Hûw Steer's Blog, page 18

What Am I Doing? December 2022 Edition

I’m in a bit of a blog rut at the moment, because I’m waiting on things. I’m hoping – really hoping – that within the next couple of days I’ll be able to announce the mysterious Next Book I’ve been talking about for the last few months (and which eagle-eyed readers will probably have already figured out the general nature of, if not the details). It’s definitely going to be available before Christmas, even if it is going to be a little bit tight. (But when are my publishing deadlines not down to the wire? I really hope I can get next year’s book out earlier than December. No promises.) But various small things are still to do; formatting and physical proofing and all those fun and frustrating things – and basically, I don’t want to jinx it. Soon. Very soon. I’m really excited to share it.

I’m also waiting on many other submissions. The short story tracker is almost entirely in the ‘active’ column (except the one that got rejected last week), and, excitingly, there’s one hanging out on a shortlist waiting for a second read. Which is very pleasant after quite a lot of rejections along the way. And I’ve still got a thing or two with actual agents that I’m waiting for responses on. So again, unfortunately no news now, but hopefully news… well, maybe not soon, but at some point. Sometimes this whole writing thing moves like lightning, but most of the times it’s like waiting for tectonic plates to shift.

In terms of works in progress, Boiling Seas 3 (please send me owl-related title suggestions) has crossed 10,000 words and shows no signs of slowing down. This is going to be another massive editing job, isn’t it? But I’m having a lot of fun being back with the crew, and they’re already in some very interesting places. I’m also very aware that I need to get back to cutting down and fine-tuning Other Book for a vague future release time, but that’ll almost definitely have to wait until the new year. One project at a time… maybe two.

And now for some actual news of actual progress: Ad Luna has officially done better than last year, and made the quarter-finals of the SPSFC! It’s now up against some pretty strong competition, of course; The Engineer and The Pono Way are both damn good books (though thankfully very different to Ad Luna), and I’m intending to read as many of my other opponents as I can, as they’re presumably similarly high-quality. It was always going to be a hard fight, but getting further than last time is definitely a much-needed confidence boost. Roll on the semis.

That’s pretty much it. Very frustrating not being able to share the new book… news with you yet, but it is coming soon, and it’ll (hopefully) be better for the wait and the thorough checking. I’m not taking any chances, especially as it’s so different to anything I’ve put out before. I really want this one to land as best it can.

People Change. Characters Are People Too.

People change. The ‘you’ you are today is very different to the ‘you’ of a decade ago. And that’s as true of fictional characters as it is of real people. When you’ve been writing the same character for a long time, it’s often a genuine surprise to look back at how they started and to see how far they’ve come. It certainly is for me, anyway.

Case in point: the three gallant protagonists of my Boiling Seas books. Even though they’ve only been in 2 books (barely, in Lily’s case), Tal, Max and Lily are shaped very differently now to my original concepts. That’s partly because they’ve become much more based on real people – which in 2 out of 3 cases wasn’t my intention at all. Lily was intentionally based on a real person. I needed a competent and capable sister character, similar to her brother but significantly cooler. So I based her on my actual human sister, who is in many ways similar to me, but significantly more competent and cool than I could ever hope to be.

But then I started writing the sibling banter between Tal and Lily. And because I was writing responses to a character who is, basically, my own sister, Tal thus became significantly more like me than he was before. It’s (hopefully) a very natural sibling relationship, because it’s a real one. But with more magic and stuff.

And then, confusingly, there’s Max, who despite having been thought up and written several months before I met her, was eerily similar to my partner of 6 years. And she’s accidentally become more so throughout Nightingale. That I really wasn’t intending to do – but it works.

But even though some of the evolutions were unexpected, all of the Boiling Seas character growth was to some degree authorial intent. But the growth of Sir Geoffrey du Babbage was completely accidental.

Sir Geoffrey du Babbage was not written as a serious character. Sir Geoffrey du Babbage was written as the lead character in one of my earliest comedy sketches, which was far too long and definitely not funny enough to deserve a slot in our show. Sir Geoffrey du Babbage is a pastiche of Monty Python’s Holy Grail and Blackadder. Sir Geoffrey du Babbage was an excuse for me to put on a false moustache and make bad jokes about the First Crusade. He was completely incompetent,

Sir Geoffrey du Babbage is now my DnD character. I resurrected him six years after I last performed that original sketch. It was for a one-shot game, so I thought it would just be funny to bring out this ridiculous, manservant-riding man for one last hurrah. And I also figured it would be much easier to role-play a character I’d already played every day for a month at the Edinburgh Fringe. So I dusted off the script, put on my best stupid knight voice, and went in swashes buckling.

And then, of course, we decided to carry on the campaign from the one-shot. I’ve now been playing Sir Geoffrey on and off for months: a comedy character in a serious setting. And while I’m still making jokes and playing him as a bit of an idiot… things have gotten serious, and I never once planned them to. Because I wasn’t writing Geoffrey’s lines before every session and thinking about what he was going to say, like I would for any of my book characters – I’ve been making them up on-the-fly while in character. His motivations have shifted – my motivations have shifted – significantly. He’s still an arrogant arse of a man, but there are shreds of genuine nobility that have been unexpectedly dredged up – the case in point being the treatment of Hansard the manservant (think big strong Baldrick), who’s gone from whipping-boy to a genuinely valued member of the party. He almost died last session, and I panicked. Or rather Geoffrey panicked. Quite unexpectedly, I found that he actually cared about this idiot in want of a village like he was his own brother.

I didn’t write Geoffrey this way. But the pressures of the story have changed this character completely organically into something far beyond his original scope. And I think fundamentally that shows you’ve got a strong character: when the story you’ve originally conceived changes because what they end up doing isn’t what you – as writer, role-player, actor, whatever – intended for them to do, or thought they would do.

