The Economics of Magic Kingdoms

If you took a poll of all the fantasy writers you know, asking them to list the top ten useful things to know about for writing fantasy, I doubt if any of them would include economics. Come to that, I doubt if many would include it in their top hundred.

Why would they? Economics seems emblematic of all that grey mundanity we read and write fantasy to get away from. I'm no different: I have to make an effort not to switch off when the economic news comes on.

Economics, though, isn't an obscure, arcane lore known only to five and a half people (none of whom are in the government). The word actually means housekeeping, and it's part of all our lives. Every time you go into a shop or click on a buy link; every time your employer pays you for the work you've done in the past month; every time you sit down with your bank statement and work out if you'll have enough left this month for that holiday, or to buy the latest series of A Game of Thrones: that's all economics.

More than that, though: economics has been a fundamental part of human behaviour throughout the history of our species. Paleolithic man traded and even had factories *, and finds from at least one of the early Neolithic towns in the middle east have included clay chips that may have been primitive money. Come to that, towns themselves are an economic institution. They might also have a defensive function, but their main purpose is to provide a convenient nexus for crafts and trade.

All the great civilisations from which fantasy draws inspiration, from Egypt under the Pharoahs to Renaissance Europe, were built on an economy. It's no exaggeration to say that you can't have any organised society without economics.

I'm not an economist, and an expert would probably find holes in what follows big enough for a dragon to fly through. I'm not trying to give a lecture, though, merely suggest areas to think about and research further when creating your world.

Broadly speaking, economics divides into three areas. A society must be able to obtain resources, most importantly food, but also minerals, building materials and other things. It must have a system that allows it to acquire and exploit the resources in a mutually beneficial way **. And it must have a system that allows it to exchange its surplus resources for items it can't get directly — in other words, trade.

If you examine a map of the real world, you'll find that there's usually a reason for important towns and cities to be where they are. Often this will be the interface between a fertile hinterland and easy transport for trade. The prosperous civilisation that flourished in the Mississippi basin at the same time as mediaeval Europe, for instance, had its great city at the point where the Mississippi and Missouri meet. Centuries later, the European settlers built St Louis in exactly the same place. The position is ideal, both to dominate an excellent agricultural region and to access all the main waterways in the centre of the continent.

It's not always food, although a city without easy access to food would need something spectacular going for it ***. Mining is always a vital industry, and some other industries thrive in specific locations. The English cotton industry in the Industrial Revolution, for instance, was centred in east Lancashire because the climate and landscape made the area ideal for cotton mills.

Economic richness can have a downside, though. The main reason for the Roman conquest of Britain wasn't self-aggrandising empire-building, it was because Britain is (or was, at least) unusually rich in mineral resources: tin and coal especially (less glamorous than gold, but far more useful) but many others too.

In fantasy novels, empires tend to expand because the king is obsessed with matching the conquests of his forebears, or because their religion has a crusading mission, or because they believe in civilising the barbarians. All of these are certainly reasons for empire-building — for public consumption, certainly — but the underlying reason is almost always because the conquered land has something the empire needs, or at least wants.

Wars are much the same: competition either for resources or to control important trade routes. Again, these aren't the reasons given, the cause used to rouse soldiers to leave their homes and fight to the death. They believe they're fighting for civilisation, for right, for the glory of their nation or their religion. In fact, they're almost always fighting for the economy.

The economy's social contract can be difficult to define, but is perhaps the most ubiquitous aspect. The contract may be a utopian system where each gives what they can and takes what they need, but the chances are it will be very unequal. The European feudal system is often seen as oppression pure and simple — and it was sometimes, especially at the stage when it had outlived its use — but the essential point was that the peasants got to keep a little of their harvest, at least, without the nearest robber-band taking it all from them, and the knights and lords were fed and could specialise in protection. It didn't always work properly, but that was the theory, anyway.

The basic arrangement is about who does the work and who gets what out of it. Even the most wretched peasants or industrial workers get something, if not much, for the simple reason that without enough to eat they can't work. Usually, though, it's more two sided than that.

Your city or kingdom in a fantasy world will have many people living their lives, and sometimes that will impinge on even the most single-minded band of adventurers. The inn they stay at will be owned by someone who has an arrangement (normally financial) with the people who serve the drinks, prepare the food and wash the dishes afterwards. The blacksmith who reshoes the adventurers' horses will have set his prices so he can cover the cost of his materials and have enough left over to buy food for himself and his family; although in a fairly primitive society, he may simply trade his work for the food itself.

Trade is the lifeblood of any civilisation, and the people who pursue it will be important in your fantasy culture, whether they adventure into the wild to obtain something in high demand (like the trappers of North America) or run a shop or market stall to sell goods from afar to their fellow-citizens. Along with local resources, prevailing trades will affect the look and feel of your culture. All those clothes, jewellery, ornaments, weapons and rare spices must have come from somewhere, and if they aren't local, it must be feasible that they could have been brought there by merchants.

