Thursday at WorldCon 2 - Space Telescopes, Filk and Fantastical Travel

As people mingled in the Odeon foyer, I overheard someone say "The dolphin communication was really good."

And I plunged straight back in (to a smaller screen) for A Million Miles Beyond Midnight, a presentation about the James Webb Space Telescope.
Bill Higgins is part of the Solar System Ambassador Program, and he started his talk by mentioning the history of astronomy in Ireland, with reference to the telescope named Leviathan which was built at Birr Castle in the 1840s by the third Earl of Rosse. This was exciting, because I've visited Birr Castle, on a family holiday when I was seventeen, and I remember seeing the base of the telescope in the grounds. In those days, it was all a lot more informal than it is now. While ambling around the gardens we got talking to an older lady with secateurs in her hands, who told us all about the great magnolia bush we were looking at. We realised later she must have been one of the family who lived in the Castle.
The talk was actually about an ambitious project for the future, though. The James Webb Space Telescope is named after the administrator who led NASA during the Apollo missions. It will consist of a 6.5m segmented mirror - and it might launch in 2021. All the components need rigorous testing, so the launch date keeps getting pushed back.
All the details are at www.JWST.nasa.gov
It's a collaborative effort with the Canadian Space Agency and European Space Agency, and the mirrors are made of beryllium with a gold coating - it's so big that it has to fold up to fit inside the nose cone of the launch rocket. It will be picking up frequencies into the infra red so it can "see" through dustclouds, and it should be able to look out far enough to see the light of the first stars in the universe, at 0.3 billion years from the Big Bang. It has to be kept very cold, about 40 degrees Kelvin, to work properly, and it will be deployed further out than any previous telescope, at the Legrange Point L2, a million and a half kilometres from Earth. That's well beyond the Moon, and this is why it's so important that it works first time - it's too far out to ever be serviced by astronauts. The Hubble telescope has had regular services, because it's in an orbit far closer to Earth.

After that I went back to the Convention Centre to queue for my wristband for the Opening Ceremony that evening. They had decided to issue wristbands to make it easier for people to get into the Auditorium without vast queues, and it did seem to work. It did mean that we were queuing outside though. There was some good natured discussion about this, and I remembered queuing for the check in at LonCon 3, where the queue was entertained by a filker with a ukulele. The song I remember was Who The Bloody Hell was Tauriel?, a critique of The Hobbit films. Then we had to explain to the volunteer marshalling the queue what filk was. "It was a typo," said someone behind me - which is true. Someone in the early days of Cons was typing the programme, and put 'filk' instead of 'folk', and the term stuck, for SF and Fantasy themed music.

I admired the DeLaurean parked at the entrance to the dealers' room as I made my first pass around, and then I headed to Liffey 2 for the Fantastical Travel Guide. The four panellists took on the personas of characters from their works to explain why anyone would like to visit their worlds - the festivals, scenery, historical buildings, sanitation - and the dangers to unwary travellers.
It soon became clear that three of the worlds had rich and varied cultures, one world was run by a god who was a little bemused by the antics of her humans, and one was really, really grim! For the sanitation question, for instance, he answered "We have swamps...." and for the question about food delicacies of the region, one of the other panellists said to him: "You're going to say stew, aren't you?" At which he suggested taking a rabbit that had been mutated by magical anomalies, adding lots of spices to the boiling pot - after which you throw away the rabbit and drink the spicy liquid!
For the question about interesting architecture, the god recommended seeing her city, which was built of a white substance which was definitely not bone....
The only panellist I was familiar with was Juliet McKenna, the others being a Polish lady called Karolina Fedyk (she was the god), a Frenchman called Lionel Davoust (the one with the grim world), Melissa Caruso and the moderator Marianna Leikomaa.

Memories of Ursula le Guin

There has been a lot of coverage of the death of Ursula le Guin over the last couple of days.
Here are my memories:

In 1973, I think it was, our school building was found to have asbestos in it, and was closed down until the asbestos could be removed. For a week or two, we were supposed to turn up at school at intervals to be given work to complete at home, but after a while it became clear that the work would take a long time to complete, and we were bussed to a redundant Victorian junior school at the other end of Salford - a rough area; we were warned not to linger on the pavement when crossing from the schoolyard to the bus in case we were beaten up by the local kids!
Because we didn't have access to our own school library, we got a temporary one, with books that did not appear in our own library. I read quite a few of these - and with three days to go before we moved back into our refurbished school building, I found The Wizard of Earthsea. It was this one:

Acutely aware of the deadline before I had to give it back, never to see it again, I read the book in every spare moment. I practically lived in Earthsea, only emerging to do whatever was essential before I plunged back in again. Even now I only have to close my eyes and see the old classroom where I was reading on my knee while eating my packed lunch - and feeling totally immersed in that magical world.

