Warren Rochelle's Blog - Posts Tagged "sylvia-kelso"

Food on the Traveling Round Table (Fantasy Guest Blog) December 2012

Sunday, December 30, 2012
This month's topic is Food in Fantasy, and since I proposed that, it's my turn to host. Welcome one and all!

Sylvia Kelso

Stay Me With Apples, Comfort Me With Flagons

Once upon a time, food must have been the most important thing in everyone's lives. Millions of Australopithecoid generations didn’t need shelter, expected seasonal sex, and maybe drew moisture from food, as gorillas still do. But food? If the food ran out, and you couldn't find more, you fell off the human family tree for good.

Lacking food storage, the now idealized Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were little safer. As for Neolithic farmers, those enormous stoneworks speak as much fear as reverence: they were at famine's mercy, and they knew it. When the climate changed in Orkney, they opened the top of the Tomb of the Eagles and filled in the centuries-old community temple, a mute testament to the despair of people who felt themselves abandoned, literally, to death.

Before the Industrial Revolution, very little changed. William Langland’s great medieval poem, “Piers Plowman”, is vague if dour about vanity and lust, but to the sin of gluttony it speaks with passionate and specific detail, invoking a society where spring doesn’t mean admiring the pear blossom but hunting desperately for the first green vegetable shoots.

Nowadays, at least in the First World enclave, our food fetish has gone negative: for most of us, food is far too available, far too tempting, far too dangerous. Our bookshops swarm with delectably illustrated cook-books, opposite shelves of diet-books. Our TVs bristle with celebrity chefs and celebrity dieticians attacking red meat, dairy products, processed food. Yet every December, Australians, having largely excised religion, and often present-giving, from their major food-based festival, embark on an orgy of food-buying, preparation and consumption calculated to send their nearest and dearest to an early grave.

Ironically, this Desire-Taboo attitude brings us right back beside the oldest (Western) fantasy stories, of the Judeao-Christian apple and Persephone’s six pomegranate seeds. Unsurprisingly, if from our differing angles, Elsewhere’s food has always been the easiest and most tempting way to get lost precisely where you DON’T want to be.

The pattern lasts through later folk and fairytales. Fairy feasts, from those of the Irish Sidhe to the story of Thomas the Rhymer and the Wood King’s revels in The Hobbit, promise eternal pleasure but also eternal loss and death. And the lure of Elsewhere food endures, from Patricia McKillip’s Solstice Wood back to the magnificently Overfat Feast in The Once and Future King, the fruit in “Goblin Market,” and of course, Jadis’ Evil Turkish Delight in Narnia.

But safe or wholesome food? As Ursula Le Guin remarked ruefully elsewhere, “It is hard to make a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another…” (“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”). It seems equally hard for myth, romance or fantasy to invent desirable food that isn’t taboo.

Most often, good food in modern fantasy marks a temporary safe halt: the desert inn in Diane Duane’s The Door into Fire, the old woman’s farmhouse in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Spell Coats, Beorn’s house in The Hobbit. But overall, earthly fantasy food should aid the verisimilitude, hence prohibiting chips and hamburgers in Pre-Industrial secondary worlds. And also hence, the scathing entry for “Food” in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland reads: “See STEW, SCURVY, STEW, WAYBREAD … and STEW” (79) A ruling that covers most noble and courtly menus too.

There is a standout exception: once again, Patricia McKillip’s The Book of Atrix Wolfe, where food plays a subtle but vital role. The lost heroine is spell-hidden in the castle kitchen. While the story bangs about upstairs through wizardry, succession worries, prince-abductions and scorched-earth hunts, its progress is recorded below through a series of hasty improvisations and unenchanted but inspired food.

As openers, for hall lunch “a proud flock of liveried servants” carry “trays of cold beef, whole poached salmon, loaves of braided bread, salad, fruit dipped in chocolate, cakes of cream and walnut chopped as fine as flour” (27. Supper, in contrast, is “a prolonged drama of great pies of hare and venison with hunting scenes baked in dough on their crusts, vegetables sculpted into gardens, huge platters layered with roast geese, woodcocks and pigeons, and crowned with hummingbirds made of egg white and sugar” (28).

As the narrative cogs engage Prince Talis, summoned home from mage school, nearly kills the King with a misspelled thunderbolt. In counterpoint, “Servants bearing trays of spiced wine and hot brandy had flung them into the air, splashing themselves; goblets rolled among the hounds” (48). Ruffled if coping, the kitchen dispatches the scullion heroine with a tray for the prince, now sequestered as a dangerous magician in the old keep. When she drops the tray, the prince reassembles, “’Salmon swimming in gravy, roast beef on a bed of broken meringue ... The bread is only slightly damp …’”(61). The bearer goes unnoticed.

Next time, the kitchen is coping with a punitive hunt. “’Twenty-six quail,” the fowl cook said… ‘Eighteen woodcock, thirty grouse, eleven lark, thirteen wild duck.’

‘Pluck them,’ the head cook said. ‘Spit the grouse and woodcocks, braise the lark and quail in butter, stuff the duck with sliced oranges before they are spitted. They will be served with an orange-and-brandy sauce.” (77). The kitchen offers the prince a tray of “game hens seasoned with rosemary, tiny potatoes stuffed with mushroom, soup of leeks and cream, a braided loaf of dark sweet bread, a compote of cherries in brandy” (86) and this time he remembers the bearer. But our next kitchen-view is of crisis. The fanfare for supper fails to sound.

Hall-mistress and servants wait beside “steaming silver bowls of soup with tiny saffron biscuits shaped like fish floating in it” while, “Haunches of ham crackled and split on the spits” (97). The soup threatens to spoil, the head cook begins to throw things, and dire news comes from the hall. The prince has been lost in the magic wood. Beans scorch, meringue swans burn, the undercooks open a brandy bottle. But the King plans a night hunt, and the kitchen jerks back to work.

“‘Reheat the soup,’ [the head cook]commanded, “Remove the fish. Chop green onions to float in the bowls with a pinch of paprika ‘… [His] eye fell on the brandy bottle. ‘Take hot brandy and spiced wine to the hunters in the yard, and thin slices of apple and game pie – quickly!’” (101)

When the hunt returns in the small hours for a “cold supper,” “[h]ams were sliced, and cold roast fowl, and long loaves of bread; a simmering soup of shredded beets was ladled out … to cool. Lettuces and boiled potatoes and scallions were chopped and mixed with vinegar, pepper, rosemary and dill. Dark, dense cakes heavy with nuts and dried cherries, redolent with brandy ... Whipped cream and flaked, toasted hazelnuts frosted the cakes… Undercooks funneled rosettes of minced pear onto the soup” (119).

But the prince stays lost. When Atrix the mage arrives, breakfast includes “pale wine scented with spices .. a plate [of] pastries stuffed with nuts and cream, cold salmon, a swan carved out of melon with its wings full of strawberries “(150). But soon both king and kitchen feel the brunt. “The king had retired in fury and despair to his chamber … Supper – roast, peppered venison, tiny potatoes roasted crisp, hollowed and filled with cheese and onions and chive, cherries marinated in brandy and folded into beaten cream – sailed over the bearer’s head and splashed … a hundred-year-old tapestry” (155).

Next day, “’Hunt,’ the head cook said tersely… ‘Again. Take up bread and cheese, smoked fish and cold, sliced venison. Mince the rest of the venison for pie. Also onions, mushrooms, leeks. Take up spiced wine’” (155).

The hunt’s next return “filled the kitchen with feathers, as grouse and pheasant and wild duck … were plucked, beheaded, stuffed and spitted. Hare, squirrel and deer were skinned, gutted and left in the cold-meat pantry,” and the head cook improvises again: “‘The venison can be smoked, the small game will do for cold pies for the hunters.” (155-56).

A normal (castle) breakfast, “silver urns of chocolate, trays of butter pastries, hams glazed with honey and sliced thin as paper, eggs poached in sherry, birds carved out of melons and filled with fruit” (156) segues into disaster: tray bearers come back “white as cream”, and then with ultimate calamity, trays of uneaten food. The head cook’s “face is tight” as he copes:
“’Cook the eggs until they harden, and roll them in minced sausage. The ham will keep for when the King hunts again. Mash the melon in sweet wine and strain it for cold soup –‘“ (160) Later things worsen. Wine is all drunk, but food ignored, and “’what is this dent in the bronze tray?'

‘The King kicked it,’ a servant said morosely. ‘He’s boiling and about to froth’” (161).

The head cook carries on more composedly than the King. “’Nonsense. Cold ham, herb bread, mince pies, red wine. The King may throw it to the dogs. At least it will get eaten’” (161). And when the hunt returns with even more kills, he sends up “stew and game pies ... salads of spinach and radish and bacon, hot black bread, simple heavy fare” (161). The only time this culinary tour de force ever mentions stew.

Meanwhile the heroine rediscovers magic, the prince meets the Queen of the Wood, and hall-servants bring back “cold broken fragments of salmon wrapped in pie crust, roast venison seared over flames and simmered in wine, garlic and rosemary, carrots and onions fried in butter and ale, baked apples stuffed with cabbage and cream, baskets of fruit woven out of egg-white and drizzled with chocolate flavoured with brandy” (176).

For a last time the heroine takes up the prince’s tray: “onion soup with a melting crust of cheese, a loaf of dark bread, a flagon of wine, a tart of oranges sliced into thin bright circles glistening under a glaze that smelled of ginger” (206). This time, meticulous, imaginative culinary detail dovetails with war and magic’s culmination: the prince remembers the scullion heroine, enters the kitchen to discover her, and the narrative’s eclaircissement begins.

Later, with the magic over, the mysteries folded away, the heroine, restored to her Wood princess status, brings the prince another tray, and this time the food goes undescribed. But the story ends as she re-enters the kitchen where she knows “the tray–mistress would be counting scratches, and the plate-washers would still be at the sinks, and the head-cook debating tomorrow’s meals, and everyone picking at leftovers” and says “’Tell me all your names’” (247).

It is uncommon, even in modern fantasy, for a secondary world novel to end belowstairs. It is a fitting finale that the focus should here move from the amazing food to its makers. The food itself is not particularly Elsewhere, in terms of high-end modern cuisine, but that this parade of lushly detailed dishes is never shown as magic, evil, or a temptation, justifies its makers’ place in the final spotlight. Unlike the mages or kings or Faery folk, their power has never produced anything but good.
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Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.

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Warren Rochelle

The Silver Apples of Narnia

This month the theme for the Great Fantasy Traveling Roundtable Blog is food—appropriate for December, given the various holiday feasts and parties on many of our calendars. So, food—food and fantasy, food in fantasy literature—and what popped out of my mental toaster were apples and Narnia, in particular the silver apples.

Apples, apples and more apples, appear again and again in The Chronicles of Narnia. They are the first food eaten by the Pevensies when they return to Narnia in Prince Caspian—apples grown in an orchard they had planted centuries before, an orchard blessed by Pomona, the greatest of the wood goddesses. Perhaps the most potent, symbolically at least, are the silver apples. According to the WikiNarnia, “In all of existence, there are only “four known individual silver apple trees.”

The first one appears in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory and Polly are sent by Aslan to find the Garden of Youth and there take a silver apple from the Tree of Youth. There he meets the Witch, who was “just throwing the core of an apple . . . The juice was darker than you would expect and made a horrid stain around her mouth” (142-143). She has attained her heart’s desire, immortality, but already is experiencing what will many long years of despair of an evil life. She was warned: Come in by the gold gates or not all/Take of my fruit for others or forbear. /For those who steal or those who climb my wall/Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair (141).

Digory plants the second silver apple tree, the Tree of Protection, on the banks of the Great River of Narnia, with the apple he brings to Aslan. The tree grew quickly. “Its spreading branches seem to cast a light rather than a shade, and silver apples peeped out like stairs from under every leaf. But it was the smell which came from it, even more than the sight, that had everyone draw in their breath.” This breathtaking scent will keep Narnia safe from all enemies. As Aslan explains, the Witch “dare not come within a hundred miles of the Tree, for its smell, which is joy and life and health to you, is death and horror and despair to her” (155). For 898 years this Tree protects Narnia from all enemies. Presumably it dies and only then does evil come into Narnia: the Witch, having outlived the Tree thanks to the apple she ate, returns and the hundred years of winter begins.

It is an apple from this Tree that Aslan gives to Digory that cures his mother. And from this apple grows the third silver apple tree, in the garden behind a row house in London. The magic is lessened in our world, although it “did bear apples more beautiful than any other in England and they were extremely good for you, though not fully magical.” This otherworldly tree is magically connected to its parent in Narnia: “Sometime it would move mysteriously when there was no wind blowing . . . when this happened there were high winds in Narnia.” When a storm brings down the English silver apple tree (whether or not the apples are silvery here is not mentioned), Digory, by then an adult, has “part of the timber made into a wardrobe, which he put in his big house in the country” (166).

We all know what happens with this wardrobe.

The fourth silver apple tree is only hinted at in The Last Battle. The world of Narnia has ended; the Pevensies and their friends are in Aslan’s country and are being called to “Come further up and further in” (167) and to pass through the golden gates into a walled garden, “into the delicious smell that blew towards them” (169)—presumably the same delicious smell of the silver apple tree in Digory’s garden. At the centre of this garden is an orchard, “where the Phoenix sat in a tree and looked down upon them all and at the foot of that tree were two thrones, a King and Queen so great and beautiful that everyone bowed down before them” (170). These two are King Frank and Queen Helen, the first King and Queen, crowned hours after Aslan sang Narnia into existence. That they are compared to Adam and Eve suggests this tree is the Tree of Knowledge, a silver apple tree.

Clearly Lewis is drawing upon a variety of sources for these silver apples, and not just Genesis and the Garden of Eden—the forbidden fruit on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is never identified in the Bible as an apple, silver or otherwise. That fruit—and the silver apple tree Digory finds, are both forbidden and are both symbols of temptation, of the fall, of sin, of knowledge and immortality. For Digory this knowledge comes in a flash: the Witch is wrong; he must do the right thing, follow the rules, and do as Aslan has commanded. It takes Adam and Eve a little longer to figure things out.

According to the Myths Encyclopedia, “Apples are brimming with symbolic meanings and mythic associations. In China they represent peace, and apple blossoms are a symbol of women's beauty. In other traditions, they can signify wisdom, joy, fertility, and youthfulness.” In Norse mythology, the apples of the goddess Iðunn are necessary for the gods to keep their eternal youth—otherwise, they will grow old, grey, bent. One of the tasks of Heracles is to bring back the golden apples from the Tree of Life that grows in the Garden of the Hesperides. When Eris tosses out her golden apple, meant for the fairest, momentous and cataclysmic events are set in motion. Apples are sacred to Aphrodite: throwing an apple at someone was to symbolically declare one’s love (even though the fruit Eve picks is never identified).

