Magic Time
Alchemy, or its consequences, first appeared in my fiction nearly four years ago in my novel, The Waiting Room.
In that story a present-day researcher discovers a ritual intended to return the dead to life. She sources its use to an alchemist burned for witchcraft in 16th century Germany. She suspects it might be Norse and quite ancient in origin. Then she finds evidence of its use in the early 20th century to restore life to a young soldier killed on the Western Front in the Great War.
Maybe I was giving alchemy a bad name, as I was later accused by some of giving paganism a bad name in Brodmaw Bay. But writing The Waiting Room did make me ponder on the time before the likes of Isaac Newton and what historians call The Enlightenment.
That was when science and magic started to become clearly distinct from each other. Science became a discipline, alchemy became a subject for mischievous dabblers who insisted on a stubborn belief in the power of spells.
I started to wonder what would become of a world where there was no Enlightenment. It's a world like ours, except it did not turn its back on the potency of magic in favour or pure science. Instead, discoveries in chemistry and physics complemented alchemical discoveries, allowing alchemy to thrive.
That's an important premise in my novel The Summoning, which is published in January. It presents a shadow world, the mirror-image of ours, where powerful magic has been allowed ungoverned through centuries of experimentation.
That's had some awful consequences for the shadow world. Which is one reason it has designs on ours. It's also a source of frightening power, which makes those designs difficult to combat or prevent.
The Summoning is my Young Adult debut and I know some people really object to the whole Y A classification, thinking it quite patronising, arguing that a fictional story is aimed at anyone who chooses to read it.
Fair enough. This is a grown-up story. It's protagonists have some awfully grown-up challenges to face. But the principle characters are 19 years old. And The Summoning is a novel in search of a younger readership than I would usually write for. I hope it finds that readership and I sincerely hope they're not disappointed with what they discover.
It's also the first novel in what is planned as a trilogy - another departure from my stand-alone writing past. Some stories take a lot of telling and when the fate of the world is at stake, this particular writer needs the space to explore and describe that gigantic conflict.
In that story a present-day researcher discovers a ritual intended to return the dead to life. She sources its use to an alchemist burned for witchcraft in 16th century Germany. She suspects it might be Norse and quite ancient in origin. Then she finds evidence of its use in the early 20th century to restore life to a young soldier killed on the Western Front in the Great War.
Maybe I was giving alchemy a bad name, as I was later accused by some of giving paganism a bad name in Brodmaw Bay. But writing The Waiting Room did make me ponder on the time before the likes of Isaac Newton and what historians call The Enlightenment.
That was when science and magic started to become clearly distinct from each other. Science became a discipline, alchemy became a subject for mischievous dabblers who insisted on a stubborn belief in the power of spells.
I started to wonder what would become of a world where there was no Enlightenment. It's a world like ours, except it did not turn its back on the potency of magic in favour or pure science. Instead, discoveries in chemistry and physics complemented alchemical discoveries, allowing alchemy to thrive.
That's an important premise in my novel The Summoning, which is published in January. It presents a shadow world, the mirror-image of ours, where powerful magic has been allowed ungoverned through centuries of experimentation.
That's had some awful consequences for the shadow world. Which is one reason it has designs on ours. It's also a source of frightening power, which makes those designs difficult to combat or prevent.
The Summoning is my Young Adult debut and I know some people really object to the whole Y A classification, thinking it quite patronising, arguing that a fictional story is aimed at anyone who chooses to read it.
Fair enough. This is a grown-up story. It's protagonists have some awfully grown-up challenges to face. But the principle characters are 19 years old. And The Summoning is a novel in search of a younger readership than I would usually write for. I hope it finds that readership and I sincerely hope they're not disappointed with what they discover.
It's also the first novel in what is planned as a trilogy - another departure from my stand-alone writing past. Some stories take a lot of telling and when the fate of the world is at stake, this particular writer needs the space to explore and describe that gigantic conflict.
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