Tal, Max and Lily, for instance have changed the way that the Boiling Seas was originally going to go significantly – Nightingale’s Sword grew around their actions when I dropped them into scenarios, not from any real planning. Just look at the airship pirate sequence – all I did was think ‘wouldn’t it be cool if there was a hijacking right now’, and let the three of them loose to see what would happen. (Which is why the original version of that sequence was about 30,000 words long, but that’s another story. Literally.)

The best characters are alive. They change over time, they become new people quite different to the ones they were before. They shape your story, not the other way around.

Artefacts 2 – Keep The Change

I’ve spoken before about the amount of Old Things I have. I am a Haver of Stuff, like my father and his father and his father before him. In fact I Have much of their Stuff, though my father has much more. It’s partly the historian in me, partly the child: the historian yearns for old coins, the child for old LEGO and Warhammer.

And a few months ago, Dad and I got stuck into what turned out to be the most amazing load of Old Things yet: my grandfather’s old coin collection.

(A note before we begin: I am not a professional numismatist by any means. I could be very, very wrong about some of these identifications. If you’re reading this and you are a professional numismatist, please be gentle.)

I’d encountered these coins many times before: old British pre-decimal currency, one of my favourite things (not least for the unrelenting ridiculousness of how it all adds up), in huge amounts. I love old coins. They’ve always hit that perfect fantastical note for me, recognisable but just that little bit absurd and alien. Granddad gave me a few coins for my own little collection, and I’ve always treasured them, just like he and my dad did. Dad once dug up a Victorian halfpenny in the garden and we still talk about it. They’re all little bits of history, so wonderfully tangible.

Some of my personal coins. The blackened and battered one in the top row is the ha’penny Dad found in the garden.

Dad spent weeks actually sorting it all out – my grandfather was very good at fitting huge amounts of stuff into small sheds, but not at, y’know, actually organising it. Hundreds of coins now sit in a couple of massive coin books, organised by type and date. Most of it was actually from the late Queen’s era, but there was quite a lot from her father – the aforementioned George VI – as well, and a bit from George V.

And then there were the ones my dad hadn’t been able to identify, which meant that I got to put on my numismatist’s hat and spend a few afternoons with him figuring out what these ancient bits of copper were.

And, dear reader, we struck… well, copper, not gold (except for that one lovely sovereign). But we really struck it.

In terms of recognisable pre-decimal currency, we found every monarch back to George I – the early 1700s – except for Edward VIII because he was here for about 5 minutes. That was interesting enough. But then we went further back. A tiny weird bit of copper turned out to be from Charles I – about 1640. A misshapen bit of silver is, I’m fairly certain, from Henry III – the 1200s. 800 years old, and in my hand.

Charles I ‘Rose’ farthing.Possible a Henry III silver penny. Really hard to tell as the inscription is very worn and battered.

And that was just the British coins. We also had these odd squiggly squares, which, after consulting Dr Shailendra Bhandare at the Ashmolean in Oxford, turned out to be from the Sultanate of Kashmir in the 1400s. Apparently Granddad just bought them on a whim at a market in India in the 80s. 600-year-old artefacts, wedged on a shelf between the power tools and the reel-to-reel film. This is the kind of man I’m going to become. I’ve already started hoarding old tins. I can’t wait.

From the reign of Sikander Shah I, early 1400s.

And then there was this. A battered bit of bronze, so worn it was barely legible. Much Google-fu and barely-remembered ancient language translations ensued. Until, eventually, I found a match, and figured out what it said.

Who’s That Emperor?

Constantius P F Aug. Sol Invicto Comiti.

Constantine Pius Felix Augustus. Sol Invictus. A Roman follis, possibly minted in London. In about 310 AD. Over 1700 years old. A bit of metal older than some religions. Older than the English language. And my grandfather just had it sitting in a bag, on a shelf, in a box, for decades. And now it’s in my hands.

The sheer amount of history that’s happened since this coin was made gives it a weight beyond that of any metal. The rise and fall of Rome, of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, Islam, the Vikings, to say nothing of most of British history… all of that, outdone by a little bronze circle. Watched by it. Contained within it.

Is it any wonder I’ve spent the last few years writing about fantasy archaeologists?

Revisiting

While working on editing Next Book for a some-time-before-Christmas release (I’ll do an announcement once I’ve got a nice shiny cover to show you), I’ve been doing something I’ve never really done before. I’ve been going back. I’ve been revisiting. And I’ve been sending my characters there too.

I’ve written quite a few books now. You haven’t seen most of them, because they’re a) not edited yet and b) not all that good, but they do exist. What I haven’t done much is write sequels. I have a couple of manuscripts that are so big I should really cut them into trilogies, but that’s not the same – I wrote them in one go as one story. I’ve only done one proper series so far – the Boiling Seas books. 2 books, 2 separate but connected stories – and now a third one, that I’ve actually started writing in earnest.

Now despite featuring the same characters, Nightingale’s Sword, apart from a couple of scenes at the university-library-hospital of the Lantern, was set in entirely new locations. The airships, the jungle islands of Tyria, the ancient temples – all new places, all new settings to explore. And though most of Boiling Seas 3 is also going to be in new locations, it’s currently kicking off right where the series began: Tal Wenlock holding up a handful of fire in the very same ancient tomb from the beginning of Blackbird. It’s pleasingly cyclical.

Obviously it’s not exactly the same scene (for one thing Tal’s already broken into that tomb). But that’s what makes it more fun. I’m taking a very familiar location, one I spent weeks bringing to life and sending my protagonist through, and now I’m sending him back in a new context. (And in new company; Lily Wenlock is of course also present and ready for action). And it’s really fun. I won’t spoil exactly what’s changed, but a lot’s happened in the months since Blackbird.

And that’s just for Tal and Lily. For me, it’s been 6 years since I first wrote Blackbird. I didn’t publish it till much later, but that first draft comes from a very different time in my life. I was in my second year at university, sketching maps during gaps in Shakespeare performances. I’m still very proud of that first scene. And now going back it really feels like I’m physically going back to somewhere from my childhood and seeing it with fresh eyes; some old building that’s been renovated, an old house that you no longer live in. An old university you no longer study at (as I discovered the last time I wandered through UCL).

