Guest Post – Fantasy: The Versatile Genre by Rowena Cory Daniells

To celebrate the release of the Fall of the Fair Isle Omnibus, one of my favourite Australian fantasy writers has agreed to write a guest blog.  Please enjoy Rowena’s post on:

 

Fantasy: The Versatile Genre

Science Fiction books can be SF-thrillers, action adventure and mysteries. It is a versatile genre and often explores the philosophical theme: As technology advances will we lose our humanity?

Meanwhile, Fantasy is known for the Quest: Can we defeat evil (which is usually encapsulated in a magical being or object) so that good can triumph. But fantasy is not limited to the black and white portrayal of good and evil.

With King Rolen’s Kin, I set out to write the kind of rollicking action adventure fantasy that kept me up all night when I first discovered fantasy. The narrative was supposed to be an examination of power and what people will do for it, following King Rolen’s four children and the choices they make when their kingdom is invaded. I concentrated on the King’s second son, Byren but before I knew it Byren’s friend, Orrade revealed that he was gay and this led to complications for Byren. Protecting his friend left him vulnerable.

I found myself exploring the question of friendship, brotherhood and being true to oneself. By the end of book four we saw what Byren would do for power and the consequences even if the motivations were pure.

When I wrote The Outcast Chronicles I knew this trilogy would explore two related themes. The narrative followed the fate of a race of mystical beings called the T’En. This gave me a perfect opportunity to explore racism in the denatured setting of fantasy. And since the T’En society was divided into sisterhoods and brotherhoods, I was also able to explore issues of gender and trust. This trilogy was a finalist in the Hemming Award 2013.

The Judges said: “The Outcast Chronicles trilogy is a tour de force of extraordinarily detailed world building. Rowena has created political intrigue, attempts at genocide, a dangerous world of magic that many believe to be gods, with flawed, noble and ignoble characters on all sides. There is poetry and wit in the writing, and characters that stay with you long after you have finished this gripping trilogy.”

I quote this because the fantasy genre gave me the opportunity to delve into characters who were ‘different’ without alienating the reader due to a preconceived prejudice.

The Fall of Fair Isle was first published between 1999 and 2003, released as three books, now Solaris have released it as an omnibus edition. Set 600 years after The Outcast Chronicles it can be read as a stand-alone.

This is a more intimate story than The Outcast Chronicles, delving into the motivations and dilemmas of the three main characters. Imoshen, named after her famous ancestor, the last surviving member of the royal family, must surrender her stronghold and her island to General Tulkhan, son of the Ghebite King’s concubine, who conquered Fair Isle to win his father’s love. She agrees to help him smooth the transition of power. But all does not go smoothly because Reothe, Imoshen’s former betrothed, has survived and he needs her help to win back Fair Isle.  Should she keep her word to the General or is she bound by her older vow to Reothe?

At its core The Fall of Fair Isle is an exploration of duty and honour, and because Imoshen is a throwback to her T’En ancestors the narrative also examines gender and racism.

King Rolen’s Kin was a rollicking adventure fantasy, The Outcast Chronicles was a political intrigue fantasy and The Fall of Fair Isle is an intimate glimpse of people caught in the crucible of power. All three examine honour and the choices we make using the fantasy genre as the medium.

This genre is really much more versatile than people give it credit and I love it when I find an author who is willing to push the boundaries.

I hope readers will enjoy The Fall of Fair Isle.

 

Rowena

 The Fall of the Fair Isle can be ordered through booktopia.

 

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Guest Posting at Ebon Shores

David MacDonald of Ebon Shores kindly invited me to guest post at his wonderful blog. 

A 21st Century Fan

I love living in the future.

I grew up in a time before the internet, before mobile phones, in a remote town at least 1500 km away from any major city.  My first brush with fandom came with the ABC’s running of Doctor Who (until the late 80’s the only TV channel we had).  Myself and four friends formed the Dr Who gang, our arch enemies were the Spades – think the Sharks and the Jets but with flowing multicoloured scarves and Men at Work rather than Leonard Bernstein .  This was primary school.

[Read On]

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Guest Book Review - The Book of Rachael by Leslie Cannold

 

post by Bruce Everett.  Mature content warning.

It feels a bit incongruous; me, a guy, writing a guy's take on a book explicitly dedicated to women. The risk of mansplaining or taking things down a side-road not withstanding, I'll go one step further and dedicate this review to male lovers of literature.

