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Science Fiction & Fantasy

Putting together ‘The Gathering Storm,’ book 12 of the Wheel of Time series

Behind the Book by Brandon Sanderson

When fantasy writer extraordinaire Robert Jordan died in 2007, his best-selling Wheel of Time series was left in limbo. His widow and editor, Harriet McDonald, selected novelist Brandon Sanderson to write the two final books using Jordan's extensive notes. Here, Sanderson explains how it feels to step into the shoes of a giant.

In a word, it's been daunting. Imagine stepping into a room and seeing an enormous chalkboard filled with equations, then being told that Einstein wrote them all out before he died. At the very end is a small blank spot, the apex of the entire formula, and a glaring 'equals' sign right before it.

My job has been to sort through all of the notes, the equations, the bits and pieces of shattered glass in an attempt to reconstruct what was going on in the genius's mind during those last months. There are parts that were scratched out, others that ran into dead ends, others where logical leaps were made that aren't explained. There are hints, tidbits and guideposts. In places, the way is clearly marked.

It's been the most challenging, rewarding and reverent literary experience of my life.

Here is just a glimpse into the astounding detail behind Robert Jordan’s notes and materials for the Wheel of Time:

And meet the team—“Team Jordan”—who was with me all the way through The Gathering Storm:

Brandon Sanderson is currently hard at work on book 13 in the Wheel of Time series, Towers of Midnight, and preparing for a national tour to support The Gathering Storm. You can find more information on the series and tour dates here or on Sanderson's own website.

When fantasy writer extraordinaire Robert Jordan died in 2007, his best-selling Wheel of Time series was left in limbo. His widow and editor, Harriet McDonald, selected novelist Brandon Sanderson to write the two final books using Jordan's extensive notes. Here, Sanderson explains how it feels…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Behind the book: The price of magic and ‘The Lost Gate’

Behind the Book by Orson Scott Card
For years, I’ve begun my writing classes with a session called “A Thousand Ideas in an Hour.” I ask questions, the class offers a variety of answers, and gradually we work our way toward interesting, believable, powerful stories.
 
Usually I start with a character and generate a story out of that character’s relationships and motives. But when time allows, we also generate a fantasy story, beginning with a simple question: What is the price of magic?
 
Even if magic comes from learning spells or acquiring magical objects, from invoking gods or learning to interpret arcane lore and oracles, what really matters is the cost of using the power. Think of it as magic inflation. If magic has no cost, then there is nothing to keep everyone from getting it and using it as they will.
 
In my thousand-ideas sessions, we spend a lot of time talking about whether you must pay the price yourself, or can foist the cost of magic onto someone else. Then we have a whole new set of questions that imply more questions, and more rules of exactly how the magic works. What we always demonstrate in these sessions is that the restrictions on magic are the source of good stories. Every nuance of a rule transforms the world and makes new principles of social organization necessary. Story possibilities pop up everywhere.
 
But I also learned years ago that fantasy works best when the magic system closely (if metaphorically) resembles the ways that power works in the real world. For instance, if your own children pay for your magic use through a stunting of their growth and/or a twisting of their bodies, then magic users have a strong incentive to have children, but then they merely exploit them.
 
So in that case, who would marry a magic user, knowing that any offspring they had would be deformed and crippled?
 
The answer is: ambitious people who care only for themselves. The marriage becomes a conspiracy to have children only to destroy them in pursuit of power. So . . . power only flows to monstrously ambitious people who don’t care if their children are destroyed by their pursuit of power.
 
In other words, it works pretty much like the real world.
 
Back when I came up with the magic system for the Mithermages stories, the series that starts with The Lost Gate, I had not yet taught a writing class and didn’t have the advantage of all these years of listening to the excellent ideas and resourceful suggestions of my students. In a sense, I reasoned backward from the real world to find my magic system.
 
How do farmers gain the power to increase their yields? They nurture the soil. They protect their seed and then their crops. They help the plants they are growing to fight off competition from other plants, parasites, or predators. (To a plant, a sheep is a predator.)
 
The same principles apply to every kind of agriculture. The cattle rancher might kill and eat the beasts, but first he must nurture and protect them, guaranteeing the maximum number of offspring that reach harvestable age.
 
If you want to hunt deer, there must be deer to hunt. If you want to eat fruit, then you must nurture and protect the fruit-bearing trees.
 
It’s a symbiotic system. Yes, you exploit the object whose yield you are trying to increase; but can it not also be said that the beast or plant you’re growing is exploiting you?
 
Are squirrels exploiting oaks by carrying off their acorns and burying most of them to eat through the winter and spring? Or are oaks exploiting squirrels by getting them to spread their acorns far and wide, counting on a certain number of squirrels to die without every digging up their caches of oakseeds?
 
So I expanded on that idea, applying it to inanimate objects, and allowing beasts, plants, and animals to behave in ways they ordinarily can’t—magical ways—in order to serve the needs of the person tending them.
 
Thus a treemage of great talent and skill not only helps trees to grow, but can endow them with enough of his own powers that his trees can walk, or take on even more human attributes. And perhaps the mage can take on attributes of the trees—great strength and sturdiness, for instance. The creatures or objects that you serve become your source of power—and you become their source of power, too.
 
To apply this to sandmages or stonemages or watermages or windmages, I had to animate these things we normally think of as inanimate. And I also had to figure out how you would go about serving sand. What does sand need? Dryness, I decided. And wind to blow the sand around.
 
So to serve the desert, you need to become something of a windmage. By blowing sand, the wind becomes visible and powerful, able to scour stone. You speed up erosion. So a sandmage is actually part windmage. You serve the wind by guiding it to use sand to tear away all obstacles that impede its flow. In the process, you serve the sand by drying everything up.
 
In effect, you’re a sand-herder, a shepherd of the wind.
 
I went through a similar process with stone, with water. To gain the power that resides within a thing, you serve it, you give yourself to it, and it responds by drawing power from you as you draw power from it.
 
Does this really correspond to the real world? Of course. We gain enormous amounts of power from oil by releasing it from underground prisons, exposing it to the air, and then heating it to release the carbon long sequestered within it.
 
We dam up water to make more and more lakes, and then release its gathered power by passing it through turbines or spreading it to places where the water would not otherwise have flowed. We gain from the power of the water; the water gains from our containment and shaping of it.
 
In a way, all this magic system does is exaggerate, clarify and personify the way the real world works. Instead of mechanical manipulations, you develop a personal relationship. Yet in the real world, our engineers and farmers study for years to learn, one way or another, how to successfully manipulate the elements from which they will derive power.
 
What is a civil engineer but an ironmage, or a claymage, or both, depending on whether they build with concrete or steel? I don’t know about you, but what they do has the effect of magic to me. I don’t know how bridges are built, but I walk and drive on them with perfect trust that the spells will hold.
 
It’s a long way from this core principle to the magic system of The Lost Gate, of course. Over the years I extrapolated more and more, until this underlying principle could explain all magics that have ever been believed in throughout history. The Indo-European gods? They were mages of exactly this sort—mages of electricity hurling thunderbolts like Thor or Zeus, mages of plant life bring forth bountiful harvests like Proserpine or Hera.
 