Everything’s still there, but everything’s different. And it’s good. It’s refreshing, it’s new, and I’m having a great time exploring all those differences through my lovely protagonists.

I suspect I’m going to run into the same scenario several times as I go through this book. (And, hopefully, in future series, as soon as I get round to writing them.) I’ve got plenty of action planned in and around Port Malice, in places I’ve already visited and places I’ve only briefly mentioned. You’ll have to wait and see what they are. It’s going to take me a while to explore them all. But it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Riftwar Re-Read #13 – The Darkwar

I’ve often heard people remarking that the Riftwar series declines in quality as it goes on, particularly after the Serpentwar. So far, I’ve not agreed with that. I really liked the Conclave of Shadows trilogy, its wonderful James Bond-ness and the great subversion of switching protagonists to the former villain partway through.

Now, however, I’ve re-read the Darkwar. And… yeah, unfortunately I see what those people mean.

Flight of the Night Hawks (why not Nighthawks, Feist, that’s how you’ve written it for the whole series including this book) is… well, it’s basically pointless. So pointless that I’m not even going to bother describing its plot. Seriously: it has no impact on the plot of the series at all. All it does is lavish a bit more detail on the two sons of Pug: grand mage Magnus and non-magical Caleb. And then it wastes the rest of the book talking about Caleb’s freshly adopted sons, Tad, Zane and Jommy.

This is a classic Riftwar setup by this point: here are your new group of young male friends, thrust into the Big Conflict of the day to learn new skills, forge new alliances and generally have Character Development. We’ve seen it in Pug and Tomas, in Jimmy the Hand, in Borric and Erland, Nicky and Harry and Marcus, Erik and Roo… But the thing about all those characters is that they went on to great things. Pug is still the main series protagonist 20+ books later. The legacy of Jimmy the Hand is endless (and we’ll talk more about that in a moment). Erik von Darkmoor is key to the whole Serpentwar and, despite being in his 80s, gets one last hurrah in this trilogy thanks to some Asterix-style magic potion.

But Tad, Zane and Jommy? And their friends who show up later? They do… well, pretty much nothing. We follow them for most of Night Hawks and Into a Dark Realm, as they are trained first by Caleb and then by service in the army of Roldem (under good old Kaspar). But they don’t do anything. They get steadily more sidelined as the main plot happens by much more interesting characters, to the point that, in Wrath of a Mad God, they are barely in it at all, and when they do, they’re essentially running errands while the proper protagonists do important things. It’s incredibly disappointing, and honestly a waste of good character development that could have been better spent on characters more relevant to the plot.

Case in point: Jim Dasher, latest scion of the long bloodline of Jimmy the Hand. (He’s the grandson of James and great-nephew of Dash from Shards of a Broken Crown.) He comes in in Dark Realm, and he’s brilliant – another Jimmy with a healthy dash of well-trained James Bond to balance out his ancestor’s impetuous streak. He’s a good character, with a main plot role and plenty of important moments of his own. Why isn’t he the protagonist of Night Hawks? Feist clearly enjoys writing him more – as evidenced by the fact that he actually has a role in Mad God, unlike the erstwhile ‘heroes’ of Night Hawks.

It’s a shame. Because even if Tad, Zane and Jommy had been useful, Night Hawks as a whole is basically pointless. Its events, while a bit of fun, have no impact on the main story other than to delay the events of Dark Realm – the status quo at the end of the book is pretty much exactly what it was at the start, only with some more sympathetic Keshians. Tal Hawkins gets dragged out of retirement for essentially nothing. Nothing matters. It’s a serious damp squib of a book.

Into a Dark Realm gets things going, though. After a book of pointless setup, Pug and company finally head off to confront some genuinely interesting villains: the Dasati, who are a society of murderous psychopaths who live on a lower plane of existence and are intent on invading Pug’s reality. They serve a literal Dark God, run around inflicting horrible violence on one another in its name, and are generally Very Nasty People.

And Feist makes one of them, Valko, a POV character, and it’s great.

Dasati society is fundamentally warped and twisted from what we’d consider ‘normal’. It’s been warped (by the Dark God) from what the Dasati should consider ‘normal’. There is no kindness, there is no charity. The strong survive and the weak are slaughtered. It’s every horrible, totalitarian regime imaginable, and we get to see it from the inside, while Pug, Magnus and Nakor come in from the outside. Valko’s plot has him rising from minor Deathknight to lord of a noble household, encountering all the horrors of Dasati society along the way and slowly learning that maybe things could be different. It’s the one part of the story where Tad, Zane and Jommy’s parallel training plot is sort of useful as a mirror to Valko’s horrorshow.

Pug and co. also bring a new character called Ralan Bek, who’s a total psycho who’s apparently possessed by a shard of the Nameless One – Midkemia’s own God of Evil, who is not the same as the Dasati Dark God. The Nameless One (who is insane), doesn’t want competition. So he’s semi-willingly/knowingly teaming up with our protagonists. It’s your classic ‘enemy of my enemy’, which is a great twist given the last several books have been setting up the Nameless One as the next Big Bad Thing. And it helps hammer home how bad the Dasati must be, if Pug will countenance such an alliance.

Dark Realm is basically ‘let’s introduce the Dasati and get Pug and co. in position to fight them’. It’s a good introduction to a new parallel world and villain… but it would have been much, much better if it had been more in-depth. Say, if it had actually started in the first book of the trilogy.

Wrath of a Mad God, book 3, is definitely the best of the bunch. That doesn’t make it great, because unfortunately it’s still building on a fundamentally flawed and insufficient setup – but it’s still good.

