Writers Who Made Me What I Am

Some time ago, I wrote a blog on Ten Authors Who've Changed My World, looking at a few of the authors who've had most effect on me over the years. For this post, though, I thought I'd have a more inclusive look at my early influences. Nothing precise, but I don't think I'll be including anything that I discovered past my mid-twenties.

It's not comprehensive, obviously. As Bob Dylan put it, Open up yer eyes an' ears an' yer influenced an' there's nothing you can do about it. I've probably forgotten some of the authors who had some specific effect on me, and there may be one or two I'd be reluctant to admit to, but these are the main ones. I'll go through them in (roughly) chronological order, rather than trying to work out the order I met them in.

Homer. No, not the yellow guy, the Greek epic poet. I read Homer (in translation) in my teens, as well as retellings of the stories, and I think he helped to encourage my sense of the grand and epic. Battle scenes, questing, encounters with wonders and monsters: it's all there in Homer.

Thomas Mallory. From quite a young age, I was reading retellings of the Arthurian legends that Mallory collected and framed in the way we know them today, and I later read the original. It made me passionate about everything concerning knights, real or romantic, and the episodes in the Arthurian cycle have influenced me in more ways than I can count.

William Shakespeare. Well, why wouldn't I be influenced by arguably the greatest writer ever? Everyone else is, whether they're aware of it or not. Besides his wonderful use of language, perhaps the two specific aspects of Shakespeare's writing I'd pick out as major influences are his characterisation and the sense of pacing in his scenes. I also borrowed from Henry V for a crucial scene in At An Uncertain Hour.

William Blake. Poet and artist, Blake has been described as a hero of the imagination. I think one of the big things I took from Blake is that he was possibly the first author who deliberately created a mythology with a modern(ish) sensibility. Blake's mythological figures are allegories of various aspects of the human psyche, but they also work convincingly as people in their own right.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Barring Shakespeare, my absolute favourite poet, and his Rime of the Ancient Mariner is my favourite poem — I could once recite it by heart, though I think too many neurons have died off since then. The Ancient Mariner is a key influence on the Traveller (who even uses an albatross as his banner) though the contrasts are as significant as the similarities. The title At An Uncertain Hour is a quote from the poem, while another Traveller story, Ancestral Voices, has its title taken from Coleridge's Kubla Khan.

William Butler Yeats. Another favourite poet, Yeats was the writer who got me fascinated in Irish mythology and the whole of the Celtic Twilight. Any wistful, magical aspect to my writing almost certainly has a flavour of Yeats in there somewhere.

William Morris. Arguably (or arguably not) the first fantasy writer to set his work in an invented world for its own sake. I first read Morris's fantasies in my late teens and was enchanted by the mixture of mediaeval exoticism and earthy reality. He was also an important socialist thinker, and a surprising amount of that creeps into his tales of knights and damsels — actually, his heroines are usually of peasant stock and far stronger than the heroes.

Lord Dunsany. Largely responsible for bringing the exotic for its own sake into fantasy, and a master of evocative naming, Dunsany created impossible palaces, the wonders of Elfland and houses built on the edge of the world. When I write of far-off, wonderful lands with resonant names, I'm almost certainly channelling Dunsany.

James Branch Cabell. Cabell, I have to admit, is something of a "take what you need and leave the rest" author. He was of his time and place (1910s and 20s in Virginia) and some of his attitudes are rather unpalatable today. If you can look beyond that, though, he was almost unique in writing fantasy that seamlessly combines comedy and romance. Perhaps his biggest influence on me, though, was the way he wove a connection between apparently unconnected books, creating a vast web of story, something I've attempted to do.

A. A. Milne. I suppose my first favourite author. I was having the Winnie the Pooh stories and poems read to me before I can remember — and I should emphasise that I'm talking about the real stories, before Disney got his hands on them. Milne was brilliant at showing characters at a stroke. One of my all-time favourite bits of characterisation is Rabbit, who never let things come to him but always went and fetched them… He's probably, more than anyone, the reason I first started writing stories.

H. P. Lovecraft. I read Lovecraft first for his Dunsany-inspired fantasy stories, but then I went on and read the Cthulhu Mythos ones too. Horror isn't my primary interest, but there are certainly dark things in many of my stories, and I learnt a lot about darkness from Lovecraft.

E. R. Eddison. Not all great influences need to be flawless. Eddison has many faults, but he was the first modern writer to create epic fantasy as we know it. The genre got diverted into elves and dark lords, but Eddison approached it politically, much as Martin does (and I do at times), and wove a Machiavellian strand into his epics.

Robert E. Howard. Now, I have been known to make fun of the stereotypical Giant Barbarian Hero (Ug the Barbarian, I call him) but Conan as originally written by Howard still stands up well. In any case, he's one of the great fantasy archetypes, and I've certainly learnt a lot about writing exciting adventure from reading Howard.

