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Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

A powerful finale for the Earthsea series

Review by Gavin Grant

The Other Wind is the sixth book in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, which becomes, with this addition, one of the richest fantasies ever created. Le Guin has written an amazingly spare novel, yet from the beginning, every word is weighed and crafted to add depth and resonance. It's like reading a time-release story, where some of the effects are felt much later. Weeks after reading it, I found myself considering different aspects of the story—the meetings of cultures, the inevitability of love, the process of aging and realizing anew how well they all fit together.

After an absence of 10 years, Le Guin returns to the ongoing fantasy realm of Earthsea, a land where actions have consequences, where characters live their lives, are influenced by others and change in unexpected ways. Le Guin's first book in the series, A Wizard of Earthsea, was published some 30 years ago. In it, we were introduced to Ged, who would one day become Archmage, one of the most powerful people on Earthsea. Now Ged is an old man who has given up his power. He and his wife are scraping by on a farm far from the center of the action. He is a minor character, anchoring us in the world, bringing other characters together, yet keeping out of the way of the wizards and rulers of the lands. He has stepped aside for the younger generation, now facing the central question: What is death?

In earlier Earthsea novels, Ged and others crossed the border into the land of the dead. It was a truly frightening place: there were no animals or plants, and the dead walked in silence, never acknowledging one another. Now, Le Guin examines her fictional land of the dead, and finds it wanting. Death is the great and inevitable unknown. No matter how much we fear it or poke and prod at it, we the living cannot truly understand it. In The Other Wind Le Guin makes us face our own mortality, and, without falling back into cliches, new age mantras or religious imagery, gives us a deeply powerful and satisfying conclusion.

Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn, where he reviews, writes and publishes speculative fiction.

 

The Other Wind is the sixth book in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, which becomes, with this addition, one of the richest fantasies ever created. Le Guin has written an amazingly spare novel, yet from the beginning, every word is weighed and crafted to add…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Future is now in Gibson’s new novel

Review by Michael Burgin

Much has been made of cyberpunk godfather William Gibson’s transition from the dystopic future of Mona Lisa Overdrive and Virtual Light to the contemporary setting of his recent novels. Starting with 2003’s Pattern Recognition and continuing in 2007’s Spook Country, Gibson abandoned the world of Molly Millions and Wintermute for present-day cool finders, benzo addicts and ex-CIA agents. The result? A world no less fascinating and characters no less intriguing.

In Zero History, the third novel of Gibson’s Bigend trilogy, a few years have passed since Hollis Henry last worked for the Belgian marketing mastermind Hubertus Bigend, a relationship she is eager to avoid re-establishing. But as happens with most who find themselves subject to the gravity of Bigend’s attention, Henry is quickly pulled back in as she searches for the reclusive maker of Gabriel Hounds, an anti-brand of denim apparel. She is joined in her search by her fellow Spook Country alum, Milgrim, an ex-drug addict (the “ex” thanks to Bigend) who is slowly rediscovering the person paved over by all the years of addiction.

Gibson is, as always, a meticulous world builder—every piece of clothing and décor comes with a detailed provenance, and even the most mundane material “actor” in a scene is described with exacting specificity. That taxi hailed on page one? “Pearlescent silver, this one. Glyphed in Prussian blue […] a smoother simulacrum of its black ancestors, its faux-leather upholstery a shade of orthopedic fawn.”

The relentless attention to detail could easily stop a reader in his or her tracks, yet somehow, it doesn’t—plot, pace and people keep the pages turning. (Though I did keep a pen nearby, building a list of the many references that escaped me for a later Wiki binge.)

Zero History sees the welcome return of most of the cast from Spook Country (and not a few of those from Pattern Recognition). This cast is an immediate and sustained strength of the novel—not necessarily because a reader need know them already, but because, like any good world builder, Gibson is allowing the potential of his characters to be realized. While such character-based brand recognition is found most easily in anti-hero Hubertus Bigend, described by Gibson in one interview as “a cross between Marshall McLuhan and a Bond villain,” it’s also evident in Milgrim, whose growth provides moments of unexpected poignancy.

Gibson’s latest novel may be set in the present, but the author’s eye for the “impending new” is no less keen, and one leaves Zero History with the feeling that Gibson has not turned his eye away from the future—the future has just moved much, much closer to us.

Much has been made of cyberpunk godfather William Gibson’s transition from the dystopic future of Mona Lisa Overdrive and Virtual Light to the contemporary setting of his recent novels. Starting with 2003’s Pattern Recognition and continuing in 2007’s Spook Country, Gibson abandoned the world of…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Dragons down under

Review by Kate Pritchard

Tongues of Serpents, the sixth installment in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, opens just as the dragon Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence, have arrived at the British colony of New South Wales in Australia. Temeraire and Laurence have been sent to Australia as prisoners after being convicted of treason, and the stain on their character is a difficult burden to bear—particularly for Laurence, whose compassion and common sense make him especially appealing to modern readers. But the real hero of these novels is Temeraire, an imposing figure who can blow holes in the sides of ships with his roar (known as “the Divine Wind”), but also loves to work on complex mathematical equations and is quite enamored of gold, jewels and fine clothing.

Temeraire and his fellow dragons are surely Novik’s finest accomplishment. Each dragon is distinguished by physical differences as well as sharply observed personality quirks and foibles. Much of the plot of Tongues of Serpents concerns a long chase through the interior of the Australian continent when one of the dragon eggs that Temeraire has been guarding is stolen; along with Temeraire and Laurence on the quest to recover the egg are Iskierka, a fire-breathing dragon who annoys the rest to no end, as well as two new hatchlings, one of whom puts the entire group in a rather difficult position.

To say much more about the dragons would be to spoil much of the pleasure of Tongues of Serpents. Less action-heavy than previous books in the series, the novel’s high points come with the introduction of new elements into its world, whether new characters or new adversaries, like the water-dwelling bunyips (a creature out of Aboriginal Australian mythology) who devise an ingenious trap for our heroes. Novik’s many fans will be pleased to spend more time with Temeraire, Laurence and their companions, and will be eager to see where their further adventures will take them. 