Then there came the gates. I knew my story needed them, but what was it that a gatemage served?
 
Then I realized: spacetime. It is the medium through which all other objects move, and yet spacetime only contains them, cannot causally affect them. But ah, what if a gatemage bends spacetime to allow causality to flow through unexpected channels? To bring far things near, and send near things far? Then spacetime becomes an active part of the world, not just the inert recipient of the actions of other things.
 
And that is where all the possibilities of the Mithermages universe come from. The mages themselves might not understand all of what they do—but to write the stories, I must understand. And to the degree that this magic system feels powerful and interesting to you, I suspect you’re responding to the way it reflects the workings of the actual world.
 
Orson Scott Card is best known for his best-selling Ender’s Game series. His new book, The Lost Gate, is the start of a new series starring a young mage who discovers his true power after being exiled from his own world.
 
LOST GATE TRAILER
 
Author photo by Bob Harrison

 

For years, I’ve begun my writing classes with a session called “A Thousand Ideas in an Hour.” I ask questions, the class offers a variety of answers, and gradually we work our way toward interesting, believable, powerful stories.
 
Usually I start with a character…
Science Fiction & Fantasy

A teen discovers her epic destiny

Behind the Book by F.C. Yee

Tough 16-year-old Chinese-American high school student Genie Lo is busy preparing for the college application process. She’s just trying to keep her grades up and her head down when she meets Quentin—the new transfer student from China. But there’s something a little otherworldy about the handsome, puzzling and charming Quentin. To make things even weirder, he also claims to know Genie from a previous life—a life where she fought evil. Based on the Chinese myth of the Monkey King, this hilarious and action-packed story will have readers cheering for Genie and Quentin as they try to defend the Bay Area from ancient Chinese demons known as yaoguai.

F.C. Yee’s The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is a smart and witty fantasy that readers of all ages will easily fall for.

Confession time: As a reader and consumer of fiction, I love the Tournament trope. My favorite part of any anime is when all of the characters stop what they’re doing to participate in a bracketed competition, no matter how much it derails the story. If the tournament is the story, even better. I love the preconflict uncertainty where you try to guess which of your favorite main characters has the edge based off what you’ve seen of their development. I love the mysterious strangers who show up and kick ass without any character development. I even love the inversions of the Tournament trope, like [in “Avatar”] when Zuko tries to honorably Agni Kai with Azula and she gleefully decides “nope.”

Tangent time: I studied Economics in college. My education in the subject only goes up to undergrad, and I was never very good at it, so I remember little. One thing I do remember though, is the academic definition of a tournament: a competition with multiple participants where the prizes are heavily weighted toward the victors. A winner-take-all outcome when it comes to resource distribution.

Consider the exact example my outdated textbook used. If Robin Williams (R.I.P.) is the funniest actor in movies and is somehow objectively twice as funny as the next funniest actor in movies, this hypothetical second-place person doesn’t get paid half as much as Robin Williams. They get paid a comparative pittance because the entire audience can get their funny bones tickled by Robin Williams, the best of the best. Like many examples used in textbooks, there’s tons of problems there, but you get the general idea. Random lotteries are not tournaments because the effort to enter is equal. Economic tournaments require the participants to put in effort.

Point time: The degree to which economic tournaments appear in life is surprising, or at least it was to me once I knew what to look for. I design for a living. Tournaments are never designed to benefit the participants. They’re designed to extract maximum value for the organizers, by having the total amount of effort contributed by the participant population during the tournament duration be much higher than the baseline effort without the competition.

That was a mouthful, but the effects of a tournament structure are much simpler to understand. They require a steady stream of participants who are willing to most likely NOT receive a reward proportionate to the level of effort they put in. Maybe they know this part of the deal going in, or maybe they’re overly optimistic. Does every person who enters the World Series of Poker have an accurate read on their chances of winning? I don’t know.

Tournaments are also one of the lowest-investment ways for an organizer to distribute rewards, which is probably one of the reasons why they’re so commonly used. Just make sure the top is massively overweighted. If there’s only one prize, and the winner does a 100 in terms of effort, you don’t have to worry about the runner-up who did a 99 effort. They get nothing. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Outside of sports and other competitive extracurriculars, one of the first very big, very important tournaments a young person is going to face is college applications, provided their desires and circumstances lead them in and allow them that direction. Imagine a high school student as a challenger exiting a small dark hallway into a vast arena covered by the blinding sun. They don’t know who their opponents are, or how strong they might be. They may not have been coached, or they may have been given outdated information. And everywhere, everywhere in the stands, they see adults nodding their heads, cheering: Yes. This is how it should be. This is what meritocracy looks like.

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is about gods, demons and make-believe punching. It’s about the comedy and pain that can ensue when a culture that you’ve never truly experienced as a child of immigrants suddenly catches up with you.

But on some level, whether or not it’s the deepest one, it’s about a high school girl’s slow realization and reaction to the fact that she lives in one long, high stakes, never-ending tournament arc. We could laugh, but then again, so do the rest of us.

Confession time: As a reader and consumer of fiction, I love the Tournament trope. My favorite part of any anime is when all of the characters stop what they’re doing to participate in a bracketed competition, no matter how much it derails the story. If the tournament is the story, even better.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionHistorical Fantasy

A grandfather’s broken past inspires a new historical fantasy

Behind the Book by Mindy Tarquini

A historical fantasy set in 1918 flu-ravaged Philadelphia, The Infinite Now by Mindy Tarquini (Hindsight, 2016) follows Fiora, a young immigrant struggling to learn the intricacies of time bending, teamwork and living in a world which seems as hell-bent on breaking her spirit as she is to keep it.

My fascination with the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 began during a bout of genealogy, which found me paging through Philadelphia death certificates. In late September of 1918, the typical causes of death—cardiac issues, cancers, accidents—gave way to another, ominous in its simplicity: pneumonia, often followed by the notation “subsequent to influenza.” Something tickled at my brain, a newspaper article regarding the bird flu scares of recent years, that the H5N1 virus responsible for that flu may be related to the virus which killed so many in 1918.

The reason for my deep dive into digital death certificates was due to my grandfather’s curious absence from the 1920 census. I’d found family records in Italy going back two centuries, found my grandfather’s emigration to the United States as a young boy, found his father’s naturalization papers, then unexpectedly, found a record from late in 1920 listing a marriage between my great-grandfather and, of all things, a second wife. But in the 1920 census, not a hint or a whisper, not on their street, or any neighboring street, nor any of the blocks after blocks that I searched page by tedious page.

Then I stumbled on records from an orphanage far outside the city that listed my grandfather as an “inmate,” a sad little name among many sad little names. He was only 12 years old.

My heart broke.

Quizzing my relatives revealed the story. My great-grandmother had died suddenly circa 1918-1919. My great-grandfather, a grief-stricken and overwhelmed father of four, had farmed out the children until he could find them a new mother. He married within a year of my great-grandmother’s passing. The family reunited, their lives continued.