Fritz Leiber. I never read much of Leiber's SF, but his stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser made a huge impression on me. There's a lot that I could pick out as influences, particularly the mixture of light hearted and adventurous, but I think what he mostly taught me was how to write a story with two equal main characters. Sometimes it seems as if the real main character in those stories isn't either Fafhrd or the Mouser, but the interaction between them. I've tried to emulate that when I'm writing similar kinds of story.

Jack Vance. Again, I've neglected Vance's reputedly excellent SF and concentrated on his hugely influential Dying Earth tales. I've picked the odd idea from his magical system for some stories, but perhaps the biggest single thing that I stoleborrowed is his word Overworld. Vance's Overworld and mine are radically different concepts, but that was where the inspiration came from.

Mervyn Peake. Peake and Howard probably stand at opposite ends of some spectrum or other in fantasy, but both have influenced me in different ways. The weight and gravity of Gormenghast, its slow oppressiveness, are feelings I've occasionally tried to emulate.

C. S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia were among the first fantasy works I read, along with the Arthurian legends and E. Nesbit, and they've soaked too far into me to have a hope of assessing. One influence I can't deny, though: my decision at fifteen to create an enemy in The Winter Legend who makes endless winter was almost certainly inspired by the White Witch.

J. R. R. Tolkien. I read Lord of the Rings at fifteen, and the world changed. I'm well aware of his faults now, and I don't actually want to write like him, but my ultimate ambition as a writer is to create something as great as Tolkien did. He's still my idol.

Geoffrey Trease. A children's historical fiction writer, not a very well-known author these days and has distinct faults (including his insistence on shoehorning a boy and girl into all periods, however implausible) but he got me into reading historical fiction. It makes a natural companion to fantasy, and it was reading Trease and others (certainly not school lessons) that really sparked my love of history.

Rosemary Sutcliff. Having read Trease, I got into Sutcliff, a much classier YA author of historical fiction. She wrote about a range of periods but mostly Roman Britain and mediaeval England. Among many things I learnt from her books was portraying friendship, with all its ups and downs.

Mary Renault. Sutcliff remained a favourite, but my growing love of Greece led me to possibly the best historical novelist I've read. Renault covered Greece from Theseus to Alexander the Great, and I've been told parts of At An Uncertain Hour show a strong influence from her. It wasn't deliberate, but not surprising either.

Andre Norton. Norton's Witch World series is perhaps most important for introducing a style of epic fantasy more based on people and relationships than headlong action, which has influenced many more recent authors. One very specific inspiration for me, though, was her way of writing unrelated stories set on different continents of the same world, which I've followed to an even greater extent.

Michael Moorcock. Moorcock's written so many books in so many different genres that it's difficult to narrow it down to a single influence. His Eternal Champion mega-series (which includes Elric, perhaps his best-known character) goes even further than Cabell in showing how so many different stories can be connected.

Ursula Le Guin. Earthsea is one of the key classic fantasy series, and there's a great many reasons for this. Perhaps the big influence on me was Le Guin's matter-of-fact racial mix, replacing the inevitable Eurocentric approach with a series where the main character is more like Native American.  I have a whole world to play with, and I routinely have non-caucasian main characters, such as Eltava who (if she came from our world) would be half Chinese, half Native American.

Doctor Who. OK, not a single author, but Doctor Who as a whole is one of my most important influences. I watched the first episode in 1963, and I've been hooked ever since, but it wasn't till someone pointed it out a few years back that I realised how much of the Doctor there is in the Traveller: a long-lived wanderer travelling in a miraculous ship, sometimes with companions, and getting caught up in causes by his devotion to justice.

Bob Dylan. Like Tolkien and Doctor Who, Dylan has been one of the overwhelming facts in the life of my imagination. His influence is more obvious on my poetry than my fiction, but he's certainly had a lot of effect on my ways of thinking and my habits of phrasing.

Karl Edward Wagner. He doesn't get a lot of mention these days, but Wagner had an intriguing habit of writing fairly standard sword & sorcery plots in an almost expressionistic way, giving them a strange and eerie feeling. Most of all, though, it was his immortal, nomadic Kane who gave me the idea that I could have a hero wandering through history, against the backdrop of different countries and civilisations in each story. It's served me well with the Traveller.

Well, it turned out to be a longer list than I expected when I started, but these are the most important authors who formed the writer I am now. There were plenty more, of course, and a lot of authors, from Mary Shelley to James Joyce to Poul Anderson, whom I enjoyed but can't pick out any specific influences.

It carries on, too, both with classic authors I didn't read till later (Chrétien de Troyes and George MacDonald, for instance) and newer influences. I've learnt a huge amount from reading both Mary Gentle and Iain Banks, but that's a refinement of the authors listed above, who formed the unformed in me.

Middle Ages? What Middle Ages?

There seems to be fixed idea that, at least until very recently, most fantasy has been set in a mediaeval-type setting. This is almost an article of faith to many people in the face of all evidence, and shows that they have very little understanding of what mediaeval* really means.