Avalon is apple-island; Snow White is tempted by a poisoned one. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Apples, apples, apples: food as myth, as metaphor, as icon, as a way to the truth—to greater knowledge of self, of what is real. Aslan’s Country is the truly real; we live in the shadowlands. God gave us bodies that must be sustained, must be fed—and he gave us souls that also must be sustained and fed. But why apples, what makes them so special? Originating in Western Asia, today apples are grown world-wide. Originally they were among the earliest trees to be cultivated, now, they are ubiquitous and we eat them raw, cooked, baked, fried, and stewed. They were (supposedly) with us in the beginning in Eden. Silver apples frame Narnian existence, from the beginning to the end. They are a fruit given by God, weighted with meaning.

I believe I will go get an apple . . . a Pink Lady, they taste so sweet …

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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. He is currently at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and a collection of gay-themed fantasy short stories. One of the collection's stories, "The Boy on McGee Street," was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press) in October 2012.

Website: http://warrenrochelle.com

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Deborah J. Ross

Food: A Fantasy Writer’s Secret World-Building Weapon

Food is an integral part of world-building, whether it plays a direct role in the plot or not. Its availability and quality affect every human endeavor, and scarcity – or fear of scarcity – is a powerful motivation for conflict. What we eat (and what we don’t eat), when and with whom, all these tell a story “off the page” about ourselves and our culture. So it’s important to depict both food and its setting in a way that deepens the world we are creating.

I live in a small town, and on our 1/3 acre plot, my husband and I grow a significant portion of our produce, which I then harvest, preserve, and cook. Even without the digging and planting, weeding and pruning, this is hard work. It also takes planning, not to mention a knowledge of climate and soil, compost/fertilizer management, pest/predator control, and techniques for “putting food by.” I notice when food is taken for granted in fiction, just the way an experienced equestrian will notice when horses are treated like motorcycles.

Throughout most of human history, food has been a limited and therefore precious commodity. The availability of nutritious foods that can be stored has shaped the course of civilization. Far too many writers seem to be taking their own experience of food (it’s what you buy in a can or a frozen package at the supermarket) and extrapolate that into their fantasy worlds. Then it’s all too easy to bounce the reader out of the story.

Projecting modern technological methods of food production, preservation, transportation, and preparation into a lower-technology fantasy world runs the risk of booting a knowledgeable reader out of the story. (Come to think of it, the same holds true for a higher technology world as well.) For example, to stew means to simmer for a long time over low heat, and is an excellent way of preparing tough cuts of meat, but it takes hours, and that means plenty of fuel and a cooking vessel of a material like metal – which is heavy -- that can withstand long cooking times. I’m sorry, Peter Jackson, but Eowyn could not have served Aragorn a stew while on the road to Helm’s Deep. She might have heated water and cobbled together some rather unappetizing dumplings, but that’s not a stew.

More significantly, food presents an excellent vehicle for world-building. Each aspect of its production and handling conveys a tremendous amount of information about the society, ecosystem, and cultural attitudes. So if all your characters breakfast on bread and cheese, and every inn serves stew, you’re missing a great opportunity to make your world and characters more interesting.

A few thoughts on agriculture: Food has to come from somewhere, and unless you have a magical system that transports it from another dimension or creates it out of thin air, someone has to grow or gather it. We can challenge the “primitive-society” stereotypes of men-as-mighty-hunters and women-as-lowly-gatherers by looking at the limitations of game and the central importance of food that is gathered or grown in small gardens. The difficulty for us as writers is, I suspect, that gathering/gardening requires so many hours every day. It’s hard to go off and have adventures when most of your time is spent on feeding your family. Adventures generally rely on the ability to “leave home” with the disposable time to do other things besides obtain and prepare food. Besides, hunting is so much more heroic; all kinds of dramatic things can happen.

The shift from hunting-gathering – where everyone participated in the activities of food production – to agriculture fueled the development of cities. Grain could then be transported and stored for long periods of time, although this is an engraved invitation for rodents (and the diseases they carry) to come have a snack. A wheat-based diet (“daily bread”), like any other diet dependent on one type of food, means a vulnerable food supply. Drought, flooding, or crop disease then easily results in famine, such as the Irish potato famine in the mid-19th Century.

Human beings are omnivores, capable of eating a wide variety of plants and animals. For example, historical records indicate Roman soldiers supplemented their diet of grain (wheat, barley, rye, spelt), vinegar, and legumes, with hares, deer, foxes, badgers, beavers, voles, wild oxen, and moles, not to mention wild mussels, chicken, duck, petrels, cormorants, herons, spoonbills, mallards, teals, geese, cranes, and crows.

We develop attitudes about what foods are “better,” which are forbidden, and which are essential to life or status. One of the most powerful ways of maintaining cultural identity is by the exclusion (or necessity) of certain foods (abstaining from pork in Islam and Judaism). Other aspects of the specialness of certain foods include holiday or celebratory foods, and which foods are suitable for which groups of people (different diets for babies, for example, or pregnant women). Food can be used to elevate individuals or demean them; likewise, different culture may vary widely in how they view the production, preparation, and serving of food. Some foods may be taboo to handle by everyone, or only by certain people.

For me, the creation and depiction of regional cuisines is one of the delights of world-building. People in India, Africa, Finland, and Venezuela don’t eat the same foods, so why should all the food in a fantasy world be the same? Different cooking styles and condiments, spices and garnishes, not to mention basic materials (wheat-based vs rice vs corn vs yams vs manioc vs whale blubber…) can result in a tapestry of sensory detail. And not a few jokes or even insults as well.

Armed with a few questions, we can look at the many roles food plays in world-building. Much of this background will be off-stage (unless your protagonist is a chef), but the decisions you make about food will color every aspect of the lives of your characters.

Who produces the food, and how are they regarded by other portions of their society? Despised, ignored, exploited, revered? Do they use magic in the sowing, reeping, weeding(!), hunting, slaughtering, harvesting, preserving…? Do they have special powers arising from their intimate relationship with the natural world, the animals they hunt, the plants they nurture? What are the traditions of sharing, communal living, and hospitality, and are they the same for other occupational groups? What happens to surplus?

What is the balance of locally grown versus imported foods? What is the seasonal or weather cycle and how does it affect food production? Are all the nutrients necessary for life present in the local diet? And are they available all year round, or are there season in which only preserved food is available? Or does the local diet provide subsistence only and robust health depends on traded/imported foods? What is the major source of calories in the diet (think outside the “grain box” to starchy vegetables, tree nuts, seeds, oily foods…)

What’s involved in moving food from the producers to consumers who then exchange money or other goods for what they cannot grow? How is perishable food handled? How are the merchants and carriers regarded? What are the penalties for theft (is it considered a grave crime like murder to steal food?) What is the response to hungry people and is it different for children versus active adults versus the elderly? How do various characters react to strange foods? What is the role or significance of poisoned food in this culture? What about psychotropic edibles? What are the intoxicants in this society and do all groups participate in them or are some reserved only for special classes? What qualities are attributed to certain foods (courage from eating a lion’s heart, cunning from snake meat)?

Are certain foods appropriate for only certain occasions (think holiday foods, funeral foods, foods given only to sick people or warriors about to go into battle)?

Who prepares the food and are they also the ones who purchase it? What are the customs of the marketplace? Is carrying food a mark of privilege, an advertisement of culinary skill, or a badge of servitude? Is a cook a priest, a skilled professional, a menial, the head of a household, or an object such as “spoils of war”? What are the superstitions surrounding the preparation of food? How is spoilage managed and when is food considered inedible? Who eats food that has gone bad? What are the attitudes towards food-borne illness and who or what gets either the blame or the credit?

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Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, and short stories in ASIMOV’S, F & SF, REALMS OF FANTASY and STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA’S PALACE. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She has lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.

http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

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Andrea Hosth

Food in Fantasy

Chocolate and tomatoes are from South America. Macadamias are Australian. Spice traders so closely guarded the origin of cinnamon that all manner of wild speculation grew up about its origins: fished up in nets at the source of the Nile, or taken from the nests of giant cinnamon birds. It was most definitely "not from here", where "here" equals what readers have been trained to see as the default fantasy setting, a "pseudo-medieval" Europe.

Food has origins. Food also has expiry dates. Seasons of availability. Limits to technology in preparation. So what are your characters eating?

Stew, according to Diana Wynne Jones. Invariably, unceasingly, stew. Perhaps this isn't due to a lack of imagination on the part of authors, but for fear a pedant will note that x ingredient didn't show up in y country until z. Even if the world you're writing in has no America, no Sri Lanka, no Australia. No feudal society, no pseudo-medieval Europe.

How to write around these expectations?

Neologisms have their limits. When your characters sits down to braised gaddy with shimshimar seasoning, it will only take a few meals before the reader starts skimming – and with no idea whether 'gaddy' is a herbivore, a feline, or a particularly tasty elf.

Vagueness is another approach. A supper of bread, cheese and cold meat. No mention of whether it's naan, fetta or kangaroo. Food is a necessity, a pleasure, to many a passion. To be vague about something so central is to take the flavour out of your world.

Anchoring those 'exotic' foods in your new world seems the simplest way. Cook up whatever you like, taking note of seasons, and whatever transport and preservation limits of your world. Mention the chocolate is from Zeverland. The macadamias from the Isles of Carray.

But keep the giant cinnamon birds. Those sound epic.

The Silver Apples of Narnia
by
Warren Rochelle

This month's theme for The Great Fantasy Traveling Roundtable is food in fantasy literature. I chose to write about the silver apples of Narnia. The entire blog post, which includes pieces by:
Sylvia Kelso, Deborah J. Ross, and Andrea Host, can be found at:
http://www.sylviakelso.com
and
also on this blog
and at:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/warren-...

*****

Apples, apples and more apples, appear again and again in The Chronicles of Narnia. They are the first food eaten by the Pevensies when they return to Narnia in Prince Caspian—apples grown in an orchard they had planted centuries before, an orchard blessed by Pomona, the greatest of the wood goddesses. Perhaps the most potent, symbolically at least, are the silver apples. According to the WikiNarnia, “In all of existence, there are only “four known individual silver apple trees.”

The first one appears in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory and Polly are sent by Aslan to find the Garden of Youth and there take a silver apple from the Tree of Youth. There he meets the Witch, who was “just throwing the core of an apple . . . The juice was darker than you would expect and made a horrid stain around her mouth” (142-143). She has attained her heart’s desire, immortality, but already is experiencing what will many long years of despair of an evil life. She was warned: Come in by the gold gates or not all/Take of my fruit for others or forbear. /For those who steal or those who climb my wall/Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair (141).

Digory plants the second silver apple tree, the Tree of Protection, on the banks of the Great River of Narnia, with the apple he brings to Aslan. The tree grew quickly. “Its spreading branches seem to cast a light rather than a shade, and silver apples peeped out like stairs from under every leaf. But it was the smell which came from it, even more than the sight, that had everyone draw in their breath.” This breathtaking scent will keep Narnia safe from all enemies. As Aslan explains, the Witch “dare not come within a hundred miles of the Tree, for its smell, which is joy and life and health to you, is death and horror and despair to her” (155). For 898 years this Tree protects Narnia from all enemies. Presumably it dies and only then does evil come into Narnia: the Witch, having outlived the Tree thanks to the apple she ate, returns and the hundred years of winter begins.

It is an apple from this Tree that Aslan gives to Digory that cures his mother. And from this apple grows the third silver apple tree, in the garden behind a row house in London. The magic is lessened in our world, although it “did bear apples more beautiful than any other in England and they were extremely good for you, though not fully magical.” This otherworldly tree is magically connected to its parent in Narnia: “Sometime it would move mysteriously when there was no wind blowing . . . when this happened there were high winds in Narnia.” When a storm brings down the English silver apple tree (whether or not the apples are silvery here is not mentioned), Digory, by then an adult, has “part of the timber made into a wardrobe, which he put in his big house in the country” (166).

We all know what happens with this wardrobe.

The fourth silver apple tree is only hinted at in The Last Battle. The world of Narnia has ended; the Pevensies and their friends are in Aslan’s country and are being called to “Come further up and further in” (167) and to pass through the golden gates into a walled garden, “into the delicious smell that blew towards them” (169)—presumably the same delicious smell of the silver apple tree in Digory’s garden. At the centre of this garden is an orchard, “where the Phoenix sat in a tree and looked down upon them all and at the foot of that tree were two thrones, a King and Queen so great and beautiful that everyone bowed down before them” (170). These two are King Frank and Queen Helen, the first King and Queen, crowned hours after Aslan sang Narnia into existence. That they are compared to Adam and Eve suggests this tree is the Tree of Knowledge, a silver apple tree.

Clearly Lewis is drawing upon a variety of sources for these silver apples, and not just Genesis and the Garden of Eden—the forbidden fruit on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is never identified in the Bible as an apple, silver or otherwise. That fruit—and the silver apple tree Digory finds, are both forbidden and are both symbols of temptation, of the fall, of sin, of knowledge and immortality. For Digory this knowledge comes in a flash: the Witch is wrong; he must do the right thing, follow the rules, and do as Aslan has commanded. It takes Adam and Eve a little longer to figure things out.

According to the Myths Encyclopedia, “Apples are brimming with symbolic meanings and mythic associations. In China they represent peace, and apple blossoms are a symbol of women's beauty. In other traditions, they can signify wisdom, joy, fertility, and youthfulness.” In Norse mythology, the apples of the goddess Iðunn are necessary for the gods to keep their eternal youth—otherwise, they will grow old, grey, bent. One of the tasks of Heracles is to bring back the golden apples from the Tree of Life that grows in the Garden of the Hesperides. When Eris tosses out her golden apple, meant for the fairest, momentous and cataclysmic events are set in motion. Apples are sacred to Aphrodite: throwing an apple at someone was to symbolically declare one’s love (even though the fruit Eve picks is never identified).

Avalon is apple-island; Snow White is tempted by a poisoned one. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Apples, apples, apples: food as myth, as metaphor, as icon, as a way to the truth—to greater knowledge of self, of what is real. Aslan’s Country is the truly real; we live in the shadowlands. God gave us bodies that must be sustained, must be fed—and he gave us souls that also must be sustained and fed. But why apples, what makes them so special? Originating in Western Asia, today apples are grown world-wide. Originally they were among the earliest trees to be cultivated, now, they are ubiquitous and we eat them raw, cooked, baked, fried, and stewed. They were (supposedly) with us in the beginning in Eden. Silver apples frame Narnian existence, from the beginning to the end. They are a fruit given by God, weighted with meaning.

I believe I will go get an apple . . . a Pink Lady, they taste so sweet …

* * * * *

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. He is currently at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and a collection of gay-themed fantasy short stories. One of the collection's stories, "The Boy on McGee Street," was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press) in October 2012.

Website: http://warrenrochelle.com

Welcome to the January 2013 edition of the Great Fantasy Traveling Roundtable Blog.