This, as I say, isn't a lesson on how it works, just an encouragement to think about an often-neglected aspect of world-making. I'm obviously not suggesting you should draw up a detailed, complex economic plan for your world, any more than I'd suggest fully creating all the languages spoken in it — unless, of course, you really, really love doing that.  But, along with the geography and history and religion and customs of your lands and peoples, it's worth giving some thought about how their economies fit together.

Because, in fact, it's intimately related to all the other aspects.

 

* One, in the Dordogne region of France, seems to have used a (metaphorical) conveyor-belt system with strict division of labour to make high-class, decorated clothing. Judging by the archaeological finds, they traded all over Europe.

** Of course, the benefits won't necessarily be equal, but even ground-down peasants will normally get something out of the arrangement. The exception is slave-based societies, where a section of the population gets no benefit at all.

*** The royal seat of the Hittite Empire bucks the trend. Build purely for strength, defensibility and impressiveness, it stood high in the mountains, far from any agricultural land or trade routes. However, this was after the tribute had started pouring in from the four fertile corners of the empire, enabling the capital to survive without producing.

When Sci-Fi Met Fantasy

My last blog post was a review of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, a classic fantasy novel written by a classic SF author, and it got me thinking about the long and complex overlap between fantasy and SF.

This lies not only in the multitude of authors from one genre who've moonlighted in the other — or have even been completely ambidextrous — but also in the many works that share traits from either side of the divide. This can be the "sword & planet" stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his successors, the epic fantasy in space of Stars Wars, or the far more complicated blends of authors such as Michael Moorcock.

The confusion starts early, partly due to the difficulty in defining what should actually count as fantasy or science fiction before a couple of centuries ago. Fantasy seems more straightforward. A large proportion of older literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, deals with magic and the supernatural, but it's not always easy to tell how much of this would have been viewed at the time as fantasy.

That's certainly not to say that all ancient cultures were naïve, but they'd certainly have viewed these matters differently from modern western civilisation. The only stories we know for certain was treated as fantasy were the mediaeval Icelandic sagas of the gods and heroes, because they had a word for them: "lying sagas", as opposed to the "true-seeming sagas", covering both biography and historical fiction. It's likely, though, that many other cultures, from Greece to China, were perfectly aware of when they were letting their fancies roam.

Early science fiction has the opposite problem, where we need to appreciate that some absurdly fanciful ideas might at the time have qualified as sophisticated science. For instance, the 2nd century AD author Lucian of Samosata wrote an adventure story where his heroes at one point visited the Moon and met its inhabitants. To us, there seems little science in this, but it should be remembered that, in Lucian's day, the mere concept of the celestial bodies being worlds that might be inhabited was pretty cutting edge.

Although it's a slight oversimplification, it could be argued that modern fantasy began in 1786 with William Beckford's Vathek and modern science fiction in 1818 with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus. The first crossover I'm aware of came in 1858, in George MacDonald's Phantastes, a strange, allegorical fantasy. In the middle of its hero's wanderings, he finds the library of a great palace where he "experiences" (rather than reads) various tales. One is set on a planet with such a long orbit around its sun that no-one experiences more than one or two seasons.

Like Lucian, MacDonald's scientific accuracy might be doubted today, but no more than some of Wells's ideas, and he was using genuine scientific speculation to create his story. Part of MacDonald's legacy was a small but interesting subgenre of allegorical science fantasy, such as David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus and C. S. Lewis's space trilogy.

One of the subgenres that most obviously combines Sf and fantasy is the Dying Earth genre. The earliest examples of this, such as Shelley's The Last Man and Wells's The Time Machine, were unmistakably SF, but starting with William Hope Hodgson's 1912 The Night Land, various dying earths (notably by Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance, and more recently Gene Wolfe) combined elements of fantasy or horror with the undeniable SF concept of the planet's days being numbered. Smith and Vance, for instance, both assumed that a decadent last civilisation would rediscover magic to replace science.

Perhaps the great era for genre-blending came with the pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. The great Weird Tales authors slipped a little SF into the mix. H. P. Lovecraft's tale Through the Gate of the Silver Key, for instance, combined horror, fantasy and SF, while Clark Ashton Smith, normally teetering between fantasy and horror, wrote a few SF stories, including the concept of time travel in which the time machine stays still and the universe moves on, allowing the time-travellers to encounter a series of planets. I suspect Einstein would beg to differ, but it's still an interesting concept.

When John W. Campbell started Unknown (also known as Unknown Worlds) he persuaded many of the science fiction authors he'd nurtured in Astounding Science Fiction to try their hand at fantasy. Perhaps the defining series in Unknown * was the Harold Shea stories of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp. This used the developing concept of alternative worlds, which would ultimately grow into the theory of the multiverse, to assume that it was possible to travel to fictional "worlds" such as the Norse myths and The Faerie Queen. A similar concept was used later by Andre Norton (also an "ambidextrous" author) to transport her hero in the first chapter of her Witch World series.