Tongues of Serpents, the sixth installment in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, opens just as the dragon Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence, have arrived at the British colony of New South Wales in Australia. Temeraire and Laurence have been sent to Australia as prisoners after…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Ben Bova

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Ben Bova’s sky-blue eyes twinkle as he gazes out on the white sands and palm trees of Venetian Bay near his home in Naples, Florida. The snowbirds have all departed, soon to be replaced by mosquitoes. Tourist season is over, hurricane season is nigh, and he and Barbara, his wife and agent, have this sleepy small town on Florida’s southwestern shore all to themselves once again.


His mind is far away: one hundred million kilometers, to be exact. Seven summers ago, readers took a sub-zero sojourn to Mars with the veteran science fiction author. This summer, the high adventure continues in Return to Mars.


“Mars is a very different world,” Bova muses. “It’s totally dry. There’s no liquid water. You could be standing on the equator in the middle of summer and the ground temperature might get up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature at your nose would be zero. The air just doesn’t hold any heat at all.”


Fortunately the three women and five men of Bova’s second Mars mission team make up for the sub-Arctic chill with plenty of out-of-this-world romance. Jamie Waterman, Navajo geologist and hero of the first novel, returns as mission director. C. Dexter Trumball, the headstrong son of the mission’s cold-hearted financier, soon challenges his authority. Jamie loves the red planet for its mysterious past; Dex wants to exploit it to win his father’s approval. They become locked in a steamy love triangle with beautiful physician/psychiatrist Vijay Shektar before their boots even hit red dust. It’s enough to burst your pressurized dome.


Bova chuckles at the suggestion that his Mars seems to be a very sexy planet indeed.


“It’s human nature. You’re a hundred million kilometers from home, some are men, some are women,” he says. “My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn’t seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky.”


There is hanky-panky of a far more dangerous sort in Return to Mars, when the crewmembers suspect they have a saboteur among them.


Bova has spent four decades crafting more than 90 fiction and nonfiction works based closely on scientific findings. Still, the “hard-science” SF practitioner says it’s the people, not the protons, that fire his imagination.


“After you spend a few years developing the novel, you do get a feeling of being there (on Mars),” he says. “I used to tell the grandchildren, ‘Grandpa’s got to go to Mars now.’ Hard science fiction is one thing, but what I’m trying to write are novels about real people doing real things. It may be in places no one else has gone before, but they are human beings and these are novels about the interactions among them, just like any other kind of novel.”


Bova chisels his characters from a variety of raw materials, including friends and acquaintances. But his decision to make Jamie Waterman a half-Navajo “red man on the red planet” arose in a roundabout way from the Martian landscape itself.

Author Photo
“It was really the geography, the land where the Navajo live, because I’d been going out to New Mexico and Arizona for 30 years, and time and again it looked so much like Mars. A very lush sort of a tropical Mars, but the landscape, the geography, is really much like the landscape you’ll find on Mars, if you take away all the bushes. Actually, when I first started plotting out the original novel Mars, the central character was a white-bread American geologist, and it just didn’t work out. So finally I came to a realization that this guy is part Navajo. So we went out to New Mexico for a month or so and absorbed the area and that’s when I started writing the novel.”


Jamie’s grandfather Al, a Navajo shopkeeper, serves as an Obi-wan Kenobi-like mystical sage in the Mars series. “Jamie’s grandfather is really a crucial character in this whole story because Al represented Jamie’s Native American heritage,” Bova says. “Although Jamie is very white and very Western, he still has that streak in him. Indeed, Mars and Earth, the two different planets, can be seen as symbols for the two parts of Jamie’s soul. I think that in Return to Mars he has finally resolved those differences.”


In most cases, characters live in Bova’s mind for years before they actually appear on his computer screen. He says the process of writing the novel is one of discovering more about his creations through their struggles.


Knowing them as well as he does, do they ever surprise him?


“Constantly! More often, it’s been someone who you would think of as a villain who turns out to be less than villainous; he’s human and he’s got his reasons for doing it, and can even do something decent on occasion.”


Such as mission moneyman Darryl C. Trumball, perhaps?


“He’s his own man, he’s come up in the rough-and-tumble world of finance. What he’s doing he doesn’t see as malevolent at all. He sees the scientists as kind of crazy, kooky. Who wants to go to Mars? Because the only thing that makes sense to the senior Trumball is to make money. That’s his criteria, the bottom line. He’s not evil, but you probably wouldn’t want to have dinner with him.”


Having completed two books in both his Moonbase series (Moonrise and Moonwar) and his Mars adventure, how do the two spheres stack up, dramatically speaking? Bova sees them quite differently.


“I think it’s perfectly OK to exploit the moon. Largely for two reasons: there’s no life there, and it is close enough and rich enough in resources to be economically useful to Earth. In the final analysis, everything we do in space, if it does not help the people of Earth, all the people, it’s not going to happen.”


Our fascination with Mars is easily understood, he says. “It’s the most Earth-like planet. It’s the only planet whose surface we can see on Earth and it looks somewhat like Earth. There has always been this fascination: is there life there? Or has there been intelligent life there?”


In recent months, Bova has moved on to Venus, a neighbor closer than Mars, where an out-of-control hothouse effect has resulted in a surface temperature that would melt aluminum and a thick cloud cover that poisons the atmosphere with sulfuric acid. Not exactly a vacation destination, perhaps. Nevertheless, Bova expects to complete the novel for publication next year.


“What I’m doing, and I’m having a lot of fun doing it, is exploring the solar system. And always, as long as you’re exploring it with people, the question of motivation comes up. Why would you want to go to Venus?”


If you are Ben Bova, the answer is obvious. He’s not exactly waiting for a call from NASA offering him a senior discount on the next shuttle mission, but he is dead certain what his answer would be should it happen.