Pug, Nakor, Magnus (and Macros the Black for some reason, but that plot point goes nowhere) find the Dasati Dark God. It turns out to be one of the Dread. They’re all-devouring entities from outside reality who have turned up semi-regularly since Sethanon as Terribly Evil Things. The Dread want to Eat Everything, so this one broke into reality, ate the Fourth and Third Planes of existence and has been doing the same to the Second where the Dasati live – first warping their society into evil and gathering power through constant violence and sacrifice. Now it wants to do the same to Pug’s reality… starting with the Tsurani homeworld of Kelewan, which it starts to literally devour halfway through the book. It’s all very nicely described: there’s an enormous Evil Temple with the Dreadlord sitting in the middle as a horrible, bloated dark demonic thing. Pug and co’s reactions to it really hammer home the significance of the threat even before it starts eating a planet. As per this review’s running theme, it could have been set up much better, but the payoff is still good.

Speaking of: the Tsurani. We haven’t really seen much of them since the original Riftwar and Empire trilogies, and it’s really nice to be back. It’s just a shame that we’re only back to see the planet blown up. Miranda, Pug’s wife, is our main POV character here, along with a scattering of others, which is a good decision: she’s less familiar with Kelewan than Pug would have been, and so we get to re-encounter Tsurani society through her laywoman’s eyes, which works well given we’ve not seen much of it in a while. Feist does a decent job of visiting key locations and bits of society to remind us of the importance of what we’re about to lose… but again, there’s not enough setup of this. It’s the death of a world, one of the two worlds that made the Riftwar… well, the Riftwar. The whole losing battle and evacuation of the planet is dealt with in the last half of the book – and while it’s really good and well-written, full of all the despair and desperation that made the Serpentwar great, it deserved a full book at least. Kelewan deserved better.

A planet isn’t the only sacrifice. We also lose everyone’s favourite gambling magician, Nakor. Turns out (in the profusion of Many Plot Twists in the back half of Mad God that distract from the whole ‘Kelewan is dying’ thing) that he’s been pseudo-possessed by the God of Thieves this whole time, explaining his various mysterious abilities. It lands quite well as a reveal. The central conceit is that, in a grand celestial game of gods, the only one who can actually effect change is one who can break the rules and cheat – i.e. the god of thieves and liars. Hence why it’s the God of Thieves interfering to fight the God of Evil and not the God of Light, etc.

Nakor heroically sacrifices himself to help kill the Dark God before it can enter his reality. He uses… Leso Varen – remember him? He was being set up as a Grand Villain in his own right and then the Dasati just sidelined him completely. He shows up occasionally throughout the trilogy to commit some murders, sow chaos and then leave. But his arc comes to a surprising conclusion at the end of this book, when Many Plot Twists come thick and fast. Ralan Bek isn’t possessed by the God of Evil (it’s a different god) – Leso Varen is, and so Nakor rips out Varen’s heart and uses it to kill the Dasati Dark God. It’s a very abrupt end to a long-running villain, and it doesn’t land that well. Feist seems to have run out things for Varen to do and wanted rid of him.

The upshot of all this plot is that the Dark God is destroyed, the Dasati set free from its influence (though it will take them a long time to learn how to not be cartoonishly evil)… but Kelewan, home of the Tsurani, is destroyed. Many of its people die too, including all the insectoid Cho-Ja. The rest are evacuated to a new planet where they can start again. It’s a very tragic ending with just enough bittersweet hope to make it land. Nakor is dead, as is Leso Varen, but Pug and the others make it out alive.

It’s refreshing to have the trilogy properly end, and end on an actually significant event. There’s no cliffhanger, no implied immediate new threat. Obviously there’s the whole ‘Tsurani society rebuilding itself on a new planet’ thing, and a bit of setup of the extradimensional Dread as future big villains – but Pug and company get to rest now. The threat of the Dasati is dealt with. It’s over. It cost them a lot, but it’s actually over. After the 300 pages of setup that was Exile’s Return, and all the promised consequences of the Serpentwar (that weren’t really delivered), it’s nice to have something more definitive. 

Overall, this whole trilogy is flawed. The first book is pointless, and the latter two, while much better, are still hamstrung by the legacy of the first pointless book and by having to fit all of the real plot into two books rather than three. Tad, Zane, Jommy and most of the plot of Night Hawks needed to be entirely cut to get straight into the Dasati arc. Spend a book getting in, a book experiencing the horrors of Dasati society, and then a whole book at least on the fall of Kelewan. It’s a shame, because there are so many good elements in the Darkwar. They’re just unbalanced by the bad and downright pointless ones.

There will now be a pause in Riftwar posts for a bit, because I only have the first book of the next duology, the Demonwar, and it’s birthday/Christmas time so it’s very possible someone will get the missing book for me so I don’t want to risk buying my own copy. But I’m excited. Because I’m fairly sure I’ve only read the Demonwar once, and it was a long time ago, and I have no memory whatsoever of most of the plot. It, and the following, final trilogy, will be new to me.

25 books down. 5 books to go. We’re in the endgame now.

Comics Are Stupid: Lex Luthor Down Under

Anyone who’s ever read, seen or consumed anything remotely to do with Superman will know Lex Luthor. He’s your classic evil mastermind supervillain: a bald, super-intelligent, scheming businessman, the antithesis of the bold and heroic Superman. Where Kal-El relies on physical strength and superpowers, Luthor relies on his mind and money; where Superman is honest, Luthor is a liar; where Superman is bright and noble, Luthor is dark-suited and underhand.

It’s a classic rivalry brought to life by iconic imagery: the Big Blue Boy-Scout in all his primary coloured finery and perfect hair facing off against the… charming, chiselled young Australian man with the flowing red hair and beard?

Action Comics #670 (1991)

Yes, you heard me right. That’s Lex Luthor. Except it’s not. But secretly, it is. Confused? I sure as hell was.