Stories are birthed from a myriad of circumstances and ideas. I could not get the vision of my all-but-abandoned grandfather out of my head. Dumped in an orphanage, far from anybody or anything he knew or loved, desperate to return home. I also couldn’t shake the hundreds of death certificates from pneumonia, some “subsequent to influenza,” that I’d uncovered in my quest for my great-grandmother’s passing. So many of the victims had been young adults, an unbearable irony when viewed through the prism of the war raging a half a world away.

My forays into family history gave me a good impression of my great-grandparents’ immigrant community. Newspapers from the period, histories of the Great Influenza and an insatiable curiosity provided the rest. One morning, a girl woke me. Just 16 years old, she filled my mind’s ear with her tale:

Her parents had just died from the influenza. Her immigration status was precarious, her brothers fighting in the war, and a neighbor had dumped her at the door of a mysterious old man, a shoemaker the girl did not know, but who was the only person standing between this girl and an orphanage. Because this girl’s mother had been the village fortune teller. Because her neighbors feared her.

The girl was bright. She was a modern thinker born into a traditional world, tough as they come, hopeful without end and determined to prevent the metaphorical tornado churning its way through her city from sweeping her American dream into the maelstrom.

I knew I had to tell her story.

Connect with the author at mindytarquini.com.

A historical fantasy set in 1918 flu-ravaged Philadelphia, The Infinite Now by Mindy Tarquini (Hindsight, 2016) follows Fiora, a young immigrant struggling to learn the intricacies of time bending, teamwork and living in a world which seems as hell-bent on breaking her spirit as she is to keep it.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical Fantasy

Researching with respect

Behind the Book by Beth Cato

Beth Cato’s fantastic Blood of Earth trilogy is set in an alternate turn-of-the-century America, and follows a diverse cast of characters as they attempt to prevent the United Pacific—the unified forces of the United States and Japan—from conquering the rest of the world. As a white woman, Cato knew that to honestly portray her characters, as well as the racism and/or sexism they would encounter in 1900s America, she would have to be open to criticism—and ready to do as much research as humanly possible. Here, she tells us how she approached creating a diverse world with respect and empathy.

My Blood of Earth trilogy may be shelved in the science-fiction and fantasy section of bookstores, but I’m writing about reality. A twisted reality, sure, because my books are alternate history, but I based my world on real situations, people and places. What seems like distant history to me might not be distant at all to people whose family stories and cultural memories keep alive the events of a century ago.

These were among my primary considerations as I researched and outlined Breath of Earth, the first novel in my trilogy. My initial concept was to rewrite the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, with bonus magic and incredible creatures. The fact that I wrote fantasy did not lessen my burden of accuracy. Instead, it complicated matters more because I delved into cultures and mythologies from around the world that were not my own.

Representing
My heroine, Ingrid Carmichael, is a woman of color living in a time period where many people assume she’s a servant and likely illiterate—that she is less of a person, with no place in society. On the contrary, she’s brilliant, compassionate and a gifted geomancer, meaning that she can channel the energy released by earthquakes. She’s just one facet of my cast.

Another one of my characters is Lee, a teenage Chinese-American boy. I extensively researched the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America during that period. It was not easy reading. The Chinese were repeatedly abused and even murdered, and the American justice system offered little succor for “Celestials,” whose very humanity was called into question.

I sought out primary sources foremost—the voices of Chinese immigrants who lived at the time. I found very little available in English, and soon found that many written records hadn’t even survived the period in Chinese. San Francisco’s Chinatown had been the largest in the United States until it burned down immediately following the 1906 quake. Through the late 19th century and into the 20th, other Chinese communities throughout the West were firebombed by anti-immigrant labor activists. Residents lost almost everything as they fled for their lives. To my horror, this happened in several towns near where I grew up in Central California. I never learned about these atrocities in school, nor had my mom or grandparents. The tragedies had been buried.

That made it even more important for me to show the genuine ugliness of the time period. As far as I was concerned, to do otherwise would have made me culpable in the continuing crime of erasure.

Citing Sources
In my alternate history, the American Civil War ends early because Union forces ally with the Japanese. By the time 1906 rolls around, the two militaries are still closely allied and in the process of taking over mainland Asia. I drew on real events as I raised the stakes for the Chinese immigrants in my setting.

However, I knew I was writing about a time period and situations that weren’t widely known. People might think I made up everything wholesale.

Therefore, in each novel in my trilogy, I include both an author’s note and a bibliography. In my note, I explain the major areas where I twisted history and why. The bibliography (which is also available on my website) outlines my source material. It’s my hope that people will read my fiction and then be inspired to read nonfiction on the period as well.

Choosing What Not to Say
While it’s important to show the ugliness of the time period, I also took care to avoid overdoing it. Constant violence against the vulnerable and the use of epithets can run the risk of being exploitive. Less can be more. Each word should be effective.

Within a series it can be tricky to know when and where to repeat vital information. In Breath of Earth, there is a major reveal about fan-favorite character Fenris Braun. When I started work on Call of Fire, I deliberated whether or not to repeat that reveal in some way. After all, there will always be some readers who pick up the books out of order. I didn’t want them to feel lost. At the same time, I also realized that if Ingrid continued to dwell on Fenris’ secret, that made it seem like she didn’t accept him. That just wasn’t right within my characters’ relationship.

Most importantly, Fenris is a complicated, realistic character, and like any person, should not be defined by a singular trait. In the end, I settled for adding a few hints in the next two books in the trilogy, and left it at that. At this point, I’ve confirmed that readers who initially skipped the first book still loved and related to Fenris without any problem.

Revising to Get It Right
I want to treat my characters with respect. I also want to treat my readers with respect. That means I’ve done my due diligence at every step in the process. I researched and tried to understand my time period. I wrote and endeavored to incorporate the truths of the era, without overdoing it.

And then—most importantly—I tweaked and deleted through the revision process, because despite all of my good intentions, I screwed up sometimes. That’s why I relied on the diverse perspectives of critique readers, my agent and my editor to help me to fix those errors and make my books as solid as possible. The value of their feedback was immeasurable.

After all, my ultimate goal was to create a fictional world that feels genuine. I want people to relate to Fenris. I want them to cheer for Ingrid. I want readers to be furious about the dark, gritty pieces of obscured history that I bring to light. I want fantasy and fact to meld. The writing and research for the Blood of Earth trilogy often felt daunting, but the entire process has also been incredibly enlightening. I only hope that readers feel the same way.

Beth Cato tells us how she created the diverse world of Roar of Sky with respect and empathy.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

“What was I, a black girl, made of?”

Behind the Book by Agnes Gomillion

In Agnes Gomillion’s The Record Keeper, an authoritarian global government has been established in the wake of World War III. Young Arika Cobane has been studying for years to become one of the elite, but when a new and rebellious student arrives, she begins to question the morality of the government and her place within it. In this essay, Gomillion explores her own political awakening and how it led to the conception of her excellent new novel.