Authors like Pratt and de Camp combined genres not only by providing a scientific framework for their fantasy tales, but also by approaching the fantasy elements with the rigour of SF. Shea and his associates, for instance, have to work out the laws by which magic and the supernatural work in the various worlds they visit. The approach is summed up by the title of one of the stories: The Mathematics of Magic.

Unknown's brief span on this earth was… well, brief, regrettably, but many of his SF authors (including Robert Heinlein, for instance) continued to write occasional fantasy. Vance and Anderson, for instance, were both too late for Unknown but wrote works very much in its tradition. The great number of later writers who've combined SF and fantasy careers (sometimes combining them in ways that can't be easily unpicked) include ** Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock, Ursula LeGuin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffery, George R. R. Martin, and my personal favourite, Mary Gentle.

Most of the time, it's easy enough to tell what's fantasy and what's science fiction. It's unlikely that anyone would mistake I, Robot for fantasy or Lord of the Rings for SF ***. There's a substantial grey area between them, though. As we've seen, authors including Pratt & de Camp, Anderson, Moorcock and Norton — arguably even C. S. Lewis — used the scientific theory of the multiverse as a mechanism to get their characters to their fantasy worlds, although in Moorcock's case it's a lot more than just a mechanism.

Science fiction can be "infected" with fantasy just as much as the reverse. McCaffery's Pern novels are ultimately SF, since we gradually learn that Pern is a colonial planet and the mysterious elements like dragons and thread-fall have scientific explanations, but for the most part the characters themselves aren't aware of any of this, and the books read more like fantasy.

Iain M Banks (whose "mainstream" novels as Iain Banks include a couple of fantasies) pulled off a similar trick in Inversions, where two characters from his technologically advanced Culture visit a planet with a Renaissance-level civilisation. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the planet's natives, so the visitors' technology appears to be magic, and it's only the reader's privileged knowledge that lets us know what's really going on.

Then again, speculative fiction can be the most glorious mash-up that shows no respect whatsoever for genre. Mary Gentle's Rats & Gargoyles is one such. Described by the author as "Hermetic Science Fiction" (in other words, suppose the laws of nature really were as the Renaissance mystics assumed them to be) it has everything from a standard fantasy Thieves Guild to trains and airships. It also has an East Pole (presumably stolen from Winnie the Pooh) and five cardinal points of the compass, each at right angles to the other. Strangely, she doesn't provide a map.

In the end, the job of a story is to entertain, excite and possibly educate, not to toe a genre line. While there's nothing at all wrong with writing a good story that stands four-square within a genre, the borderlands can often provide the most fertile territory, and natives of one land can learn from those who do things differently in another country.

Fantasy has explored excellent borders with horror, with historical fiction, and sometimes even with realism, but there's something about the combination of fantasy and science fiction that seems entirely appropriate. Perhaps that's why they almost always share a section in bookshops and libraries.

 

* Arguably the greatest series to appear in Unknown was Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but this was somewhat atypical. Campbell accepted them with comments like "This is more of a Weird Tales piece than Unknown usually prints. However—" The missing sentence presumably being something along the lines of "However, who cares with a story this good?"

** Apologies if I haven't included your favourite. It really is a very great number. Feel free to add any glaring omissions below.

*** You'd think. In fact, a review in 1954 by Naomi Mitchison (who wrote fantasy herself) describes Lord of the Rings as "really super science fiction". Go figure.

Review of Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article for Fantasy Faction looking at The Broken Sword, a fantasy novel by Poul Anderson, which was, if nothing else, a good excuse to reread a book I'd loved back in the seventies. Anderson is best known for SF, but from the 1970s onward he also wrote a number of fantasy novels. Besides The Broken Sword, though, he only wrote one other early in his career, and I'd somehow neglected to read that. I've now put that right and just finished Three Hearts and Three Lions.

It originated in a 1953 novella, but the full-length version wasn't published till 1961. Where The Broken Sword is a full-blooded saga-style tale, Three Hearts and Three Lions is a modern-hero-whisked-away-to-fantasy-world story, with a lot more humour (though it isn't a comic novel) and more than a touch of the moonlighting SF writer on show.

Holger Carlsen is a young Danish man with a mysterious background, whose secrets both he and the reader discover as the book proceeds. We first meet him in the US just before the Second World War, through the eyes of a nominal narrator who simply relates the tale Holger later tells him in third person. Holger ends up fighting for the Danish Resistance against the Nazis and, in the middle of a crucial fight, finds himself whisked away to a world loosely based on the Carolingian legends, complete with dragons, trolls and the Kingdom of Faerie.