Some fantasy is certainly based on mediaeval Europe, from William Morris to George R. R. Martin, but it's only one of many models that traditional fantasy authors have used (though it's undeniable that most have been centred on Europe or the Middle East).

Tolkien is often cited as an author who uses a mediaeval model, but in fact there's very little mediaeval, as usually understood, in Lord of the Rings. The Shire is an idealised version of 19th century England without guns; Rohan is early Anglo-Saxon; the Dwarves are ancient Norse; Gondor has a distinctly Babylonian feel, although I suspect Tolkien was going for Solomon's Israel; and some of the other cultures, such as Lorien, have no real-world model.

Similarly, most of the pulp fantasy of the 30s and 40s, such as the Conan stories, tend to be set in a mashed-up imagining of the classical world and the pre-classical Middle East. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser's environment, on the other hand, had a lot in common with the Renaissance Mediterranean. And so on. Some mediaeval influence was there, but it was only one type of setting among many.

The problem seems to be that it's often assumed any time before gunpowder is mediaeval, but really the term only refers to a few hundred years (for part of which gunpowder was in use) on one of the world's smallest continents. To give some sense of perspective, besides Europe, civilisation has existed (before modern colonisation) in Asia, Africa, North America and South America**, and the earliest known civilisation (i.e. people living in a city) was over 11,000 years ago in the town later known as Jericho.

In reality, the Middle Ages (also known as the mediaeval period) didn't exist. It was a sneering term coined in the Renaissance to dismiss western Europe between the fallen of the classical world (good) and the birth of the new age (nearly as good). In the same way, the sometimes exquisite art and architecture of the period was described as Gothic, implying it was the work of barbarians.

The period the Renaissance scholars thus consigned to the scrapheap actually covers many different cultures, over both its timespan and its geographical distribution, although there are certain generalisations that can be made.

There isn't even any clear agreement as to when it started or finished. To some extent, of course, all historical periods are just convenient places for historians to start and finish their books. Some periods have more obvious beginnings and ends, but it's rare to have such a significant change that people living at the time would notice it.

My own view, with all possible disclaimers in place, is that the Middle Ages (to the extent that they existed at all) started in 732 AD*** and finished in 1453. On a Tuesday. At teatime.

Everyone knows that the Roman Empire fell in the 5th century. Except that it didn't. The Roman Empire had been changing and evolving throughout its lifetime, most obviously after the reforms of Diocletian (right) in the late 3rd century, and by this time it consisted mainly of barbarian warlords controlling their own territories and paying nominal fealty to the emperor. When the last western emperor was deposed in 476, they just carried on the same way, except that they paid even more nominal fealty to the eastern emperor in Constantinople, where the Roman Empire continued till the 15th century.

For the most part, the barbarian warlords were proud of being part of the empire — they fought the legions internally, as when the Emperor Honorius double-crossed the Visigoths and they besieged Rome, but they'd no wish to tear it down. Well, except for the Huns, but they were a rival empire, not a ravening horde.

Nothing substantially changed. Civilisation and culture had been declining through the later part of the imperium and continued to do so, but western Europe didn't really move on to anything new till the Frankish leader Charles Martel (below) smashed the Moors at the Battle of Poitiers in 732.

There are two reasons why this was crucial. For one thing, although Charles was never actually king of the Franks, his son was crowned and his grandson became Charles the Great — Charlemagne. By the time the Carolingian dynasty had played out, only a few generations later, the map of Europe had changed, the first signs of our modern nations were stirring, and the concept of empire had been updated.

The second reason was the reason why Charles Martel had won the battle: a radical new type of fighting-man he'd copied from the Byzantine Empire, called the knight.

Aristocrats in older civilisations are sometimes described as knights, but this is retrospective. The knight as we know him first arose in Persia, due to the introduction of stirrups, which made heavy cavalry possible for the first time. Unfortunately, the equipment and, in particular, the great war-horses were expensive to keep up. The Persians solved the problem by imposing crippling taxes on the cities, with the result that, when the Arabs invaded, the cities opened their gates and went over to a more reasonable enemy.

The Byzantines, learning from this, came up with a new idea: to give each knight a parcel of land and let him pay his own way. It was this concept Charles adopted, and so the feudal system was born.

The feudal system was, if anything was, the central institution of the Middle Ages, and any fantasy setting that doesn't have it can't be described as mediaeval. In reality, it was two separate but complementary systems. One was a contract the king made with his nobles and knights, whereby he granted them land and they undertook to fight for him when called on. In fact, many knights were more interested in running their estates, and it became increasingly common during the period for knights to pay money in lieu of service, which the king would use to hire mercenaries.