At 7, I understood that each of us are patchwork, composites of our past. My best friend Liana, for example, had her mother’s thick hair and her father’s moon face. And once, when we visited her grandmother, I saw parts of my friend in the faces of old family photos. An ear here, an eye there. A dozen pieces that, all patched together, made Liana. At the time, it wasn’t odd to me that I called Liana’s grandmother, who was old and white, my grandmother—my Yaya. At the time, I had no idea I was Black.

Ten years later, at 17, I became aware. The question of affirmative action arose in my senior history class, and my hand shot up. I was staunchly in favor. My parents, after all, had benefitted from affirmative action. Without it, my whole upper middle-class life might not have materialized.

A blond girl, Marianne, disagreed with me. “Lazy people who aren’t as smart as me shouldn’t be given my place in college just because they’re black.” When several students agreed with her, I was shocked, and the debate commenced. Opposition mounted. I stopped raising my hand and stood to combat the entire class, including the teacher, who tore apart my ideas. I knew nothing of systemic racism or white privilege—my high school didn’t teach that. I couldn’t unpack misleading statistics that, on their face, indicated Black people were—in fact—lazy and unintelligent.

I had nothing but the gut belief that my mother was not inferior to theirs. And my cousins were not stupid. My father deserved his medical degree and I, myself, deserved my life. If there was something broken in America, I knew it wasn’t us—only my education hadn’t prepared me to prove it.

When the bell rang, everyone left for second period as I sat, eyes wide open. My peers, I saw, with their myriad of differences, were the same in the only way that mattered. They were white, I realized. And, finally, I understood that I was Black.

After that, everything bisected, and I was suddenly excluded, the opposite of everything I admired. My textbooks were mostly white. My church—including Jesus—was white. My teachers, celebrities I idolized, Disney princesses, the heroes I read about—all white. The best parts of my world belonged to the white race, and according to known history, it had always been that way.

Around this time, I began to wonder about my people’s patchwork. What was I, a black girl, made of? I thought of the pictures at my actual Yaya’s house, and considered history—surveying what I knew. Before and after Martin Luther King, I concluded, there was little to be proud of.

It was a lie that took 15 years to dispel. I was jogging and listening to The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin when the truth finally hit me.

“Take no one’s word for anything,” Baldwin said. “The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember . . . [y]ou come from sturdy peasant stock, men who . . . in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.”

The words struck with such force, I stopped in the street to cry. I’d been lied to. Duped by my biased education. To heal, I had to seek, for myself, from whence I came. From that moment, I questioned everything—especially what I’d been taught about American history. It was the beginning of a very long journey.

Arika’s journey through The Record Keeper parallels my own path to freedom. When she realizes her view of herself and her people are largely influenced by her education, she starts to question her education and the structures of government that dictate it. Soon, she awakens to the biases that underpin her thinking, and armed with the truth, she begins to resist.

In my view, every American must take this same trek if we’re to realize racial reconciliation. Just like each of us, our country is also composed of its past. In order to realize the ideal—a more perfect union—the government itself must journey, excavate, illuminate and atone for its misdeeds. I wrote The Record Keeper, in large part, to encourage readers to take up this quest.

In Agnes Gomillion’s The Record Keeper, an authoritarian global government has been established in the wake of World War III. In this essay, Gomillion explores her own political awakening and how it led to the conception of her excellent new novel.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Off the edge of the map

Behind the Book by Max Gladstone

In Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone’s riotous new science-fiction adventure, tech genius Vivian Liao is thrust into a battle for the universe’s independence after being unexpectedly transported to the farthest reaches of time and space. Gladstone’s novel has the structure of a portal fantasy (a subgenre best typified by The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), except that the portal opens into a distant stretch of the galaxy rather than a magical world. Gladstone argues that the unexplored frontier of outer space provides an opportunity for modern authors to be part of a time-honored literary tradition.

Where can we go a-Questing?

In the fourteenth century, a Florentine poet, scholar and politician could find himself midway along his life’s journey, lost and in a wood, and discover in that darkness the gates of hell and the long winding path to the Celestial Rose. The cave that led to Dante’s hell might not be found on any map, but a wanderer reading his poem could suppose that maybe over this hill, through this copse of gnarled trees, might stand the yawning portal. At any turn in a sufficiently unknown place, they might slip into a story-space, one of those strange realms where the rigid daily progress of events gives way to the heightened, analogically realm of magic and revelation.

In Spain a hundred years later, the world felt too mapped for giants and chivalry. Cervantes writes of a madman Don Quixote in a late medieval social world so known, so observed, so mapped, that it could not possibly contain chivalric quests and wicked magicians. Don Quixote’s quest-land—where he quests after wizards and grails, slays monsters and jousts with wicked knights—that quest-land must not exist for it to exist at all. He takes part in stories that could never have happened and yet centuries later, they remain instantly relatable and comprehensible to any reader of fantasy romance

Cervantes mocks this invisible world, rendering golden helmets as shaving basins and ladies of legendary beauty as tavern wenches—but he also recognizes that Don Quixote’s realm offers meaning, clarity, revelatory power, even though it is absurd. Even after Don Quixote’s “cure,” he cannot long survive without constructing for himself another fantasy—this time using the forms of the pastoral.

No organism, as Shirley Jackson would write centuries later, can long exist under conditions of absolute reality. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

The great inner moments of life—revelation and transformation, confrontation with our darkest fears, attainment of the divine, the rapture and pain of true love or the dissolution of the self—are as real as rabbits. We know they exist. We encounter them and are destroyed and changed. Even when we are not in their grip we see them at the edge of the shadows. But when we try to approach them head on, to speak or write about them, they hop back from our clumsy advance, scamper to a safe distance, and resume their quivering vigil, watching us watch them. One woman’s quest for inner grace—for relief from the chains she has forged around himself—can only indirectly be captured by the sharp realism that refuses to dive into the quivering mess of myth and memory that underlies our shared experience of this bewildering thing we like to call reality, so named because it makes us feel better. But we do have tools to tell stories about that search. All we need to do is go off the edge of the map, where we can find knights, and a wood, and a Grail, and a wounded King.

In the Tang dynasty, a monk called Xuanzang set out from the Imperial Capitol in the city now called Xi’an. He traveled west to India through places now called Xinjiang and Tibet. He left behind a glittering and literate Imperial court, the height of global civilization of the age, a place where he enjoyed patronage and support, to travel a Silk Road ruled by no empire, awash with bandits and hostile strangers. As a Buddhist monk, he brought few comforts with him.

Why make such a long and brutal voyage? Why leave friends and Emperor? He sought scriptures. He sought the salvation of the world and the liberation of all sentient beings. A new form of Buddhism had filtered into Tang Dynasty China across the Himalayas—building a more political and communal vision of Buddhist practice in the person of the bodhisattva, a character who, having achieved liberation from the world, remains within it to help set others free. This new tradition fascinated, but the Emperor wanted to study its sources firsthand—so he commissioned Xuanzang to go West, study, and bring back an authentic copy of the scriptures of this “Great Vehicle” (which was what its originators called it, being savvy marketers in addition to holy men).