This month we are pondering that mainstay of fantasy literature, the Hero and the Quest, with thoughts on unlikely heroes, what a hero is and isn’t, how authors such as Frank Herbert have used this trope, and how we interpreted said Hero and said Quest in our own fiction. Enjoy and reactions and responses are always welcome!


Warren Rochelle
My Heroes
According to the online version of the American Heritage Dictionary, a hero is:
1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.

2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life: soldiers and nurses who were heroes in an unpopular war.

3. A person noted for special achievement in a particular field: the heroes of medicine.

4. The principal male character in novel, poem, or dramatic presentation.

The word hero should no longer be regarded as restricted to men in the sense [of] “a person noted for courageous action,” though heroine is always restricted to women.

Two of my favorites heroes are Russell and Jeff, who happen to be two of the four protagonists in my novels, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007, paperback, 2008) and The Called (Golden Gryphon Press, 2010). They are rather unlikely heroes. Briefly, Russell and Jeff are the Fire and Water of their tetrad, their found family. Tetrads are the basic social unit of Faerie, and come in all kinds of gender combinations; their tetrad has three boys and one girl, Hazel, the Earth. Malachi, the other boy, is the Air.
Often there are couples within the tetrad with the couple as primary bond, the tetrad as secondary. Except for Malachi, who is half-fairy, these children are the descendants of changelings left in our universe centuries ago. In Harvest, their long-dormant fairy DNA is awakened and they became to change, and become more magical, acquiring such abilities as flight and glamour-casting. At first they are dealing with these changes alone, then they find each other, and of course, they find themselves fighting Evil, human and otherwise, and on a Quest.

When the reader first meets Russell Avery White he is 12 and in the 5th grade, having had to repeat two grades earlier. The school system has classified him as learning disabled. Red-haired, he has grass-green eyes and is living with his father and pregnant stepmother. His birthmother ran away years ago, taking with her his little brother, and leaving Russell to be verbally and physically abused by his dad. As he tells the other three: “I don’t remember him ever not doing it, now that I think about it” (Harvest 214). Russell’s body and soul are scarred and wounded. He is angry and thinks of himself as dark. He has learned to keep secrets, including his growing awareness of his attraction to boys. He dreams of centaurs—dreams sent by Faerie.

Jeffrey Arthur Gates is 10, a 5th grader and in Russell’s class. He has dark brown hair and sea-green eyes, and suffered “aggravated and protracted sexual abuse” from age 6 to 10. His father was the perpetrator; his mother abandoned him. Like Russell, he has been classified learning disabled. Like Russell he is scarred; Jeff’s are invisible. Now in foster care and fearing returning to his father, Jeff dreams of dragons.

With Malachi, Hazel, they will fight demons, monsters, evil people, as, with the help of Malachi’s father, they search for the gate to Faerie.

In The Called, the two boys, now lovers, are older, emotionally and mentally in their late teens, their physical aging slowed from their years in Faerie. They are called home to Earth to reunite their tetrad, to fight in another war against evil. And they are still haunted by their pasts: the abuse, the pain, and the anger. They are still Outsiders.

They carry no swords or spears. Their births seem ordinary, their rearing, with the abuse, less so. They are called to adventure, to the Quest—but it is more that adventure and the Quest finds them. Helpers, animal and wise souls, yes, and as they encounter evil and discover how to deal with it, they are tried and tested. There are monsters, yes, but the evil is often interior—the shadows of their pasts, and the damaged adults who sort of care for them. Russell’s anger is not easy for Jeff to deal with, no matter how much he comes to love him. Russell’s darkness, his disbelief in his own goodness, is not easy for anyone to deal with. For Jeff, the Somebody in the dark who came for him is still there, a ghost that is always present. They make awful mistakes again and again.

And Russell and Jeff are two of my favorite heroes.

Why?

From pain comes strength? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Pain and anger can break someone; it breaks Russell; Jeff surrenders to it. Perhaps part of the answer can be found in these words by Jane Bowles*: “Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it through your whole life but you must not circle around it.” That pain can bring tenderness, is, I would argue, the real source of the strength of my problem children. If they had not suffered and survived and grown from this, Jeff and Russell would have found their
Quest-given tasks far more difficult. As Fred Chappell said in the blurb he wrote for Harvest: “Perhaps a new beatitude is discovered: the broken shall mend the earth.”

But aren’t heroes the characters with whom the reader is to identify? The Hero is the archetype of the Self, right? The Hero and the Quest is the archetypal journey of coming of age (yes, I know it is problematic in its privileging of the public and the masculine)? But are there people who have not been hurt? We all were children once. And surely Heroes are Outsiders. I do identify with these two boys who grow into young men: they are telling part of my own story; they represent parts of my Self.

The potential for heroism is present in all of us. The pain and hurt that comes to us can break us, but it also has the potential for ultimately bringing us greater strength of character and a truer sense of Self.

The Quest is an ongoing journey.

*Jane Bowles, 1917 – 1973, is an American writer and playwright considered by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery to be “one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.” She has “long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century.”

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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012).

http://warrenrochelle.com

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Deborah Ross
Hero on a Quest
Once upon a time, a hero represented a very particular character, an archetype if you will. He was invariably male, either a youth or in the prime of life, neither a child nor infirm with age; he was physically powerful and if not morally irreproachable, clearly a “good guy.” It was fine for him to have a flaw or two, so long as it did not interfere with his ability to accomplish great deeds and conquer mighty foes. Occasionally, the flaw would prove his downfall, as in the case of Achilles. The tradition that stretches from Odysseus, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh continued through King Arthur and his knights, to Tarzan, the superheroes of comic books, Doc Savage, and James Bond. True, there were occasional female-heroes in this mold, but mostly they imitated the men, only with brass bikinis, improbably high heels, and better fashion sense. What made them heroic, men and women alike, were physical prowess, lofty ideals, and larger-than-life goals. In other words, they were Worthy of The Noble Quest.

The Quest was always something beyond the reach of the ordinary person. No average plowman or shop-keeper could aspire to find the Grail or slay the dragon. The Quest usually involved what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” meaning that the central character must leave behind the familiar, venture into unknown terrain fraught with danger, and then return home. Sometimes he is changed by his experience, sometimes he merely puts himself back on the shelf until the next plea for help.

The function of this kind of Hero is not only as a Campbellian agent – that is, to guide the reader through a transformative journey – but as an agen instrument of Order and of The Triumph of Good. (Notice how the topic lends itself to unnecessary capitalization?) The world has veered toward Chaos, if not actually toppled headlong into the abyss, and the task of the Hero is to set things right. (I suspect that one modern incarnation of the classical Hero is the detective, who restores right social order by solving puzzles that lead to the apprehension of wrong-doers.) One of the implications here is that only those of noble birth, etc., and who are favored by the gods have the capacity to do great deeds. Aforementioned nobles undoubtedly relished stories that demonstrated them how superior they were and didn’t mind the peasantry being reminded of it. This propagated a hierarchical power structure in the same way as did the notion of the divine right of kings. It reinforced the notion that those with political power were inherently better (stronger, luckier, sexier, purer of thought, beloved by the gods) than those who had none.

In an interesting twist, if one wants to praise someone in the People’s Republic of China (or the old Soviet Union), one says he or she is a Hero of the Revolution.

One of the most interesting changes to come about with the development of the novel was the notion that stories about people of ordinary stature and circumstances could be interesting, and that such characters, however humble, might behave in admirable ways. Of course, “ordinary” is in the eye of the beholder and people who were illiterate due to poverty had little opportunity to see themselves in novel characters. Jane Austen wrote about her own fairly comfortable social class, people whose circumstances were familiar to her. One might consider her a Hero of the Novelistic Revolution.

With the shift to non-Heroic characters came the concept of a protagonist – one who acts — rather than a hero, and the blurring of lines between a person who may do extraordinary deeds but is not of the aristocratic, chosen-by-God mode. We might encounter protagonists-of-noble-birth who are heroic in spite of rather than because of their dynastic sociopolitical standing. Eventually, we also had anti-heroes, reluctant heroes, villains-with-hearts-of-gold, and women heroes (to distinguish them from the typical wailing wilting damsel-in-distress heroines). We had central characters who represented ordinary people who rise to extraordinary heights, people that could be you or me. We stopped calling them heroes for a while, but now often do so again.

Sometimes ordinary-people heroes go on quests, sometimes they get dragged kicking and protesting into adventures, and sometimes they simply ache with dreams until they wake up one day and take a small step toward realizing those dreams. In some ways, they carry us with them on their quest more readily because they are more like us. But with the specificity of character comes a different sort of distance from the reader. Many of the old-style Heroes were pretty bland as characters; they didn’t need quirks and failings and insecurities because they were, after all, Heroes. We now appreciate that in the hands of a skillful storyteller, superficial similarities (gender, race, socioeconomic status, nationality) fade in importance compared to the common human experience and aspirations. A sympathetic character trumps one who is “like me.” Added to that is the value placed on diversity and “exoticism” (which is another way of saying, the romantic aspect of strange lands and people).

I wonder if the shift from superhuman/aristocratic Hero to ordinary person acting in heroic ways also reflects a shift in empowerment. Once upon a time, not only could the people who comprised the vast majority of the work force hope to achieve anything notable, they dared not draw attention to themselves. I think now of the people who jump into rivers to save children, or land disabled airplanes under near-impossible circumstances, or place themselves between gunmen and the students in their care (or talk those same gunmen into laying down their weapons). These are true heroes and what they accomplish – often without planning or forethought – may not fulfill the classical definition of a quest. But to the children who are still alive and to everyone who hears these stories and gets tears in their eyes, these spontaneous acts of courage shine all the brighter.

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Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov’s, F & SF, Realms Of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba’s Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She’s lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.

http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/

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Chris Howard
Frank Herbert and the Quest without a Hero
Like any writer I have many stylistic influences spanning classical, romantic, and contemporary authors from Homer, Hugo, and Dostoyevsky to Terry Pratchett, Richard Morgan, and Caitlín Kiernan. But if I had to pick an author whose work influenced me to the core–and at a young age–it would be Frank Herbert. For a particular work it would be Dune.

One of the things Dune taught me was that the protagonist of the story can go on the quest, suffer at the hands of an oppressor, struggle through and around the obstacles enemies lay out for him, and he can even complete the quest and emerge victorious. And he can do all of this without being a hero.

Or maybe Paul Atreides was just a different sort of hero, one I had never come across before. With Dune Frank Herbert made me look at heroes and their quests in a different way.

I think many fantasy writers would automatically stick Tolkien on the list, but although I have read the Lord of the Rings dozens of times—and The Silmarillion at least ten—I can’t say Tolkien affected me the same way—or as deeply. Certainly Tolkien showed me the wonder of maps, invented languages, an excitingly deep world, and how a big story—Lord of the Rings—can become just one insignificant fragment of a far longer and more complicated story. These are the things I still love about The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I probably would have said Tolkien was my favorite author when I was a teenager, but when I hit twenty or so, after four or five readings about Paul Atreides and all the craziness he gets up to with the fremen, I sort of felt like I had graduated from The Lord of the Rings to Dune.

Dune was also exotic, non-traditional. It had European roots without being entirely European, and that drew me in. There was also a very familiar parallel with Paul’s move from Caladan with its broad oceans to the faraway and very different desert world of Arrakis. I had moved around a lot and I thought that gave me insight into Paul’s plight—typical teenager. I was living in Japan, going to high school, when I first read Dune, but I had also lived just outside Paris, and in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. I had been up and down South Korea, Italy, and through East Germany by train to Berlin. I had lived on both American coasts, and I was living in Silicon Valley. In my seventeen- or eighteen- year-old mind there was definitely something that connected the changes shaking up Paul’s life and the constant moving around when I was young.

If the unfamiliar and striking backdrop of Arrakis lured me in first, that was quickly followed by Herbert’s push and play with the concept of a hero. Paul Atreides wasn’t your typical innocent kid with a quest thrust on him, with everything he counted on pulled from under his feet. He wasn’t just a pawn struggling to find his way in a universe of space-folding guild navigators and galactic-scale trade and political manipulation. He was a significant piece in the Bene Gesserit breeding program. He took the terrible risk—basically gambling everything—to gain god-like powers, which he used to gather and train thousands of fanatical soldiers. He defeated the emperor’s forces, killing armies and princes, the whole time maneuvering himself onto the throne, marrying the emperor’s daughter purely for political gain. And he ends the last chapter with less control over his life than when the story started.

Paul was a man playing god,” said Herbert.

That idea hooked me at the first reading—that the hero could take on powers that he would not be able to control, that he could end up flawed so deeply he wasn’t a hero anymore.

None of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings had an evolution like Paul Atreides. Frodo, Aragorn, and the others were heroes in the traditional sense. Even if Frodo didn’t come home whole, he came back a true hero, having lost a finger and defeated the greatest evil of his age. Paul Atreides didn’t come home from his long journey a hero. He was a messiah at the head of a monster of religious ferocity he created. Anything that monster did would be done in his name, and he didn’t really control it.

Then he unleashed it on the universe.

In Herbert’s own words, “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.”

Paul had the quest. He made the journey. He was victorious. There’s a clear apotheosis stage—literally. Paul Atreides is deified. He passes through the stages of the hero’s journey. He just isn’t a hero. Not in the usual sense.

I haven’t read Dune in ten or fifteen years, but I can still feel the affect that book and the following two—Dune Messiah and Children of Dune —had on me. I loved the culture clashing in Dune, the court intrigue, the power and plans of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, the dinner parties with codes and signals and conversations being carried on at several levels at the same time—and only understood by a few. But it was the protagonist wielding power beyond his control that pulled me back into that universe again and again. It was Paul-Muad’Dib driving his followers, his family, the guilds, the Bene Gesserits, and the entire empire toward a doom he could not escape.

That is what has stuck with me to this day. Paul became a model for the kinds of heroes I love to write about. Heroes who barely have the will or personal strength to hold onto the reigns of some monstrous power that is part of them, or that they have created, and sometimes they end up being consumed by it.

In the introduction to his short story collection Eye, Frank Herbert elaborates on this theme. “Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. That’s how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid…”

I don’t know if it’s unusual but I love the idea of a protagonist who isn’t heroic in the traditional sense. I love an unsympathetic hero–or a hero who starts the story without a shared compassion or a strong connection with the reader, and grows to become sympathetic.

On the other hand I also love a good straightforward heroic quest, where the hero is good and right and fights evil. I know Herbert has been taken as being an active opponent of the hero’s journey, the monomyth, the whole Campbell thousand-faced hero, and in the Dune trilogy it looks that way–even with Paul’s progress through the story closely following many of the steps Campbell describes. It’s what Paul ends up becoming that disrupts the structure.

I don’t think Herbert’s in the same camp with David Brin, a confirmed and outspoken adversary of the hero’s journey and the Campbellian insistence that components of the myths are common among most cultures worldwide (Read Brin’s fun and interesting “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists: http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_...).