The other, which had existed since the later Roman period, was manorial serfdom. Serfs were distinct from slaves in that, though they weren't free to leave or refuse to work, they belonged to a manor, not to a person. They had rights, too, although that varied considerably from kingdom to kingdom. English serfs tended to have most rights. The feudal system wasn't used in England till after 1066, and many of the people's ancestral rights were restored a few decades later. Serfs in other kingdoms were usually a lot worse off, but the lord of the manor didn't legally have power of life or death over them. Though the question was whether anybody bothered with the law.

And what about the end of the Middle Ages? 1453 was the year that Constantinople, the last remnant of the Roman Empire, fell to the Turks. The immediate significance was that many scholars and artists fled to the west, fuelling the already growing Renaissance in learning and the arts.

In fact, the Renaissance wasn't a sudden development, and the Middle Ages weren't quite as bleak a period for learning as they're often painted, although certainly a low point. Knowledge had been seeping in, especially from the Islamic world, at that time the most culturally advanced civilisation in the west. Art certainly took a huge step forward in the Renaissance, but it's been suggested that the biggest academic change was that they started following Plato instead of Aristotle.

Besides the Renaissance, though, the mid-15th century marks a point where most of the characteristics of the age that followed were already being established. Gunpowder had come to stay and was making the transition from field guns to hand guns, rendering knights obsolete. Gutenberg was setting up his printing press in Mainz, and the voyages of discovery were well under way, with the Portuguese venturing down the African coast en route to India, leading the Spanish eventually to try another direction.

Social mobility was growing, too, as was religious dissent. Neither were anything like as absent from the Middle Ages as is often assumed, but both increased immensely after the Black Death. The mediaeval Church was either divided or powerless for much of the period, and there'd been radical preachers from at least the 12th century saying essentially the same as Luther did four hundred years later. By the 15th century, religious movements led by Wycliffe, Ball, Huss and many others became bigger and better organised. Luther was just the most successful of these.

There had been towns and cities throughout the Middle Ages, and industries had flourished there. It wasn't easy to escape from serfdom, except by going into the Church, but those who did had the chance of getting rich. Again, after the Black Death the feudal restraints became untenable, due to the shortage of manpower making labour a marketable commodity. The powers that be fought a long rearguard action against change, but it was becoming inevitable.

The Middle Ages were a long and varied period, even leaving out everything that was happening outside western Europe, and almost everything changed in their course. The armour worn by knights, for instance, went from ring-mail sewn onto leather to the familiar suits of plate armour (which were not too heavy to manoeuvre in), driven by changing weapon technology.

At any given time, none of the typical mediaeval institution were present everywhere, and some areas — Scandinavia, for instance — were barely affected till very late in the period.

So, if you want to create a fantasy setting "based on the mediaeval period", by all means do — you'll be in good company — but decide what you actually mean by that, and do plenty of research on the specific country and era that interests you. On the other hand, if all you want is for your hero to wield a sword or use a bow and arrow, you have an entire world and eleven thousand years of civilisation to choose your model.

 

* The original and most accurate spelling of the word is mediaeval, but medieval is now common and acceptable. Seeing the word (as I all too often have) spelt midevil makes me want to stick my head in a bucket of water and scream. Please don't make me do that.

** Pre-settlement Australia can't really be described as civilised, though that doesn't make its cultures any less rich and fascinating.

*** Yes, I use BC and AD, which have served perfectly well for the past 1500 years. Get over it.

Interview on Daniel Ausema's blog

And, following on my interview with Daniel Ausema yesterday, today he's interviewing me on his blog. The questions were great fun to answer.

http://danielausema.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-rather-different-sort-of-interview.html

Interview with Daniel Ausema

Today, I welcome to my blog another contributor to the Unburied Treasures anthology, Daniel Ausema, author of Musa Publishing's Spire City series.

Hello, and many thanks for agreeing to be a guest on my blog. Can you tell us something about yourself — who is Daniel Ausema when he's not writing?

Thanks for having me here. I'm always writing in many ways, thinking about stories and letting the words and images bounce around in the back of my head even if I'm not actively typing/scribbling/tapping away. But to answer the question, I'm a dad. For close to a decade I've been staying home with my (now three) kids. Prior to that, I'd worked in education, especially what's called experiential education, which is things like high ropes courses and teambuilding exercises and other learning-by-doing programs about history and science.

How long have you been writing, and what have you had published?

My first publications were just out of college, almost fifteen years ago. Those were mainstream, literary works. For the past seven or eight years I've had dozens of short stories and poems published in fantasy, science fiction, and horror magazines and anthologies. And then of course I have the serial fiction project Spire City. More about that below. My work tends toward the artsy, literary side of things, atmospheric and lyrical, though hopefully not in an obscure or opaque way.

If there's one thing anyone who's read your work will remember, I think it's your strange and impossibly inventive settings. I'm incredibly envious of your ability to come up with these. Do they come naturally to you, or do you have to work hard at being weird?