“I’ll get in the car right now and drive to the cape.”



Jay MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

Ben Bova's sky-blue eyes twinkle as he gazes out on the white sands and palm trees of Venetian Bay near his home in Naples, Florida. The snowbirds have all departed, soon to be replaced by mosquitoes. Tourist season is over, hurricane season is nigh, and…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

David Clement-Davies

Interview by Michael Sims

Arriving on American shores this month, escorted by ecstatic reviews, is Fire Bringer, an epic animal fantasy in the tradition of Watership Down. This first novel by 36-year-old travel writer David Clement-Davies was published in England last year as a children’s book, but here in the U.S. it will be treated more as a crossover title.

This 500-page saga of the lives and society of the Herla, as the red deer call themselves, ranges from private domestic moments to heroic battles, from rival herd-leaders’ secret machinations to ancient prophecies of a deer with a blaze on his forehead shaped like an oak leaf. (Many readers will immediately think of Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar, which likewise marks him for future heroism.) No matter how far we think we have come from the superstitious artists who painted animals on cave walls, we are still moved by heroic tales of our fellow creatures. Is it because we intuit deep down that they and we are closer than we think? Whatever the rational explanation for this affinity, David Clement-Davies has tapped into its exotic power.

We reached the author at his home (and office) in London. Clement-Davies is already hard at work on his next book — about wolves — but he well remembers the amount of work that went into Fire Bringer. "Overall it took about three years to write, on and off. I had the idea quite a long time before, actually. I was sort of wondering what to do, especially after leaving university. I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to set about that. Eventually I went on and became a travel journalist." Today he climbs mountains, scuba dives, sky dives, and writes up his adventures for various periodicals.

Not surprisingly, many of Clement-Davies’s own favorite books as a child — and, for that matter, as an adult — were animal fantasies. "Watership Down is a favorite book," he says, acknowledging the most frequent comparison with his own first novel. "Going further back, the sort of greats like The Jungle Book. And there are other books which are more demanding — The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Wind in the Willows."

Therefore, he says, "I had a sense of the type of book I’d like to write." However, he knew he didn’t want to follow too closely in the footsteps of Richard Adams. "Before I got into the book, I thought about deer. They appealed for their mystery and — I don’t know how to say this — they’re rather more exciting animals than rabbits." Deer seem more mystical, more historical — and of course the stags, unlike male rabbits, are heavily armed, which offers dramatic possibilities in a story fraught with rivalry and deception.

Clement-Davies did a great deal of research into the lives of red deer. "Reading about deer is fascinating. You have this unique thing, which is the antler cycle, which makes them for me somehow stranger. While writing the fantasy, I was wrestling back and forth — wanting to make these creatures realistic, too."

Paradoxically, the details of the deer’s natural history — birth, growth, death — somehow "humanize" the creatures. We empathize with them because they go through the same cycles of life that we do, and because they respond to these cycles in the same ways we do — with fear, joy, dread, excitement.

Clement-Davies didn’t want to set his fantasy in a Never-Never Land of animals without a human presence. "I wanted to set people together with animals and see what I could do with that. And that gives me the basic tension." The presence of marauding humans — one of the chief predators always lurking on the outskirts of deer society — affects every scene. For example, most of the deer accept the humans’ Hunt as an inevitable part of life in the Park, and even encourage each other to sacrifice themselves for the good of the herd. Naturally, any deer who imagines a life outside the Park faces cries of heresy and revolution.

Clement-Davies pauses to think over the issues intertwined with his story. "I knew when I set out — you obviously have lots of ideas swirling around in your head, but you don’t quite know where they’ll take you — I knew I wanted to write about people, and about human issues. Actually very big themes such as fascism." The emotional roots of fascism, and the way in which individuals manipulate the society around them toward their own sad goals, is one of the ongoing themes.

Clement-Davies credits his agent, Gina Pollinger (who was also Roald Dahl’s agent), with giving him "the holy touch" and telling him, "You’re a writer." Clement-Davies remembers, "That sent a little shiver down my spine. When you begin to talk of yourself as a ‘writer,’ it gives you a kind of new authority. You don’t feel such a sham anymore, going into a pub and saying, ‘I’m a writer.’"

If Fire Bringer proves as popular in the U.S. as it did in England, Clement-Davies won’t have time to wonder if he’s a writer. Too many people will be reading his books.

Michael Sims’s next book will be a natural and cultural history of the human body for Viking.

Author photo by Tim Booth.

Arriving on American shores this month, escorted by ecstatic reviews, is Fire Bringer, an epic animal fantasy in the tradition of Watership Down. This first novel by 36-year-old travel writer David Clement-Davies was published in England last year as a children's book, but here…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Tom Cross

Interview by Gregory Harris

Wizards are typically portrayed as mysterious and secretive beings, but readers now have a chance to enter their enchanted world. With Tom Cross' The Way of Wizards, the curious can embark on a magical journey led by the author's alter ego, an apprentice mage named Penelo.

Lavishly illustrated, The Way of Wizards is a full-color, large-format book that uses more than 200 illustrations to depict the fantastical world of wizards. Penelo, as narrator, describes everything from a wizard's garb to elemental sources of power to the enchanted places that are a wizard's realm. At times, the book resembles a tome from a wizard's library.

Wizards is a project Cross began nearly 20 years ago, at a time when books on otherworldly creatures like gnomes and fairies were wildly popular. "We had pursued the idea of doing a wizards book, and then as things go, they said the market went soft,' he explains. Cross, a noted ecologist and artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries from Florida to Japan, continued to produce magically themed art until wizardry caught the public's imagination again, in part due to the phenomenal popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Cross believes that other factors also led to the resurgence of interest in magic.

"Fantasy seems to be an outlet during good times and a safe harbor during poor times."