So Xuanzang made his voyage through what Tang writers at the time thought were barbarian lands, reached India, studied with masters, learned Sanskrit, copied sutras by hand and translated them into Chinese, and, after many years, returned—his mission a success—to a grateful Emperor.

This is history on a mythic scale. But as the history turned into story, the stark exterior image of a monk traveling with minimal escort over barren vistas, studying languages in foreign lands, unfurled into the multicolored petals of myth.

Xuanzang’s quest was a grand one—so in Wu Cheng’en’s retelling Journey to the West, its internal aspects gained magical incident and mythic resonance. The monsters of danger and temptation that plague anyone of deep commitment became demon kings and seductive immortals, evil Taoists, escaped alchemical experiments. The man’s own profound internal drives emerge from his person, and take on form: animal demigod disciples, rich in mystic power, each corresponding to a different feature of the psyche, their deep personal conflicts standing in between Xuanzang and his westbound Quest.

Once Xuanzang steps beyond the bounds of known, stable Tang China, anything can happen—well, not quite. A different set of things can happen, a different set of rules apply. To understand Xuanzang’s pilgrimage on foot, to understand its scale and consequence and the range of difficulties he faced within his heart, Wu teases out around the walking man a world of Monkey Kings and voracious pig gods and spider immortals, ribald and rich and vast as any soul.

But where, in our extensively Google Mapped world, are we to go that could be peopled with magic, monstrosity and transformation, as was Xuanzang’s Journey West? In what dark wood might we lose ourselves to find those gates with the famous words above them, and Virgil ready to lead us down? We live in Cervantes’ world more than Dante’s or Wu Cheng-en’s. There’s no beyond-the-edge-of-the-map left.

Tolkien, among others, answered this challenge by creating a whole other realm in which his dramas could play out, in which men walking together through an age-ending war could be the pivot of history. But the subcreated fantasy world is, by definition, a place where we cannot go. No one, midway along their life’s journey, finds themselves lost and in Middle Earth. (At least, outside of fan fiction.)

Also, the subcreated fantasy is caught in a finger trap. The tale-teller must create working systems and societies for our heroes to pass through, lest the illusion shatter. Who grows the grain here? Who might these traders trade with? Why might one build a castle there? The systems and maps and justifications that orient readers all cut against the drive to create a great unknown, a realm of transformation. The kind of tales I’m talking about here start with characters we know and drive them off the map. Epic fantasies, as a rule, start with maps.

How can we turn off the edge of the map? Where can our spirits unfold to their full mythic scope? Each genre offers its own answer. Through the gate, the door, the fairy ring, to Oz or Narnia or Roland’s world, says portal fantasy. To the great silent spaces behind the upstairs neighbors’ apartment doors, says urban fantasy. And to the shadows—in the closet, the woods, the long-shuttered house, our dead parents’ attic, the tunnels beneath our nation—says horror. (This, by the way, is why My Neighbor Totoro remains firmly locked in my heart as Miyazaki’s great horror flick.)

But each of these options has a built-in limit. As we grow up, we realize that the wardrobes of our youth did not, in fact, lead to Narnia. Only as a child can we truly believe that the back of our uncle’s wardrobe might lead anywhere interesting. And while that silent neighbor might be a vampire, soon the strictures of logic and urban space constrain the space available for the adventure. (How does she feed? No city has that many murders. Could there be a society of vampires? If so, how do they operate?)

But space—SPACE! It’s up there, known through the pinholes of astrophysics and high-powered telescopes. But the pinholes are small, and space is huge. Our science, we know, is not complete—and there’s the edge of the map, beyond which “here be dragons.” What little we know of what is up there—black holes of a million solar masses, quasars and pulsars, sprawling nebulae, neutron stars and gas giants, supernovas smelting gold and galaxies smashing one another to oblivion, the endless stellar bestiary of weird and awesome phenomena (Dark Matter! Darker Energy!) offers a vast unrolling space where character can unfold and reveal itself in the grammar of the Quest and Adventure.

The SPACE of the Quest, rich with alien life and faster than light travel and planet-smashing super weapons—may be as deeply unlikely as Herodotus’ giant ants. But that’s just what’s so great about SPACE! We don’t know any of these things to be false yet. So, as long as the texture of reality is preserved, SPACE remains always a place we could encounter wonders, a dark and unknown wood we could wander if only we turned in a new direction—straight up, into the stars.

I’ve written many books set in an alternate fantasy world, which works for me like a funhouse mirror—curved and distorted, magnifying aspects of our own reality that are often invisible or overlooked. (Though less so now than they were when I started writing Three Parts Dead in 2009.) But a reflection, even a dark one, is a closed space. Reach out to touch it, and you touch cool glass. Strike it, and you shred yourself.

I wanted my new book, Empress of Forever, to be a door, like Journey to the West or the grail stories. Vivian Liao, our near future protagonist, would scoff at being called an “everywoman” (and she’d be right to), but any of us could find ourselves on her path, blinking and afraid, in a brilliant new world—and set out to get things done. Vivian Liao moves beyond the map’s edge into Oz, the West, space, the antipodes of the soul. She will find new friends and bitter enemies; she will save worlds and break them and learn more about herself than she thought there was to know. Starships burst in a singularity sky. Pirate queens steal suns, monks sift the ruins of countless worlds for shreds of enlightenment, and she will face them all.

It’s a marvelous world out there. Come on. Let’s go off the edge of the map.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Empress of Forever.

Empress of Forever author Max Gladstone argues that the unexplored frontier of outer space provides an opportunity for modern authors to be part of a time-honored literary tradition.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The classic inspirations for an intriguing new fantasy

Behind the Book by C.M. Waggoner

Victorian and (in recent years) Regency-inspired fantasy worlds aren’t new, but there’s never been anything quite like C.M. Waggoner’s Unnatural Magic. A novel that explores troll social structures (for example) with as much joy and verve as it does more typical settings such as a school for magic, Waggoner’s debut is a treat for historical fiction and fantasy fans alike. Here, Waggoner shares some of the classic novels that inspired her debut.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with world building in fantasy novels. When it’s done really well, reading a book can feel like winning a free trip to a wildly interesting vacation destination, but when it’s done badly it feels more like reading a user manual for an appliance that you don’t own. My pickiness about world building made it pretty intimidating for me to have to take it on for my own first book, Unnatural Magic, mostly because I don’t think of myself as being naturally any good at it. I struggle to read a map, let alone invent one, and though I speak a second language, the idea of making up an entirely new one makes me want to take a nap. Though I really admire writers who create completely original worlds for their characters to frolic around in, I didn’t think I could pull it off.

“I struggle to read a map, let alone invent one, and though I speak a second language, the idea of making up an entirely new one makes me want to take a nap.”

Because I was wary of trying to build a universe from scratch, I decided to start from a real-world time and place. From there, it was completely natural for me to dig into the U.S. and U.K. of the 19th century, which is the historic and literary era that I’m most familiar with. Though I didn’t want to write alternate history or steampunk, I did want to create a world filled with riotous gin palaces, pistol-wielding gentlemen, trolls on trains, scientifically minded wizards of leisure and the complicated politics that come along with rapidly advancing technology. Instead of looking for ideas from other fantasy novels, I tried to get most of my world-building inspiration from books that were written during the Regency or the Victorian era, which gave me a chance to reread some of my all-time favorite classics. These are a few of the books that had a big impact on the world of Unnatural Magic.
 

