have spoken too soon. Load of ruffians calling themselves Dunne-ed-dane (spelling?) turn up, along with a blond pretty-boy and a dwarf.
Allegedly they are with the army of Dead and are off to Minas Thing to save it from raiders and orcs and black-hearted scoundrels. Quite what killer whales are doing teaming up with scoundrels not quite clear, as is threat they pose to Minas Thing. …

As Black Pearl is clearly jewel (hahahah) of fleet, chief of Dunne-ed-dane has chosen it as flagship. He came aboard with pretty boy and dwarf but was put out to find me here.
Am off to Minas Thing to save it, says he.
Not on my ship you aren’t, says I. Arrrrr.
Why not? says pretty boy, looking at me with superior look.
For one (says I) I spent ten years without the Pearl an’ I’m not giving her up again for anything…
Dunne-ed-dane chief turns out to be Isildur’s Heir: eventually understood he wasn’t Isildur’s Hair (what is that accent?), but have never heard of Isildur, let alone Heir (or Hair)…
Pretty boy tells me he is Elf, from realm of Fairy. Reacts badly to being asked where his wings are, then. Points to ears as evidence, but have seen pointier ears on a bo’sun from Swansea. Something very familiar about him, but can’t quite put finger on it. Not while he’s watching, anyway. Dwarf tells me he is a Dwarf. This so blatantly obvious, do not bother to comment…

We drink to Destiny. Isildur’s Heir starts on about the Dark Lord, who is called Sow-Ron and lives in Morrdorr and is a Bad Thing. In return, tell him about myself, Aztec curse etc. Isildur’s Heir not much interested, but neither was I…
The rest, if you’re interested, is at http://www.livejournal.com/users/viva_gloria/95146.html

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.