"Fantasy seems to be an outlet during good times and a safe harbor during poor times,"  he says, noting that Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of his Middle Earth saga during the 1930s and '40s times of worldwide turbulence. As he researched wizards and mages for his book, Cross noted a recurring theme of harmony with nature that resonated with his background as a coastal ecologist. "A lot of what's in this book is researched folklore,"  he explains, "and every culture has its take on nature's phenomenon that couldn't be explained, and they almost always point their finger at a gnome or a fairy or a shaman or a witch doctor or a medicine man. If you think about it, every culture has wizards, whatever they call them. It's usually been the guy or the woman who was most in tune with nature."

In striving to synthesize magical legends from many cultures, Cross accessed material through the Internet, which jibed with his vision of the magical tome. "I had a very wild hair about the book basically being the material version of the real thing, a two-dimensional version of what's real,"  he said. What would a real wizard's book consist of? "It'd be hypertext, interactive, click here, click there, every word takes you somewhere, every image takes you somewhere. The Web is probably the best manifestation we have of what wizardly communication really would be."

Just as a wizard combines elements for a spell or potion, Cross blended ancient technique and modern technology to produce the images in his book. "The book is a very interesting evolution of technique, he explains. "The early stuff and particularly the things that are on the old book pages are handwritten or pencil and watercolor, and the major art pieces are all digitally done. So I pretty much have evolved as technology has allowed me to. Cross wrote some of the text in a page layout program that let him combine words with images and manipulate their appearance.

"It was neat. The page, the spread, became my palette, he said. "It was a bit of wizardry in that sense.

Gregory Harris is a writer and computer consultant in Indianapolis.

 

Wizards are typically portrayed as mysterious and secretive beings, but readers now have a chance to enter their enchanted world. With Tom Cross' The Way of Wizards, the curious can embark on a magical journey led by the author's alter ego, an apprentice mage named…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Jeffrey Ford

Interview by Gavin Grant

How can a painter create a portrait of a model he never actually sees? That question is at the center of Jeffrey Ford’s fascinating new novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. Set like Caleb Carr’s The Alienist in 1890s New York, Ford’s book is a masterpiece of suspense. But unlike The Alienist, which used actual historical characters, The Portrait relies for the most part on the author’s imagination. And what an imagination it is! Ford has honed his creative voice in a rich outpouring of short stories and novels, including the unique allegorical trilogy, The Physiognomy, Memoranda and The Beyond. The first book in the trilogy won the 1998 World Fantasy Award.

Ford’s latest novel takes place in the top tiers of New York society in 1893. Piero Piambo, an artist slumming as a portraitist, is hoping to make enough money to allow him to paint what he wants although he’s not at all sure what that might be. The Portrait kicks into gear when Piambo is given a mysterious and high-paying commission: to paint the eponymous Mrs. Charbuque. The job has one difficult condition, however; he must paint her without ever seeing her. Piambo cannot resist the challenge and is soon attempting to paint Mrs. Charbuque (who sits in the same room with him, but behind a curtain) while listening to her strange tales. As Piambo becomes obsessed with finding out the truth behind Mrs. Charbuque and her increasingly strange and frightening stories, he lets own life, his friends and his lover, Samantha, a beautiful actress, slip out of his hands. Painting an unseen subject is a captivating idea that sprang from Ford’s own experience as a reader. I see the characters of a novel in my mind, he said in a recent interview. They take on features, hair color and expressions, and bulk and height, becoming real individuals. When Piambo tries to see Mrs. Charbuque in his mind, the image keeps changing. I want the reader to have the same experience as Piambo is having as he tries to decipher her looks form her words, Ford says.

The author faced another challenge in creating the novel: how could he convey a painter at work or the beauty of a painting so that it would feel real to the reader? To solve this dilemma, Ford interviewed painters and read up on the subject particularly in James Elkin’s insightful book, What Painting Is. He also used his own experience as a painter in the Henry Miller school of paint what you like and die happy.’ One aspect of writing the novel came easily to Ford the setting. A New York-area native with a long-standing interest in local history, he grew up on Long Island and as a child was often taken into Manhattan. He later worked in the city, and he and his family now live within easy reach of New York in South Jersey, where he teaches English at Brookdale Community College. Despite his local background, Ford spent considerable time researching the New York of 1893. He discovered just how much difference 109 years makes: coffee cost less than a penny; an all-naked review in the name of high art was popular (although it didn’t last long); and many of the buildings of the period are long gone. However, not everything he discovered made it into the book; otherwise he’d never have finished. As his editor pointed out, a little research goes a long way.

Although he made his name as a fantasy author, in The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, Ford handles the mystery genre with apparent ease, building suspense right from the start when Piambo is handed a note by a blind man. Ford says his primary goal in writing the novel was to see how far his character would go to successfully paint his unseen subject. As Piambo is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery behind the curtain, the novel moves from one climax to the next, slowly and skillfully increasing the tension so that as the ending nears, the reader, like Piambo who lives for the stories and will do almost anything to find out more about Mrs Charbuque has to know what happens. Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn with the usual overload of books.

How can a painter create a portrait of a model he never actually sees? That question is at the center of Jeffrey Ford's fascinating new novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. Set like Caleb Carr's The Alienist in 1890s New York, Ford's book is a…
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Denise Giardina

Interview by Belinda Anderson

The storyline of Denise Giardina’s new novel, Fallam’s Secret, features time travel, an orphaned heroine and a love story punctuated by sex lots of sex.

It seems at first a departure for Giardina, a West Virginia author best known for serious historical fiction, including Saints and Villains, her acclaimed 1998 novel about the life of Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A closer examination of Fallam’s Secret reveals threads of serious themes, but it’s clear the author is mostly enjoying herself in this first book of a new series.