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Though not quite as universally beloved as Pride and Prejudice, this is my personal favorite of Austen’s novels. You get a great sense of the true stakes of love and marriage to women in the era, but with sensible Elinor as your guide and a typically Austenian happy ending, the whole thing never drifts toward depressing Tess of the d’Urbervilles territory. Though the rules governing the behavior of women in the actual Victorian and Regency periods were far, far stricter than they are in the universe of my book, as I was writing it I tried to make sure that my characters had a sense of decorum and proper behavior that would feel somewhat foreign to the reader—for example, my young female protagonist, Onna, can’t go on a journey by herself without a chaperone.
 

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Dickens is pretty uncool these days—an old-timey white dude who was also a real jerk to his poor, long-suffering wife—but if you’re ever in the mood for a truly delightful and occasionally laugh-out-loud romp through Victorian England, you really have to read David Copperfield. Dickens as a writer was deeply interested in the lives of people from every part of Victorian society, and David Copperfield is chock-full of incredibly entertaining characters. The scheming, obsequious (and sometimes strangely sympathetic) Uriah Heep alone is more than worth the cost of admission for this one.
 

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
This book was written decades after the first two on this list, and its characters live in a very different world: wealthy American expats drifting aimlessly through Europe at the end of the Victorian era. To me, The Portrait of a Lady is special mostly for James’ deeply empathetic and complex depiction of a female protagonist running up against the confines of a restrictive culture. It’s a portrait of a lady—the protagonist, Isabel Archer—but also a thoughtful, melancholy portrait of the society that she and James lived in.

This is also one of the many books from the era in which the concept of the “European tour” as a sort of expected rite of passage for the upper classes makes an appearance, and I tried to work a similar concept into Unnatural Magic—sometimes to work in jokes about people telling boring stories about their vacations (a problem which transcends time and space!) and partly because it’s a great way to hint at a character’s social status without making it explicit.
 

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
When I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a 14-year-old, it practically blew the top of my head off. I’d never read anything like Oscar Wilde’s lush, ornate prose. After that, I bought a gigantic hardcover edition of his complete works and ended up reading through the whole thing about five times. Now, as an adult, I find the writing that captivated me so much in Dorian Gray pretty overwrought, but Wilde’s plays are still as biting and hilarious now as they were when I was 14—and as they were when they first premiered over a century ago. If I ever manage to put a funny line of dialogue into a character’s mouth, it’s probably thanks to Wilde.
 

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool
This fantastic reference book is an invaluable resource for an ignorant author of fantasy novels who isn’t sure whether or not her proper-young-lady protagonist should carry a handbag (she shouldn’t, it turns out: instead, she should carry a very small bag called a reticule). Even if you’re not writing a book yourself, this book makes a great companion to any of the novels I listed above, or any other piece of literature from the 19th century. If you’ve ever wondered what a beadle is or wanted to know the difference between a gig and a curricle, you can find your answers here.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Unnatural Magic.

C.M. Waggoner shares some of the classic novels that inspired her fascinating fantasy debut, Unnatural Magic.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical Fantasy

Me and my shadow

Behind the Book by A.C. Wise

Author A.C. Wise sheds a light on the “inherent darkness” of Peter Pan, which she explores in her new historical fantasy, Wendy, Darling.

There were several aspects of the Peter Pan story I wanted to explore through Wendy, Darling. To my mind, there’s a lot of darkness inherent in the tale—the idea of a boy who refuses to grow up, who kidnaps children from their beds at night and who is able to become separated from his shadow. There’s a forced innocence to Peter, a determination not to see the more frightening and unpleasant aspects of reality (for instance, the stealing of children) by narrowly focusing on the bright world of make-believe, and never looking behind him at what kind of chaos his actions might cause.

“Once you’ve been to a world where animals talk or children can fly, how do you return to the mundane world, the day to day?”

I also wanted to look at how that worldview might play into various definitions of family, particularly motherhood. When Peter takes Wendy to Neverland as a child, he wants her to be a mother to him and the Lost Boys. By his definition, that means cooking, cleaning up after him, telling stories and sewing his shadow back on when he loses it. It’s yet another abdication of responsibility. Peter wants someone to do all the work, deal with all the consequences of his playing and running around and making a mess, so that his fun is never interrupted and he never has to pause or look back, knowing someone else will deal with it.

The inciting incident in Wendy, Darling is when Peter reappears in Wendy’s life when she is grown, with a child of her own, and takes her daughter, Jane, away to Neverland. I wanted to contrast the realities of motherhood as Wendy experiences it with Peter’s idealized version. In a similar way, I wanted to contrast Wendy’s process of building a family and a life for herself after Neverland with Peter’s attempts to create a family within Neverland by stealing children and forcing them into certain roles. Found and chosen family stories are of great interest to me, and here, Peter’s idea of found family is a dark inversion of Wendy’s healthier version.

Another aspect of the Peter Pan story I wanted to explore in Wendy, Darling is what happens after “the end.” With portal fantasy stories, I’ve always been interested in the lasting impact the journey to another world has on a character. Once you’ve been to a world where animals talk or children can fly, how do you return to the mundane world, the day to day? How does it change your relationships with the people around you who haven’t experienced that kind of magic? Several creators have done a wonderful job of tackling these questions in films, novels, short stories and games, and since many of those are stories I love, I wanted to try my hand at providing some possible answers as well.

 

Author photo by Steve Schultz.

Author A.C. Wise sheds a light on the “inherent darkness” of Peter Pan, which she explores in her new historical fantasy, Wendy, Darling.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Survival of the fittest

Behind the Book by Robert Repino

Robert Repino’s War With No Name science fiction series began with an immediately compelling premise: What if animals gained sentience and rose up against humans? But the heart of the series lies in an interspecies friendship between Mort(e), a former housecat, and Sheba, the dog who was his best friend before the world changed forever.

With the release of Malefactor, the final novel, Repino looks back on the surprising, heartwarming origins of the War With No Name series.

In the fall of 2009, I awoke from a strange dream and immediately began scribbling everything I could recall in my notebook. Groggy and working by the light of a Manhattan streetlight, I remembered an image of my old neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill. An enormous spaceship hovered directly above my parents’ backyard, with a metal gangplank extending from the hull to the grass. A strange energy pulsed from inside the ship. And all the pets and stray animals in the neighborhood suddenly, as if on cue, rose onto their hind legs in a comical but hideous impersonation of humans. At that moment, all hell broke loose. The animals attacked, dragging the humans from their homes, cornering them against cyclone fences and manicured shrubs. It was grotesque and liberating at the same time because, in my mind, I was among the animals, yearning for some kind of revenge, unable to ignore my instincts to kill and to protect my territory. By the time I was done, I asked myself what an uplifted animal would choose as a name. And without thinking, I wrote what felt like a nonsense word: Mort(e). I fell back asleep.