Let’s cast our minds back to the early 90s. DC’s continuity likes to rewrite itself every few years with another Crisis, which usually leads to various characters being lightly tweaked in various ways. The most recent one was 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, which led to all the many worlds of DC’s multiverse being folded into one. (By the time of the next big Crisis they got unfolded again, and then folded back, and then unfolded in a different way, etc. etc.) What this meant for Lex Luthor was a streamlining of his variable background into the modern ‘corrupt businessman villain’ persona we know today. He uses his vast business empire to finance big robots to fight Superman, finds, recruits minor villains to do the same, figures out how to use Kryptonite – all as usual, right up until the point where Lex’s Kryptonite ring gives him fatal radiation poisoning.

Now in modern comics, such a fatal disease might inspire a change of heart from a villain, or at least some sort of last hurrah of extreme villainy before he died. Not for 90s Lex Luthor. 90s Lex Luthor has a plan. 90s Lex Luthor fakes his own death in a plane crash, then transfers his mind into a younger, hairier clone of himself. Sure – that’s par for the course for comic villains.

“Sir, was this whole thing all an excuse for you to have a hair transplant?” Action Comics #678 (1992)

But then in order to return to the world, the rejuvenated Lex pretends to be his own secret love child, Lex Luthor II. Who’s been raised, in secret, in rural Australia. And therefore has an Australian accent. Which is conveyed… interestingly through comic speech bubbles.

It is not a good accent. Action Comics #671 (1991)

And the entire world just accepts this. Because Luthor the character is very clever: the Australian accent and the hair are all there to throw people – especially Superman – off the scent. He doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s actually the original Lex Luthor. And so to that end, he also changes his public personality… into that of a nice person. Lex Luthor II is a great guy. He treats his employees well, is friendly to Superman – even reworking his ‘father’s’ robot suits to help Superman fight crime in Metropolis – and generally distances himself from the old Lex in every way possible.

Action Comics #672 (1991)

Of course he’s really the same conniving villain as always underneath, but it takes a while for that to be revealed and for Lex to return to his bald, megalomaniacal self.

Action Comics #672 (1991)

A side note: I didn’t find out about this character change from reading the comics. I first encountered Lex II in the Death of Superman comics, which take place after Luthor’s clone gambit had already been introduced and explained – so I was just slightly confused as to why Luthor had hair and was being friendly. I found out instead through that seminal prose tome, The Death and Life of Superman – a novelisation of the whole arc by Roger Stern. Because what could be better than taking a legendary piece of graphic storytelling and removing the ‘graphic’ bit? (It is, as you would expect, rubbish, but it cost me £2 from a charity shop so what’re you gonna do?) The one ‘good’ thing the novelisation did was explain all the character backgrounds in lengthy bits of exposition. Mostly these were frustrating and not-well-written asides, but the Luthor one at least was actually really valuable to me.

As comic book villain plans go, Lex’s reinvention of himself as his own son isn’t that far-fetched. But I keep thinking about how weird the Australian thing is. There’s just no reason for it. Lex II could have been ‘raised’ in America far more easily; it would have spared him the need for the atrocious accent. Hell, it would have made a really effective narrative parallel to Superman himself, and thrown him off the scent more effectively too: what better way to make a humble farm-boy from rural Kansas trust you than pretending to be a humble farm-boy yourself? But instead, the writers decided on Australia, despite the fact that none of them appear to have ever visited Australia, because they don’t even do a good job of writing a bad Australian accent. And so, hairy Aussie Lex is a permanent part of DC’s history.

Yes he’s a cowboy now, don’t question it. Action Comics #678 (1992)

Also, he was sleeping with Supergirl. Who wasn’t the original Supergirl, or Power Girl, or even Kryptonian, except she sort of was, and she looked exactly like her, and then she became sort of human…

But that’s a story for another blog post. And oh boy, I’m gonna write it.

It is also entirely possible that the whole thing was a reference to this scene from 1980’s Superman II.

It should go without saying, but all of the comic images above are the copyright of DC Comics.

Riftwar Re-Read #12 – The Conclave of Shadows

So you’ve been reading this epic fantasy series. It started as a classic swords-and-sorcery number, with epic set-piece battles, all-powerful magicians, warriors from other worlds. Lately it’s taken a darker turn into some grittier, more ground-level fighting. But there are still mighty demons to slay and magics to explore. So when you pick up the next book in the series, Talon of the Silver Hawk, you’d expect more of the same.

Nope. It’s character-focused revenge thriller time. And it might be my favourite book in the whole Riftwar.

(Side-note: with this review, I’ve caught up with my actual Riftwar reading at last!)

Farewell to classic fantasy covers, but hello to a striking style.

The eponymous Talon is a young man of the Orosini, one of several Native American-esque tribes in the far east of Midkemia (a nice new region to explore). When his village is burned to the ground on the orders of the nefarious Kaspar of Olasko, Talon is the only survivor. After being nursed back to health, he naturally vows revenge… which is convenient for the mysterious Conclave of Shadows, who also want to stop Kaspar’s various evil plans.

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone that the Conclave is, of course, headed by good old Pug, the Black Sorcerer. And Miranda, Nakor, and many of our other magical friends from before. And quite a few new ones, but we’ll get to them.

The magicians are all present, but they are not main characters by any means. This book is named after Talon and it’s all about him: the fact that his personal revenge goal aligns with that of the Conclave is a happy coincidence. A very happy coincidence, as it happens, as the Conclave promptly pack him off to the kingdom of Roldem to become the greatest swordsman in the world. Literally. There’s a tournament for it and everything. Spoiler: Tal wins. Then he heads north again to rescue a fellow tribe, the Orodon, from the same fate as his own people, happily slaughtering the mercenaries who killed his family in the process.

Talon of the Silver Hawk is a cracking book for many reasons. The much more focused plot makes it a gripping read; Tal is a powerful protagonist with strong motivation, and becomes genuinely fun to read as he matures. He’s a great swordsman, a fantastic chef (we get some cracking food descriptions in this book), and has a way with the ladies. He’s basically James Bond in a fantasy world – and it really works.