The Book of Rachael is a work of historical fiction set two millennia ago, told from the perspective of Rachael, the sister of a certain fellow destined for martyrdom. And it's through the experience of Rachael, her sister, her mother and the various women of the text, that you'll find yourself in new territory. More-so if you're a bloke.

Now, if you're a beneficiary of male privilege, odds on there's leeway you'll be sharing with your fellow penis-wielders – all without much in the way of a second thought. If you can, why can't they? Only fair, right, not to deny the same for your mates? Too easy.

So how far do us guys extend this tolerance to authors without the sausage and meatballs? If you're a progressive type, you're most likely, at least in theory, to aim for some kind of gender balance. Perhaps you'll even be offended at any suggestion to the contrary, you good righteous progressive, you.

In this respect, reading The Book of Rachael trained a surgical light upon the dark recesses of my hypocrisy. I'll digress.

***

I came to Leslie Cannold's book with Michael Moorcock's Behold The Man in mind as a kind of benchmark; a book by a guy, about a guy who travels through time to find Jesus. But instead of a successful pilgrimage, Moorcock's protagonist fumbles through various licentious adventures, including an attempt at sex with the promiscuous Mary (failing to get it up thanks to an onlooking idiot-Jesus), before accidentally becoming the Christ of lore himself.
Pulp as it may be, Behold The Man is one of my favourite books, and I've never so much as flinched while reading it. Yet it wasn't The Book of Rachael that ended up being tested against this benchmark. Rather I found myself as a reader being tested through my questionable application of the intended standard.

Amidst Cannold's vivid (and obviously well-researched) depictions of herbs, artifacts and day-to-day humdrum, came the various secretions and sensations; defecation and its derivatives are repeatedly dealt with in unflinching detail, as are all the suppurations and oozes. All quite necessarily, because Rachael is a healer.

Cannold's take on female arousal, as you'd expect, contrasts anything you'd read by Moorcock, and not just because Moorcock is a barking mad provocateur. But the sex in The Book of Rachael is still every bit as graphic as anything in Behold The Man; all the tumescence and moistening and ejaculate is there, albeit in a different arrangement.

This is of course, all quite natural. Yet I still caught myself asking if the detail wasn't a bit much, perhaps even insufficiently lady-like; clearly my brain has been the host of a noxious double-standard.

(Further to this, I managed to read without a hitch, Teri Louise Kelly's biography American Blow Job over the same period – the tale of her time as a highly sexed young man in the US. You can probably imagine that I extend the same pornographic tolerance to Martin Amis, and you'd be right if you did).

And if it wasn't the sex, there were times when the discussion of iron-age pregnancy made me want jump forward to the now to find a hospital corridor to pace! (Although predictably, the Deuteronomy 22:28 treatment made me livid like any sane person).

But why would a reader want to react like this? I find consistency consoling, but beyond this, and beyond the issue of the obvious sexism, why would anyone, as a reader, want to be in possession of a character flaw that potentially jars them out of the narrative, robbing them of enjoyment? Insane!

Up until now, I didn't know this about myself; that I was host to some sub-pious, vestigial remnant of a puritan double-standard. I thought I was all on-board with female sexual expression in the arts, yet here I am, The Book of Rachael diagnosing part of my prefrontal cortex as uncooperative.

Now I know this, I'll try to get better. Rachael is a healer.

Anyway, I'm starting to make things about me, and this is supposed to be a book review. Let this self-indulgence on my part serve as recommendation to male readers; there's several reasons why it's important the book is authored for '...every woman still struggling for a place in history'.

It's one thing for men to say they're okay with the idea of a female take on the narrative, and another to value it as an experience.

***

Now, unless you've missed the culture wars of the last few decades (and perhaps the prequel known as The Entire History of Western Christianity) you'd have noticed in discussions of culture, that 'Judæo' often seems surgically attached to 'Christian'. You'd also have noticed it's often the 'Christian' attaching itself to the 'Judæo', and rarely the other way around.

Thankfully, 'Christian' isn't dominating The Book of Rachael. There's no kitsch, retro-active, Anglo-Saxon Euro-Christ with sheep in tow; cultural appropriation is wound back, the result being greater authenticity.
With the plight of the women of the text presented against a backdrop of the common sufferings of the time, overt feminism at the spearhead of the story's revolutionary movement comes across as intuitive. Indeed, the way the story tells it, it seems more plausible as a historical movement than much of the ad-hoc re-tellings that pass for mainstream, Christian historicity.