Pretty soon after that I found The Tombs of Atuan - and I could navigate the labyrinth perfectly, just like Arha, in the dark.

The Farthest Shore gave me nightmares of that low wall over which the dead pass - but also showed me the importance of living well, unlike the people Ged and Arren met on their journey, who had given up and were waiting to die.

A couple of years ago, the BBC adapted The Left Hand of Darkness and the first three Earthsea stories on radio, and I got that same thrill as when I first read them.
I haven't seen any of the film adaptations - I don't really want to....

As an adult, I discovered The Dispossessed and The Word For World is Forest and The Left Hand of Darkness, as well as the Hainish stories and some of the Orsinian Tales, and her additions to the Earthsea saga.

I have only been able to read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas once.

One birthday, my mum presented me with a thick book, saying that she knew I liked this author. It was Always Coming Home, and was possibly the best birthday present she ever gave me, considering that she thought my reading tastes were a bit weird.

More recently, I've read her blog posts in the Book View Café blog, so Ursula le Guin has been a part of my reading background for most of my life. I was very pleased to see her honoured by the literary establishment, as well as her many SF and Fantasy awards.

Most weeks, I go to an acoustic music session locally - there's singing, but also poetry reading and other readings. I often perform something when a famous person has died - if a TV star, I'll sing the theme of their TV show, for instance. For Ursula le Guin, I found a quotation which has been doing the rounds of Twitter and Facebook - the one that finishes: "I'm going to go unbuild walls."
It seemed to go down well.

The Shannara Chronicles - end of the season

Okay, so the fairly subtle hints of a previous age of technology on the world of Shannara turned into a fully fledged ruined city and a civilisation probably destroyed by nuclear war - presumably the races of elves, gnomes, trolls etc. began as mutated humans.
And our heroes stumble upon a place called Utopia, where humans are preserving what they can of ancient technology, such as the ability to produce electricity. The scene where they showed film clips of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was hilarious! Of course, any place like that, seemingly so perfect on the surface, must be hiding a Dark Secret.... (I was reminded of that vacation planet at the beginning of the original Battlestar Galactica, for instance).
On the whole, the series was fun, with a twist I wasn't expecting at the end, and with a few loose ends left should they ever want to do a second season.

The Shannara Chronicles

I paused in my epic rewatch of the Avengers - there's only so much early 1960s TV I can take in one go - to have a look at the Shannara Chronicles series that my Young Man brought down for me to watch.
I'd heard that it was being made, but I never really got into the books, so was only mildly interested to hear that a TV series was being made.
So far, I'm quite enjoying it. It helps that two of the older characters are played by really good actors - John Rhys-Davies is the Elven King, and Manu Bennett (who was Slade Wilson in Arrow) is the Druid.
The younger characters are quite fun - there's a scene by a river where Wil (last of the Shannara family, so nominally the hero of the series) is about to go swimming, so strips off to reveal his manly chest (in fact, he reveals his manly chest quite a lot as the series goes on). Noticing the Elven princess watching him, he says: "Hey, what happened to 'eyes up here'?"
However, I'm now at about the mid-point of the series, and the Elven princess has almost been raped twice (once by the leader of the Reivers, who we're supposed to be rooting for later on) - rescued both times before it gets too 18-rated (though the box set is rated 15, with "strong violence, injury detail, sex").
Several of the characters seem to have met with Certain Death in the last episode I watched - so it'll be interesting to see which of them survive to complete the quest (which is to do with getting the seed of a magical tree to a certain place before the old tree dies and releases an army of demons onto the world).
The world of Shannara Chronicles is a bit more interesting than I remember from the books, as well - there are relics of a technological past in the background all over the place - an old fridge when Wil dives into the river, an ancient truck, a children's playground in the woods. So I'm assuming that this is a post-apocalypse world, which also explains the poison gas area they run into at one point.

Oblivion Storm by RA Smith

I met Russell Smith at a couple of EasterCons, and saw him speak on several panels, where he was interesting and amusing, so when I saw his book on a stall at EasterCon last year, I had to give it a go.
It says something about the length of my "waiting to be read" shelf that I've only just now got round to reading it!
I thought I was getting a Victorian mystery at first, with a plucky street urchin become heiress heroine....
and then we were in a modern tube station, where a different woman was being attacked.
From then on, the time line moved between the two, as the modern woman tried to regain her memory after the attack, and work out why someone was trying to kill her, and the Victorian lady appeared to her as a ghost, and went through her own adventure in her own timeline.
There's lots of action, maybe a little too graphically described for my tastes (but I am a bit of a wuss), so what I liked were the quieter moments where "Rose" worked out how to use the new supernatural powers she'd acquired to help ghosts move on. The scene with the ghost in the pub was very good. "Rose" also gets two fun sidekicks in the form of Kara the paranormal researcher and Jennifer, who has superpowers of her own.
But it all comes back to Grenshall Manor in the end, and the secret in the North Wing.