Herbert was more of an explorer of conflict and ideas, using his heroes to work through serious flaws in leadership, on the environment and very long range planning, the power of linguistics, and down to challenging what’s considered normal and abnormal. In the Dune books at least, he did not focus on science or future technology. His explorations frequently brought him up against traditional character structure and reader acceptance, but I don’t consider him an enemy of the popular heroic journey and story structure. I consider him a thoughtful science fiction writer who wanted to push the boundaries of the genre in ways that focused on awareness of important issues—ecology, flaws in perception—the infallible leader, and on the dangers of accepting without examination long-held beliefs and cultural fixtures—the hero who completes the quest and returns home a better or at least a more evolved person.

Herbert said, “We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, ‘Well, the only answer is….’ or, ‘If you would just. . . .’ Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don’t see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don’t think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction.”

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Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books) and half a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. In 2007, his story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of other books, blogs, and places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com

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Carole McDonnell
The hero in stasis
Perhaps it’s the Judeo-Christian virtue of endurance. Perhaps it’s my own life. But my characters have never really wanted to go on a quest. Often they end up on one. Because the genre requires it, because the story requires it. But, for the most part, the quests of my heroes is the quest of a happy home. Home, as they have found it, is a burden to them and they generally want to leave home in order to find or create a better home — far from their own tribe or clan.

I haven’t read up on the hero’s quest in a while so I’m not sure why the hero generally leaves home. Maybe I’ve fallen into the requirements of the trope without knowing. After all, the hero’s quest is such a part of our culture. The prince must depart his land, fight dragons or ogres, marry a woman from another clan, then bring her happily back.

I will say, though, that my characters tend to be heroes of endurance. Whether women or men, they are mired in stasis — usually by well-meaning parents or clans. It is as if, my muses are not so much concerned with the quest but with exploring the brief imprisonment the hero endures. In most fantasy books, the hero has his little encounter with the jail/dungeon/dark prison then he moves on. In my books, the enduring of the dungeon is the entire novel. The hero or heroine is mired in waiting. This waiting involves hope, remorse, existential questions to God, deadly routine, and the determination to hold on to their personality, character, and/or will.

Thus, the quest is to leave the state of being mired and to return to a normalcy the typical hero takes for granted. To merely have a happy home. Perhaps that is why many of my characters are princesses or wives in unhappy marriages or damaged children of kings and warriors. Men and the healthy have a certain freedom that women, the sickly, and young children do not.

There are moments when they seem to have an apparent chance to leave their dungeon —whether by suicide, flight, or concession to the powers that be— but their love for another character, hope in Divine Intervention or a possible change of mind of their prisoner, or a holding on to their will prevents them from leaving. I suspect this kind of hero stasis can only be understand by those readers who, like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, are constantly being reeled back in —-in spite of every attempt to flee the clan.

So my new soon-to-be published novel, The Constant Tower, is not for happy middle class kids who want an adventure in order to grow, but for kids in bad neighborhoods, poor kids who wish to run away from home, kids who don’t want to be in clans, women married into hateful clans. Folks who just want to be happy with the normal. The Christian worldview of battling for a regular life in the face of suffering, sickness, and the fact of others controlling our lives changes the Hero Quest trope a bit — because of that Christian virtue of Endurance.

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Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her first novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/



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Sylvia Kelso
When is a Quest Not a Quest?
“Quest: a journey towards a goal,” quoth the ubiquitous Wikipedia. “Hero” – one of the few words that descends but doesn’t translate from Classical Greek or Latin. “Heros” in Greek means exactly the same as “hero” in English. Whatever that may be.

The usefully succinct Wikipedia once again:
hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice—that is, heroism—for some greater good of all humanity.

Key-words, courage, philanthropism, self-sacrifice. Says something about the general run of homo sap. sap. that these last two qualities should be the benchmark for heroism, doesn’t it?

Outside literature, heroes don’t need a quest. They can fulfill the Wikipedia criteria without warning or training, on a surf beach, at a bushfire, beside a stormdrain. Inside littracha, everybody from Joseph Campbell up or down has produced endless lists of quest and hero variations. “’Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return’” (FOTR, 3 75), says Frodo to Gandalf, in That Book, citing just two possibilities. And every type of hero or quest studs modern fantasy, with the exception of one. The true anti-hero doesn’t appear.

An anti-hero usually loosely means, a hero who doesn’t look heroic: he’s unwilling, or ugly, or cowardly, or immoral. But in fact, a real anti-hero wd. be the opposite of a hero: when the crunch came, instead of fronting up like all the unlikely heroes, from Sam to Beau Mains, the anti-hero would turn and run. And without a hero who can meet the Wikipedia criteria, the whole “heroic” storyline would collapse.

But suppose that even if the hero/es behave/s in good heroic fashion, the Quest turns out not to be a Quest? Does that violate the spirit of both terms?

Quests are trickier than heroes. In littracha, you need them because without a goal, the hero/es’ wanderings wd. degenerate into a picaresque novel, a train of adventures with no coherent end. With a goal, there’s motivation for the story arc. There’s a visible reason to keep going somewhere.

I have done my share of starting-a-book-with-a-Quest, but for some reason the Black Gang, aka the creative part of the writing crew, chose to end my second Amberlight book at the start of a Quest. It was complete with dream omens, the gathering of a company, and an unknown but apparently desperately urgent goal. Deprived of their magic McGuffin at the end of Book 1, the main cast has been struggling to maintain their small Utopian community of Iskarda in the turbulent vacuum left by the fall of the city of Amberlight. At the end of book two, the McGuffin is suddenly restored – but now it’s no longer the basis of their former power, it’s a literal “seed,” powerless to protect even itself.

Only one solution, says their chief strategist. Get it out of here: the River knows it exists, the power-wolves will be after it. So make a public, heavily visible departure in hopes this small indefensible community will be ignored. Take it where? The answer is already supplied, perhaps by the McGuffin itself: the dreams’ goal, the image of a place their own lore identifies as the River’s source.

The novel turned out a two-fold story, told in letters between the chief Quester and her community’s newest foreign member, back in Iskarda. The Quest section proceeded in the proper mode: obstacles, traumas, self-discoveries and harrowing interpersonal conflicts, moments of wrenching loss, exotic new environments, uncovered secrets, and a tail of cataclysmic events, as the McGuffin’s presence disrupted or outright overthrew River states. All kosher by Quest list-rules. The “heroes” also met helpers as well as enemies, they transcended their ordinary selves, their actions were meant to benefit many others. Eventually, they reached the place that had been their goal.

The Questers had come to assume they would find not merely the River’s Source, but a solution to all the problems of a world by then convulsed in war, threatening to destroy Iskarda along with the precious new states founded in the McGuffin’s wake. Whatever it was, the goal would give them the means to save everything.

And it didn’t happen.

The Questers dealt, in some sort, with the shock. They picked themselves up, realized that their world was still dissolving behind them and set off, empty-handed, to fight and if necessary fall with their friends. As they very nearly did. In a sense, the return journey was far more heroic, in the general sense, than the one toward the goal, because unlike Frodo with his treasure lost, the return journey offered only probable immolation for its end.

Of course, this being a fantasy novel, the eucatastrophe that Tolkien first articulated eventually intervened. But the question remains: if the hero goes through the motions of the Quest, heroic and otherwise, but reaches his goal to find it – well, not what he expected – can that journey still be called a quest?

And if it isn’t a quest, though the journey remains motivated, is the goal-seeker a hero, in the most rigid and basic sense? That is, can you have a quest without a hero, even if you do have heroes without a quest?

The Black Gang consider the whole Q and A a critical trivium. Who cares, they say, if it’s “really” a quest or the heroes were “really” heroes? if it looks like a hero, and talks like a hero, and acts like a hero, it’s a hero, isn’t it? And if it looks like a Quest, and sounds like a Quest, and produces a story like a Quest, who cares? Nobody said the goal had to be more than a purpose or an aim. If you want a list-maker’s version, they sniff, then puff out your chest and claim it as the ultimate variation – the Quest that looked like a Quest and sounded like a Quest, and wasn’t technically a Quest at all.

And on this one, I think I’ll let the Black Gang have the final word.

* * * * *

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.

Travelling Fantasy Blog Tour: Disabilities and Fantasy
This month our travelling fantasy blog tour deals with disabilities in fantasy.

Disabilities in Fantasy

As we know, disabilities come in all kinds. Mental, physical, emotional.

One of the problem with creating/defining a disabled character is deciding how restricted one's character will be. A character who is utterly unable to move will not be available for derring-do unless his mental/dream world is being explored or unless he lives in a world that allows for his mind and heart are able to affect people and situations. This kind of utterly disabled character could be asleep, in a coma, in cryo-sleep or even dead. However, for the most part, a disabled character generally is able to move around.

There are also disabled characters who are not really disabled. This often happens in sci-fi where technology is so advanced that a disability hardly matters anymore. There are also stories where disabilities are considered romantic -- the odd eye-patch, a blind character such as Star Trek's Geordie who seems more hip than challenged (It's the future, after all!) or a character with an attractive limp. Consider the movie, Avatar, where for all intents and purposes, the hero's disability doesn't matter to the extent that it should, and his being helped by a female of a lower/different class feels a bit like Mr Rochester being helped by Jane Eyre. Whatever the effect, the film's creators can preserve their cake and eat it simultaneously. In some fantasies, as in the Drakengard video games, often some exchange is made between the disabled and some other entity which renders the disability useful in some ways. For instance, Caim gives up his voice to bond with his Dragon. It's a loss but it's also a gain.

There is also the situation where a disability is not seen -- by the disabled character, by fellow characters, by the audience, or by the reader as a disability. This can be good, bad, idealized, or romanticized. In the original Star Trek, the Vulcan Spock (and many of the so-called advanced cultures) are idealized because of their inability to feel emotions. There is also a disability which is a kind of living death, a character who has some kind of debilitating ever-worsening illness which makes them continually at war with their bodies, for instance, "The Incredible Shrinking Man."

Whether mentally, intellectually, or physically disabled, a character with a disability is also affected spiritually. They are "marked" in some way that makes them view the world a little differently than others in their world.

Because of my health issues and my son's, I have become very interested in abilities, afflictions, infirmities, and disabilities. I try to see how being disabled can be strengthening to the human soul and how it opens the eyes to situations the able-bodied do not see. I don't think one has had to suffer in order to have one's eyes open to the world but I think it helps. For me, a disabled hero (with a true disability) is an excellent character. I will admit that I often write about disabled characters as a kind of catharsis, or to show the able-bodied how difficult life is for the sickly. But I also write about disabled characters because they populate the world I live in -- especially with the rise of autism in the US population) and they rarely show up as heroes in fantasies. . I feel we ought to show the lives of all kinds of people that disabled people and the "unseen" can see themselves in literature, and that others can see them as well.

In my short story, Lingua Franca, the inhabitants of a far-off planet do not consider themselves disabled. In my novel, Wind Follower, the main character is so ashamed of his disability (epilepsy) that all around him pretend not to see it in order to spare him from shame. There is also an autistic learning disabled character who -- although she is almost an old woman-- is a playmate of the main character. In my novel, Constant Tower, disabled boys born in the Wheel Clan are either killed or made into "living ghosts" called studiers, who are made to feel grateful because they have been spared death. -- Carole McDonnell

Difference and Ability in F&SF
Chris Howard

I spent some time thinking about this month's roundtable topic, disability in fantasy (and SF), building a list of characters I can remember from the literature as well characters in my own books that come to the story with physical or mental differences--differences that force the character down less certain paths or put boundaries on action, sometimes painful boundaries.

I started out with the idea this was going to be difficult, that disabilities in fantasy and science fiction were poorly represented, but hoping that was just my own limited scope of reading, and the lack of differently-abled characters was not pervasive. I think, it turns out, I was partially correct, that there aren’t many examples, but there are significant ones—just from the books I have read. Many more from books I have yet to read.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, born with significant physical impairments, came immediately to mind. (Bujold has characters with disabilities in several books). Michael Moorcock’s Elric was another, although it’s been decades since I’ve read the stories. William Gibson has several stories containing characters with prostheses, or characters who are wheelchair-bound. There are also a few Tim Powers books, but the one that comes to mind is The Stress of Her Regard, in which the main character, a physician, lives with physical and mental disabilities, as well as other characters with prosthetic eyes and missing limbs. (I did google around after writing this post, and found the "Decloaking Disability Bibliography", a fairly long list of authors with books that attempt "to explore the intersection of disability and technology within texts from the genres of science fiction and the literature of the fantastic." It’s an impressive list, and just shows that I need to find more time to read. Link below).

As my kids have moved through the teenage years I’ve read more and more YA lit, and my impression is there’s some real focus on disabilities there, characters with paralysis, speech limitations, bulimia, dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome. Most of these aren’t in fantasy or SF books, but in stories that focus on characters struggling to cope with differences in a social context, characters breaking free of walls they have put up themselves, or that society has constructed to hold them back.

This month’s topic also made me look critically at my own work. I do have a few characters with limited or missing senses and limbs (Emandes in Sea Throne, Corina in Seaborn who has lost the complete control of her body), but not that many. I have written several books with main characters who struggle continuously against mental limitations or differences—Kassandra in Saltwater Witch­, Thea in Dryad. Internal struggles form the basis for my favorite kinds of characters. This month’s topic put the focus on an important missing element in my reading as well as my writing.

Finally, there’s an interesting recent example—a recent read for me anyway—in Joe Abercrombie’s character Monzcarro “Monza” Murcatto, who begins the first page of Best Served Cold as the ruthlessly competent fighter and captain of Styria’s most feared mercenaries, but by the end of chapter one she’s mercilessly killed and thrown off the battlements into a ravine. Duke Orzo, who commands and orchestrates the whole thing, can wipe his hands and go about his continued political maneuvering with his greatest military threat broken and lying in her own blood below his castle, dead.

Almost.

Monza, it turns out, is only mostly dead. She’s picked up—almost in pieces—by a mysterious stranger and nursed back to a damaged but still breathing version of her old self. As you can guess by the book’s title, she sets out to destroy everyone involved in her “death”. I won’t be giving anything away in saying I think she does okay.

Decloaking Disability Bibliography
http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/Decloa...

Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books), Salvage (Masque/Prime, 2013), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. His story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages and covers of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com


The Abilities of Disability – at Least in Fantasy

In real life, disability is exactly what it says. A lack. A limitation. A loss of possibilities open to others, whether to see, to hear, to walk, to run, or just to go a week without the black dog of depression dropping on your back to take the taste out of everything.

Atop the inner physical limitations, come external ones: doors too narrow for a wheelchair, handles too high to reach, prompts or safety signals only visible, or only audible. A flight of “simple” stairs. Even an escalator can be another infuriating check to someone with a “disability.”

Add on the invisible limits: as with race, class, and colour, even heterosexuality, disability can leave a person either Othered or literally invisible. Even when visible, the unlucky Other has to run the gauntlet, if not of naming for the problem – right up or down to names like Hopaling Cassidy – then of the other egregious reactions, from pity to repulsion: less happily than Hopalong, the person vanishes behind the stereotype.