Trick question, trick question! Hmm, well it certainly comes from the things that I enjoy reading. I do deliberately make sure I'm not turning down any idea just because it seems too weird. And also, when I have an idea that feels only OK, I'll push myself to look at it more closely, try to find an interesting angle or approach. Which tends to make ideas weirder. Whether that means it's natural or something I work hard at... Chicken first, or egg? I suspect the answer is, “Yes, both.”

And speaking of strange and wonderful settings brings us to SpireCity, your serial currently being published by Musa Publishing. Can you tell us something about it, and why you decided to go with a serial rather than a more conventional format?

About...seven years ago, I had an SF novel nearly accepted by Aio, a small press that was making a name for itself with absolutely gorgeous print books. One of the publisher's comments was that she kept opening the files of each chapter I'd sent (on CD by snail mail back in those days) and imagined them as a Charles Dickens sort of serial. Unfortunately the press closed shop before we could finalize any contracts. But her comment stuck with me and made me wonder what it would take to write something deliberately for serialization, to try to take advantage of the different way of reading that would result.

To fit the Dickens comment, I decided that steampunk would be a natural extension of the idea, and I'd already written a novelette in Spire City. So the two ideas came together, and I joined that with a ragtag bunch of outcasts who've been targeted by a mad scientist's deadly serum. Spire City: Infection is their story.

I use television terms for the story (the original drafts actually had commercial breaks built in instead of scene breaks), though it was always written to be read, not to be a TV script or anything of that sort. So we've just finished the 13-episode first season. Which, if I understand right would be called a series instead of a season in the U.K.? And there are two more 13-episode seasons to go.

Yes, although season is becoming more common now. Whatever they're called, it's good news that there are more of them.

Your story in Unburied Treasure, A Map Is Not the World, seems to me to be largely about the differences and connections between concepts and reality, and this kind of playing with ideas also seems very characteristic of your work. Can you tell us something about the story?

The story started (quite a few years ago) with an image someone shared with our writing group as a prompt. It was of a person kneeling down while tiny skeletons fell from his? her? fingers. Around that time I'd just finished reading the novel Falling After by Paul Witcover, which alternates two storylines, one in the real world and one in a role-playing sort of secondary world that tweaks the standards of RPGs just enough to be fascinating.

I think that format is what inspired me to do the back and forth here, though I chose both storylines to be in fantasy worlds. There's a deliberate band-of-would-be-heroes feel to the group in the one storyline. And the connection between the two stories is never explicit but up to the reader to connect. The title, of course, is a reference to “a map is not the territory,” which was a sort of common phrase well before my time that I encountered in college classes in the context of the connection (if any) between words and the objects they refer to or signify.

So what about the future? What projects are you working on, and where do you see your writing career going?

Well, Spire City will be the big thing in the next couple of years. Season 2: Pursued begins serialization on November 28, with a new episode every three weeks. Then Season 3: Unwoven will begin a year later. I've also had one novella published in Musa's shared world, The Darkside Codex, and I hope to have at least one more come out. I also did some writing recently for a start-up card game company, which was a lot of fun. So I'd be open to doing something else along those lines, if something comes up.

Beyond that, I continue to write short fiction and poetry, and I have at least a couple of novels that I still believe in enough to shop around to agents and major publishers. A lot will depend on what if anything comes from any of those. At the moment I'm taking a short break from any big projects, but I've got a couple of ideas for what novel-length work I might begin writing next, in addition to all the revisions and rewriting of earlier things. Those ideas will continue simmering in the back of my brain for a few more months at least before I feel ready to write them.

I'll look forward to seeing where you go next. Many thanks, Dan, for coming on my blog and sharing your thoughts.

 

You can follow Dan's writing at his excellent blog, Twigs and Brambles, and find the whole Spire City series at Musa Publishing.

 

Links to buy Unburied Treasures can be found on this page.

 

The Grim Gathering and Grimdark Fantasy

 A couple of years ago, I went to an author evening organised by Fantasy Faction which featured Joe Abercrombie, Peter V. Brett and Myke Cole. I'd never read a word by any of them, but I was impressed by the way they talked about their books. Since then, I've read, enjoyed and reviewed the first books by Abercrombie and Brett. Cole attracts me less, not because I don't expect him to be good, but because real-world military stories aren't really my bag. I will try him, though — I may find him the exception that proves the rule. *

On Wednesday evening, Fantasy Faction organised a return event dubbed the Grim Gathering. Held at Waterstone's bookshop in Kensington High Street, this featured the original three, plus Mark Lawrence. Understandably, it was more important to have him than to keep the alphabetic theme going and get someone whose surname began with D.

The large space on Waterstone's lower floor was packed, and the authors were entertaining, especially Abercrombie. It was surprising, though, how few questions they could get through, with four people each giving full and informative answers. All the same, I felt we got a flavour of who each author was.

There was a good deal of discussion about the so-called Grimdark fantasy genre that's fashionable at the moment, with which all four are more or less identified. My reason for writing this is more to give some thoughts and reactions about the genre than simply a review of the event.