“It was just so much fun,” Giardina says during an interview in Charleston, West Virginia, where she lives and teaches writing. “I finally reached the point where I thought, you know, I don’t have to prove anything writing some big, heavy, serious thing anymore. Saints and Villains took a lot out of me.” Fallam’s Secret tells the fascinating story of Lydde, a West Virginia woman who goes back in time. “She’s an actress and she’s been living in England for a long time but she comes home because she thinks the uncle who raised her has died,” Giardina explains. “She ends up in the Mystery Hole, which has a wormhole under it, and she goes back in time.” A wormhole, in theory, is a space tunnel where time behaves differently. Giardina based the setting of the Mystery Hole on a real tourist attraction near the New River Gorge in West Virginia. “The gorge itself has always seemed very mysterious to me. It just popped into my head that it would be fun to have the Mystery Hole be the site of one of the wormholes.” Part of Lydde’s adventure is traveling through time as a 55-year-old woman and emerging in 1657 with a 20-something body. Giardina’s other books contain sex scenes, but she acknowledges these are more explicit. “I try to do different things in each book and this was something I decided to explore it’s supposed to be hard to write, so I wanted to try it. I also wanted to show sex as a beautiful thing and to show married sex as explicitly erotic and to challenge the puritanical attitudes toward sex that still exist.” Giardina researched the 17th century for authentic details, but emphasizes that most of the book came from her imagination. “It’s fantasy history. Chichester and Stratford I mushed together into a town I call Norchester. Even the New River I’ve fictionalized. I’ve got the Mystery Hole on the other side of the gorge I moved it.” On the serious side, characters in Fallam’s Secret challenge attitudes of prejudice and struggle against injustice, a trademark of Giardina’s fiction. “I really take on fundamentalism. The Puritans in this book stand in for modern fundamentalists. Not just Christian fundamentalism, but Islamic fundamentalism, too,” says Giardina, a multi-faceted woman who holds a divinity degree and ran unsuccessfully for governor of West Virginia in 2000. “This whole fundamentalist mindset is very scary to me. I think it’s the big challenge that we’re going to have for the next generation. It’s very powerful, it’s very irrational.” The ease with which Giardina wrote Fallam’s Secret astonished its author. After the arduous task of writing about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Saints, “I didn’t even know if I’d ever write another novel,” she says. But in six months, she was finished. “It even took my publisher by surprise. I’m already in the middle of book two.” “I hit 50, and I started doing several things differently. I started saying I’m going to read things I want to read, not because I think I should read them. If I start a book and I don’t like it, I’m not going to finish it. I’m 50. I don’t have as much time left as I used to have,” Giardina says. “I think I’ve decided to do that with my fiction, too. I just decided if it’s not fun, I’m not going to write it.” Belinda Anderson is a West Virginia writer and teacher and the author of The Well Ain’t Dry Yet, a collection of short stories published by Mountain State Press.

The storyline of Denise Giardina's new novel, Fallam's Secret, features time travel, an orphaned heroine and a love story punctuated by sex lots of sex.

It seems at first a departure for Giardina, a West Virginia author best known for serious historical fiction,…
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Jasper Fforde

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Jasper Fforde takes readers on a witty, wild ride Humpty Dumpty and his nursery rhyme mob are threatening a boycott. The rabbits from Watership Down have reproduced in such numbers that only Lennie from Of Mice and Men cares to visit anymore. Everyone in Wuthering Heights has been ordered to attend rage management class. And all misspellings must be reported at once to the Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire.

Welcome to the deliriously topsy-turvy world of Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, the most incessantly inventive literary satire since Alice what's-her-name fell down the you-know-what.

A frustrated writer who was making a living in the film industry, Fforde first made a splash in the publishing world with The Eyre Affair, a genre-stretching fantasy featuring ace "Prose Op" literary detective Thursday Next. Thursday operates in an alternate universe where authorized Prose Ops can pursue villains into BookWorld, a place where fiction comes delightfully to life, in order to prevent dastardly plot tampering with classic novels.

Thursday continued her literary enforcement in a sequel, Lost in a Good Book, but even ace detectives occasionally need a rest. In his latest novel, Fforde chose to virtually suspend the series' storyline involving Next, her time-traveling Uncle Mycroft and missing husband Landen Parke-Laine in order to get downright daffy with the inner workings of the Well of Lost Plots.

In the 26 dingy sub-basements of the Well, characters, premises and prose are polished and peddled to nascent novels. Part Moroccan thieves' market, part B-movie back lot, the Well also is where A-list heroes and villains take a break from their classic novels to vacation in unpublished works via the Character Exchange Program.

So plentiful were the satiric possibilities of this font-of-all-fiction that The Well of Lost Plots is "is a 340-page digression almost, but the idea was so strong that I really just needed to play with it," Fforde says by phone from his home in Wales. "And rather than play with it in a separate book, since I've already established that Thursday can travel into the BookWorld, let's just have a go at the whole thing."

Indeed, the presence of the Cat Formerly tips us to the unusual adventure ahead. Along the way, we encounter bat-like, text-deleting grammasites, mispeling (sic) viruses, the chatline-like footnoterphone (with running gossip about Anna Karinina), black-market plot contrivances (Still waiting for Godot? That's him in the head-in-a-bag plot device) and one particularly uncivil Minotaur on the loose.

Casting a long shadow over the future of BookWorld itself is UltraWord, a revolutionary book operating system featuring Enhanced Character Identification (you'll breeze right through War and Peace), WordClot (Bigger words? Smaller? You choose!) and PlotPotPlus (to keep you from getting lost in a good book). UltraWord: Good for business, bad for books.

"It's having a little go about modern marketing. It's about trying to get the formula right so we can sell it instead of trying to get the story right so people will buy it," says Fforde. "Bookshops didn't used to be about retailing and marketing, they just used to be about books. Now they seem to be very much about hard sell this is what is selling, this is what you should read. That's what I was sort of railing against."

The London-born Fforde spent his youth at a Harry Potter-esque boarding school in Devon, where his interests ran to Victorian classics, airplanes and movies. Rather than continue on to university, he left school at 18 and became a "focus puller," or second assistant camera operator. He spent the next 19 years traveling the world, working behind the camera on such films as Goldeneye, Entrapment and Quills.