At first, all Holger wants is to get home, but he seems in some way to belong in this world. He links up with various companions: the dwarf Hugi, the swan-maiden Alianora and, later, the Saracen knight Carahue — not to mention the feisty steed Papillon who seems to be his — and finds himself caught up in a great war between Law and Chaos to decide the fate of the world.

As a science fiction writer, Anderson was very much part of John W. Campbell's stable and, although he was too late to publish in Campbell's fantasy magazine Unknown Worlds, Three Hearts and Three Lions is very much in its tradition. It's slightly reminiscent of Pratt & de Camp's Harold Shea stories in its analysis of the world of legend the hero finds himself in, though less outright comic.

Holger is an engineer and scientist, and he can't help trying both to explain what's happened to him, using theories of alternative universes, and to find scientific explanation for issues like how magic works and why the fae can't touch iron. In a memorable scene, he defeats a dragon by tossing several helmets-full of water down its throat. He explains to his astounded companions:

Look, if the creature breathed fire, then it had to be even hotter inside. So I tossed half a gallon of water down its gullet. Caused a small boiler explosion.

For the first few chapters, as Holger wanders around gathering companions, the story threatens to topple over into aimlessness, although all the characters are engaging enough to maintain interest. Long before this becomes a problem, though, the pace and sense of purpose pick up, and the story builds to an exciting climax.

It's not perfect. The narrative cuts off somewhat abruptly, jumping forward to Holger meeting the unnamed narrator again after the War, and showing us nothing of the great battles we've been building up to. In a way, I can understand that — the story's really about getting him to the point where he can be the Champion of Law — but it seems incomplete without some idea of what happened next.

I also found the faux Scots dialect of both Hugi and Alianora a little annoying. It didn't distract me too much, and both are too good as characters to put me right off, but it wasn't very convincing.

One other criticism is no reflection at all on Anderson and the novel, but I couldn't resist mentioning the cover of the 1974 Sphere edition (reproduced above). The illustration shows an implausibly half-armoured, half-naked warrior on a light-coloured horse and carrying a red shield, smiting a dragon with his sword. In fact, Holger wears complete and sensible armour, which Anderson carefully describes, rides a black horse and carries a predominantly blue shield. And, while he faces a dragon, we've seen above how he actually deals with it. One more example of a cover artist neither reading the book nor being properly briefed.

Nevertheless, carps aside, Three Hearts and Three Lions is a wonderful book: exciting, funny, intriguing, romantic and clever. The characters are engaging, from Holger himself and his companions to the villains, including Morgan le Fay from the Arthurian legends, to some delightful bit-parts. The prose varies between completely serviceable and lyrical, and the story serves as a good introduction to the Carolingian legends. I must admit, I only know about these in a very general way, having concentrated more on the Matter of Britain than the Matter of France. I certainly feel motivated to read more now.

It's also a surprisingly important novel. The concept of Law and Chaos, very familiar now, seems to have originated here, although it was subsequently developed by Michael Moorcock (an Anderson fan) in his Eternal Champion cycle. It's been claimed that the original version of D&D took not only its alignments from Three Hearts and Three Lions but also elements of its trolls and its Paladin class.

It's a short novel by modern standards — a mere 156 pages in the edition I have — so there's really no excuse for not reading it. I'd include Three Hearts and Three Lions as one of the classics that any lover of the fantasy genre would do well to read.

Historical Fact About Historical Fiction

Although I mainly write fantasy, I've loved historical fiction since I was a child. Why wouldn't I?  I was obsessed with knights and, although my favourite place to find them was in the legends of King Arthur, I took the real thing seriously too and learnt quite a bit about the middle ages.

Later, I began reading historical novels, progressing from Geoffrey Trease to Rosemary Sutcliff and later to Mary Renault, among others.  I was always very firm, though, that I wanted stories about history, not just costume stories set in the past. That is, stories that showed me a different era, its different culture and values.

It's sometimes said that historical fiction began in the 19th century with Sir Walter Scott, which seems unlikely on the face of it. There have always been stories set in the past, right back to the oldest surviving fictional work, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Written in its earliest surviving form around 1800 BC, it was set about seven hundred years earlier.

The same can be said about Homer's works, believed to have been "written"* around four hundred years after the events they describe took place. Or didn't take place, but the thing that prevents the Iliad and the Odyssey from being historical fiction isn't that the Trojan War might never have happened. It's the fact that Homer makes no attempt to portray late Bronze Age Greece, instead presenting a society very much like the one he lived in.

The same was true of the mediaeval romancers, from Chrétien de Troyes to Thomas Malory, whose stories were theoretically set in 5th century Britain or the 8th century Frankish Empire, but were actually an idealised picture of the writers' own times. Very idealised, in fact. For the most part, the romancers seemed to be giving a vision of how their society should have been, rather than how it was.