Grimdark, of course, is a convenient umbrella term. Like many musical trends (punk, for instance, a comparison which was mentioned during the evening) it lumps together many individuals who respond to a particular zeitgeist in often very different ways. Brett, for instance, disputes that his work is really Grimdark, and certainly The Painted/Warded Man ** seems to me to contain far more heroism than cynicism.

Although I've enjoyed what I've read of these authors so far, and intend to read more, I have two slight queries about how the genre is presented. Neither invalidates it, but the queries are there.

Firstly, a lot of use seems to be made of the phrase the world as it really is (or variations) to distinguish Grimdark from the more Tolkien-inspired fantasy of the 80s and 90s. This seems perilously close to the arguments traditionally used by those who want to insist we shouldn't read fantasy at all. We should concentrate on the "real world".

In any case, what is the world like, really? It's very easy to follow the news and conclude that the real world is all psychopathic killers, money-grubbing bankers and cynical politicians. That's a significant part of it, of course, and needs to be acknowledged by anyone presenting a broad view of this or any other world. But the real world also includes heroism, compassion and self-sacrifice: firefighters risking their lives to pull people out of burning buildings, or carers who dedicate their lives to looking after someone. I believe this side of the world needs to be acknowledged too, and can be writ large in fantasy as world-saving heroism and compassion.

The other thing that I find a slight annoyance is the perception that Grimdark is a startling new direction, and that all earlier fantasy was light and shining. Again, I'm reminded of punk, where the "year zero" attitude ignored the fact that there'd been plenty of punk before punk (come on, by what definition was The Who's My Generation not punk? Or Chuck Berry's No More Monkey Business?)

Cynical manipulators as fantasy heroes go back at least as far as Cabell's Jurgen. Conan (as originally written) was morally grey and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser a deeper charcoal; Clark Ashton Smith's work was full of characters who would be very much at home in Grimdark, and E.R. Eddison was almost as Machiavellian as Martin. The trend intensified in the 60s and 70s through morally ambiguous heroes like Moorcock's Elric, Wagner's Kane and Donaldson's Thomas Covenant. And I have vaguer memories of more obscure "heroes" who made those look like shining paladins by comparison.

Then, from the late 70s, the pendulum swung to the optimistic and heroic: Brooks, Eddings, Weiss & Hickman and the rest. Even so, there were greyer authors like Gemmell, though it's probably fair to say the trend was a brightness that Martin — Grimdark's ultimate inspiration — broke through like a dark beacon.

Grimdark can perhaps be best seen as an unusually wide swing of the pendulum to the dark side, but not unique. The depth of its darkness can probably be put down to boundaries already pushed further in the modern age, although Lawrence pointed out at the Grim Gathering that horror has routinely included material for years that's far darker than anything he's done, without creating any particular comment. Nevertheless, it's not fundamentally a new idea.

Several of the authors on Wednesday made the point that Grimdark (however it's defined) hasn't by any means taken over fantasy, and that the genre is still a broad spectrum. I'd add the argument that there also doesn't have to be any absolute choice between positions on the spectrum. For myself, I've enjoyed Abercrombie and Brett, but I also still love Lord of the Rings. I get different impacts from them, and I've no wish for every book I read to affect me in the same way.

For my own writing, I probably fall somewhere in the middle, but I try to spread out a fair way on either side. I certainly don't have any time (except in comedy) for heroes whose strength is the strength of ten because their hearts are pure, but I suppose I'd characterise my favourite type of hero as an idealist with serious human flaws, who tries to do his or her best and sometimes succeeds. Not that I'm at all averse to the odd psychopath, or just an opportunist on the make; but I do try to balance them.

The authors characterised as Grimdark are important, and I suspect they'll be seen from the future as the defining fantasy authors of the twenty-teens, but there'll always be alternative fantasy visions for different tastes. And that's precisely how it should be. In the meantime, I'll read more by the authors at the Gathering and look forward to the next event Fantasy Faction organises.

 

* Going off at a complete tangent, I'd just like to clarify for anyone who's not already aware that this saying uses the old meaning of "prove" and properly means "the exception that tests the rule". Otherwise, it would be absurd.

** I'm not sure which to treat as the correct title. Although Brett is American, the book was published first in the UK as The Painted Man and subsequently in the US as The Warded Man. Even so, I find the US title far more convincing and appropriate (unlike, for instance, the ridiculous change from The Philosopher's Stone to The Sorcerer's Stone.)

Review of Wintersmith by Steeleye Span in collaboration with Terry Pratchett

Folk song, perhaps more than any other kind of music, is a storytelling medium. Many songs tell stories, but in folk it's almost universal, whether the tale is a ballad passed down from time immemorial or the song equivalent of a man walking into a bar. And, in among the gory murders, the lovers breaking a token in two and then inexplicably failing to recognise one another, or the young men and young girls cut down in their prime, a good many of the stories are fantasy.

