Benjamin Hope's Blog
December 11, 2019
Recommendation in 60 Words: Cold Iron
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Publisher: Gollancz (this edition, 2019)
(Masters & Mages Trilogy #1)
One fateful night, student Aranthur is quick with his sword. It earns him respect but changes him too, landing him amidst a dangerous, political quagmire that penetrates deep into the City and beyond. This coming-of-age saga has top-notch world-building, from the magical to the socio-political. It has it all: swords, dragons, heart, brutality, civil unrest… and it’s only book one!
December 2, 2019
Recommendation in 60 Words: Kraken
Genre: Urban Fantasy / Weird Fantasy
Publisher: Pan Books (2010)
A giant squid disappears from the Natural History Museum and curator Billy Harrow’s life spirals into madness. This heady ride into London’s underbelly is rife with warring cults, nefarious magic-wielding killers and the down-right strange. Weird fantasy it is, with cast and plot so darkly, riotously original you’ll be thinking there’s something in your tea! Armageddon is coming, but which?
November 26, 2019
The Gaia Collection: the Dystopian Trilogy with Heart
It was back in July 2018 that Claire and I wrote a dialogue piece reflecting on our writing processes and the formulation of our respective debut novels. In our writer timelines, following the award-winning success of The Gaia Effect, Claire was at the final hurdle of completing draft one of her sequel, and the second book in The Gaia Collection, The Gaia Project; I was just embarking on my sequel, A New Religion. It is with huge admiration then, that, nearly a year and a half later, and with my own sequel postponed until 2020, I congratulate her in bringing her trilogy to a close with The Gaia Solution: a body of work which manages to be at once thrilling and poignantly heartfelt in its premise. In fact, I am a week or two late in my applause, as the final chapter in this original race against time came out on 8th November! If you haven’t come across this trilogy before, it’s certainly worth taking a peek. You can do so using the links to the books below or having a read of the summary that follows but… SPOILER ALERT – you are warned, in giving an overview of the events that lead to The Gaia Solution, some spoilers are unavoidable!
The Gaia Collection:
The Gaia Collection is Claire’s hopeful dystopian trilogy set 200 years in the future after much of the planet and the human race have been decimated during The Event, when the world went to war with high-energy radiation weapons.
In The Gaia Effect, Kira and Jed Jenkins – a young couple who were recently allocated a child – together with their closest friends, discover Corporation have been deliberately lying to them and forcing them to remain sterile. With help from Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, the group of friends begin to fight back against Corporation eventually winning and taking over the governance of City 42.
In The Gaia Project, Corporation fight back under a new, more terrifying organisation called New Corp and Kira, Jed and their friends end up fleeing for their lives trying to find a safe place to live. They travel to City 36 and City 9 in vain and must go further afield.
In the final book, The Gaia Solution, the main characters have ended up with the Resistance and not only do they have to deal with surviving against New Corp but an extinction environmental event is looming on the horizon and they’re running out of time to save what’s left of the human race.
Book Links
August 2, 2019
Genre: Dystopian / Sci-Fi-Adventure
Publisher: Kyanite Pu...
Genre: Dystopian / Sci-Fi-Adventure
Publisher: Kyanite Publishing (2019)
In a post-nuclear apocalypse, Alex wakes from his Cryo-Pod and embarks on a dangerous journey, determined to find out what became of his parents. Prescott weaves an entertaining and easy-read narrative with super-beasts and nifty gadgets galore, offering up a coming-of-age tale that combines adventure, humour, heart-break, and all-out action sequences. The dystopian setting is well-conceived; the technology, equally so.
More information available at: Kyanite Publishing
June 26, 2019
Publisher: Angry Robot, October 2017
Genre: Gothic
When C...
Publisher: Angry Robot, October 2017
Genre: Gothic
When Catherine Helstone’s missionary brother, Laon, fails to send word from Arcadia, the land of the Fae, she sets out to find him, disembarking into a sinister world beyond her imagination. This is a slow burn that conjures a fully realised world and literary history, parallel to that of Susanna Clarke, with a fantastical insidious menace akin to Peake’s Gormenghast.