In fantasy, as with race, class and colour etc., things could, even ought to be different. Alas, a quick mental survey of Fantasy I Have Read matches too well with the real-world social map: blind seers or crippled beggars appear quite often among minor or even lesser characters. I can recall only one high-to-mid-level blind character, the bard in Tanya Huff’s Four Quarters series, who is definitely and encouragingly NOT disabled by his blindness and indeed, in the first book, plays a crucial climactic role.

Again, in The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner offers a powerful cameo of her previous lead character, the great swordsman Richard St. Vier, now suffering from loss of all but peripheral vision, yet devising his own remedies, to remain a swordmaster unparalleled.

Barbara Hambly has two main male characters, wizards whose magic is off-set by poor vision. One is Antryg Windrose, her most notable wizard, and perhaps my favourite among wizards, Gandalf included. Antryg’s myopia is definitely not “disabling” – though his ability to practice martial arts without his glasses does stretch my credibility – it is only one in a bouquet of anti-establishment attributes. Antryg comes from a dirt-poor tundra family, he learnt his arts from the series’ main villain, and he is more gloriously dotty than even T. H. White’s Merlin, even Antryg frequently considering himself to be outright mad.

There is no deaf, blind, and certainly no paraplegic or quadriplegic main character or protagonist in any fantasy I can think of (and don’t mention Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, his universe is unequivocally SF.) Does this mean mainstream fantasy is as exclusive of the disabled as of non-WASP, middleclass, heterosexual protagonists?

There is some justification, on narrative grounds. Fantasy is, after all, an adventure genre. Protagonists have to be equally fit for flight or fight, accustomed or at least able to confront dragons and scale castles at a blink. As Hambly’s Californian geek computer programmer ponders at one point in the Windrose series, after three days spent on the run, or the walk, in a pre-Industrial countryside, eating bread and cheese and sleeping in haystacks: “Thank God I don’t have allergies – that’s probably something selected against in the evolution of heroines.” (Silent Tower 179.) And so are blindness, deafness, and of course, any form of wheelchair limitation. Disabilities just make things too difficult for the writer, you see?

But should they? Try telling anyone that Long John Silver’s wooden leg limited Treasure Island in any way, adventures included. Come to that, does lameness limit Hopalong Cassidy? Sure, it would probably bring an appreciable change if Long John had needed to push a wheelchair over Hispaniola, but otherwise?
In fact, for a writer, disability should present not a limit but a valuable asset, especially in building characters. And by this I don’t mean simply turning the “disabled” to an Other of terror and nightmare, as Long John Silver becomes. Without going completely Pollyanna, I consider disability in a main character will give a writer not just means to individualize him/her, but to strengthen that character morally, emotionally, and what matters most to a writer, charismatically.
I can say this from experience: in the third Amberlight book, Source, I invented an imperial heir, known as a crown prince, with a “delicate stomach,” that could be upset without warning or rule by certain foods. (Art again anticipating nature, I later found one of my own friends actually has this problem.) At the time, this was just an individuating quirk in a mid-range character. But Therkon went on to become the male lead in the fourth, (unpublished) book, Dragonfly, and there I was charmed to find his stomach upsets did not merely show Men under Pressure Behaving Well, but could actually function as part of the plot. Not merely to hamper the action at crisis but to advance the emotional plot (love-story, okay?) and, in one case, to help hero and heroine out of a tight corner as well.

Again, though I can’t recall a fantasy hero with a mental disability, (there are a few in SF), I managed to produce one who could suffer from clinical depression. Also unpublished as yet, The Heart of the Fire was meant as my version of the super swordsman: silent, deadly, impregnable to all finer feelings. Unfortunately, by Chapter 2 his workname had become The Killer Caramel, since he had developed an incurable weakness for fostering orphan calves.

Later more lethal character flaws surfaced: at life crises he would drink himself, not into mere alcoholism, but to a hair-trigger readiness to take offense, and his case, kill someone. Or someones. Later, he would sink into life-threatening lethargy. Only after four books and buckets of wonderfully dramatic angst did his life even out to a point where these phases finally faded away.
Such “cures” are less available in reality. But as a writer, I have found disability, at least of a “minor” variety, a powerful and fertile trope. Ironically, at least to a writer, “disability” should be considered less a limitation than a valued basis on which to build a strong, dramatic, even charismatic hero/ine. And what writer would consider one of those a disability?

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.

This was first posted at:
http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/2...

Disabilities and the Fantastic

In Irish mythology, only a king without imperfections could sit on the throne. According to The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore (Checkmark Books, 2004) “a king could only claim the goddess of the land as his wife—and through her, sovereignty of the country—if he were whole and without blemish. If injured he was forced to abdicate the throne” (49). So it was for Nuada, who lost his hand or arm in battle, and had it replaced with a silver one (thus becoming Nuada of the Silver Hand). This injury meant he had to give up his leadership of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.1 Only when he is given a magical prosthesis is he allowed to return to the throne. His silver hand is not enough; it has to be covered by a special skin to appear normal (362).

Nuada lost his throne, thanks to prejudice against the disabled. That he did is indicative of attitudes which suggest that those who are not “whole” are no longer capable, and that their disability somehow hurts others, in this case, the people he ruled. Nuada was still able to fight with his silver appendage, but that wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t whole; he couldn’t be king.

Tiny Tim, in A Christmas Carol, is another disabled character in fantastic literature. His lonely crutches in the corner, carefully preserved, are a familiar image to many readers. If he is not treated, death is his future—and it is only through the repentance of Scrooge’s evil ways that Tiny Tim can receive the medical care he needs. Unlike Nuada, who experiences prejudice, Tim is accepted and loved by his family. But it could be argued that Dickens is exhibiting prejudice against the disabled, as he isn’t a fully realized character; rather he is a symbol of repentance and redemption, an image of pity, and not a little boy who happens to have a disability.

So, what is going on with the presentations of the disabled, of disabilities in the fantastic? Surely, there are characters who are more than just victims of prejudice and pathetic imagery? My (admittedly unscientific and indeed casual) research for this blog took me to The Passive Voice website (http://www.thepassivevoice.com/09/201...), and “10 Inspirational Disabled Characters from Sci-Fi and Fantasy.” Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones, immediately got my attention. Yes, as Passive Guy says, “The insults thrown at Tyrion Lannister in both the books and the TV show Game Of Thrones are, sadly, a reflection of what many dwarfs in our real world have to go through (although Tyrion, being a contrary sort, takes one of these insults – “Imp” – and makes it his own).” But he is presented as a “fantastic character first, a dwarf second . . .Of course his size is an important part of what makes him Tyrion, but he’s so much more: clever, sardonic, scheming, sexy and vulnerable. Tyrion is not “just” a dwarf: he’s one of the best characters on TV right now.”

Another character I found intriguing was Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon. He has a damaged tail, which dooms him to being flightless, and thus, probably to death. Young Viking Hiccup, however, makes him a prosthetic tail (perhaps the “first dragon-limb-replacement”) and he takes wing. According to Passive Guy, Toothless is a “great example to set kids who might never have thought about what it means to need a prosthesis.”

All right, so far, so good. Better, yes? Well, not according to one commentator, Steve Godden, who felt the entire list bordered patronizing, and borderline insensitive. Must the disabled be inspirational and good examples? Can’t they just be a dragon who needs a tail, or a prince who happens to be a dwarf? Godden found this list to be “[offputting sic] as characters are being defined by their disabilities, and therefore not as whole people. He notes that the “One of the things the athletes at the para-Olympics requested is that the term ‘inspiring’ should not be used.” As he further notes, “Characters are only ‘inspiring’ if they stoically accept their disability.” However, another commentator, Mira, brings up the question of intent. Why are these characters in the story at all? It is important, she argues, that the disabled be seen, and not hidden away or (often literally) looked over. According to Mira, “. . . sometimes those in a targeted community sometimes get too caught up in political correctness, and forget intent. Sensitivity is important, for sure, but sometimes there are positive things happening even if they are not 100% sensitive.”

True and Godden agrees: “Representation is important, I just wish we had reached a place where there was no need to represent because it was no longer an issue.” But we will always have the disabled, whether due to genetics or an accident or disease. The place we need to reach is one in which there is no longer discrimination against the disabled, and they are considered whole people, and not a disability, or inspiring examples.

In the interest of full disclosure (and shameless self-promotion) two of my main characters in Harvest of Changelings and The Called, Russell and Jeff have learning disabilities, a legacy from their fairy heritage. I remember being quite aware of not making them an image but fully realized people who are, among a long list of adjectives, also learning disabled. I hope I succeeded; that was my intent.

So, there has been progress from Nuada’s disguised hand and Tiny Tim’s presentation as an image and not a boy who is disabled. A bad-ass prince, a dragon, and two boys who help save the world. They are real, visible, and certainly not stoic and they are certainly more than their disability: they are heroes.

Let’s keep on until we reach the place where the disabled are just there, among the rest of us—all part of the human rainbow—including disabled villains.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has appeared in such journals and publications as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, and The Silver Gryphon. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was recently published in Queer Fish 2.

1 The Tuatha Dé Danann ("peoples of the goddess Danu), are a race of people in Irish mythology. In the invasions tradition, they are the fifth group to settle Ireland. The Tuatha Dé Danann are thought to derive from the pre-Christian deities of Ireland. When the surviving stories were written, Ireland had been Christian for centuries, and the Tuatha Dé were represented as mortal kings, queens and heroes of the distant past; however there are many clues to their former divine status. A poem in the Book of Leinster lists many of them, but ends "Although [the author] enumerates them, he does not worship them." Goibniu, Creidhne and Luchta are referred to as Trí Dé Dána ("three gods of craftsmanship"), and the Dagda’s name is interpreted in medieval texts as "the good god." Even after they are displaced as the rulers of Ireland, characters such as Lugh, the Morrígan, Aengus and Manannán mac Lir appear in stories set centuries later, showing all the signs of immortality (Wikipedia contributors. "Tuatha Dé Danann." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 19 Mar. 2013).

Amazing Fantasy Round Table: 50 Shades of Fantasy
This month's Amazing Fantasy Round Table examines the question of whether modern fantasy comes in shades other than grim and gritty.


Warren Rochelle: Fantasy: How Many
Shades of Grey?

All right. I’ve been browsing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. I googled “different kinds of fantasy—and, for the most part, found similar lists and similar terms. I doubt most of those who write for this blog would be surprised at the terms and definitions I found, such as:

Ø high fantasy: immersion, set wholly in the secondary world, “with its own set of rules and physical laws,” (no connections between here and there). Think Middle-earth.
Ø low fantasy: “a sub-genre of fantasy fiction involving nonrational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world where such things are not supposed to occur. Low fantasy stories are set either in the real world or a fictional but rational world, and are contrasted with high fantasy stories (see above)… The word "low" refers to the level of prominence of traditional fantasy elements within the work, and is not any sort of remark on the work's quality” (Wikipedia contributors. "Low fantasy." (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 Mar. 2013. Web. 2 May. 2013.) Examples include The Borrowers, Tuck Everlasting, The Five Children and It, Edward Eager’s novels, and so on.

Ø epic fantasy, which is centered on the quest, relies on a heroic main character, stresses the battle between good and evil, heroes, legendary battles—often called heroic fantasy. A portal-quest or portal fantasy could be a variant, with a prime example that of the Chronicles of Narnia.

The lists go on to include contemporary/urban fantasy, anthropomorphic, historical, dark, science fantasy—you get the idea. Fantasy, all about good vs. evil, the light versus the dark, heroes and heroines, magic, dragons, and their ilk, comes in many shades of grey. (50? That’s another essay—see the blog on sexuality in fantasy, okay?) Then, there is immersive vs. intrusive and liminal or estranged and … But instead of defining each and every one, and dredging up examples (which is something I like to do when I teach fantasy lit—English 379, this fall, 3:30-4:45 TTh, come on down), I want to talk about the shade of grey I write and why (and yes, grey, the British spelling, and not the American gray. Grey just looks …. well, grey, and it’s prettier… I digress).

So. What’s my shade of grey? I have two published fantasy novels, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon, 2007) and its sequel, The Called (Golden Gryphon, 2010). A third is being edited, The Golden Boy, and a fourth in progress even as I write, The Werewolf and His Boy. They are all, I am thinking, low and intrusive fantasies. True, The Golden Boy is sort of pushing the above definition of low, as it is set in an alternate reality, that of the Columbian Empire. Magic is real, but it is illegal, and the Empire is definitely meant to be a rational country. Magic, does, however, intrude, according to the Columbian political and religious authorities. But, the others: this world (more or less), and then magic returns (thus intruding), or is disclosed in some fashion, voluntarily and otherwise. Harvest and The Called are set in North Carolina; Werewolf, in Virginia. Complications ensue—lots of complications. Bad things happen. The good guys are in serious trouble. Yes, there are forays into Faerie from time to time, but on the whole, things happen here, not there.

The question of the moment is why, to what end. Part of me has always wanted to believe in magic (oh, all right, part of me does believe in magic) and that it is real and if we just knew—the right people, the right words, where to look—we could find it. It’s always been here. There has to be a reason for all these stories. So, I create fictional worlds that satisfy this longing. In these worlds the magical and the mundane intersect, overlap, come into conflict—and I find these encounters fascinating. As do their real-world counterparts (encountering the unexplainable), such meetings pull back the veils and reveal us as who and what we really are. They are meetings in which we are forced to ask the question of what it means to be human. That some of these encounters are fraught with peril is also part of this question.

To be human is, sometimes, to be in danger, to be facing great evil, and to have to confront that evil, albeit the evil is a monster, another human, or a personal darkness. To be human is to undertake the quest. As Le Guin says in her essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” “fantasy is the natural, the appropriate language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul”(Language of the Night 64).

In low fantasy, in intrusive fantasy, the metaphor, the myth, the symbol, the shadow, can be real, literal. It can be touched, felt, and fought. Russell, a hero of Harvest and The Called, is an abused child; so is Jeff, his partner. They grew up with people who behaved monstrously. They also find themselves confronted with evil reptilians and black witches and other bad guys. They find they have to fight their inner demons as well as those that wait for them. Could I do this in high fantasy? I think so, but I am finding it is important to me to acknowledge the darkness and mystery that is here, in this world.

Good fantasy, after all, is about human beings doing human things, and with all the ambiguity and trouble and good and evil and love and hate and all the rest that comes with being human. Yes, they have to deal with the magical, the impossible, the mystery, the myth made real, but they are still humans—most of the time, and mostly.

So, I write in this shade of grey because it is here that I live, that my imagination lives. Oh, yeah, by the way: magic is real.