This is book one of a series, and I also have Book 2 waiting, which I'm looking forward to.

Dance the Dark Morris

I came across a picture of this morris dancing troupe on Facebook, and instantly thought of Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith, where the Dark Morris is danced to bring on winter.
In fact, this troupe is called Mythago Morris, after the book Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock - which is just as impressive! Mythago Wood, in the book, contains archetypes of legends throughout human history, and the deeper into the wood you go, the older the archetypes get.
This picture comes from druidry.org website, and shows them dancing at a Beltane celebration.
It's not surprising that they're asked to dance at Pagan celebrations - according to their website they base their dances around British myths like Herne the Hunter, the Green Man, the Rollright Stones, Ceridwen's Cauldron and the Knuckerhole Dragon. They're based in Sussex, and they dance in the Border Morris style.
It looks like great fun!

Earthsea on Radio 4

I've just finished listening to the last of the six episodes of Earthsea, and I was glad to see that all the first three of the books in the series were adapted. They were pared down to the essentials, but still had the power I remember from first reading them.
The Farthest Shore gave me nightmares about death. This time, it was just terribly sad to see Sparrowhawk lose his powers to heal the world.
There are short stories that Ursula le Guin wrote about Sparrowhawk, and I wish she'd written more of them. She created a wonderful world, and I was glad when she returned to it years after the first trilogy to turn women into dragons. But the first three stories were the best, and this was a very good adaptation.
I wonder what Ursula le Guin thinks of her character being given a Northern British accent.

Earthsea

I've been listening to Earthsea on Radio 4. To my delight Judith Adams, who adapted Ursula le Guin's story, has taken The Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan and mingled them together. Sparrowhawk and Tenar are telling each other the stories of their childhoods, so you get bits of both books put together. It's extremely well done, and I'm really enjoying it, so much that I think I shall have to revisit the Earthsea books very soon.

Engraved on the Eye

I like diversity in my SF - what's the point of leaving the planet if you're only going to encounter what you're familiar with already?
I'd heard of Saladin Ahmed, but not read anything of his, until I got a chance to download a free ebook of his short stories, called Engraved on the Eye.
There's quite a mixture here. It's fun to visit an Arabian Nights fantasy world for a change, and he also has stories set in a future Middle East, and a funny super villain story. There's even a Muslim Wild West story. I enjoyed them all, and will be looking out for his novels in future.
He has a website at www.saladinahmed.com

Goodbye Terry Pratchett

There'll be a welcoming party going on now at the Broken Drum.

Formative Images of a "Writer"

Kameron Hurley has written an excellent article over at Fantasy Magazine, at http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/new/new-nonfiction/language-and-imaginative-resistance-in-epic-fantasy/.
She's talking mostly about women writers and epic fantasy, but she also talks about how people form images of "cheese" or "police officer" or "nurse" from their earliest exposures to those things, and thereafter, everything cheese-like has to be measured against that first experience of cheese to see if it fits.
So, her first experiences of writers were of white men, and this affected how she thought about writers for a long time.
Which got me thinking.
I never had the thought that I couldn't be a proper writer because I was female, because most of the writers I became aware of as a child were female. Enid Blyton was a massive influence - as a child, I desperately wanted to be George from the Famous Five, and go camping in the woods with my faithful dog. I didn't have a faithful dog until much later in life, but George's dog Timmy was the reason I always wanted one.
Later, I discovered historical fiction through the medium of Rosemary Sutcliff, and to a lesser extent through Henry Treece and Geoffrey Trease - so I was aware that men wrote books, but I wasn't excluded because women wrote books too. The other great favourites of my early teenage years were Mary Renault and Mary Stewart.
As a Star Trek fan, I was aware early on that DC Fontana's first name was Dorothy, and that she had written two of my favourite episodes, Friday's Child and Journey to Babel. So women could clearly write good science fiction. Among all the Asimov and Clarke and Zelazny and Silverberg, there was also Ursula Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley and CJ Cherryh and Anne McCaffrey. And fantasy didn't just mean Tolkein and his many imitators, it meant Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain, too, and Gillian Bradshaw and Mary Gentle and Andre Norton.
Which makes it strange to me that a new generation of readers seem to be unaware of the women writers who have always been there in SF and fantasy, and who inspired me to write.