The dream could not have come at a better time. I was between my second and third failed novels. Book number three—a somewhat autobiographical work set in the Caribbean—was about to go out to agents, a miserable process that had already left me in despair the previous two times I tried it. I had come from the MFA world and had produced mainly literary work up until then, with a few short stories published here and there. And now, with this dream still rattling in my head, I had to ask: Could I change course and write a completely bonkers novel about a war between humans and sentient animals?

All my sad little eggs were in one basket with this goofy mess of a science fiction novel, part epic, part Saturday morning cartoon.

So, while novel number three began its journey through the meat grinder, novel number four—Mort(e)—came to life a few months later. By then, I had replaced the aliens with a hyperintelligent ant colony. Insects that are treated like pests would have a more coherent motivation to wage war with humanity, and would hark back to some of the weird B-movie entertainment that helped to raise me like Them! and Phase IV. That first draft opened with the aftermath of my dream, with the humans tied up and carted away by their new animal overlords. And from there, I let it rip, creating a war story with characters who find themselves permanently damaged by their pyrrhic victory over their sworn enemy.

But believe it or not, all of this was meant to be a love story. When I asked myself who the protagonists would be, the answer was simple. Before I was born, my parents adopted an orange and white cat named Sebastian when they moved into their first apartment. In the unit below lived another married couple, who owned a big dog named Sheba. My parents became such good friends with the couple below that they named them as my godparents when I came along a few years later. Sebastian and Sheba, meanwhile, had an adorable friendship, often falling asleep together on the landing of the steps that connected the two apartments. That experience may have convinced Sebastian that he was a dog. There is a scene in the novel in which the cat protagonist fiercely “protects” the house from a babysitter, which is word-for-word reenactment of an incident from my youth. My mom still loves to tell that story. And so, Sebastian and Sheba were the perfect couple to place at the center of the chaos of war.

While Mort(e) continued to grow, my previous novel crashed and burned. Though I found someone to represent it, the book languished for over a year on submission. Eventually, I had no choice but to part ways with the agent I had spent nearly a decade trying to find. Over five years had passed since completing my MFA, and everything felt like it was going backward. By then, all my sad little eggs were in one basket with this goofy mess of a science fiction novel, part epic, part Saturday morning cartoon.

As I tried to focus on the positive, I found the book changing as well. In later drafts, I deemphasized the spectacle of the premise in favor of the simple, platonic, interspecies love story. That’s been the backbone of the entire series, which I think made it attractive to a new agent and, eventually, to a publisher. The series now includes three novels and a spinoff novella. Somehow, as I moved on from a demoralizing period in my career, I was able to conclude the War With No Name on a relatively positive note with Malefactor, focusing more on redemption rather than revenge, and forgiveness rather than judgment. Frustration and despair may have given birth to the project, and even sustained it for a while, but what’s the use in that if it doesn’t lead to something better?

 

Author photo by Nicholas Repino

Robert Repino looks back on the surprising, heartwarming origins of his War with No Name series, which follows an interspecies war between animals and humans.

Science Fiction & FantasyChildren's & YAYA FictionMiddle Grade

Wizards in waiting: excitement builds for Harry Potter’s return

Feature by Howard Shirley

If you live with anyone under the age of 20, you might have noticed them looking longingly at the calendar and marking off the days (indeed, you might be marking off the days yourself). School’s already out, summer’s well along, the final Star Wars movie hit the screens weeks ago, and Christmas . . . well, even the stores don’t start playing carols until October. So what’s causing the sighs and anticipation? Why, it’s the magical arrival on July 16 of the sixth book about the young wizard in training.

<b>Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince</b> (or <b>HBP</b> to fans) has a first printing of 10.8 million copies, the largest initial print run for any book in American history. But exactly what happens in book six, no one, except J.K. Rowling and her tight-lipped editors, can say. The book has been treated with a level of security worthy of a state secret, and with remarkably fewer leaks to the press. It’s harder to get an advance copy of HBP than it is to Disapparate from Hogwarts. Unless you have the Inner Eye of Professor Trelawney, you’ll just have to wait with the rest of us Muggles until July 16. (Bookstores around the country are hosting midnight parties and will start selling the book just after 11:59 p.m., July 15.) Depending on your budget, you can choose between the regular edition of <b>HBP</b> and the deluxe edition, a slipcased beauty with special artwork and a retail price of $60.

Needless to say, the secrecy hasn’t stopped a steady stream of speculation and even outright wagering as to the plot, events and characters. Whole Internet sites are dedicated to analyzing the least little clues, from the cover art to offhand remarks by Rowling. Recently, bookies in the U.K. refused a flurry of wagers on who gets killed off in book six, in part because the wagers originated from the town where the books are being printed. Rowling has since downplayed the rumors, though not so far as to rule out the prediction.

The two great mysteries of <b>HBP</b> are the identity of the Half-Blood Prince and the question of which favorite character will die. As for the latter, Rowling has stated that no one (except Harry and Lord Voldemort) is 100 percent safe, and has kept mum otherwise. The identity of the Half-Blood Prince has seen a few more tidbits spilt; it is not (as some speculated early on) either Harry or Voldemort (or his teenage counterpart from <i>Chamber</i>). Could it be a character whose mixed heritage is already known (such as Hagrid, Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas and a few others) or a character who is well-known but whose origins are not (Snape is a favorite, as is Dumbledore) or a character not yet introduced or one mentioned but never encountered (such as Godric Gryffindor, co-founder of Hogwarts and ancient defender of Muggle-born students)? If you want to join the speculation, a great place to start is Rowling’s official website. It’s a delightfully animated exploration of Rowling’s cluttered desk, brimming with clues, hints and hidden oddities. From there you can follow links to Potter-fan web sites and Rowling’s American and British publishers. The Scholastic site offers a glossary and an audio pronunciation guide for wizardly words a great boon to Muggles like me, who discovered that I said many things woefully wrong.

<i>Howard Shirley is a writer in Franklin, Tennessee, who is convinced that Godric Gryffindor is the Half-Blood Prince. Unless, of course, it’s Hagrid. Or someone else.</i>

If you live with anyone under the age of 20, you might have noticed them looking longingly at the calendar and marking off the days (indeed, you might be marking off the days yourself). School's already out, summer's well along, the final Star Wars…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

An epic quest

Feature by Sean Melican

When the Barenaked Ladies sang “Everything old is new again,” they probably weren’t referring to science fiction and fantasy. But if this month’s offerings are any indication, they certainly could have been. For August we have a new vision of elves, a Dyson sphere populated by historians, pirates and fools, and an anthology of vampires inhabiting a multitude of ecological niches.