*****
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street” was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). http://warrenrochelle.com


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Andrea Hosth: Grimdark

The last ten years have seen a rise in what is known as "grimdark fantasy" (or, more amusingly, as "grittygrotty"). Joe Abercrombie defines the core of the genre as:
"The dirt physical and moral. The attention to unpleasant detail. The greyness of the characters. The cynicism of the outlook."

There are numerous articles discussing grimdark, covering everything from what makes it "more real", "less real", "nihilist", "gratuitous", "honest", or "unimaginative". Most of all, "sexist".
Beyond being a sub-genre I'm disinclined to read, I'm sure some of my negative reaction to grimdark is due to some of its champions positing it as an "evolution" of fantasy: something which has left less evolved, inferior versions of fantasy behind. This both annoys and confuses me.

Part of the confusion is due to what I see as a lack of newness about some of these concepts. Are grimdark protagonists more morally ambiguous than, say, Elric of Melniboné? Steerpike of Gormenghast? Heck, Lord Vetinari of the Discworld? How much more cynical in outlook are these worlds compared to, say, Mary Gentle's "Grunts" (a satire of heroic fantasy, but certainly not a recent one)? Is Leiber's Lankhmar naïve and 'unevolved'?

What exactly has evolved here? Is a willingness to describe people peeing the big advance we're supposed to find in grimdark?

The other, perhaps larger, source of my confusion is whether the link made between "grey" and "real" is supposed to lead to a second link between "heroic" and "fake". If the charcoal greyness of the protagonists is the big selling point of grimdark's advances (ignoring the decades of "pre-grimdark" fantasy featuring morally grey characters), does it follow on that real heroism does not exist?
The people-are-fundamentally-rotten trope is common to another genre: post-apocalyptic. Almost inevitably, post-apocalyptic stories feature small bands of people, sometimes fighting viciously for resources against other bands, until their own group dissolves when Untrustworthy-Second-Male produces a schism against Mr-Reluctantly-In-Charge because he wants to be in charge/to get the girl/to go that way. My own apocalyptic story was a direct reaction to how boringly predictable I find this story progression, and to recent events at the time of drafting – particularly the 2010-2011 Queensland Floods. Here, as with countless other natural disasters, lives and safety were threatened…and thousands of people stepped up. Helped out. Behaved heroically.

If we spend the time to look around us, at the real world, we see villains, we see plenty of morally grey people – a vast bunch on the paler side of the grey scale. And we see heroes.

Grimdark is a genre which removes a portion of the real. To cast a crapsack world as a "more real" world is to ignore the considerable amount of grey in large portions of heroic fantasy, and to suggest that the concepts of nobility, heroism, selflessness, and the rule of law are all weak figments which do not and never did exist in (historical) reality.

A brief stroll through the myths and legends which are used as the basis for many modern fantasy stories will show us that grim and tragic events are hardly new to the genre (try Deidre of the Sorrows on for size). A passing acquaintance with history will show us heroes.

*****
Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.Her website, Autumn Write.

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Sylvia Kelso: Shades of Fantasy

Originally I meant to talk about sub-genres, but I’ve covered this before, so instead I’ll look at shades in high fantasy, varying by both authors’ style and time. Which logically lets me start with one of the fathers of modern fantasy, Lord Dunsany. Here’s the intro to his short story, “Carcassonne:”
They say that [Camorak’s] house at Arn was huge and high, and its ceiling painted blue; and when evening fell men would climb up by ladders and light the scores of candles hanging from slender chains. And they say, too, that sometimes a cloud would come, and pour in through the top of one of the oriel windows, and it would come over the edge of the stonework as the sea-mist comes over a sheer cliff’s shaven lip where an old wind has blown for ever and ever (he has swept away thousands of leaves and thousands of centuries, they are all one to him, he owes no allegiance to Time).

Writing pre WWI, Dunsany has more than an echo of Yeats’ Celtic twilight: whimsical tone, slightly formal, archaic usages such as the “they say” beloved of medieval romances. And characteristic of Dunsany, whimsy extended into a long, flapping, image-ridden sentence that in the wrong hands could come perilously close to a place in the Bulwer Lytton awards.
From around the same period we have:
“His highness rode a hot stirring horse very fierce and dogged; knee to knee with him went Styrkmir of Blackwood o’ the one side and Tharmrod o’ the other. Neither man nor horse might stand up before them, and they faring as in a maze now this way now that, amid the thrumbling and thrasting of the footmen, heads and arms smitten off, men hewn in sunder from crown to belly, ay, to the saddle, riderless horses maddened, blood plashed up from the ground like the slush from a marsh.”
Yep, that other Daddy of the Genre, E. R. Edison, from the chapter “The Battle of Krothering Side,” in The Worm Ouroboros. And yes, nobody sounds or ever again could sound like Edison. The lavish detail, the exuberance, the outrageous yet so brilliant faux Elizabethan language is a Phoenix. One of a kind.

The writing in The Worm actually ranges widely, from battle scenes like this, sounding almost straight out of Mallory, to the ornate settings, and breathtaking natural beauty like the sunset that closes this chapter, or the first view of Zimiamvia. But it’s a good shade away from Dunsany, not least in the ferocity of its focus, and the equally ferocious insistence of its rhythm.

Now here’s one of the modern heirs of both Edison and Dunsany. Describing magic outright this time, 70 or so years later, when fantasy styles have greatly simplified – or been dumbed down, imo – for a far larger, less literate readership.

Lynn Hall had changed again. This time she showed me how her secret wood devoured it, in a monstrous tangle of root and vine that wove into its stones and massed across its gaping roof. Past and future and the timeless wood scattered broken pieces of themselves within two rooms. Nial Lynn’s marble floor lay broken and weathered by the years, even as his blood or Tearle’s flowed darkly across it. A curve of tree root so thick it must have circled the world had pushed through the floor beneath Corbet’s table...
Much plainer than Edison or Dunsany, yes, and yet no less part of Elsewhere
in the starkness of images like the broken marble floor and the flowing blood, here in service to the time-folding, reality-dissolving effect so common in McKillip’s work. Yes, Patricia McKillip again, this time from Winter Rose, Chapter Twenty-Three.
And now a particularly famous figure from modern fantasy who first appeared in the late ‘60s and returned in the 2000s, through his creator’s trademark mix of utterly everyday details and sudden, yawning vistas of unreality:
The leaves shook and the man came briskly down the ladder. He carried a handful of plums, and when he got off the ladder he batted away a couple of bees drawn by the juice. He came forward, a short, straight-backed man, grey hair tied back from a handsome, time-worn face. He looked to be seventy or so. Old scars, four white seams, ran from his left cheekbone down to the jaw. ( The Other Wind Ch. 1)

Yup, it’s Le Guin’s famous mage, Ged, in his (happier) old age. Now an almost poverty stricken dweller on the heights above Havnor, with a plum tree and some goats and chooks – chickens, to American readers – a handsome old face, and the four scar marks that invoke his first mortal struggle in the magical world.
In this quote everything looks deceptively simple. Until you begin to analyse the subtle, resilient rhythms of the prose, and the almost invisible patterning of assonance and alliteration. If Edison is the High Priest of Ornament, Le Guin is the Mistress of Understatement.

Further into the present, and not quite high fantasy, here’s a very good Canadian writer doing urban fantasy at its most attitudinous. It’s from The Second Summoning, a world where Keepers use their magic to maintain the fabric of reality against determined incursions from Hell, below, but sometimes, accidentally, from Heaven above. In this one, a street evangelist is confronted by a currently humanly-embodied angel (read the book for the full outrageous details):
“Greenstreet Mission. We’re doing a Christmas dinner. You can get a meal and hear the word of God.”
Samuel smiled in relief. This, finally, he understood. “Which word?”
“What?”
“Well, God’s said a lot of words, you know, and a word like it or the wouldn’t be worth hearing again but it’s always fun listening to Him try to say aluminum.” (Ch. 7)
But, I hear you muttering, where are the famously gritty and dourly “realistic” masters like George R. R. Martin? OK, I confess. I loved Fevre Dream, years ago, but the Thrones books feel to me like a fantasy version of Stephen King’s gross-out followers. It’s not realism I find in Martin. Perversely, it’s like King, a “gritty fantasy” gross-out.
When it comes to gritty, I’d sooner go with another prize-winning contemporary woman fantasy writer, and the opening of her first book in the “Chalionverse”:
Cazaril heard the mounted horsemen on the road before he saw them. He glanced over his shoulder. (Lois McMaster Bujold The Curse of Chalion Ch. 1)

The well-worn track behind him curled up around a rolling rise, what passed for a hill on these high windy plains, before dipping again into the late-winter muck of Baocia’s bony soil. At his feet a little rill, too small and intermittent to rate a culvert or a bridge, trickled greenly across the track from the sheep-cropped pasture above. The thump of hooves, jangle of harness, clink of bells, creak of gear and careless echo of voices came on at too quick a rhythm to be some careful farmer with a team, or parsimonious pack-men driving their mules.
It’s not over-gritty – yet. Before the end it will go beyond gritty to grotesque, to appallingly realized unrealities, like Cazaril’s demon-pregnancy, but here the only signals are in the landscape. The natural fallacy. Bleakness in the meager messy surroundings foreshadows Cazaril’s own plight, penniless, dressed in rags, with crookedly healed fingers and a back thick with flogging lesions, creeping like a beggar toward his last hope of sanctuary, after a life of war, siege and the galleys that have left him only the knowledge of “how to prepare a dish of rats.”

I meant to end with a tour de force from the grand master of modern fantasy, who in one book can do all the shades of tone and voice from chatty children’s book to King James Version mythology, with epic and romance and comedy and tragedy in between. But I’ve traveled too often already in the realms of Tolkien, so I’ll stop here, with the grit under Cazaril’s sandals, only one of my particular favourites among fantasy’s more than fifty shades.

* * * * *
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012. “The Honor of the Ferrocarril” is forthcoming in Gears and Levers 3 from Skywarrior Press, and “Spring in Geneva,” a novella riff on Frankenstein, is projected to appear from Aqueduct Press in August 2013.

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Carole McDonnell: Shades

This month's blog tour is called Shades of Fantasy -- a perfect title, I think. Because what is shading, exactly?


There are shades of evil, shades of humanness, shades of power, shades of the psyche, shades of power, shades of spatiality, shades of time, shades of intelligence and different kinds of intelligences, shades of sexuality and gender, shades of cultures, shades of life and non-life. Each shading can bring us closer to the darkness in the universe or in humanity. It can also bring us closer to the light.

Depending on the writer, any of these shadings can be explored. A good fantasy book will show its reader so many shadings of its theme that the book and its issues will forever linger in the reader's mind. For better or for worse or for all the shadings in between.

*****
Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her first novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/

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Deborah Ross: Fantasy –A Long View of the Gritty, and Hope for the Numinous

At first, I thought the current fashion of dark, gritty fantasy – fantasy noir – is just that, a recent shift in popularity, like the explosion of angsty teenage vampire stories. If we take the long view, it’s an established variation in a much larger genre. Historically, fantasy’s appeal was as tales of wonder, from Homer’s Odyssey (a “tall tales” story if there ever was one) to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Scary things certainly do happen in these stories and much is at risk, but the tone is elevated and the sensibilities are distinctly romantic. I suspect that one reason movie-goers who loved Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and found the novels unengaging was the somewhat old-fashioned “epic” level of prose, very much in line with the mythic tradition Tolkien is so much a part of and yet foreign-sounding and artificial when placed in the context of contemporary “realistic” literature. In this, Tolkien’s work has much more in common with Beowulf than with The Dresden Files.

Spooky stories like the early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk (1796), the works of Edgar Allen Poe or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) approached the fantastical as other-worldly, making no pretense of portraying the seedier side of everyday reality. In Germany, Gothic fiction was called Schauerroman (“shudder novel”), in the sense of a delicious fascination with the macabre. Black magic, occult rites, vampires and ghosts, haunted castles, “the sins of the fathers,” Byronic heroes, ancient curses and the like pervaded these works.

Even stories that sought to balance supernatural elements and realistic settings could in no way be described as “gritty.” As time went on and literary tastes changed, the macabre or horrific elements shifted to include “explained supernatural” and psychological horror. What constitutes “realistic setting” has evolved from 18th Century drawing rooms to the streets and skyscrapers of modern urban fantasy.

Contemporary gritty fantasy, whether in an urban setting or not, has been influenced by the larger movements in 20th and 21st Century literature. The Cold War fostered the twin sensibilities of paranoia and impending disaster, giving rise to generations of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories. I don’t think Ann Radcliffe or William Polidori, or even Robert Louis Stevenson would have dreamt of the bombed-out cities, virulent plagues, social disruption, and ecological collapse that characterizes modern dystopic fiction. Taking this thought a step further, I see the transformation of the zombie from a figure in voodoo religious rites to yet-another-monster to the victim of an epidemic, to one of hordes that walk the streets and break down doors, infecting everyone they bite, with all the attendant end-of-the-world you-will-be-eaten-next tropes. As a person who remembers the McCarthy Era, I see a chilling parallel in the underlying themes of contagion and loss of humanity. In this way, what we see in gritty fantasy today, particularly the dystopic and urban flavors, reflects the fears rampant in recent history.

At the same time, although it has occasionally fallen out of popular favor, epic fantasy, whimsical fantasy, fantasy that echoes spiritual or religious themes of hope and redemption, not to mention beautiful magic and romance, has not gone away. I think readers (and writers!) respond to the optimism and portrayal of courage, loyalty, and imagination in these tales.

I first got the idea for my own epic fantasy trilogy from a series of short stories that were published in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress series. I love horses and was intrigued by the cultural clash between the Romans with their cities and disciplined infantry, and the nomadic horse peoples of Asia – the Scythians, Sarmatians, and others. I wondered how these two very different cultures might give rise to different systems of magic as well as different military strategies. One story (the first one being “The Spirit Arrow” in S & S XIII) wasn’t enough! I fell in love with the vast reaches of the steppe, the nature-based religion of the nomads, the lore of horses. This isn’t so different from what Tolkien envisioned in the Rohirrim of Rohan, although I came at it from a different historical context. As one story followed another, “Rome” deepened and became less of a monolithic enemy and more of a culture to be admired. In order to create the complexity of conflicts necessary for a work of novel length, I added an ancient city-state, guardian of the magical devices that once protected the living world from the forces of chaos. All this was background for the real story, the adventures of a handful of characters as they make their way through this world, each with her or his own goals and follies. I was off and running with The Seven-Petaled Shield. The first volume comes out in June 2013.

Hosted this month by Carole McDonnell:

This month the Travelling Fantasy Blog Tour discusses Children and Fantasy. It's my topic because this is the month my book The Constant Tower comes out. Although there is one adult POV in the novel, I think of Constant Tower as a young adult book because YA often deals with the fear of loss, the desire to please a parent, and other stuff that childhood nightmares, hopes, and fears are made of.