That isn't history. The Greek word historia originally meant inquiry or investigation. Early authors wrote "investigations" into various topics, but the word took on its current meaning when Herodotus undertook to investigate the root causes of the war between Greece and Persia. His criteria for what constituted historical events may have left something to be desired (he identified one of the earliest phases of the quarrel as Zeus's abduction of Europa) but his approach was essentially sound: to understand the present by first understanding the past.

Later Greek and Roman historians, such as Thucydides and Tacitus, developed the discipline further, but mediaeval "history" devolved into little more than a recital of events, real or imagined. It was in this climate that the word history was co-opted to refer to any tale: it's still histoire in French, and was reduced to story in English. History as we know it wasn't really reborn until the Renaissance** and took a quantum leap in the 18th century with Edward Gibbon and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, there was historical fiction long before Scott, particularly in two widely separated cultures. The Chinese novel reached the beginning of its classic period in the 14th century, and two of the earliest great works were unmistakably historical in theme. The Water Margin told the story of a group of outlaws a couple of centuries earlier, while The Romance of the Three Kingdoms went back a thousand years further. While these novels' motives seem to have been partly to illuminate their own turbulent times by presenting parallels from the past, they portrayed history in ways that the epic poets and romancers of Europe hadn't attempted.

The other haven of early historical fiction was Iceland between the 12th and 15th centuries, where some of the earliest European novels were written in a culture whose literacy rate wouldn't look too shabby today. Some of the sagas retold the old legends of gods and heroes, but most were set in 10th century Iceland and explored the processes, a little reminiscent of the taming of the Wild West, by which the anarchic settlers gradually coalesced into the Icelandic Commonwealth with the world's oldest parliament. One or two, such as Ari's Saga, dealt with more recent events.

Genuine historical fiction occurs elsewhere now and then. Quite a few of Shakespeare's plays are certainly historical and arguably (Richard III, for instance) fictional. On the other hand, while many of the Gothic novels of the 18th century are set in the past, this is largely no more than a conveniently dramatic setting.

Scott wasn't quite the first modern historical novelist, but he was the one who made it fashionable. He was followed by, among many others, Marryat, Blackmore and Stevenson in Britain, Fennimore Cooper in America, Hugo and Dumas père in France, and authors in many more countries. By the 20th century, historical fiction was well established.

As in ancient times, setting a story in the past doesn't necessarily make it historical fiction. The Hungarian critic and philosopher György Lukácz argued that Scott was the first true historical novelist because he treated the historical period as socially and culturally distinct from his own time. Though I'd argue that this could also be said of the Chinese and Icelandic works mentioned, it does rule out many works, notably a large proportion of costume romances, which aren't particularly interested in exploring the period, as well as many recent "historical" TV shows where the characters are little more than modern people in fancy dress.

Historical fiction is usually associated with periods substantially in the past, but arguably it can be set within living memory. The best-known historical novel by Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, was set little more than sixty years before its publication, and Hugo's Les Misérables was a good deal more recent. Historical fiction can certainly be written now about World War 2, and perhaps a good deal later. Perhaps your attitude to that will depend on your age, but it can be disturbing to have events you clearly remember described as history.***

Whether you set your historical novel in Pharaonic Egypt or in the 20th century, though, it must be approached with the curiosity and analysis — the investigation — of a historian. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of people in nice clothes acting out a modern story. Which can be fun, but it isn't historical fiction.

 

* It's unlikely Homer actually wrote his work down. Writing disappeared in Greece after the fall of the Bronze Age palaces, since its main function was for palace records and accounts, and was probably not re-introduced till after Homer's time, via the Phoenicians. The only oblique reference Homer makes to writing (in Glaucus's story of Bellerophon) suggests he'd heard of it but had no idea what it was.

** I'm referring here to the European study of history, which is what most concerns us in the English-speaking world. The discipline flourished in other parts of the world, such as China and the Islamic Empire.

*** Such as the recent "historical" Doctor Who stories set in the seventies and eighties. Puh-lease.

Happy 450th, Shakespeare

Four hundred and fifty years ago today, arguably the greatest writer ever was born. Or it may have been four hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, or tomorrow. Births weren't normally registered in the sixteenth century, only baptisms. Shakespeare was baptised on the 26th April, and three days would have been the expected gap, unless there was a serious risk of the baby not surviving, in which case it would have been done at once. Shakespeare also died on the 23rd April, offering an attractive symmetry. It's St George's Day too, a fitting day for England's favourite author to be born.

Whatever, a decision has been made and ratified by tradition that today is Shakespeare's birthday. Rather like the stray dog or cat you pick up from the refuge — no-one really knows when they were born, but you pick a birthday  for them. After all, the important thing is to celebrate that they were born, not necessarily to do it on the right day.

William Shakespeare was born what would today be described as an upper-middle-class boy in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John Shakespeare, had improved himself from a tenant farming family to become a local businessman and a major figure in Stratford's local politics. His mother, Mary Arden, came from a significant landowning family, which automatically put her on a higher social standing than anyone in trade.

