Interview on Lydia Kurnia's blog

Lydia Kurnia is the excellent fantasy writer and artist who provided the lovely illustrations (including the one above) for the recent anthology Unburied Treasures (links in a previous post) which includes my story Finder's Fee. Today, Lydia interviews me on her blog about the anthology, my books, history and grammar nazis, among many other topics.

The interview can be found on Lydia's blog.

Unburied Treasures: an Illustrated Anthology of Speculative Fiction

Unburied Treasures

edited by Erika Wilson

Illustrations by Isaia and Lydia

 

Available on Kindle from Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk

 Also available from Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, & Amazon (UK, US, Australia)

 

This beautifully illustrated anthology features stories loosely on the theme of "unburied treasure" from a variety of speculative authors, some widely published, others who should be. There are stories from Daniel Ausema, Barbara A. Barnett, Nyki Blatchley, Lindsey Duncan, Indigo Dylis, Lydia Kurnia, Jonathan S. Pembroke, Leslianne Wilder & Erika Wilson.

 

My story, Finder's Fee, is set in a version of the modern world that's been conquered by intelligent dragons. Humans are merely the servants of the dragons and their genetically engineered lizard people, and the world is run according to what dragons value. And, as everyone knows, what dragons value is treasure. They employ human Finders to sniff out unclaimed treasure, but one has his own ideas of how to exploit this situation.

 

 

Excerpt from Finder's Fee

 

            "Do you have an appointment?" asked the lizard at reception.

             "Well... not exactly."  This was all I needed, after weeks away and the long drive yesterday.

             The lizard fixed me with those unnervingly lidless eyes.  I tried to stare it out, but that was never going to happen.  "Not exactly?" it queried at last.

             "Well, actually, no.  No, I don't have an appointment, but Master Ssa'ath will want to see me."

             I could have told the lizard I was one of Ssa'ath's Finders and it wouldn't have dared delay me, but probably best not to.  The Masters all get twitchy about anyone knowing who their Finders are: afraid someone else will try to poach them.  It was easier in the long run to put up with the lizard's haughtiness.  If everything went to plan, it would be the last time.

             The lizard's impassive face expressed silent scorn at the idea that a Master would want to see a mere human, but it touched the computer screen a few times with its tongue and then nodded.  "Master Ssa'ath has a window in half an hour.  Ten minutes.  And if your... assumption is incorrect, it'll be your head in his mouth.  Please wait here."

             "Thanks," I said from habit, but it had gone back to its work and didn't look at me again.  I settled myself on a chair clearly designed for lizards.

             I'd visited Ssa'ath's offices a number of times, and the usual lizard knew me, though was no more welcoming than this one.  They always made me uneasy, right back when I was a kid.  There weren't many of them around then, but the Masters had begun genetically enhancing them, breeding faithful servants to replace the humans they despised.  Most of us never forgave the lizards for that.

             I hoped I was right in my assumption that Ssa'ath would welcome me.  The lizard's colourful expression was merely a saying, but you never knew with the Masters.  He should be pleased to hear my news, as long as he didn't guess my true motives.

    

Damned published in The Colored Lens

Issue 11 of the excellent magazine The Colored Lens in now out, featuring my short story Damned. The first of three stories (so far) in a loose series set in a magicpunk world (or magitech, as I prefer) is about moral choices in a dystopic society whose treatment of the magically gifted will be only too familiar to anyone familar with twentieth-century history.

Besides Damned, this issue features stories by Marcelina Vizcarra, Peter J. Enyeart, Steve Toase, Greg Little, Melinda Moore, Jeff Suwak, Dusty Cooper, Damien Krsteski, Iulian Ianescu, J. A. Becker and Todd Thorne.

 

 

Excerpt from Damned

 

 

The spell to start my car didn’t work that evening, so I contacted the repair service and walked home from the office through darkening drizzle, rather than being ripped off by the Instant Transportation System.  Rain insinuated itself inside my upturned collar.  Typical: they spend a fortune on improving the fireballs and blasting spells, but nothing on controlling the weather.

 

“Can I see your papers, sir?” said a voice behind me.

 

I turned with the practiced air of having nothing to hide, but my mind was racing.  Had he heard my thoughts, and would he consider them disloyal?  I’d always doubted the rumours of the peacekeepers using mind-reading devices, but I wasn’t so sure at that moment.

 

It was reassuring that his fireball-thrower was still in its holster, although his hand rested on it, but his face was blank and unreadable as they always were.  He had the spell-shield slung over his shoulder, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice and reflect any hex back on the attacker. 

 

I fumbled the papers from my inside pocket and tried to stand calmly while he scanned them.  Everyone feels paranoid in this situation.  Or maybe just me.  It’s not as if anyone would dare to discuss it.