Steeleye Span, a band rooted deeply in the folk tradition but playing in a contemporary idiom, have tackled fantasy many times in their interpretations of ballads like Thomas the Rhymer (the hero seduced away by the Queen of Faerie), King Orfeo (a Shetland version of the Orpheus legend, believe it or not) and Seven Hundred Elves (um, speaks for itself). In 1977, two members wrote and produced a wonderful folk-rock opera version of Lord Dunsany's classic novel The King of Elfland's Daughter (worth listening to, among many other reasons, to hear Christopher Lee singing).

This being so, it's no surprise to discover that Steeleye Span and Terry Pratchett have been long-term fans of each other, and last year Steeleye released an album, Wintersmith, created in collaboration with Pratchett and based on the Tiffany Aching strand of his Discworld series.  Each of the four books are referenced, but the main plot follows the novel Wintersmith, chronicling the "romance" between the teenage witch Tiffany and a destructive spirit of winter.

Each track focuses on a different aspect of the story or of other parts of Tiffany's life, such as the Wee Free Men and the training of a witch, and they weave together to create less a continuous narrative than an impression of the story. The album ends with a song called We Shall Wear Midnight, in which Tiffany directly addresses Terry Pratchett, asking him to continue her story and let her grow up. There are, apparently, rumours that he's intending to comply.

Pratchett is credited as co-writer on all tracks (presumably working on the lyrics more than the music) and he appears at the end of the song The Good Witch, with a spoken section relating the rules of how to be a good witch. I don't recognise the passage, but from the style I suspect he's quoting Granny Weatherwax.

The music is basically folk-rock, some of it extremely heavy, but quite diverse in its styles and influences, from a heavy rock version of morris dance to spacy, electronic sounds. It's been observed that the album would perfectly suit production as a stage show, and I can actually imagine it as a kind of folk-rock ballet. I'd definitely go to see that.

In these days of downloads and (allegedly) short attention spans*, concept albums often get short shrift. In good hands, though, the album is still a powerful art-form, and the concept album even more so. If you're interested in how songs can tell a long, complex story, I thoroughly recommend Wintersmith.

Besides, how many albums have you ever heard that describe a turtle swimming through space?

 

* Allegedly. It seems that, very often, the people who complain that "kids today can't concentrate" are the same people who, in the next breath, complain that "kids today spend hours playing stupid computer games." Which, it seems, are supposed to need no concentration at all.

 

Wintersmith by Steeleye Span in collaboration with Terry Pratchett, released by Park Records in 2013, is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, as well as many other outlets.

 

Interview with Erika Wilson

Today I welcome fantasy author and poet Erika Wilson to my blog, editor of the anthology Unburied Treasures.

Hello, Erika, and thanks for agreeing to appear on my blog. Could you tell us something about yourself, and what you do when you're not writing?

As you can see from my picture, I wrestle dinosaurs in my spare time...

 

Actually, of late I don't seem to have much in the way of spare time (to the great relief of the local dinosaurs). I spend a lot of time at my job, though I do try to escape outside most days for lunch, which is when I get a lot of my best writing done. There's a little park nearby with picnic tables where I can sit with my salad and laptop in the shade of a tree, listening to the birds and feeling the breeze on my skin. I find that very conducive to writing. 

When I'm not working or writing, I'm probably reading - books or online news. The news is almost uniformly depressing, but I'm fascinated by the sorts of problems we are faced with, and the vastly different opinions on how they should be addressed. I suspect I'm studying the nature of interpersonal conflict, since I'm so conflict-avoidant, I have trouble putting it into my stories.

I hope to do more traveling soon. Unfortunately I suffer from air-sickness, and airplane seats are fiendish torture devices, but I do love visiting friends and seeing new places. Last year I spent a wonderful week in Oxford - 'the city of dreaming spires' - and this past autumn I helped organize a family trip to Key West, where my nephew and I made friends with one of the descendants of Hemingway's six-toed cat.

I wonder if it had any family anecdotes passed down about Hemingway. How long have you been writing for and what kind of things have you written and had published?

Hmm, it's a bit hard to say when I 'started' writing, it seems like it's been more of a step-wise progression to the point where I can actually say that I write well enough to call myself a writer. I've always been a huge reader - I was one of those kids who would visit the library every week and leave with a stack of books under my chin. In the years before I discovered the Fantasy genre, I wore out my book of Grimm's fairy tales and read through Edith Hamilton's 'Mythology' dozens of times. I thought books were absolutely magical in the way they could create beautiful pictures in my head, and make me laugh and cry, just with words.

I think I've always wanted to try my hand at creating that sort of magic myself. As a college freshman, I submitted a story to F&SF magazine, which was rejected, since it was mostly a series of pretty images with no real plot or characterization. Four years later, I had a story published in our school magazine which had actual character and plot development, so I was learning. After graduating, I spent several years writing fan fiction, which helped me practice constructing stories around existing characters. Nine years ago I signed onto Fantasy-Writers.org and started creating original works.