On the road, he stayed busy conjuring a fantastic alternative England circa 1985 in which some technologies, such as cloning and time travel, are hum-drum routine while others, such as computers and jet engines, do not exist at all. Great literature, not soccer, is the national passion in his alternate U.K. Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen are virtual superstars. Thursday Next, the detective assigned to protect these national treasures, is a thoroughly modern career woman, veteran of the still-in-progress Crimean War and proud owner of a regenerated pet dodo named Pickwick.

Fforde's fondness for puns is reminiscent of the late, great Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame. He has a particular soft spot for character names Paige Turner, Millon de Floss (after George Eliot's Mill on the Floss), Landen Parke-Laine (what you want to do in the British version of Monopoly) and so on. And the setting unremarkable Swindon echoes the buttoned-down world of Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide.

In each outing, Fforde selects major works from the Western literary canon around which to weave his merriment: Bronte's Jane Eyre in his debut; works by Poe (The Raven), Austen (Sense and Sensibility) and Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) in Lost in a Good Book, and Wuthering Heights in his latest. It's both an artistic and a pragmatic decision.

"People ask, why don't you use contemporary novels? For one reason, they're not in public domain. But for another reason, why? When there is so much good stuff to use in the classics," he explains. "I regard Dickens, the Bront‘s, Austen and Trollope as going back to primary sources."

The Well of Lost Plots might have been a drastically different book, in fact, but for the modern-day legal hurdles. Disney denied Fforde's request to enlist Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, and the estate of H.G. Wells wouldn't release the Morlocks from The Time Machine, either.

How in the world, then, did he manage the neat trick of bringing in Godot from Samuel Beckett's classic existential play, Waiting for Godot, much less as a head-in-a-bag plot device? Fforde laughs: "The good thing about Godot is, he doesn't actually appear in the play; they're waiting for him but he never appears! He's not actually a copyrighted character because he doesn't exist, he's not there. And now you know why: his head is in a bag in the Well of Lost Plots."

 

Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

Jasper Fforde takes readers on a witty, wild ride Humpty Dumpty and his nursery rhyme mob are threatening a boycott. The rabbits from Watership Down have reproduced in such numbers that only Lennie from Of Mice and Men cares to visit anymore. Everyone in Wuthering…

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Gregory Maguire

Interview by Ellen Trachtenberg

Fairy tales are, by their very nature, magical things. But something rather extraordinary happens to them after they’ve been re-imagined by Gregory Maguire: they get a loyal following. Best known as the author of the wildly popular Wicked (adapted into a Broadway musical) and its sequels, as well as books for both children (Leaping Beauty, What-the-Dickens) and adults (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Mirror Mirror), Maguire has lent his witty, sophisticated storytelling to some of the most beloved tales in our collective consciousness, often altering our long-held and deeply felt reactions to notorious characters and infamous plotlines. While never contradicting or poking fun at the original tale, he always adds a new dimension to our interpretations.

All of which makes Maguire’s work perfectly suited to adaptation for stage, screen and, most recently, radio. Each year, NPR asks a well-known writer to create a Christmas story for broadcast, and in 2008, Maguire was tapped. The result was Matchless, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story “The Little Match Girl.” In the original work, translated from Danish in the mid-19th century, a poor young girl dies alone in the night, freezing to death in the bitter cold. At the time, her dying visions were widely interpreted as religious metaphors. In Matchless, Maguire gently shifts the focus to illuminate a seldom-considered character. Young Frederik, living through desperate times with his mother, is the nameless boy from Andersen’s tale who absconds with the match girl’s shoe just before her death. The shoe is quite a find for Frederik, who has very little in the way of material possessions. But his intention for the shoe is unexpected. He returns home with his prize and quickly retreats to the attic where he has been meticulously constructing a miniature island town, made from bits and pieces he’d collected at the docks.

“Andersen left me a little thread to pull,” Maguire says in a telephone interview. “Frederik is the only other child and he has a line: ‘Here’s a cradle for my babies.’ Therefore I felt invited to follow that. I began to realize who the boy was and what his particular hardships were. As sad as it is, it’s a beautiful story. There’s this little bit of domestic magic that re-illuminates the possibility of connection between the living and the dead.”

While “The Little Match Girl” was adored by generations past, it hasn’t reached as many 21st-century readers as Andersen’s other tales, which include “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling.” That’s one of the reasons Maguire selected it for the NPR project. “It struck me as being perfect,” he explains. “Though people of a certain age will remember the story, it has been gradually slipping away.” But writing a story—with very little lead time—intended to be read aloud before being published was a new experience for the author.

“When you’re doing a radio story, you have to let your characters have individual-sounding voices,” Maguire notes. “You have to roll the story out very quickly with just enough, but not too much, description so that the listeners can learn about the environment as well as the conditions. So it was very different for me. Sometimes I’ll have the story idea on my desk for five years before I feel like I have caught the particular cadence of how it should go.”

Published for the first time this fall in a beautifully designed gift edition, Matchless contains Maguire’s own finely detailed black-and-white drawings. These vignettes, each contained in a small circle as if viewed through a lens, show such scenes as a carriage on a cobblestone street and a cozy attic room accessed by a ladder.

Maguire’s story has the weight and solidity of a treasured folk tale, something to be handed down and retold. It’s for children at bedtime but also for their grandparents. That’s one of Maguire’s obvious strengths: the ability to write on several different levels to personally address the interests of his entire audience. He credits Andersen with a similar talent: “He had the capacity to start the story in the first sentence. He dispensed with many of the conventions of storytelling—the once-upon-a-times—and spoke colloquially.”

In Matchless, Maguire leaves open the possibility of an optimistic ending, as Frederik’s family joins together with the poor match girl’s. And with this retelling comes the possibility of renewed interest in the original story. But perhaps, too, the reading of Matchless will become a new holiday tradition for many families. “It’s something that all artists hope,” says the author, “that their work will live beyond the length of their days.”