Tal is also very much an everyman in Riftwar terms – he’s never heard of the Tsurani or elves, has no idea what the Serpentwar was, etc., which makes him a good vehicle to gently show we long-time readers what’s changed in the 20 years since the last book took place.

The settings are also fantastic, and almost all new, which is great. Pug has a new academy on Sorcerer’s Isle – basically a training-ground not just for magicians but for spies and agents too, which is a good concept and very well-executed. During our time there we also meet Pug’s new children (with Miranda) – Magnus, a classic magician very much in his parents’ mould, and Caleb, who’s not magic at all. Both these men have a great influence on Talon’s development, and both will be very important later in the series – for now, they add more richness to the world.

The other main setting is Roldem, which is a really fun environment. It’s basically fantasy Renaissance Italy; everyone’s swanning around in floppy hats, eating fine food, seducing anything that moves and getting into swordfights. We’ve heard lots about Roldem in the series so far but never been there, and the grand sword-fighting tournament of the Master’s Court is one hell of an introduction. Tal’s progress through the tournament is beautifully described, with some breathtaking duels and lovely bits of intrigue.

So that’s Conclave of Shadows book 1. Book 2, King of Foxes, is much of the same: Tal continues his quest for revenge by infiltrating his enemy Kaspar’s ranks as a ‘loyal’ servant. To earn Kaspar’s trust he must do many morally dubious things – several murders, for one – hammering home the willingness of the Conclave to do whatever’s necessary to protect Midkemia. It’s all very James Bond-y again, in a good way: Tal is in the lion’s den, but still finds time to seduce Kaspar’s sister in between acts of espionage. And then, predictably, he gets found out, sent to prison, and has to escape in order to tell the Conclave what’s going on and bring Kaspar down.

Now here comes a thing I both love and hate at the same time. In the middle of King of Foxes, Tal Hawkins, renowned as and defined by being an absolute master swordsman, gets his sword-hand cut off. Watching him overcome his new disability and still manage to do things like lead a prison-break, build an army, be a great chef, etc. is great. Tal is forced to adapt to working without his greatest talent – he has to rely on other, half-forgotten skills instead, make compromises, and generally become that bit more rounded a character.

And then his hand grows back by magic, so he’s perfectly healthy for the final battle. Which is annoying. Because there was a several-month gap between the prison escape and the battle while the hand grew back – i.e. enough time for Tal to train in fighting with his other hand instead. Sure, he wouldn’t be the greatest swordsman in the world anymore, but that would have been even more satisfying as he overcame his injury to win regardless. In fairness, Kaspar’s confusion when a two-handed Tal comes at him in the final confrontation is pretty funny – but it’s not worth the much more narratively satisfying alternative of him having to actually relearn his skill.

(Side-note: King of Foxes came out in 2003, a few years after A Storm of Swords – in which G.R.R. Martin has Jaime Lannister, another master swordsman, also get his hand cut off and have to learn to fight with his left. I wonder if Feist deliberately avoided giving Tal the same arc?)

All that aside, Tal wins. Kaspar is defeated, his family’s murderers are brought to justice. His revenge quest is over. He even finds another Orosini survivor – conveniently his ex-girlfriend – to settle down with. It very much feels like an earned ending for the character.

But wait, I hear you cry: isn’t this a trilogy? If Tal’s story is over in book 2, what’s book 3 about? Well, Kaspar might be defeated, but his strings have been very much pulled by evil magician Leso Varen – our new ongoing antagonist, who’s actually showed up before in a few different guises throughout the series. Notably in the Krondor books. Damnit Feist, stop making that trilogy important! (Don’t, it really enriches the world.) Varen has had many schemes and he continues to have more, which means someone’s going to have to stop him. But it’s not Tal – he’s out of the game.

And here comes the unexpected masterstroke. The protagonist of Exile’s Return isn’t Tal Hawkins. It’s Kaspar.

Tal spares his life, but Magnus, son of Pug, has another punishment idea: send him to a barren wasteland to learn humility. So off Kaspar is teleported – to the shattered remnants of Novindus. It’s actually nice to be back in Novindus – though it’s certainly not nice for anyone living there. The Serpentwar devastated the Kingdom, but it absolutely ruined Novindus: the population is decimated, every city burned to the ground, lawlessness reigns, etc. Seeing these lasting consequences of the Serpentwar scratches the itch of not really getting to see them in the Kingdom. Kaspar has to journey across this blasted continent, coming to terms with the loss of all his power and riches, in a character journey that’s surprisingly satisfying. He’s a great mirror to Tal: Tal started with nothing and then worked his way up to glory, whereas Kaspar has just been knocked down to his rival’s starting state. Without the power and wealth (and to be fair without the evil wizard nudging him down darker paths), Kaspar turns out to be a decent bloke, or at least have the potential to be one. Losing everything was the best thing that could have happened to him.

Kaspar also stumbles across the Plot, which in this book is basically just setup for the next trilogy, the Darkwar. The Plot takes the form of a suit of cursed armour that compels Kaspar and some reluctant, disposable companions to carry it across the world. It’s very, very evil. So evil that it’s not actually from Midkemia at all – it’s from another plane of reality, where evil not-demons plot another invasion. Kaspar slowly learns this by meeting the actual gods, then being picked up by Pug and the Conclave again when they realise what’s going on. In fact he contacts Pug by meeting his old rival Tal Hawkins – now retired and running a fancy restaurant in Roldem. It’s a short appearance from our original protagonist, but a really nice glimpse of the fact that he’s found peace and happiness.

Linking up with Pug, Kaspar and the armour – because it’s actually a sort of death robot – fight alongside the Conclave to defend Sorcerer’s Isle from the aforementioned evil wizard, Leso Varen, which is a nice conclusion to Kaspar’s arc: he directly confronts the malign influence that ruined him, but in a way that acknowledges that Varen was just an influence rather than the cause. Kaspar was still a bad person – but he’s gotten better.