Fantasies and Fairytales often begin with a story about children or youths. Whether or not, the child grows into adulthood during the course of the story, one can be sure that the hero's life has been affected by some great trouble in his -- or his parent's-- past. Trauma abounds in fantasy, and a novel that is conspicuously empty of children, childhood trauma, family issues, childhood betrayal just doesn't feel right. And a fantasy peopled with only adults (and without backstories or flashbacks) feels unreal.

That said, a story decides where to put children, and a story decides if it is going to be a YA story or an adult story. Childhood has its own fears; youths has its fears and wishes; adults fears, wishes, and regrets. An adult story containing children needs to deal with the child's fear/desire for its own safety. It must identify with a child’s awe, powerlessness, or ignorance and the adult's response to that -- even if only in passing. A writer of an adult fantasy has to write from a child's viewpoint at one moment, and from the adult viewpoint at another.

In my opinion, the two most important aspects of children are: their need for a loving, guiding parent and their childlike -- often irrational-- way of looking at the world. But these two aspects of children are rarely shown in a realistic manner.

Offhand, I can only think of books like A High Wind in Jamaica, and Henry James "Turn of the Screw" where the child mind has been shown in its terrifying un-adult worldview. When the thought-life of children pop up in some fantasy stories, we usually end up with characters like the sister of Paul Atreides in Dune, kids so prescient that they are turned into wizened psychics. And children are generally not allowed to be too needy because in worlds where heroic stuff has to be done — childhood has to be amended, unless the helplessness of the child aids the hero/heroine's maternal streak. Generally, teen angst in fantasy spurs the main character onward. There are rites of passages, vengeance, and journeys to begin.

In fantasies, kids are often freed from their bad destinies by going on a journey or they are pulled out of perfect Edenic homes and thrust into a cruel world. (Of course there are stories such as George MacDonald's "The Day Boy and The Night Girl" where the children aren't aware of the limited worldview they've been given by traumatized well-meaning parents.

But what if the Edenic world they were pulled from was not as perfect as it was supposed to be? Or what if they are unable to runaway? What does one do with that? And what if there are no adults around? Then the control of events is in the hand of a youthful character who is learning/discerning truths as he goes along.

The fantasy writer who writes about youthful characters must be both adult and child throughout the writing of the book. The adult reader will have to watch events with both a child's eye, and an adult's eye, perceiving disasters the child has yet to understand. But at the same time, the adult reader will encounter her youthful self and perhaps reconnect to her own forgotten childhood innocence. At the same time, a child who is reading the fantasy must learns and discern along with the youthful character. Perhaps he should know a little more than the main character in some things, and a little less in others. But at the end, there should be hope for both the youthful character and the youthful reader. . .whether the hero has had his adventure far from home, or whether he -- like those in my novel, The Constant Tower-- was forced to stay at home and endure.

Other writers speak on this topic below:

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Fantastic Children
by Warren Rochelle

Children in fantasy, or children and fantasy or children’s fantasy—those seemed to be the three likely variants of this month’s topic for the Great Traveling Fantasy Roundtable Blog. Hmm, but what about fantastic children—children with magical powers? Such gifted and special beings do show up in children’s fantasy—and they are definitely children in fantasy—and, I would argue, they might also be the children that the children who read children’s fantasy yearn to be.

I certainly did. After reading The Chronicles of Narnia in third grade (and since reread many, many times), I wanted to have conversations with animals, go for morning rides in forests on the back of a centaur, saying hello to rabbits and squirrels who said hello back. But the Pevensies, for all that they becomes the Kings and Queens of Narnia, and manage to “clean up the messes made by adults,” are still English school children (Ford, Companion to Narnia, rev. ed., 2005 140). So is their cousin, Eustace, and so is his friend, Jill. They know magic is real; they can recognize it by its feel, but they are not magical.

I so wanted to go to Narnia—okay, I still want to go to Narnia, but I wanted to be not just around the magical—I wanted to be magical. I can recall running on the playground in the sixth grade, at the ripe old age eleven or twelve, and running, running, and thinking if I just kept running, and with the right wind, that I could spread my arms, just like a plane, and fly.

I know, I know, fantasies of flight are not unusual. We all dream of it, often literally. And it is those children—the ones who can fly—that I want to consider here, the children in fantasy who are fantastic, the sons and daughters of the fey, the young witches and warlocks. I want to take a closer look at the fantastic children in two novels: the four of my own, Harvest of Changelings, and Harry in the first installment, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. There are quite a few others, of course, such as Will Stanton of Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, the Princess Eilonwy in The Prydain Chronicles, and the young Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea.

In Harvest, none of the four—Jeff, Russell, Hazel, and Malachi— know they are magical in the beginning. The slow awakening of their magical abilities, such as flight (of course), teleportation, and being able to call up a wind or start a fire, comes as a surprise to all of them. This awakening becomes part of the personal growth and struggle and identity crisis of each of them—a coming of age, as it were—and is a dominant theme in the novel. Each of the four are already outsiders: Jeff and Russell are both learning disabled and survivors of abuse; Hazel is unusually gifted and has been raised by indifferent grandparents; and Malachi is marked as different by his size and appearance, and his intelligence. Learning that they are magical thus further sets them apart, even as it expands their notions of just how the world really is. They are no longer of the mundane. Their specialness is also that of mission, of quest—they discover that there are things they must do—that only they can do. They are chosen ones, and they must confront evil.

These same patterns—and no, I didn’t do this on purpose—are easily discernible in Harry, who when we first meet him on 4 Privet Drive, is an outsider, living under the steps—not “normal” as his aunt and uncle profess to be. They are Muggles—mundanes—Harry, like his parents, is not. He is a wizard and like my protagonists, has to learn what this means and how to use these inborn powers deliberately and with intent. He, too, has to grow into his abilities, and this, too, is a struggle of identity and growth, a coming of age, of growing up. He, at least, can do this in a world where magic is acceptable, that of Hogwarts Academy and the rest of the wizarding community. Harry, “the boy who lived,” is, of course, the chosen one, fated to be the enemy of the great evil of Rowling’s universe, Voldemort.

Will Stanton turns out to be “the last of the Old Ones, immortals dedicated to keeping the world from domination by the Dark . . . [and] the force of the Dark is rising.” Another chosen one. So is Ged. The still-all-too-human protagonists of these stories, as magical as they are, still have all the frailties and foibles and fears that are part of childhood, of growing up, of being human. And yet, they have been chosen for great deeds. Grails await. The Pevensies are also apparently chosen—they fulfil an ancient prophecy; their rule restores the kingdom. Any unusual abilities seems only to come after death (but that is another essay).

It can’t be coincidence that I could also describe Jesus as a child in much the same way.

So, what is going on here with these gifted, fantastic children? Is it an inherent power of this great myth of the gifted, the chosen, the sent? Is this, as C.S. Lewis argues, an affirmation of the truth of the Christian myth? Or, is this wish fulfillment? Could these stories be an attempt, through metaphor and myth, to explain the truly gifted, such as Daniel Tammet, the autistic savant with his seemingly magical computational abilities, his unbelievable memory? A plot device? As our heroes learn to use and understand their magic; so does the reader. They ask the questions to understand what is happening, and so the reader comes to understand as well.

I think the answer to all these questions is yes. I think that when we encounter fantastic children—gifted, magical children—in fiction, and when we tell such stories, we are trying to explain what can’t be explained—the mysterious wiring of Tammet’s brain, the mysteries of religion—the mysteries of anyone who is given great abilities and the time and place to exercise them. As the heroes grow, so does the reader.

I still wish I could fly. I still want to go to Narnia.

***
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street” was published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012).
http://warrenrochelle.com

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Children and/in Fantasy
by Sylvia Kelso

There’s always been a strong link between children, or the idea of children, and modern fantasy: partly through the juvenilizing of fairytales – Grimm’s collection were domestic rather than fairy stories – and partly through the tacit but powerful view that fantasy is the opposite of rationality, and hence something left behind, when, as St. Paul wrote, “a man” will “put away childish things.”

This is largely a view beginning with the Enlightenment, but fantasy has still had its English defenders, beginning with Coleridge, and moving on of course, to that T-man, with the ground-breaking 1930s lecture “On Fairy Stories.” Tolkien conflates fantasy and fairy story, and valorizes both, but predictably, he has to confront the “childish challenge” before he can defend the power of faery for adults.

Children AND fantasy is thus something of a default setting: as Tolkien noted, not all children are either enchanted by or even comprehend fairytales. Even Lewis Carroll can fail notably with children, beginning with me. I only read the Alice books with appreciation once I cd. identify the wicked parodies, eg. of Wordsworth, recognize the chess game moves, and understand the nonsense. As a child, I found the whole deal not only bewildering but at times outright menacing.

Children IN fantasy tends to branch out from this default connection. Being considered the rightful audience, children, it seems, are easy for adults to insert as characters IN fantasy/modern fairytales. Children are, perhaps, taken not only as the rightful audience, but thanks to their supposed readiness to accept the unreal, as fantasy’s best audience. As flow over, their presence in the text, especially as pov characters, not only offers a viewpoint child readers can readily accept, but their acceptance of the unreal events presumably makes such credence easier for children outside the text. And partly, of course, modern fantasy and fairy tale stories were once, mostly written FOR children.

Modern fantasy starts around the turn of the 19th century, almost as a descendant of imperial romance (think Rider Haggard) and ghost stories (think Sheridan LeFanu.) Andrew Lang, Lord Dunsany, and perhaps most importantly, George McDonald, whose books span both adult and child audiences, seem to be the founders of the form.

In contrast, modern children’s fantasy starts about the same time as modern children’s fiction, sometime in the middle of the 19th Century. One of the earliest and most illustrious examples is Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, which is not a fairytale, but is most certainly fantasy, and as a child, a beautiful illustrated edition had my whole-hearted allegiance.

As I recall it, Water Babies was notably clear of the problems that beset later children’s fantasy. One such problem emerged as my mate Natasha Giardina wrote her PhD thesis, on the transmission of ideologies through children’s fantasy; this was the uncertainty of the narrative voice. Adults until after WWII still seemed unsure how to write for children. For example, does the narrator try to speak as an omnipotent pov to children? (Yes, very often, cf. the asides in The Hobbit.) Does the quasi-adult voice work? (Not very comfortably, no.) Does the narrator try to enter the child’s view point? (Occasionally, and not all that well, in pre WWII texts like The Hobbit. The one exception I can think of is Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books. ) Worst of all, does the author, without or without using the narrator’s voice, attempt to preach? That is, to impress on the child reader, consciously or unconsciously, the morals, and more worryingly, the ideologies of the adult world?

The answer to the latter was a resounding Yes, hardly surprising, since none of us can completely escape our culture and world-view, but very uncomfortable for the analyst, when such world-view includes racism and sexism – evident even in the Harry Potter books – as well as religion, as in the famous case of the Narnia books. In contrast, such preaching rarely occurs in adult-aimed fantasy. It seems a lasting adult assumption that children, even when reading for pleasure, have to be taught.

So children in fantasy may represent not only the primary audience, but also the work’s target, in moral and ideological terms: that is, what happens to child characters, what they learn or fail to learn, do not “simply” provide amusement, as for an adult reader, but are powerful socializing tool. “It’s only a story,” in a dismissive tone, with implicit rider, “and a kid’s story, what can it matter?” is one of the silliest assumptions ever made. To the child, lacking adult experience against which to test the text, it’s a manual for the world ahead, and what that manual says can be easily be swallowed whole.

In adult-directed modern fantasy, children are not central characters, for the simple reason that a child protagonist instantly shift the story to the Children’s or YA category. Children here are, at best, appurtenances – or perhaps hindrances – to the main characters. It’s a rare female fantasy protagonist who has even born a child, let alone takes one around with her. I can think of only one novel, Pat Wrede’s Caught in Crystal where the protagonist does actually take children on a Quest, and I can’t think of any male fantasy protagonist who does so. Some of them do have children, but usually these are shuffled off to the side, or hurriedly grown up to take a bigger part in the story.

Most often, children with any important role in adult-aimed fantasy are those familiar characters, the youthful prince or princess who is a pawn in the power struggles of one or more kingdoms. At times they are befriended, protected, guarded, or their causes promoted by the adult protagonist or other characters, but they themselves have little part in the action. In Patricia McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow an orphaned ducal heir fulfills this role, and the main male and female characters largely act in his interests. Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End does better, by growing the abducted infant princess up in the course of the story.

Tolkien, of course, had the best of both worlds with the hobbits. Their view point is central to both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they are no bigger than well-grown children, and they can behave like children, particularly in Pippin’s case. Yet they are in fact adults, and longer-lived than humans – thirty-three, not twenty-one, is the age for hobbit maturity. So Middle-earth remains a domain where children’s wonder and innocence in the face of the unreal are central for readers of all ages, and a domain that both child and adult readers can enter without worrying about publishers’ categories. (Though I wouldn’t introduce the Black Riders in Book One to any child under ten, myself. )


Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.

Welcome to Part 18 of the Traveling Fantasy Round Table, a roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature! Today, I join Andrea Host and Sylvia Kelso join in discussing mythical creatures.

Andrea K Höst

What makes a mythical creature?

Let me tell you about the darati.

Twice the height of a tall man, but very narrow, they dwell in birch forests: their pale mottled skin providing a natural camouflage, while the trunks offer them support and shield them from winds which might knock them from their feet. Darati are patient hunters. They stand, and they wait, usually near water sources, or bushes heavy with edible berries. When prey comes within reach, they exhale a thin mist which disorients and makes drowsy. There is no future for any who fall asleep at the feet of a darati.

Now, let me tell you about dragons.

Your reaction to that second sentence is the difference between fantasy and myth. Darati are not mythical creatures, but rather fantastical ones. They have no weight, and the word 'darati' is as thin a conjuring as the creature I spent the last few minutes creating. No creature I will ever invent could hope to bring with it the tidal wave of association, the almost contemptuous familiarity, the endless flood of possibility in the statement: Here be dragons.

Beautiful, dangerous, villainous, munificent, terrible, transformative. Are dragons rivers, or greed or dinosaurs? Yes, they are. Dragons are thousand stories, old and new. A mental image imprinted into the common id. A different image, perhaps, particularly as you move from one culture to the next, but a word with an almost unrivalled strength. It was not so long ago that dragons were as real as elephants.

Here be dragons. A phrase used on maps. A deliberate conjury not of the unknown, but of myth. Here, the mapmaker suggests, might exist those things that we have all heard of, but are not here, within the bounds of this map. Beyond the borders of the known world live not unspecified ideas of monsters, but all the ones the stories have told us are out there. This outside area is where the mermaids, the rocs, the pegasi enjoyed something resembling existence. The darati never lived there.

The choice to use a mythical creature in a fantasy is a double-edged sword. There is an immense, immediate emotional and intellectual reaction to the word – the idea – of dragon. But this reaction can range from "I love dragon stories!" to "Not another dragon story". Readers will bring their pre-established idea of what a dragon is to the story, and compare your story to all the other stories about dragons, and ask if you're doing anything new – or be disappointed when Your dragon is not Their dragon. And your dragon will never quite be 'yours' either, because it started from a base template of myth built up by your own experience of dragon stories.