Ellen Trachtenberg is the author of The Best Children’s Literature: A Parent’s Guide. She writes from Philadelphia.

Fairy tales are, by their very nature, magical things. But something rather extraordinary happens to them after they’ve been re-imagined by Gregory Maguire: they get a loyal following. Best known as the author of the wildly popular Wicked (adapted into a Broadway musical) and its…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Charlaine Harris

Interview by BookPage staff

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?

The beginning of the holiday season for me is the Christmas shopping trip I take with my best friend. We arm ourselves with lists, clear out our cars, and head for either Shreveport or Texarkana for a day of shopping. We plan our route, eat a lunch at a good place, and come home tired but happy. Then I'm officially in the holiday mood.

Does your family have one very special holiday tradition?

We have a few things we usually do, but I wouldn't characterize them as traditions. We do always have the same meal, and I do always get all the kids books even now that they're grown. We open presents on Christmas morning, and we go to church on Christmas Eve.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?

I most look forward to having my whole family together. The winter my son was in the service and had to stay on post in Alaska for Christmas was so painful.

What’s your favorite holiday book or song?

I love Christmas carols, and nothing gets me in the Christmas mood faster.

Why do books make the best gifts?

Books are such a great gift because you take the time to match the book to the recipient.. That process is a lot of fun, and you're thinking about the giftee all the time.

What books are you planning to give to friends and family?

I usually give my daughter some nonfiction book, my middle son gets science fiction, and my oldest son . . . well, he's pretty hard. Sometimes a nonfiction, sometimes some sort of adventure book. My husband is a Civil War buff, and if I can find a new publication on that topic, that's what he gets.

What was the best book you read this year?

The best one. Hmmm. That's almost impossible to pick, because I've read some really good ones. Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? was awfully good. So was Harlan Coben's Long Lost. I also loved The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston, and Martin Mullar's The Lonely Werewolf Girl.

What’s your number one resolution for 2010?

I don't make New Year's resolutions! That's just asking for defeat.

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?

The beginning of the holiday season for me is the Christmas shopping trip I take with my best friend. We arm ourselves with lists, clear out our cars, and head for either Shreveport or Texarkana for…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Dan Simmons

Interview by Michael Alec Rose

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion. Spanning four novels and many centuries of real and imagined galactic history, the Hyperion saga is an astonishing achievement, overbrimming with adventure, lyricism and insight. A miracle of invention and economy, played out on a dozen and more meticulously created worlds, the tetralogy is surely one of science fiction's grandest visions of humanity's shared fate with its technology — not least because of the unforgettable character of Aenea, the young girl (and later, woman) in whose hands lies the future of humankind.

Simmons will return to his Hyperion universe once more in an upcoming novella, part of a set of stories by a select group of science fiction authors who have been asked to revisit their now-classic worlds just one more time. ("If only Herbert and Asimov were still with us," says Simmons, wistfully.) But for now, with the culmination of the preceding novels Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion and Endymion (all Bantam paperbacks) in the current volume, Dan Simmons takes time out to introduce the entire series to new readers and to share some thoughts with his avid fans about The Rise of Endymion.

BookPage: The universe of your four-novel epic is so vast and so fully realized. What was its genesis?
Dan Simmons: It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri. I first created the Hyperion universe for my students during storytelling hour, little by little, day after day. Later, I incorporated that experience into my story, "The Death of The Centaur" (from Prayers to Broken Stones, Bantam paperback).

BP: There is a deep strain of great literature running through the four novels. It's not hard to recognize the models for many of the things you write: The Canterbury Tales, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of course, John Keats' poetry. Is it important to you that your readers make those connections? Would you like your books to send readers back to those sources?
DS: I think the readers who know that literature can enjoy pursuing those references, and that can deepen their Hyperion experience — it certainly did for me. But it's not just a game of finding literary references. In fact, when I first started writing Hyperion, I knew I'd have to deal with Keats' long poems, "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion." I really appreciated his theme of life evolving from one race of gods to another, with one power having to give way to another, as Hyperion must. But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

BP: Well, it works nicely on both levels when John Keats' persona appears as a "cybrid" artificial life form in the story!
DS: Yes, that was the idea.

BP: As I understand it, there are three mighty powers which become unleashed throughout the four novels, and which vie together and apart for the soul of humanity: the first is the church, the second is artificial intelligence and I'm not sure what to call the third — maybe the basic human freedom to choose one's own fate?
DS: That's a good way of putting it.

BP: Let's focus on the first two for the moment: do the futures which you envision for religion and technology in these books reflect a conviction on your part about where those forces are headed? Are they prophecy of a sort?
DS: No, I don't believe in prophecy. They're a story, a development of ideas. I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence — a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity (this is where Keats' theme resonates). As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction. It's really about what happens whenever religion and power go hand in hand. I'm not anti-church by any means; what interests me is that human beings are almost always corrupted by the control they wield over other human beings. That situation has been especially tragic for religions.

BP: I have a question specifically about the current book, The Rise of Endymion, coming out this month. To me, it's a love story more than anything —
DS: Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that.
BP: — between Aenea and Raul Endymion. It's a love story against all odds, even against death and time. "Love is a fundamental force in the universe," says Aenea over and over again. That's what she calls "the music of the spheres." How do you hear this music?
DS: Well, I think all the simple things can and do still work — holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

BP: I know what you mean. It's too bad. I teach a Beatles course at Vanderbilt and we go dangerously into that hokey territory.
DS: Well, I write that way.