About five years later I squelched my fear of submitting, and in 2010, I had a few poems and short stories accepted. That felt like a real achievement - to be paid for my work and published where anyone could read it. Since then I haven't submitted much - my story in the Unburied Treasures anthology is the first to be published in quite a while. There is something about having my work 'out there' that made me want to really love the stories I submitted and be proud of them - not just of having written them - but to publish the kinds of stories that instilled my love for reading all those years ago.  

What gave you the idea to edit the anthology Unburied Treasures?

The lovely Lydia deserves all the credit. She e-mailed out of the blue and asked if I wanted to help get the band back together for another anthology - this time fully illustrated by her and Isaia. It sounded like a brilliant idea, but I wasn't at all sure that I was the right person for the job. But really, when Lydia asks you to do something, it's pretty impossible to say no. She makes it sound like a wonderful project and convinces you that you'll have great fun doing it with her - all of which is absolutely true.

Did you find it easier or harder than you expected?

Much easier. Everyone was so pleasant and professional, and submitted such marvelous stories, I hardly felt I had earned my editorial title. I tried to get Lydia to take additional credit, since she did so much more than the beautiful illustrations, but I think she likes to be the secret elf who sneaks in at night to do her magic when everyone is asleep. Which is often the case, since her time-zone is so different than us Northern Hemispherians. 

Your story in Unburied Treasures comes over, to me at least, with a distinctly Buddhist feeling. Was this deliberate, and what were you aiming to convey?

It all started with a snow leopard, so once I had that, I had to have the Himalayas and a Yeti, didn't I? It is tricky, I think, to set a story in a country and culture with which you have no direct experience. It can come off as stereotyped and cliched since we tend to draw on simplistic images that come primarily from pop culture references, rather than taking the time to dig into the deep complexity of original sources. I did worry about that, but I tried to do at least some research into the symbolism of mandalas. Personally, I've always found them beautiful and fascinating - how can you not? My hope is that I may intrigue someone with my light-hearted story, and they will be inspired to look further into the images that I present in order to understand them better.

When you came to London a few years back, your instant target was the British Museum. How important is history to you?

What an amazing trip that was! Thank you for touring the museum with me and showing me so much of the City, Nyki. And reciting poetry while sitting on a bench overlooking the Thames! Wonderful memories. I only wish I hadn't been so tired - I'd been traveling around Europe for three weeks by then, so I was fair exhausted. And you're such a great walker - hard for this soft American to keep up with!

It was great for me, too, to have someone to remind me I hadn't taken advantage of being near all those things for too long. Thanks.

History, yes, I do have something of a passion for it. I don't know if you remember, but I said something about it when we were browsing the Egyptian exhibit - I thought it was like being surrounded by thousands of story fragments, that each little relic or carved hieroglyph was a piece of an unknown story. So much of who we were and how we got here has been lost to time, but museums are full of ghostly whispers hinting at how people once lived and what was vitally important to them. I homed in on the British Museum because there were two things I wanted to see most of all - the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta stone. I'd been deeply affected by what had been written about them, and had an intense desire to see them for myself. And I wasn't disappointed. They're like time machines revealing the pinnacle of ancient art and language, showing us how easily such things can be lost, and how much else of irretrievable value disappears when that happens.  

Can you tell us something about what you're writing at the moment and any future writing (or editing) plans?

At the moment, I'm working mostly on collaborations. I'm 15,000 words into a story set in a world created by a friend, using some of his characters. I've done a few others, one of which he may include in a future collection of his stories, so perhaps this could end up going the same way. Though at this point I'm writing it for the sheer fun of playing in his wonderful sandbox. It's like writing fan fiction, but with the original creator willing to comment and make helpful suggestions.

Editorially, I've been helping another friend with his online comic book. We actually started writing it together more than twenty years ago, but as neither of us could draw well enough, it fell by the wayside. He has since discovered the magic of 3-D computer graphics programs, and has done an outstanding job teaching himself how to put together some truly stunning illustrations. The scope of the project has expanded greatly as well - from the original six-issue series, to a thirty-issue monster. He's got it all planned out, though - I have the color-coded outline. It looks like a schematic for the New York Subway system. It's called The Great Game and the first issue was recently accepted by Comixology. 

For myself, I'd like to start submitting again. My favorite stories end up around novella-length, so I need to investigate some of the on-line markets that have been opening up for less-than-novel-length stories.

The recent one I've been reading certainly needs to be got out there.

Thanks so much for inviting me to be on your blog, Nyki, and getting the word out about our anthology. Your dragon story was wonderful, as well as providing an eye-catching focal point for the cover illustration. 

And thank you for entertaining and informing us, and for editing the anthology.

You can follow Erika's blog, and the links to buy the anthology can be found on this page.