 

He looked up at last.  “Seen any of the damned, sir?”

 

The question threw me, as was no doubt the intention, but I was able to answer truthfully, “Of course not.  I’d have reported it if I had.”

 

 

You can buy The Colored Lens on Kindle from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

 

 



Light of the Last Day - new fantasy anthology

Light of the Last Day

 

Edited by Nyki Blatchley & Natalie Millman

Cover art & design by Mette Pesonen

 

Print edition, EPUB edition, Kindle from Amazon.co.uk, Kindle from Amazon.com

(also available on Kindle from other regional Amazons)

 

 

 

I've just completed editing, with Canadian fantasy author Natalie Millman, a new anthology of stories and poems by thirteen authors from all across the globe, spanning a broad range of styles and approaches to fantasy. All belong to the writers' peer critique group Fantasy-writers.org, and some are widely published authors.

 

The title refers to the theme we began with, combined with a selection of unrelated pieces, to write a story involving the phrase Waking to the light of the last day. Just that: it could be the last day of the world, the last day of an old life, or even the last day of a sporting season. We left it entirely up to each author to decide what to make of the phrase, and we had an enormous variety in their responses.

 

Let me introduce you to the contributing authors and their stories:

 

 
William Moon: Questions of the Creator is a brief tale about the end of a universe that's been a disappointment to its creator. But is that really all?
 
Leslianne Wilder: The Once and Future Kiss is a contemporary piece chronicling a relationship that doesn't proceed in the right order. And who is the mysterious seducer?
 
Mette Pesonen: besides providing the beautiful cover art and interior decorations, Mette contributes two lighthearted stories. Looking for Trouble is about a Hero at a loose end, while The Forming of Draakoa tells a legend from her wonderful realm of Hypnosia, governed by the Cliche Laws.

Nyki Blatchley: I also have two stories. In Lari's People, a ritual outcasting from a village proves not to be what it seems, while Dayglow illustrates the problems when a kind-hearted giant adopts a human baby.

Lindsey Duncan: The Scientific Method has a sorcerer trying to put right the catastrophe caused by his last experiment, while The Laughing Eye is a haunting poem.

Lee Kirk: Obsession is a time-travel story, but time-travel for something far more useful than killing your grandfather or stepping on a butterfly. Lee also contributes two short pieces: a chilling poem called Madness and a melancholy vignette called Tears.

Carl J. Snyder: Hair Apparent is the tale of a magic student that everyone picks on - until he's able to take revenge on his tormentors.

Erika Wilson: Ain't No Sunshine is a disaster story with a difference, as a group of survivors find non-human help and danger when Yellowstone erupts.

Natalie Walker Millman: Gaia gives a heartbreaking picture of just how far we've turned away from Mother Earth, while The Story Tree is a chilling fable of crime and punishment.

L. M. Price: Peter and the Monster is a children's fairy-tale of an unlikely symbiotic relationship and what happens when it's disrupted.

Lydia Kurnia: Eishenan tells of a boy caught up in a cosmic war between the Sun and the Moon. He's trained to be a heartless killer, but can he really be changed that much?

Jens Hieber: In Drops of Peace, a messenger of the gods comes to offer a rebel goddess redemption or punishment. Which will she choose?

Julie St. Thomas: Milla is a deceptively simple tale of a father's concern when he has to leave his young daughter home alone. But all is not quite as it seems.

So those are the authors and the stories. I hope you enjoy Light of the Last Day.

One Story at a Time: the Fantasy Short-Story Series

Fantasy and the series go together like Smeagol and Gollum, but mostly people think about obese volumes collected into trilogies, tetralogies, dodecalogies, eicosilogies and the like.  There's another type of series, though, that has played a crucial role in the development of fantasy — the short-story series.

The fantasy short story goes back to Lord Dunsany, whose first stories came out in the early years of the 20th century.  Well, it's not really as simple as that, of course.  Fantasy has been around since the dawn of storytelling, and so have short stories.  Still, Dunsany was really the first writer of modern fantasy who excelled at the short story, but most of his work consists of stand-alone stories, give or take the odd sequel or recurring character.

It was in the U.S. pulp magazines that the fantasy short story really came of age, in the hands of authors like Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he wrote fantasy as well as horror) and their successors, and it was here the series came into its own.  Some were only loosely connected by setting, such as Smith's tales of Zothique, Hyperborea, Xiccarph and many others.  Other authors focused on a specific character, or pair of characters: Howard's Conan, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry, Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp's Harold Shea, and countless others.

The tradition survived well into the 60s and 70s, though by this time there was more of an impetus to write novels.  Both Michael Moorcock's Elric and Karl Edward Wagner's Kane featured both in novels and short stories, for instance.  The process has developed, and novels are now the default for any fantasy author wanting to write something ongoing, while the series of shorter stories is now predominantly the domain of TV.