June 19, 2019
Hansel & Gretel: A Potted History & Why Such Stories Endure
A new production of Hansel and Gretel opened to a full house on Monday night at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and it was met with rapturous applause by the audience, and with almost universal praise from the press the following day. I certainly thought it was a fantastic evening of opera: the production balanced the bitter with the sweet in the blending of magic with the macabre; and the cast and orchestra were on top form too. But what is it that makes such a story endure? Why are people still so intrigued and enamoured by such a grisly tale more than two hundred years since it was first penned (in this guise) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812? There’s certainly something in the fabric of this story (and fairy tales in general) that maintains its relevance throughout the decades and centuries; there’s something that has kept it present in our cultural psyche right up to the present day.
Humperdinck had huge success right from the opera’s premiere in Weimer in 1893; but his was not the only re-imagining of the tale. In fact, the Brothers Grimm who were known for collating folk stories of Germanic heritage from the ‘common folk’, also aligned their own version with other cultural backgrounds, with the likes of Le Petit Poucet and the Slavic Baba Yaga stories. These of course go back further than their own tale of 1812, and it is widely agreed that they were all born of the Great Famine in the early 14th century (which spread from Italy right up to Russia), where families were desperate enough to abandon their children in the woods or even resort to cannibalism. Starving children left to die in the deep dark woods and do battle with evil witches may seem entirely make-believe but looking far enough back and you can see how the bare bones of the narrative came from people’s real-life experiences. Perhaps this is why they continue to resonate so keenly today: not only can they act as metaphors for more contemporary societal issues (I saw glimmers of this in the production at Regent’s Park), but they act as a reminder of the hardships our ancestors faced in their own lives too. Maybe Hansel and Gretel is just a good story, macabre and magical enough to tantalise our imaginations and speak of our fears; maybe it’s so much more than that. Like the breadcrumbs left out by the children along the track, perhaps it’s a reminder of where we came from in the first place…
If you are a fan of traditional stories, check out the Kyanite Press’ Winter Digest of Fables and Fairy Tales in which I wrote the guest foreword, On the Importance of Fairy Tales, as well as my own short story contribution, Baba Yaga and the Ailing Child.
June 12, 2019
Short Story Publication: One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth, in: ParABnormal Magazine, June 2019
I’m thrilled to confirm that my fantasy short story, One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth, has been published in Alban Lake Publishing’s ParABnormal Magazine, June 2019. It is the story of two sisters and the lengths they must go to in order to protect the youngest from a soursmith who would prey on her soul.
The ParABnormal Magazine is a home for stories that, in their words ‘include[s] shapeshifters, mythological creatures, and creatures from various folklores… shapeshifters [which] refer to the spiritual shift, not the physical…’. I was struck by their notion that ‘paranormal activity centres around the human, not the creature’ and, as One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth, combines spiritual shifts centred around the soul, as well as drawing heavily on bird folklore, I was pleased that they agreed our worlds were a good match. This month’s issue also includes the Nebular Nominated short story, Cymodoce, by Joseph Carrabis, so it’s certainly worth a look!
Dare you enter the world of ParABnormal Magazine?!
The June issue can be purchased here:
ParABnormal Magazine, June 2019
Or for an annual subscription, check out the option here:
March 4, 2019
Celebrating eBooks with Smashwords’ Read an eBook Week: Get Involved!
In my book, if you’ll pardon the pun, Smashwords is a fantastic ebook platform. For those self-published authors out there, it offers an exceptional tool and service for publishing and formatting your ebook outside of Amazon. Amazon is, of course, also undeniably brilliant in facilitating the self-publishing process but it is limited to their own platform and file type (i.e. .mobi files). The beauty of Smashwords, is that it opens up the market for authors to make their books accessible for all devices and all readers (including .mobi files): from .ePub files, for current Sony Readers, Kobos, Nooks and tablets; to .lrf and and .pdb, for older e-reader kit. I’m sure Smashwords is no secret to most reading this but I wanted to champion them for the other initiatives they run too, such as the ‘Read an eBook Week’ they are running right now. Of course, this is an opportunity for indie authors to develop their readership through heavy discounts and giveaways, but just as importantly, it also opens the door for readers to try out new authors and seek out gems without the cumulative bill that might otherwise put them off. So, if you haven’t already, I’d urge you to take a peek at the great books on offer at Smashwords this week (this particular event is running 3rd – 9th March, inclusive). I’ve already bagged two historical fantasy novels, Wreck of the Frost Finch by Joseph Robert Lewis, and The Watchmaker’s Daughter by C. J. Archer, and can’t wait to get stuck in!