Little is known about how this boy came to be an actor and playwright in London, except that his father ran into serious financial problems when William was in his teens. This was presumably the reason why he never went to university, as he almost certainly would have otherwise, a fact used to taunt him as an adult. The lack of information has given rise to a number of absurd conspiracy theories, which I discussed a couple of years ago.

When Shakespeare began writing, playwrights weren't highly regarded, being generally dismissed as hacks — plays were often produced without even mentioning the author. Christopher Marlowe began to change things (it's one of the great what-ifs of history how Shakespeare and Marlowe might have pushed one another even further and higher if Marlowe had lived) but it was largely thanks to Shakespeare that the generation of playwrights that followed him were clearly recognised and acknowledged.

After his death, his friend and colleague Ben Jonson described him as not of an age, but for all time, a remarkably prophetic comment. His works have been translated into almost every major language on Earth (and will eventually, we're told, be available "in the original Klingon", a parody of Hitler's insistence that Shakespeare was a German writer) and it's been said that one of his plays is being performed somewhere at every moment.

Shakespeare isn't to everyone's taste, of course, and I'd suspect mind-control if any author were. Still, I believe many people who dismiss him might not find him difficult or boring if they'd first encountered him through a really good production or film version, rather than being made to study him in school. Even many of the language problems vanish if good actors are using the lines, as Shakespeare intended, to entertain instead of as revered icons.

Shakespeare is the greatest single influence on me as an author — such an all-pervading influence that I often forget all about him when asked to list my favourite authors or my greatest inspirations. Of course, I write nothing like him. I don't write plays in iambic pentameter, nor do I use Elizabethan or Jacobean language. The world I'm writing for has very different values, and my characters think in ways very different from his.

Still, Shakespeare is the touchstone for everything I write. I might not create the same characters as he did (I would hope not) but he was one of the greatest character-makers of all time, and understanding why his characters are the way they are can be illuminating for my own characterisation.

The English language itself wouldn't be what it is without him. So many phrases and sayings we use as a matter of course can from his plays — in one fell swoop, a sea-change, or star-crossed lovers, just to pluck out a few at random. It's a fair bet that every one of us, at some point, uses at least one Shakespearean phrase every day.

So, happy birthday, Shakespeare, and here's to you. Whether or not today really is your birthday.

Yes, There Was Fantasy Before the Eighties

A couple of weeks ago, and completely out of the blue, I was contacted through my website by the organisers of Pulpfest, a convention due to take place this summer in Columbus, Ohio, asking if they could use one of my articles for their programme.

For a few years, I've contributed articles to the excellent Fantasy Faction website, many of them about classic works of fantasy and their authors, and the article Pulpfest were interested in was the one I wrote about Fritz Leiber and his series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Since Fantasy Faction were fine about the article being reused, I was delighted to give permission.

During the exchange, we talked about how so many fantasy readers now seem unaware of the genre's rich history — part of my motivation for the Fantasy Faction series in the first place. It seems to be a common misconception that fantasy started with Tolkien, then nothing much happened till the 1980s.

Now, the 1980s were without doubt a wonderful explosion of fantasy, which in the decades immediately before had been regarded largely as a poor relation of science fiction, but the new works that began emerging certainly didn't come from nowhere. Fantasy has a long and illustrious history.

You could argue, of course, that fantasy has been around since the dawn of literature. The oldest extant work of fiction, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is full of gods, magic and immortals, as are the slightly later great epics of Greece and India. Were these regarded as fantasy at the time, though? It's very difficult to say exactly how Homer and his audience, for instance, thought of the gods who took human form at Troy or the monsters Odysseus fought on his way home. It's likely that they wouldn't have seen these elements as completely impossible, but such tales of wonder would certainly have been regarded as something other than normal life.

Magic and the supernatural have abounded in epics, romances and fairy tales told since then, all across the world, from the Welsh Mabinogion to the great Chinese novel Monkey, or The Journey to the West.  No doubt many of these were written and received with the same mixture of acceptance and scepticism as Homer's works.

Possibly the first culture to define fantasy as a genre was mediaeval Iceland. Contrary to popular misconception, the Icelandic sagas weren't traditional oral tales, nor were they in verse, nor were they mostly about gods and heroes. They were highly sophisticated literary novels, serving the population with by far the highest literacy rate in Europe at the time, and most typically historical fiction examining the birth of the Icelandic Commonwealth in the tenth century.

However, a minority of sagas were retellings of the old legends (most famously the Volsunga Saga, essentially the same story that Wagner used for the Ring Cycle) and the Icelanders had a name for these: "lying sagas". The word lying didn't have quite the unpleasant and disapproving meaning it does now, but it did define these stories — as opposed to the "true-seeming sagas", which covered both fact and realistic fiction — as deliberate fantasy.