There are, of course, more obscure mythical creatures. I came across a new one to me when researching the Food in Fantasy topic, and discovered the Cinnamon Bird. More obscure mythical creatures will perform their conjury only for the select few who have heard of them, but even so they have a certain something extra. So why use the darati? Why invent from scratch creatures whose name performs no conjury, whose existence lacks the resonance and power of myth?

Perhaps simply because all myths had a beginning, a first time that tale was told. There's always room for another story.

Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue.
***
Sylvia Kelso

“Mythical” in this title cd mean, firstly, non-existent, including invented beasts, or secondly, beasts out of myth and legend, non-existent or not.

A fantasy writer inventing a beast naturally asks, Can I make this seem original? A fantasy writer looking to a legendary beast – a dragon, a unicorn - *knows* that s/he faces the answer given by one of Barbara Hambly’s vampires, when asked if they had ever tried to use other ways of getting blood: “Everything has been tried.”

And with the famous mythical beasts everything HAS been tried. Yet, perversely, if you do use/recycle one, yours will never be *quite* the same as every other version. If only because your writing style, hopefully in a good sense, is not like anyone else’s.

Way back in the last century, before I ever wrote anything that cd. be labeled fantasy, I did decide to write what I called a fairytale. It had only two parameters: It started with “once upon a time” and it had a monster/weird thing per chapter. At the time my brain was stuffed with enthusiastic research into antiquity and the second parameter was a cake-walk. Said “monsters” included an Assyrian hawk-headed god, a chimera, of sorts, a serpent oracle, a couple of Gilgamesh Scorpion Men, and, among others – a unicorn.

I did not actually think, how can I make this unicorn original? Nor did I rehearse all the versions I knew, right down from James V of Scotland’s famous “Fenced Unicorn” tapestry that I finally saw in Stirling Castle, a building replete with Scotland’s own heraldic beast. I didn’t even recall the airiest and most delicate of the modern sugar and good-magic incarnations, in Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Mine just came through the avenues of the story – written in longhand, omg – and – um – there it was.

At this point, Our Hero and his Faithful Sidekick (I was also very traditional about questers in those days) had passed the set-up stage, weathered their early tests and were facing Serious Danger Number One – Lost in Desert During Murderous Pursuit. Which had modulated to Lost in Desert in a Sand-storm. And:

Perhaps it was the thirst that made them heedless when the wind’s regular onslaught broke into veering gusts; and perhaps it was the thirst that hid from them the way the sand now crunched thin and hard under their feet; certainly it was the thirst, locking them into a stupor of endurance, which concealed Sweetwater’s true avenger until it was too late.

Two sand flurries had clashed, an eddy recoiling upon itself, and it came upon them through the curtain, so all they saw was a flash of solider, linearly moving white; all they heard was the crr-unch crr-unch of approaching hooves matched to the grunts of a galloping beast. Then something hit the mare’s right side with the impact of a new-fired cannonball.

The shock bowled her right off her legs and over the prince at her left shoulder, down in the sand beyond him with a great horse scream of pain and shock and fright. The overset prince caught one flash of milk-grey belly and thrashing legs as they arced over him; a sector of open sand; then at right angles to the rest a pair of white, driving hocks that plunged like a fired bow and were gone.

He was rolling in the sand, a snapped spear haft vertical at his elbow, Ervan and the bay a mist shadow beyond his feet. Beside him, all her side a flaring scarlet shield of blood, the mare was trying to get up. And beyond her the attacker had wheeled to complete the kill.

Ripples of silver hide glistened through the sand murk, slender steel muscles played above cloven yellow hooves. It had a horse’s head but a goat’s beard, a pure gold eye, cold and impassive as a surgeon’s, and from the silver forehead a length of gleaming, whorled tortoise-shell was levelled like a spear. The gleam was a lacquer of fresh blood. The goat’s chin tucked under as it trained its weapon on the fallen mare, the delicate hocks were flexing like tempered steel.

The prince struggled onto an elbow. As he did so he saw the pain and terror in his mare’s eyes, and suddenly the sand mist went a bloody, mottled red. His hand shot to the snapped spear. He wrenched it out and floundered up, yelling, “Come on!”

Though it came out as a mere cough the movement sufficed. The unicorn’s eye flicked. Quick as a great cat it changed aim in mid-career, leapt the mare with one feather-light spring and charged the prince.

He had dropped on one knee. Now he planted the other on the broken spear butt and leant it up and outward, gripping it in both hands. The blade was just above his head. He knew the haft was too short, he knew that even if he aimed true the unicorn would transfix him, and he did not care. He had forgotten all about the Quest. He knew only that his innocent mare was dying, and he meant to have her revenge.

The golden eye leapt at him, the nostril flaring like a great red rose. He heard its quick breath and somehow admired the splendid force with which its hind feet punched the sand. I shall die with honour, he thought, and dropping the spear point below the round ringed boss of the levelled horn, he trained it between the cushions of that sleek silver breast.

But suddenly a shadow sprang over him. Something flashed; there was a brazen scream, an axe-like clunk! A silver projectile hurtled past, a spray of blood drenched his face, and the swing’s impetus dropped Ervan on his knees beside the prince, yelling, “Got him! Got it! Look!”

Out in the fog the unicorn pivoted, a splendid, deadly javelin haft, rearing, beating the air with its forefeet, braying with rage and pain; and the prince saw what Ervan had got.

The horn had been lopped. Its point was gone, and the trunk played like a fountain, three or four simultaneous sprays of blood.

No, my unicorn wasn’t pretty, or in the least simpatico. I did hope it was powerfully vivid, menacing, and very definitely Elsewhere. But the creative unit, aka the Black Gang, were operating in their usual mode, right down to the lopped horn, which, like the heads of cattle I had seen dehorned back home in Australia, would spout not one but two or three jets of blood.

The BG’s nature emerged even more clearly at the Last Major Battle, a confrontation with the Scorpion Men which was going to be awesome, a heraldic swash-and-buckle, larger than life – in fact, mythical. Unfortunately, the Black Gang extrapolated the consequences of swinging a sword two-handed at a six-foot high monster while standing on an ice lake, and ye heraldry degenerated into an ice-hockey pile-up over a collapsed Rugby scrum.

The consequences were definitely catastrophic, but the actual event? Traumatic, ferocious, bloody. Yep. Mythical? Well, er – no. It seems if I do mythical, with beasts or anything else, it very definitely turns out nearly all my own.

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “The Honor of the Ferrocarril” appeared in Gears and Levers 3 from Skywarrior Books, and “Spring in Geneva,” a novella riff on Frankenstein, is projected to appear from Aqueduct Press in October 2013.
***

Warren Rochelle
Necessary Monsters

According to Jorge Luis Borges, “…there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster ..." (The Book of Imaginary Beings xii). It is what these monsters, the mythical beasts that populate the wild countries of the fantastic, might be necessary for that I want to consider briefly here. What some of the parts do they play in the tales we read (and write) of these countries—as necessary monsters are they symbol, metaphor? Archetypes of the monstrous, evil—or rather something more amoral, wildness, the uncontrolled?

For Le Guin, the answer as to what her dragons are necessary for might be, to all of these questions, yes, more or less. In a previous essay, “The Emersonian Choice: Connections between Dragons and Humans in Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle (Extrapolation 47.3, 417-426), I have discussed this at some length. Here, briefly, dragons and humans were once “all one people, one race, winging and speaking the True Language.” Some became more in “love with flight and wildness” and “Others of the dragon-people came to care little for flight, but gathered up treasure, wealth, things made, things learned …” (Le Guin, Tehanu 12). They become two people. Dragons choose to be; we chose to make. Dragons choose to be Nature; we choose to be active in Nature—and learning this, for both dragons and humans in Earthsea, becomes an essential act—for humans of being fully human.

Tolkien writes of the necessity of monsters in a different way in his famous essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics.” Originally a lecture, he took on the critics who wanted to downplay the “fantastical elements” in the poem. He argued, instead, they were the key to the narrative, and the poem should studied as a work of art. In other words, Beowulf needs his monsters, his mythical beasts, Grendel and his mother, and the dragon. To be the hero he wants to be, he must have monsters to fight. He is the Good; they are the Evil. He, to be a hero, must fight evil.

To return to Le Guin, she argues, in her essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” that not only must the hero, the Good Guy, have monsters, or Evil to fight, but that good must not just fight evil, it must embrace it—“this monster is an integral part of the man and cannot be denied …” (in Language of the Night 56). The dark, the monster, “The shadow is on the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind” (59) and if we are to live “in the real world, [we] must admit that the hateful, the evil, exist within [ourselves]” (60). We are the monsters, the mythical beasts.

But, are all mythical beasts monsters, are they all dark emblems of evil? What of unicorns? Surely these mythical beasts are not malevolent. Well, it depends on the story. According to A Natural History of the Unnatural World, unicorns are “fierce, wild and untameable by nature,” but “[they become] meek and gentle with [their] young and in the presence of human virgins” (78). In the Thurber classic, “The Unicorn in the Garden,” the title beast is indeed untamed, but it is not tearing up the garden, rather it is “cropping the roses.” It eats the lily from the man’s hand. Gentle and wild, a “mythical beast”—and perhaps there, perhaps not. Perhaps here it is more about believing that such beasts do have a reality. But the man does use the unicorn to get rid of his wife; he does lie to the psychiatrist; he is not wholly innocent, no matter how justified his actions may seem to most readers (including this one).

Which brings me back to the beginning: necessary monsters, essential metaphors, living symbols. We are both dark and light, and the dark is integral to being human as much as the light. Yes, monsters are necessary and sometimes we find them in our myths. Sometimes we find them by looking into our mirrors.

Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012). His short fiction can be found in such journals as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, Forbidden Lines, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. He is at work on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction, in which all the stories have happy endings, sort of.

Please see http://warrenrochelle.com

Other Voices: Interviews with Guest Bloggers: Sylvia Kelso
January 15, 2014 at 10:05am

I would like to introduce my friend, Sylvia Kelso, Aurealis Award nominee, and author of Everran's Bane, The Moving Water, The Red Country, The Seagull, Amberlight, Riversend, Source, the Blackston Gold series, and her latest novella, “Spring in Geneva,” all of which are available via Amazon.

See more including sample chapters on http://www.sylviakelso.com/

1. How would you characterize your fiction? Are you writing to/for a particular audience or audiences?

Once I could have said, I think of my work as moral swords-and-sorcery – more emphasis on the ethics of using magic and might than on the tin-clashing. But though that fits even the unpublished Everran novels, the Amberlight series is more of an sf/fantasy genre straddler, and its focus is gender politics. And the Blackston Gold books you’d could only call fantasy crossed with time romance, adding a streak of mystery and police procedural, while “Spring in Geneva” is unabashed swash-and-buckle, with a dash of steampunk. Though like its close ancestor Frankenstein, it is concerned with the morality of science. Similarly, I suppose Blackston Gold is concerned with ecological morality. So maybe a concern with morality is the overall attribute. In my eyes, at least.

Once I used to try to write to an ideal fantasy reader who would get all the allusions and follow all the smart bits. Now, after a bunch of books and some very kind work-in- progress readers, I find myself concerned less with the target audience and more with anticipating clarity. Is this or that going to give a reader the correct meaning at first and perhaps only glance?

2. What writers have been major influences in your work and why?

In fantasy, Tolkien above all others, for the world-building detail, and the way LotR in particular conveys not only a living and loved landscape, but a sense of its long history.

Overall, Mary Renault, who could make dialogue mean more, and leave out more superfluous explanation, than almost any other novelist I ever read. But of course, writers collect something from everyone they read. It’s like spores off plants and flowers on your clothes as you walk past.

3. You have had some/or have some forthcoming work. Tell us about those and what your readers can expect. Continuing stories? New territories?

For already-out, 2013 was a good year for me, in short fiction. Two longer short stories written in 2012 both came out in 2013, along with “Spring in Geneva.” I was very happy especially because, unusually for me, all three were written not only in another time, but in settings I’ve never personally seen. I dislike generic settings of any sort, urban OR rural, so when I write anything set in “our” world, I like to visit the place: see the colour ranges, get a sense of the light as well as the layout.

With “The Honour of the Ferrocarril,” however, the Black Gang, or Creative Crew, decided we would write a steampunk vampire story set in the land of real vampires, ie. South America, and I ended up doing big research on the astounding 19th century railways of Peru, a place I have still never been. With “The Price of Kush” the same thing happened, only this time the setting was Africa, around 1500 BC. I was quite happy with the even larger amount of research, but more uncomfortable with second hand sources for the light values and the landscape, alas.

And for “Spring in Geneva,” which is set in 1818 and has the swash-and-buckle’s suitable amount of street chases, duels, and horseback road-hunts, I found myself working out streets in the Old Town of Geneva on Google, and hunting up Net images of the town. Thank goodness FOR Google, but all the same, I wd. have preferred to use my own eyes.

In oncoming work, in December I signed a contract for the 4th Amberlight book, Dragonfly, with Jupiter Gardens Press, who published its forerunner, Source. I was delighted because Dragonfly is in many ways the Amberlight novel nearest to my heart. Firstly, it’s a daughter-of, second generation story, so it fulfills one of my favourite writing itches, finding out What Happened After the Ending.

In Dragonfly’s case, it was 4 years after Source before the Black Gang had an answer to that. And said answer pushes the envelope for romantic relationships in a way still not much mentioned or accepted, even in these days of race, gender and sexuality awareness. That is, a relationship, as in Lolita, possibly too far across the age barrier.

It proved almost so for at least three of my work-in-progress readers, and I did quite a bit of micro-revision to keep the age difference but make it palatable before I sent off the ms to anyone. So for both those reasons I was very happy to have a contract for this one!

In current works-in-progress, I have two stalled novellas on the blocks, and now an invite to contribute a story to an anthology on “Cranky Ladies in History;” which has led to revising an entire old historical novel, that I think I’d now like to get published in its own right, at least after tinkering. But I’m very little further forward with the short story, alas. It may well prove to be new territory, if I only knew where.

4. What advice do you have for new and aspiring writers?

As I’ve said before, don’t quit your day job till your advance offer tops $500,000, and never say about a requested revision, It can’t be done.

5. Is there a question you wish you would be asked and if so, what is the question and what might your answer?

One I’ve been asked elsewhere, always helpful to writers, is:

Give me one thing you want readers to remember after they finish this blog?

To which my answer would be:
The names of those latest works? “Spring in Geneva” now, and, I hope, sometime in 2014, Dragonfly.

Sylvia Kelso

I was interviewed by Australian fantasist, Sylvia Kelso the other day and I wanted to share a link to the interview. We talked about writing, fantasy, audience, the process, and fairy tales and various things:



http://www.sylviakelso.com