The title of Elfland leads one to expect a traditional fantasy story—the orphaned hero, the last surviving remnant of the monarchy, a motley and moral fellowship, a great quest—but readers will be pleasantly surprised by the directions in which the story branches. Yes, the narrative engine is driven by the threat of a world-ending ice giant, Brawth, and the efforts of one man, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper between Earth and the Otherworld, to contain Brawth.But Freda Warrington’s novel rises above other fantasies by focusing on the lives of the densely interwoven Wilder and Fox families who are concerned with the threat, but not consumed by it. Though it’s branded as a fantasy, Elfland shares as much with mainstream fiction as it does genre. The novel begins when the oldest child is not yet an adolescent and ends well after he’s spent time in prison for murder and has (borrowing from the romance genre) stolen the heart of a woman who once despised him. The novel generates greater emotional responses from the warp and weft of the families’ twisted skein, including adultery, betrayal, incest, love, lust, murder and brutal secrets brought to light. It is a strong beginning for a series that has the potential to attract a diverse group of readers.

A fantastic new world
Even though three books in the Virga series come before it, The Sunless Countries doesn’t require any outside knowledge—an odd discovery in light of the novel’s philosophical stance. Virga is a mini-Dyson sphere with a nuclear fusion engine as its sun, and various wheeled cities rotating around even smaller fusion engines. Leal Maspeth is a tutor hoping to be promoted to faculty, but what is a historian to do when the ahistorical Eternists (straw-men stand-ins for Creationists and Wikipedia-ists) have taken control of her city? And what is she to do when she falls in with Hayden Griffin, the hero and sunlighter, just as a voice resounds through the world warning of impending doom for all Virga? As in many otherwise excellent hard science fiction novels, the characters here suffer from a certain flatness. Virga is a superb example of world-building, with complex visual wonders deftly handled by Karl Schroeder’s writing. Curiously, Leal’s historical view is oddly old-fashioned, seeing history as a collection of static, objective facts, which she sticks to despite the evidence that her own historical role will be read one of two ways—heroine or quisling—depending on whether she is alive or dead when the Eternists eventually fall. A fifth novel is demanded.

The vampire authority
Popularly, vampires have ranged from bogeymen to darkly sensual to angst-ridden, but John Joseph Adams’ hefty anthology, By Blood We Live, resurrects 37 incarnations. There are familiar names with familiar stories, most notably Armstrong, King, Lumley and Rice, who is represented by her only published piece of short fiction. Vampires appear in historical and mythological contexts, from the sinking of the Titanic to James Wentworth’s South Pole excursion, the American West to 1930s China, Roanoke to Fallujah. Often the setting is merely a place to locate the vampire, but some authors venture much further. In “Snow, Glass, Apples,” Neil Gaiman brilliantly re-examines the underlying assumptions of the Snow White mythology, and with Lilith Saintcrow’s pitch-perfect “A Standup Dame,” we are treated to a consideration of gender roles in noir genre. We learn what happened to Elvis and Gatsby, Jesus and the devil’s own son, among others. There is also lust, parasitism, violence and narrow escapes. More than anything, this anthology demonstrates that the vampire is not only undead but mutable, and in the best writers’ hands, a tool for analyzing our mortal frailty and resilience in the teeth of unadulterated evil and unimaginable love.

Sean Melican is the new science fiction and fantasy columnist for BookPage. In alphabetical order, he is a chemist, father, husband and writer.
 

When the Barenaked Ladies sang “Everything old is new again,” they probably weren’t referring to science fiction and fantasy. But if this month’s offerings are any indication, they certainly could have been. For August we have a new vision of elves, a Dyson sphere populated…

Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYA

Sense of Wonder: Harnessing the power within

Feature by Sean Melican

This month our fantasy triptych includes the story of a young woman who is too beautiful and powerful for even the most powerful men, a machine too powerful for the Wild West and a former slave whose power may destroy him.

In the world of Kristin Cashore’s Fire, every living creature has a monster analogue, distinguishable by unnatural colors and a lust for blood—particularly monster blood. Though she does not lust for blood, Fire is a human monster. Her beauty causes uncontrollable lust in weak-willed men, and through a form of telepathy she can force men to do her will—though she is understandably reluctant to do so. Her father and his puppet king destroyed their kingdom through excess and cruelty, and Fire quickly finds herself embroiled in court politics, assaulted by the king and used as a tool to interrogate spies. She faces internal conflict as she sees the manipulation of human will too similar to her father’s amoral and casual brutality, but also necessary to the defense of the kingdom. To make matters worse, she falls in love with the prince—and his daughter. Aside from sharp writing, the strength of Fire lies in Cashore’s depiction of womanhood. The author plays with traditional gender fantasy roles, giving us a strong but feminine character whose physiology generates her strengths and weaknesses, and male characters who are aggressive chauvinists and misogynists—not the asexual ideal heroes of Tolkien’s pale imitators. The enchanting prequel to Cashore’s beloved young adult novel Graceling, Fire is an excellent book for all ages—particularly young women.

Steampunk in Seattle
There are plenty of alternate Civil War novels, but none quite like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. In the 1860s, Leviticus Blue builds a gold-mining machine in response to a Russian contest. But something goes terribly wrong—either intentionally or by accident, we don’t quite know—and the Boneshaker destroys the banking district of Seattle and unleashes a gas that turns the living into the living dead. A wall is built around Seattle to contain the gas and the zombies. Sixteen years later, Leviticus’ widow attempts to rescue their son, Ezekiel, who has braved the wall to vindicate his universally hated father. Behind the wall, a man who may or may not be Leviticus—and who may or may not have robbed the banks—has built a kingdom of the living, and he has other plans for Ezekiel and his mother. What follows is a fantastic whirlwind tour of an alternate history and a steampunk version of The Lord of the Flies. While slightly marred by a few too many similar chase scenes, Boneshaker offers fans of both steampunk and the New Weird much to enjoy.

Fantasy pick of the month
Flesh and Fire gives us another unlikely hero. Jerzy is a slave plucked from the vineyards because he shows a talent for creating spellwines. The reader learns (as Jerzy does) that these magic wines were omnipotent until the vines were split into types by a semi-deity who ordered that vintners and governing entities be entirely independent from one another. This Command has been kept and vigorously enforced, but has led to a stagnation in the development of government and particularly the evolution of spellwines. Peace has been held for centuries, but a new malevolent and destructive power appears which no one can identify. The narrative develops slowly, but the patient reader is rewarded with the skillful unfolding of a richly developed world heavily dependent on religious interpretation—a delightful discovery especially as the novel eschews slavish imitation of Grecian mythology or thinly veiled criticism of Christianity, instead presenting a history and mythology which informs and guides the powerless and the powerful. Laura Anne Gilman also approaches the issue of slavery from an alternate viewpoint; Jerzy sees slavery as a natural and moral behavior, is unable to recognize any other option, and questions the meaning of “freedom” through an examination of what it means to be guided by a dead deity’s Commandments. Moral questions are deeply embedded in the novel, with a brilliantly limited authorial intervention, and presented through well-developed characters and first-class world-building. Since this is subtitled “Book One of The Vineart War,” we can only look forward to the sequel(s).

In alphabetical order, Sean Melican is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

This month our fantasy triptych includes the story of a young woman who is too beautiful and powerful for even the most powerful men, a machine too powerful for the Wild West and a former slave whose power may destroy him.

In the world of Kristin…

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