Fantasy continued to flourish through the centuries that followed. At least two of Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, are unmistakably fantasy, while others have supernatural elements. Both Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance, would be defined today as magic realism.

Eighteenth-century fantasy ranged from Gulliver's Travels to the new Gothic genre, which eventually evolved into horror, to William Beckford's wonderful Arabian Nights extravaganza, Vathek.  It was in the nineteenth century, though, that fantasy as we know it today began to evolve, along with the science fiction of Shelley, Verne and Wells. George MacDonald wrote a series of fantasy romances, some for adults and some ostensibly for children, but it was William Morris, artist, poet, socialist and wallpaper designer, who really laid the foundations of fantasy in a series of novels at the end of his life, in the 1890s.

Morris's approach was essentially similar to the mediaeval romances, but he completely abandoned any pretence of real geography. Although he occasionally mentioned Rome or Jerusalem, the stories were essentially set in a mediaeval world of his own invention. He sent his heroes and heroines — the heroines are usually the stronger characters — on magical adventures to the world's end or exploring enchanted islands, and threw the supernatural at them from all sides.

Morris certainly influenced later fantasy. His islands in The Water of the Wondrous Isles show a strong similarity to those in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, while Tolkien appears to have used The Well at the World's End as the plot template for Lord of the Rings (it even ends with a Scouring of the Shire episode). Beyond that, though, Morris set the template that fantasy is mediaeval, a perception that still persists, even against the clear fact that only a minority of fantasy settings are mediaeval.

As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, a number of authors followed in the footsteps of Morris and Macdonald. Lord Dunsany effectively created the fantasy short story as we know it, with tales of adventurers and thieves "beyond the fields we know" and "at the edge of the world". William Hope Hodgson created far-future fantasy (as opposed to far-future SF) with The Night Land, a flawed but still impressive epic. In the US, James Branch Cabell blended romance and comedy to create the light side of fantasy, along with his antihero Jurgen, the model for all those fantasy antiheroes who live by their wits. And, back in the UK, E. R. Eddison wrote the first fantasy epic as we know it today, The Worm Ouroboros. In place of the individual adventuring of Morris, Dunsany and Cabell, Eddison showed world-spanning political manoeuvring, a vast war and a desperate quest. Like The Night Land, it's a flawed book but well worth reading.

It was in the US pulp magazines, though, that fantasy really took off in the thirties and forties. Authors such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he wrote fantasy too), C.L. Moore, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Hannes Bok, Henry Kuttner and Poul Anderson — not to mention Fritz Leiber, the best of all in my opinion — took the Dunsanian fantasy short story and ran with it over the hills and far away.

Many were ambidextrous in fantasy and SF, especially those who wrote for John W. Campbell's magazine Unknown Worlds, and they tended to write stories that applied the rigour of hard SF to their fantasy worlds and magic systems. Perhaps the best example of that school is the series of stories Pratt and de Camp wrote about Harold Shea's adventurers in the worlds of mythology. Others, notably Howard, took the story of pure fantasy adventure to a new level and created the sword & sorcery genre — which Leiber, who stood somewhat between the two schools, proceeded to delightfully deconstruct and reinvent.

Back in Blighty, besides two Oxford dons with a taste for beer and tobacco, T.H. White and Mervyn Peake each created idiosyncratic fantasy like nothing before or since. As the fifties turned to the sixties and then the seventies, a series of fantasy authors began to emerge: Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock, Ursula LeGuin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karl Edward Wagner, Anne McCaffery, Tanith Lee and many more. At the same time, Lin Carter and Ballantine began reprinting many of the older classics mentioned above, for readers looking for "something else like Tolkien".

 

In his 1973 book Imaginary Worlds, Carter pointed out an oddity: that, despite Tolkien's success, few fantasy authors seemed to be emulating him. That changed in the late seventies — around the same time that The Silmarillion was revealed to the world — with two epic fantasies. The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks was cuttingly described at the time as an exercise in rewriting Lord of the Rings in your own words, although the series it spawned still has many fans. Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, on the other hand, was both recognisably in the same tradition as Tolkien and utterly different.

These seemed to open the floodgates, and fantasy began its rise to the point where now it's seen as a major genre by the entertainment industry. Authors such as Brooks, Donaldson, Gemmell, Eddings, Martin, Jordan and many others are now seen as the "old, classic" fantasy authors, and I've no wish at all to demean them. But fantasy is much, much older than the eighties, and any reader interested in knowing the roots behind their favourite would do well to investigate some of the authors I've mentioned. There are some great stories waiting for you.

Unless I win the lottery before summer, I'm not going to be able to get over to Pulpfest. I'm proud, though, to be helping them remind readers of some of the great classics of fantasy.

 

You can find links to all my Fantasy Faction articles on this page of my website, where I've discussed many of these authors in more detail.