I’m also taking part with my fantasy novel, The Procurement of Souls, and have made it available for FREE! You can download it in whichever format you like at Smashwords, here.
Incidentally, if you have any recommendations for books taking part over at Smashwords, I’d love to hear from you, so do add books to comments below!
Happy reading…
February 22, 2019
‘Fairy Tales and Opera: The Perfect Match?’ OR ‘Dispelling the Myths that Fantasy Fiction is Lowbrow; that Opera is Elitist’
Norse mythology came to the fore in a big way a couple of years ago when Neil Gaiman released his celebrated book of the same name, but as of yesterday, Francesca Simon’s book, The Monstrous Child, has it rearing it’s deliciously vile and decidedly grotesque head once again. When the YA novel came out in 2016 it was a success in its own right – shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 – but it was interesting to hear from the author herself, on the Today programme, that even at the draft manuscript stage, she knew she had more than a book on her hands: she had an opera. And last night was its world premiere at the (almost) brand new Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre in London.
I have to say, I was rather blown away. Everything about the production oozes the macabre charm that traditional tales hold dear (think Hans Christian Anderson meets Brother’s Grimm) and like many strands of traditional story-telling, it celebrates the brutal and the grotesque – in the comically visceral birthing scene that opens the opera, complete with giant vagina, and placenta that follows the delivery of Jormungand the snake, of Fenrir the wolf, and the half-human-half-corpse goddess of the underworld, Hel (around whose life the story is centred); in the base behaviours of the Norse gods themselves; in Simon’s wonderfully indelicate libretto; and in the rich sound-world that composer, Gavin Higgins, has created. She was right. She had an opera on her hands and it has been realised as a truly immersive piece of theatre, not least because of the talented and fearless cast and the inventive design aesthetics which references its oral story telling heritage through its use of puppetry.
It’s true: fairy tales/traditional tales in opera is nothing new. Purcell wrote Dido and Aeneas in the late 1600s and certainly Norse mythology itself is no stranger to the operatic stage, with Wagner’s Ring Cycle being first performed in the 19th century. It makes sense. As Francesca Simon made reference to in her Today interview, these stories grapple with huge themes: with love and hate; with life and death; with greed and avarice and vengeance; with making sense of how things came to be. What better way to bring such concepts to life than with full orchestration behind it and with voices, singing from the soul?! It’s a perfect match in my book. And, focussing in on the literary world for a moment, it also raises an interesting question about why genre fiction is often poo-pooed as being somehow naff or aligned with certain audiences. I forget which book it was in reference to now, but The Guardian damned one such fantasy novel with false praise in stating: ‘file under guilty pleasure’. This is indicative of what I’m driving at. Why there is the need for guilt when enjoying a well delivered story (whatever the medium), or for it to be ‘filed away’ is beyond me. Fantasy has been at the core of our world culture for centuries (Homer’s Iliad is a case in point!) and it invites the exploration of themes and ideas that transcend genre. On the flip side, I think Francesca Simon and Gavin Higgin’s The Monstrous Child makes an equally clear and important statement about opera. It’s intended audience is young adults; its story is part of our world heritage. Like genre fiction, opera is for everyone; and for both, the only thing that stands in the way of wider audiences are preconceived ideas…
February 14, 2019
Recommendation in 60 Words: The Ravencrest Chronicles, Book 1 – Seahaven
Publisher: Kyanite Publishing (February 2019)
Genre: Flintlock; Dark Fantasy
When Hillcrest Manor is left unguarded, burglar, Gareth Vann, seizes his opportunity. But it’s more than riches that greet him. Clean prose and a well-realised world, of ale-houses, choked back-alleys and sewers, deliver an enjoyable read, enriched by a punchy plot and cast of humorous and hateful characters, from pirates to prostitutes; vampires to street urchins. Seahaven has it all!
A note about the recommendation:
Seahaven is the first book within the Ravencrest Chronicles: an anthology which is comprised of three distinct novellas as well as short stories and poetry. I am recommending Seahaven individually, as it also stands as a publication in its own right.