Exile’s Return is an odd book. On the one hand, it’s basically setup for another series, and so Lots of Plot comes a bit too thick and fast for my liking. It’s a shame, because if not for that, the whole Conclave trilogy could almost be read standalone – the character arcs and the rest of the story wrap themselves up nicely. On the other, the idea of switching protagonists from the original hero to the villain partway through a trilogy is brilliant, and Feist really pulls it off with Kaspar.

Exile rounds off a trilogy centred on revenge with a story about redemption, and it’s ultimately very satisfying. Despite the inherent darkness of the overall story, despite all the hurts Tal and Kaspar suffer along the way, they both come out… ok. They’re very similar in many ways, as they realise during their brief confrontation. Tal had to do awful things to achieve a noble goal, and is only now making peace with what he did. Kaspar did awful things for an ignoble goal, and is now trying to make up for that.  They’re a great pair of protagonists in a great trilogy, that bucks the Riftwar’s fantasy archetype in interesting ways.

This is a fantasy James Bond story with a neat redemption arc at the end. In that alone, it’s well worth the read.

What Am I Doing? October 2022 Edition

Figured I’d do a general update as to where my various projects are at. TL;DR: ticking over, big news to come.

Short fiction: I’ve got 7 in the running for something or other at the moment, which feels good! I say ‘short fiction’ rather than ‘short stories’, because 2 of the short stories are 10,000 words or more, and one of them’s a full-on novella. As ever, I am great at coming up with cool short story ideas and very bad at keeping them to short story length. Hopefully I’m getting better… we’ll see when I get around to editing the couple of other shorts I’ve got sitting in the to-do pile. And finishing the one I’m currently working on, of course. It’s a fun one. Sci-fi, with steam trains, but not steampunk.

Long fiction: well. I’ve said before that I’m going to try and get a book out for Christmas, and that remains true. It’s just that it’s probably not going to be the same book as I originally intended it to be. No firm announcements yet, as I’m waiting for a few moving parts to come together, but I hope to have a nice big fanfare coming very soon.

Boiling Seas #3 also remains very much high on the to-do list. I have a little bit written and most of a plan in my head, and as soon as the next Big Thing is ready to go, I’m getting stuck in in earnest. I miss Tal, Max and Lily as much as some of you do. But the first priority has to be the aforementioned Semi-Mystery Book.

The other long fiction news is that Ad Luna is (at the time of writing) still in SPSFC #2. It’s still very early days for the competition (so not surprising that I haven’t been eliminated yet), but still nice to be still in the running. I’m making an effort to read a lot more of the other entrants this year, starting with the rest of my group in GSV Galactic Beards’ intake, and I’m having a great time. The Pono Way was a nice bit of near-future allegory, and The Engineer was an absolute brick of an epic set in a really cool world. I’m making sure to do reviews for everything I’m reading, too (on Goodreads, etc.). They’re important.

As for what I’ve been reading, I’ve been taking a Riftwar break while I catch up on the review series – just the Conclave of Shadows trilogy review to go now, which I’ll likely do next week, and then I’m up to date and I can get stuck into the Darkwar. I’m looking forward to that one. I’ve reached the point in the series where, because I didn’t have all the pieces of the various trilogies and because they were published later, I haven’t re-read every one multiple times – which is nice for a bit of novelty.

Most recently I dipped back into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because I’ve been singing ‘So Long and Thanks For All The Fish’ with the lovely choir I’m part of, Ready Singer One. (We’re on at the Science Museum on October the 26th for their SF Lates event. That’ll be fun.) I’d forgotten how good the books are – and how bold a decision it was to open a comedy SF movie with a full-blown West End musical number.

So that’s where I’m at, basically. Stay tuned for more news, hopefully very soon, of the Next Book – whichever one it ends up being – and of the SPSFC, whatever happens with that.

Riftwar Re-Read #11 – Shards of a Broken Crown

The Serpentwar is over. The actual war has come and gone, leaving the Kingdom in ruins and many beloved characters dead – but the good guys won and the world was saved. In many stories this is where the tale would end: a little pyrrhic, but still a victory, with the implication that while there’s rebuilding to be done it’s all going to take place offscreen.

But that’s not what Feist did.

And so ends the saga of This Guy. And in true This Guy fashion, it’s not really clear what part of the book’s plot this is meant to be. Maybe he’s been a Novindan mercenary all along, and he’s just… hanging out? Who knows? We probably never will.

Shards of a Broken Crown is all about the rebuilding, the fallout, the consequences of the war that Feist built up for so many books. The actual invasion of the Kingdom has been thwarted and the Demon King slain… but that still leaves an enormous army of foreign mercenaries stuck in the Kingdom with no way, and no desire, to go home. And some of them are giant lizardmen. And because of all the politicking and plotting that went into the defence of the Kingdom, and because it’s now looking very weak indeed, other old enemies – particularly the desert empire of Kesh – are both feeling betrayed and looking to seize some territory.

Essentially, it’s not looking good for the Kingdom. But don’t worry, I hear you cry: surely the heroic princes of old will ride in and save the day?

Well, no. Because as previously established, all the old heroes are dead. Prince Arutha got old, Prince Nicky got shot, Jimmy the Hand got blown up. That leaves the new guard. And for the most part, they’re not up to scratch.

There’s an underlying theme in Shards of children treading in their forebears’ footsteps to varying degrees of success. Patrick, the new Prince of Krondor, is trying to live up to the massive reputation of Prince Arutha… and largely failing, because he’s impetuous, vain and doesn’t take advice well. Arutha, son of Jimmy the Hand, is also trying to live up to his namesake Prince Arutha – and though he does much better than Patrick, he fails in different ways. He’s a good man, but he’s not the Arutha of old. The point that Feist is hammering home is that nobody is the heroes of old. Even the surviving heroes like Pug and Tomas have been fundamentally changed by this conflict. The Riftwar series has undergone a big tonal shift from its beginnings, and its characters have changed with it.