Steal Away Published on Kindle

Steal Away

Nyki Blatchley

 

Cover art & design by Shannon LC Cate

 

Available on Kindle at

Amazon.co.uk £0.77

Amazon.com $0.99

 

 

Kari and Fai, teenaged lovers and sorcerers, have a problem. They're penniless, but they've hit on a plan to solve their financial difficulties. The Traveller, a foreigner who's turned up to lead the city's rebellion against the evil Demon Queen, must surely be loaded down with treasure. All they want to do is relieve him of a small amount.

The Traveller has several problems, struggling with intransigent allies and assassination attempts by his enemies. The last thing he wants to deal with is a pair of incompetent thieves, but this long night in the ancient city of Errish, perhaps their problems aren't so very different.

Steal Away was first published by the late, lamented magazine Golden Visions, and appears here in a slightly revised version.

 

 

 

Excerpt

 

 

"I think we should get out of here," said Failiu. She wiggled her toes carefully, examining the results as thoughtfully as an alchemist with an experiment.

 

"Why?" Karaghr glanced around the tiny room at the mould staining large areas of wall and the pile of rubble on the dirt floor where they hadn't bothered to clear the collapsed section of ceiling. Absently treading on a scurrying cockroach, he looked back at Failiu's naked form stretched out on the pile of rags they called their bed. That was much more to his liking. "It's all we can afford."

 

"That's only because we're not paying for it," Failiu pointed out acidly. "We can't actually afford anything." Flexing a leg, she scratched her foot thoughtfully. "Same as these fleas aren't paying to live on me. That wasn't what I meant, though, Kari. I meant we should get out of Errish."

 

"What?" Karaghr was so startled that he momentarily forgot about the view Failiu's contortions were giving him. "Why in Taliqi's name would we do that, Fai?"

 

Fai wrinkled her nose. "In Taliqi's name? If it weren't for what was done to us in his name, we'd be sleeping in nice comfortable beds."

 

"But not together," Kari pointed out. "We always had to do that in secret."

 

"We'd have a whole library of books on the High Arts, instead of having to make it up."

 

"And endure days at a time of doing nothing but chanting. Yuck."

 

"We could be having baths," said Fai wistfully.

 

"Washing's over-rated," said Kari airily. He'd rarely bathed in the first fifteen years of his life, and the couple of years he'd been in Errish hadn't endeared him to the habit.

 

"I'm sure the fleas agree with you." She sighed and stretched, distracting Kari from the conversation. "It makes sense, though," she added after a moment.

 

"Uh? What?"

 

"Leaving Errish. Kari, can't you ever think of more than one thing?"

 

"Of course." He knelt beside her, giving the grin he knew she always found irresistible. "I can think of lots of things I could do with you."

 

Fai giggled, and there was no more coherent conversation for some time. Eventually, though, Kari asked, "Where would we go?"

 

"Hm? Mmmm," she commented, as he lazily traced shapes in the dirty sweat sheened all over her.

 

"If we left Errish, where would we go?"

 

She snuggled closer to him. "There's the whole world."

 

"But we're in the greatest city in the world. I spent half my childhood dreaming about getting here one day. Anywhere else is going to be a disappointment after this."

 

"Well, maybe, but at least other cities aren’t going to be besieged and sacked."

 

He raised himself up on an elbow and stared at her. "It won’t come to that. People are just saying all kinds of thing, and..."

 

"And they're right, Kari. Of course the Demon Queen's going to take Errish back. You've studied the histories: in all the centuries she’s ruled her empire, how long has any rebellion against her ever lasted? She’s had a year to gather her forces, and they’ll be coming."

 

"Well..." Deep down, he knew she was right, but he was reluctant to give up his dream that easily.

 

"We could make for Jalkiya," she suggested. "Or go east, and try our luck in the Thaal kingdoms. Somewhere the fighting won't reach."

 

"Maybe." A few years ago, as a village-boy dreaming of something finer, such a proposal would have been irresistible. After experiencing the wonders of Errish, he knew the alternatives would be drab and uninspiring. "We've no money, though."

 

"Oh." She stretched. "We could make a living as itinerant sorcerers: there's always a demand for that. We learnt enough before we got thrown out, and we can fake the rest. Good enough for villagers."

 

Kari had to admit she was probably right. Their studies in the secret library of the Temple of Taliqi, as much a reason for their expulsion as the breaking of their celibacy vows, had yielded sufficient results to make them both competent sorcerers. Still, there was far more that they'd never managed to learn, and he sometimes dreamt of a chance to get more than that one brief glimpse of the blasphemous Kebrai Codex.

 

"Or..." She suddenly raised herself on her elbow, near-black eyes sparkling in the way that always meant she was about to get him into trouble. He didn't mind: trouble with Fai was a hundred times more appealing than safety with anyone else.

 

"Or what?" he asked, since her dramatic pause seemed to demand it.

 

"Or we could get some money before we left."