While Cannold's version could stand well enough on its own merits, the origin of the real-world, mainstream, patriarchal narrative is given it's own fictional depiction - credibly fleshed out in cynical, thuggish, tragic opportunism. More conservative types may balk, or be offended, but that'd probably only speak to the merits of the book.

That The Book of Rachael manages all of this (and more) in lucid, descriptive prose, while maintaining pace and consistency, is quite a feat. Tension is maintained throughout the book through the well timed, yet uncontrived use of ever-looming, threats.

There's really only one issue on which I can find fault, and that's if you pick up on the thrust of the narrative, then the going-ons in the final chapters can broadcast themselves in advance just a little. In part this seems due to familiarity (being historical fiction) but also because even if not overly didactic about it, it seems clear the book has a mission. The end flows naturally from what goes before - almost obviously so.

Mind you, I note this perceived fault mostly out of a need for due diligence. I'm not so sure it's avoidable, nor not a product of the many merits of the text. Much less did this apparent flaw detract from my appreciation of said merits; these being many and sound.

This 'flaw' is just my focus on part of my own perspective, so even if you do accept my take on things there's still a lot more to the story - including several important divergences from the main events of the plot. You just can't be bored by this book.

It's essential reading, especially for us guys. So just lay back, open the book, and respect that Rachael knows what she's doing.

Rating: 4.5/5

 

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Contemplating Other Worlds - Guest Post by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Sean asked: “If you had your way, what pop culture show would you like
to write for or what fictional world would you like to bring to the
big or little screen...”

Which is an awesome question, though admittedly I looked at it and
mostly heard ‘lalalalalala would you write for Doctor Who if they
asked, lalalala. So let’s get the Doctor Who part out of the way
first!

This is actually something I have thought about quite a bit. Because
Doctor Who is the show I have loved most my whole life, and because
there are a lot of properties swirling around it that provide work for
working writers and I am, after all, a working writer. But on the
other hand, I love being a fan of Doctor Who, and it’s just about the
only deep interest in my life that is not also work of some kind -
from quilting to gaming, every hobby I have somehow has turned into an
enormous to do list of WORK. Doctor Who is delicious fun times, with
no responsibility.

Having said that, if someone asked me to do anything in the Doctor Who
universe, I can’t actually imagine myself turning it down. I love it
so much!

Other creative properties I would love to get my hands on, one way or
another, include Wonder Woman (and just about any superheroine of the
DC Universe), Blake’s 7, The Avengers (Steed and Peel, not Marvel) and
Xena. When it comes to turning existing literature into TV or film,
I’d love to see some Diana Wynne Jones works on the screen, as well as
Sarah Monette’s gorgeously gothic Melusine series, Sarah Rees
Brennan’s Demon series, and Diana Peterfreund’s unicorns...

Having said all that, I’m not a scriptwriter, and while getting to
play with any of those properties would be a lovely incentive to learn
new skills, the thought of starting from scratch with a whole new kind
of writing is incredibly daunting - I’d much rather see those books
adapted by someone who is qualified to do the job! I don’t have any
particular ambition to make it as a screenwriter, largely because I
would be beginning again with a whole different career, and I’m
already kept quite busy by the one I have. I’ve been listening to a
brainload of audio plays lately and that format intrigues me a lot
more than film scripts, but even then it would be quite a learning
curve - though one I’d be quite interested in attempting. I am a
complete dialogue junkie, after all.

Prose, prose, prose. I would certainly happily play in other people’s
universes if we were talking about short stories or novels (depending
on the universe, of course). Even if it was Doctor Who. Who am I
kidding? ESPECIALLY if it was Doctor Who.

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Tansy Rayner Roberts is the author of Power and Majesty (Creature Court Book One) and The Shattered City (Creature Court Book Two, April 2011) with Reign of Beasts (Creature Court Book Three, coming in November 2011) hot on its tail.

Her short story collection Love and Romanpunk will be published as part of the Twelfth Planet Press “Twelve Planets” series in May.

This post comes to you as part of Tansy’s Mighty Slapdash Blog Tour,and comes with a cookie fragment of new release The Shattered City:

In chimaera shape, Velody was invincible. Power coursed through
her muscles, bolder and brighter than anything she felt when she was
in human form, no matter who she was kissing. Chimaera was strength
and spirit and there was nothing the sky could do against her when she
wore that skin.

She could not move. Slowly, invisible hands lifted her high in the
air, above the thing that wore her friend like a cheap suit.

“One king down,” the creature said with a friendly smile. “Only you left.”

 

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Note this is a reposting, from my now borked wordpress blog.