As a case in point, we’ve got our new protagonists, through whose eyes we see this devastated Kingdom and the efforts to rebuild it. They’ve been side characters all series, but with all the death and destruction some opportunities have opened up for them. Enter the two grandsons of Jimmy the Hand: Jimmy and Dash.

Jimmy and Dash are a very enjoyable pair of characters to read, especially if, like me, you’re a fan of late lamented Jimmy the Hand. Because his two grandsons are just like him, but in pleasingly different ways. Both of them are very capable and multi-talented young men, but in each, different aspects of Jimmy 1 shine through as the book progresses. Jimmy the younger takes on a more public role, taking up noble office and following Jimmy 1’s path to political power. He’s shrewd and clever enough to pull it off. But Dash, on the other hand, takes on his grandfather’s less salubrious aspects. While his brother tries to rebuild Krondor from the surface, Dash ends up embroiled with the Guild of Thieves as they try and resurrect the city’s underworld. It’s a nice way to replace Jimmy the Hand: not with an identical character, but with two, each of whom honours his legacy in a different way. Because Jimmy did so damn much that it takes two lesser people to fill his boots.

There’s also this invading army still hanging around, which needs to be dealt with and fast: they very quickly seize Kingdom cities and threaten to conquer themselves a little nation of their own. But some of the invaders are persuaded to join the Kingdom, in a cleverly written bit of politicking that brings in some nice new side characters. Without the influence of the Emerald Queen, the bad guys are revealed to just be people after all, which I really like. Everyone’s human. (Except all the people who aren’t, like those lizardmen, but they get resettled in some nice open steppes of their own.)

This politicking is what brings in the biggest shift in character status quo. Good old Pug the magician has been loyally defending the Kingdom all his long life. But that was the old Kingdom. Instead of asking for his help like Arutha would have done, Prince Patrick keeps trying to force Pug to do his bidding, including several attempts to make him commit genocide on the lizardmen. Pug is understandably not happy about this. And so, after multiple shouting matches and significant embarrassment on Patrick’s part, Pug ups and leaves. He’s got his own battles to fight, his own new threats to handle, and he declares that he’ll do it his way. It reads like the final nail in the coffin of the old heroic annals of the Riftwar, and in many ways it is. The next section of the cycle is a very different story indeed.

And that’s the problem with Shards. It’s a coda to the Serpentwar, which is fine, but it sets up such an interesting new status quo for the Kingdom that I really want to read more. I want another book or two about the cultural integration of the former Novindan mercenaries. I want to see Prince Patrick trying to deal with the weight of responsibility and legacy. I want to see Roo Avery try to fleece everyone for every copper he can get. We even get a hint of the Tsurani becoming relevant again, as some of their magicians are brought through the old rift to help out. The world of Midkemia has changed, and there’s so much potential to write about it.

But instead, the next trilogy takes place after another 20-year timeskip, and most of these developments are never mentioned again. And it’s a real shame. Shards shouldn’t have been a coda, it should have been a whole section of the saga. It functions well for what it is, but it could have been so much more.

But oh well. The Conclave of Shadows trilogy might not be a continuation of what Shards sets up, but it’s still bloody good.

Writing For Kids

I’ve been working on two main projects lately. The first is my previously-alluded-to next book (hopefully still on track for Christmas… maybe early next year…) – a much darker bit of fantasy than my previous entries. It’s bloody, it’s full of dubious ethics, and it’s generally not the sort of thing you’d want to read to an 8-year-old.

The second project is a book for 8-year-olds.

When I’m not writing, I work with children. I run workshops at a children’s charity – arts and crafts, LEGO, things like that – and so as a result I spend a significant number of my waking hours talking to kids. Which is great, because I am a huge nerd, and so mostly we talk about Star Wars and cartoons and videogames. (They’ve actually given me some great recommendations over the years.)

But we also talk about books. Obviously there’s a wide range of tastes among a wide range of kids, but fantasy adventures are a common denominator. Stories like Beast Quest, for one thing – some of which I’ve now read, which has given me a very healthy respect for the various authors who are Adam Blade. (Seriously, I know there are multiple authors working under one gestalt name, but there are 140 books in the series. They might be short, but that’s insane!) They’re short, relatively simple adventures, full of derring and even do.

So I figured I’d have a go. I dug through my piles of character ideas, picked some of the most entertaining, invented a child protagonist and off I went.

And, friends, it is bloody difficult.

I write for adults. I write complex sentences to amuse myself and use words that even I don’t understand. My shortest book is more than 5 times as long as your average Beast Quest. My fight scenes are bloody and my profanity, while limited, is still very much there. It was, and is, really hard to adjust my writing style to suit a younger audience. I keep getting into the flow of things and writing epic descriptions and elaborate scenes, before looking back and realising that I’m going to have to cut them down by half and probably lose a few side-characters along the way. Writing simply is complicated.

And I’m loving it. I’m outside my comfort zone and it’s brilliant fun. Everything’s light-hearted; the characters are all a bit ridiculous, the story is as wholesome as I can manage, and I’m trying my best to actually put jokes in. Whatever actually comes of this book, I’m going to be a better writer for it. Because I can now look much more critically at my own writing style – and, hopefully, tailor it better to my regular audience, not just this new waist-high one.

Because the great thing about working directly with my intended audience, of course, is that I have a ready supply of beta readers. They can have the first draft, take it apart, and I’ll reassemble it in whatever way they like most. I have no doubt that it’ll go through several iterations before all of them are happy – they’ve all got different tastes and they’re all slightly different ages. (I’m aiming for around 8-11 year-olds, which seems reasonable but may turn out to be way too big a range.) I certainly know that I’ve got a lot of trimming and tweaking to do before I even show them a first version.

I have no firm plans for what I’m going to do with this story when it’s finished. It really all depends on whether my intended audience of approximately a dozen children enjoys it. But as long as they end up enjoying it… well, that’s more than enough.