BP: Well, I feel that way. And I don't know how to express my gratitude to you. I feel like I'm speaking for countless fans here. You have enriched that feeling for us beyond calculation, and way beyond "hokey-ness." It's more like holiness. It's wholeness, certainly.
DS: Thank you. It's very kind of you to say that.
BP: Thank you for creating so generously and so well.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion. Spanning four novels and many centuries of real and imagined galactic history, the Hyperion saga is an astonishing achievement, overbrimming with adventure, lyricism and insight. A…

Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Anna North

Interview by Jillian Quint

Anna North's dark, gripping and wildly creative debut, America Pacifica, goes where few Iowa Writers' Workshop grads have gone before: a futuristic end-of-days setting where the buildings are made of sea-fiber and solvent-huffing hoodlums roam the streets. Still, North's story of a young girl in search of her mother (and her island's history) is remarkably universal, with characters as real those found in any contemporary fiction.

We sat down with the author to chat about dystopias, female protagonists and the pressure of happy endings.

America Pacifica is a difficult book to categorize. To what extent do you consider it a post-apocalyptic or sci-fi novel?
I definitely consider it post-apocalyptic, but whether it’s sci-fi is a more difficult question. I think the reputation of science fiction has really improved a lot over the years, but a lot of readers of literary fiction still tend to think of sci-fi as badly written, or as not concerned with character. This isn’t true—there are a lot of wonderful and beautiful sci-fi novels. Sometimes I call America Pacifica “literary sci-fi” so that people know I care about emotions and sentences, but I do look forward to a day when that kind of marker won’t be necessary.

The creation of a fantasy world like America Pacifica requires creating a universe larger than the book itself. Did you have the entire landscape and rules of the Island in your head before you began to write, or did you develop as you went?
I developed as I went, but my knowledge of the world had to be pretty far ahead of the story. So if Darcy was going to a particular neighborhood I had to know where it was on the map and how long it would take to get there before she set out. I drew a lot of maps, and I kept a map of the whole island in my desk and referred to it constantly. A lot of the rules—things like the absence of cameras and phones and Internet, and the general difficulty of getting your hands on metal—I established very early on, because I did a lot of thinking about how hard it would be to get a bunch of stuff across the Pacific. But others, like the toxic seawater, actually came in much later drafts.

The dystopian setting and strong female lead brings to mind the (wildly popular) Hunger Games books. Have you read that series and how do you feel about the comparison?
I haven’t read the Hunger Games books, because someone recommended them to me while I was in the thick of writing America Pacifica and had banned myself from reading dystopias until it was done. But I’d like to read them. They sound like the kind of thing I’d really enjoy, and I’m happy they’ve done so well. I think we need more books about girls swashbuckling and having adventures.

Speaking of strong female lead, Darcy is quite a character. Had you always imagined her as book’s focal point? Or did you develop the concept first and the character second?
I started with the idea of writing a post-apocalyptic novel involving a missing person, but Darcy came fairly quickly after that. In my very early stabs at a beginning, she had a different name and lived in a totally different place—a mainland full of tent cities that people got around by bicycle. But she was pretty much the same person—she was always someone young who has to seek and search, and carry a lot of responsibility mostly on her own.

Along similar lines, I see your publisher is doing cross-promotion with YA markets. Were you ever pressured to publish this as a Young Adult book? What do you think makes it decidedly adult?
I was never pressured, but I did have an agent suggest to me that I make Darcy several years younger and try to sell the book as straight-up YA. I felt strongly that Darcy should be 18, because I wanted her to be an adult, but only just. Over the course of the book, I wanted her to be finding out what kind of adult she would be, the way you do when you’re still very young but not a child anymore. I didn’t want it to be about coming of age quite so much as I wanted it to be about the fashioning of a grownup self. The fact that it’s less about the (very real) perils of adolescence and more about what happens afterward may make it more adult than your average YA book. But I think it’s getting tougher and tougher to make these distinctions—young readers have always read books for adults, and now more than ever, adults are reading YA.

Without giving too much away, I’ll say that book’s second half and ending definitely diverge from norms within the YA/sci-fi genre. Did you feel pressure to wrap things up neatly? Did you always know how the book would end?
I always knew more or less what the last chapter would look like. It was probably the fastest to write because I had it all planned out in my head. But my first draft did end a bit more ambiguously than the finished one, in a way that my advisor found way too sad. I think she was right—not because sad books are bad, but because it hadn’t really had the effect on her that I was going for. So I did end up making some changes, but I never felt pressure to make things too neat or tidy. I think that would be contrary to the spirit of the book.

I see you’re an Iowa grad. Were you working on America Pacifica while you were there? If so, how did it differ from what your classmates were up to?
I wrote pretty much the entire first draft while I was at Iowa, which was a wonderful place to do it. Work set in the future was pretty uncommon there, though one of my classmates did write some post-apocalyptic stories set in Maine (another wrote very compelling fantasy). I worried about this a little before I got there, but it turned out to be totally fine. Everyone was very respectful of America Pacifica and treated it like it was a serious book, and even though futuristic stuff was pretty uncommon, the diversity of my classmates’ work was really impressive. I got to know a lot of people who were taking big risks and trying new things in their writing, and I never felt like I had to conform to one specific mode or do things in a traditional way.

You’re also a writer for the smart-lady blog Jezebel. How does writing in the online (and feminist) sphere influence your fiction?
Writing online means I read a ton of news every day, which is really good for my fiction, because I end up having a lot of ideas and facts swimming around in my head all the time. It’s also exposed me to a lot of writers I might not be aware of otherwise, which is a good thing for any fiction writer. I do think my interest in female protagonists and especially female protagonists doing heroic things was set before I started working for Jezebel, but working there and also reading the other great feminist blogs I became aware of as a result has given me a better understanding of the politics surrounding women’s writing and women’s stories. And I think being more politically aware is making me a better fiction writer, even if my work doesn’t end up being overtly political

We have to ask: what’s up next for you?
I’m working on a novel about a dead female filmmaker, told in the form of a filmography composed by the four people who loved her most.

 

Anna North's dark, gripping and wildly creative debut, America Pacifica, goes where few Iowa Writers' Workshop grads have gone before: a futuristic end-of-days setting where the buildings are made of sea-fiber and solvent-huffing hoodlums roam the streets. Still, North's story of a young girl in…

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