Most short stories now are stand-alone, but the series isn't entirely dead.  I love the format, and I've developed several of my own.  There are the stories relating moments in the Traveller's millennia-long journeys.  There are the tales of Eltava's life, many of them overlapping with the Traveller's series.  There are the wanderings (both in a physical and a moral sense) of teenage sorcerers Karaghr and Failiu, a lighter series perhaps more in Leiber's tradition.  And then there's the completely unrelated series about spoof hard-boiled detective Sam Nemesis.

So what's the attraction of the series, and what are its advantages and disadvantages?

I suppose the most obvious disadvantage must be the risk of getting repetitive, of falling into a predictable formula for every story.  On the other hand, this pitfall isn't restricted to a series: an unimaginative author can easily recycle the same plot and characters over and over, even when all the names are changed.

There's also the practical issue that, when the stories are published occasionally, here and there, it's necessary effectively to introduce the main character and the concept for each story.  Back in the days of the pulp magazines, the Conan stories, for instance, (almost) always appeared in Weird Tales, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in Unknown.  It meant that the author could assume that a large proportion of the readers were familiar with the series, in the same way that a TV series doesn't need to introduce first principles every episode.

That isn't true with current short story magazines, whether print or online: readers don't generally want to see the same authors and the same characters coming up issue after issue, and writers of a series have to hawk the stories around, getting into one publication here and another there.  The seven published stories in my Eltava series, for example, have appeared in six different magazines.

On the other hand, a series gives the opportunity to develop a character or a setting in a way that's usually only possible in a novel.  Even if the readers aren't following it consistently and consecutively, as with a TV series, the author is able to gain a deep knowledge of the character and the settings in which he or she appears, if those are constant, and that can translate as a level of confidence and reality that will come over even to the casual reader.  It's the same as how, for example, a new viewer of Doctor Who can often feel the weight and significance of the show's fifty years behind what they watch, without having to understand everything that's gone before.

Unlike a novel series (though there are exceptions even with those) a short story series doesn't have to come in sequence, especially when the stories are being published here and there.  Indeed, many of the classic series weren't written with any strong sense of sequence at all.  The Conan stories have a vague sense of Conan getting older, and they've subsequently been arranged by fans into a firm order, but for the most part they "reset to default" for the beginning of each story. 

The original seven stories of Fafhrd and the Mouser, written for Unknown, follow an approximate sequence, largely governed by the pair's four-story-long excursion to the western continent and back to Lankhmar, and the stories Leiber wrote from the 70s onward follow an order, but the stories in between are fairly random.  When the whole series so far was gathered into five volumes in the 60s, two of the three stories in volume one were among the last to be written.

On the other hand, a series with a more logical progression, such as the Harold Shea stories, might be written and published in strict sequence.  The two approaches can be seen on TV, too.  Many older shows, such as the 60s classic The Avengers, were done very much on a reset to default system — nothing that happened in a given story was carried over to the next episode, and they can be comfortably watched in any order at all.

To a slightly lesser extent, this is also true of the original Star Trek, and indeed there are different versions of the correct order for these stories.  By the later versions of Star Trek, though, from the late 80s onward, this had changed.  Characters changed and developed in a logical way, and the events surrounding them developed too.  The first couple of years of The Next Generation could just about be watched out of sequence, though not comfortably, but Voyager couldn't at all.

I've used the full range of options for my various series.  The Sam Nemesis tales are completely reset to default — they take place in an undefined mythical setting, where nothing significantly changes.  At the other extreme, the stories I've written so far about Kari and Fai (three published, and I'm working on the fourth) follow a logical sequence of events, and to some extent show the characters taking forward what happens in one story to the next.

The Traveller and Eltava are both written completely out of order, especially the Traveller, whose stories might be set thousands of years and thousands of miles apart.  In the case of Eltava, I started with the most obvious part of her life to write about (her twenties) and have since expanded backwards and forwards — so far from early teens to late sixties.

The advantage of this is the capacity to explore the character thematically, rather than lineally.  A story about the Traveller at the age of four thousand might inspire something he does as a spring chicken of a few hundred, as much as vice versa.  I used this approach too in the novel At An Uncertain Hour, but most novels don't have the capacity to explore this kind of thematic development.

Even with those series that are written, the aim is to publish them, carefully arranged in sequence, in a book (of whatever format).  An example, a few years back, is the excellent The Servant of the Mantichore by Michael Erhart, which falls halfway between a story collection and a novel.  Of course, I'd love to have my various series in book form, but in some ways that's a distraction from the nature of the series: to explore the characters and settings in a form that can grow in strength by being taken together, but is ultimately designed to be read one story at a time.

Yes, I'll Write About You - Just Put That Sword Away

“Eltava... was someone who spent most of her life with me, and I loved her very deeply... I first saw her when she was a few weeks old, and I didn’t stop loving her from that day till the day I laid a very old woman to rest.”

These were the first words I wrote about Eltava, wanderer, swordswoman and companion to the Traveller.  They’re from Chapter Fourteen of At An Uncertain Hour, when the Traveller tells Sharf the story of how he and Eltava had, long ago, fought and escaped from the mountain-ghouls of Purwe.

Eltava’s grandparents appear earlier in the novel, as children, and I already had the idea that I’d like a later member of their family to be a companion of the Traveller.  I chose this particular story for him to tell for two main reasons.  Firstly, he’s trying to illustrate to Sharf how listening to your fear, far from being cowardice, can be an essential survival skill.  Secondly, I’d realised that I’d tended to make the Traveller’s relationships in the novel rather negative – either they turned bad or they came to a bad end.  I wanted to show him in a relationship about which he has no regrets.

And that was supposed to be that.  Eltava was one of many characters in that novel who cameoed in one chapter and then were gone; but she had other ideas.  Eltava insisted that she had to have a series of her own, and you don’t argue with a girl wielding a sword and willing to use it.

The first Eltava story was The Golden Serpent (recently published in Icarus) which was initially written in response to a challenge to reverse a fantasy cliché – I wrote about an action heroine rescuing a beautiful prince from an enchanted tower.  This was followed by Just Deserts (published in Quantum Muse), Heirloom (Afterburn SF) and two stories in which Eltava and the Traveller shared centre stage – Ancestral Voices (nanobison) and The Singer and the Song (Aoife’s Kiss).

All of these stories featured Eltava in her prime, ranging from early twenties to early thirties.  With female action characters, even more than male, the stereotype is to portray them as young, vibrant and beautiful, but as the opening quote suggests, there’s more than that to Eltava.  The next story I wrote about her, which has just been published in Shelter of Daylight, was The Eternal Sorceress, featuring Eltava approaching fifty, at a time when she faces the knowledge that her strength was still undiminished, and her skill was greater than it had been in her youth, but she’d grow weaker in the end, till she could do nothing but sit around telling stories of the old times.

This story also, as had Ancestral Voices, features a brief flashback to Eltava as a young child, here in a scene with her Grandma Rivil – last seen in At An Uncertain Hour at the age of thirteen.  This made me interested in exploring her early life too, and the most recent story I completed, Witch, centres on a fourteen-year-old Eltava’s relationship with the Traveller.  Witch is still unpublished but under consideration (fingers crossed) and I have a beginning and a vague outline for a story where she’s in her sixties.  I’ve a feeling she’s going to be every bit as fun at that age as at every other.

Two things in particular make Eltava different from traditional fantasy heroes of either sex, though perhaps rather less unusual now: her ethnicity and her sexuality.  Her grandparents, Rivil and Jikralt, are most like Chinese in real-world terms, while her mother is of a race not unlike Native American.  I’ve always imagined Eltava as looking somewhat like a female version of the bandit chief from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  Although by no means a persecuted minority, Eltava is something of an outsider everywhere she goes.

The Traveller is very much the love of Eltava’s life, but she’s by no means monogamous.  In Ancestral Voices, she reflects that she needed danger too, conquest and heartache, and the wonder of someone who could feel swept away by her strength and mystery.  How could she have that from a man who had cleaned her up as a baby and played with her as a child?

Like the Traveller, Eltava is bisexual, and most of the affairs she’s shown having are with women.  In the scene quoted at the beginning, the Traveller speculates that maybe she found them easier to distinguish from me.  Then again, her background and her experiences with the Traveller have left Eltava with scant regard for custom and an inexhaustible appetite for all that life has to offer.  Perhaps it’s easier for her to acknowledge her desires that it would be for many.

An issue that comes to the fore in The Eternal Sorceress is she’s a mortal who’s both companion and lover to a man who never ages and will never die unless he’s killed violently.  The Traveller learns to take the good as well as the bad from this, but it’s harder for Eltava.  As the story opens, she’s finally accepted that she’s now a middle-aged woman with a young man, and eventually she’ll be an old woman with a young man.  It’s as she’s struggling with this fact that a solution presents itself.  Or does it?

Eltava’s life is full of incident, and the seven stories I’ve written about her have only scratched the surface.  I love working with her.  Though far from immoral (or even amoral) she’s less concerned than the Traveller with doing the right thing and more concerned with having fun.  When Sharf comments that she sounds perfect, the Traveller responds, Perfect, no.  She had a vile temper at times, and she could be rather more predatory in her affairs than I’d have liked.  Still... She was glorious, and I’d have trusted her with my life. I did, quite often.

Yes, we’re both in love with her.