Learning Magic with PC Peter Grant

"Magelight or Magefire is so common among MAGIC USERS that it is probably what an APPRENTICE Wizard learns to do on his first day. The operator simply thinks, and a small ball of bluish or white light appears.... It is otherwise not good for anything much, but it would be nice to be able to do it."
So says Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land.
Peter Grant, the hero of Ben Aaronovitch's series beginning with Rivers of London, is a bona fide APPRENTICE Wizard - he had to take an oath and everything - and the first thing he learns to do is make a werelight, which is the same thing as Diana Wynne Jones' magelight. In his case, however, it takes him four hours of practice a day for a month before he can do it, and then he burns his hand the first time. He also has to learn Latin, because all the books of magic back to 1775 when Newton codified the practice of magic (in between inventing science and reforming the Bank of England) are written in Latin.
I like Peter a lot. The story is told in the first person, and he has a nice line in snarky comments that had me laughing out loud on occasions. He's also pretty good at being quick-witted in dangerous circumstances.
The other thing I like a lot about the book is The Folly - a sort of gentleman's club for magicians, though at the moment (for reasons at present shrouded in mystery) the only occupants are Peter, his Master/Inspector Nightingale, Molly the not exactly human maid, and Toby the ghost hunting dog. Charles de Lint has a similar big house with lots of unusual occupants (sometimes artists and sometimes more esoteric guests) in his Newford urban fantasies. I'd love to live in a place like that, with three libraries, and good food - I suppose the Tardis is another similar place (when you get beyond the console room to the library and swimming pool and so on) and Ben Aaronovitch has been a Doctor Who writer.
There's another Doctor Who writer who is writing a broadly similar series about police dealing with magical crimes in London - Paul Cornell, whose first book in his series is London Falling. He's also a very good writer, but I found his characters much less likeable, and the world they live in rather more bleak, than Rivers of London. Terrible things happen in Ben Aaronovitch's world too - people's faces fall off in graphically horrible detail, for instance - but there's a lot more humour.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Seattle in Fiction

There are many, many books and films and comics and so on set in London and New York, and many of them are great fun - but there's more to Planet Earth than that.
One place that hasn't been used as a setting all that often is Seattle.

In The Longbow Hunters, Mike Grell sent Green Arrow and Black Canary to Seattle to fight crime, rather than the fictional Star/Starling City. Apparently the proximity to the Canadian border was one of the reasons for the choice, opening up ideas for plots.

I next came across Seattle in fictional form in Wizard of the Pigeons, by Megan Lindholm. "It did not have much of a reputation for sunshine and beaches, but it did have plenty of rain, and the folk who lived there were wont to call it 'The Emerald City' for the greenness of its foliage." That's what she says on the very first page - which makes it an even more fitting place for The Emerald Archer to live. Even better, I see from the Wikipedia page about Seattle that it was also known as Queen City until 1982.
I like the way magic is presented in the story, and the threat to Wizard from Mir is serious enough to threaten the city. Wizard's friends Cassie and Rasputin are great characters as well. I was always sorry that there wasn't a sequel, but Megan Lindholm has gone on to greater things as Robin Hobb.

And then, from the end of the 1980s, there's Ishmael, the Star Trek novel by Barbara Hambly that sets Spock down in the middle of 19th century Seattle and the TV series Here Come the Brides (which starred Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father Sarek), and adds Klingons. Oh, and Spock's lost his memory. I knew nothing of the TV series when I read the book - I don't think it ever crossed the Pond to the UK - but I did enjoy Barbara Hambly's writing. There are all sorts of little references to other Western series and SF series tossed into the mix too, and it's fun to spot them. In fact, I don't think I ever did spot them all - but it didn't matter to the story; it just added local colour. Reading Ishmael led me on to the Darwath books (and one day I'll get round to the Benjamin January books). I have a vague memory that there was some sort of copyright problem with the use of Here Come the Brides, but whatever it was, it seems to have been sorted out now.

I gather that Seattle has more recently been the setting for several TV shows I haven't seen, like Frasier, so the city hasn't been entirely ignored. It looks like a nice place to visit.

Left-Handed Fictional Characters

I've been working my way through episodes of Babylon 5 over the past year. I'm now coming towards the end of season 5 - and I noticed something that hadn't caught my eye before. President Sheridan is signing a sheaf of papers before a meeting - and he's left-handed.
It reminded me that I had once belonged to a book discussion forum where there was a list being made of left-handed characters in fiction - but it's long enough ago that I can't remember what the forum was called.
I do know that I contributed to the list. One of my favourite characters in children's fiction was Drem, in Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff. He's a Bronze Age boy with a withered right arm, and therefore does everything left-handed.
I seem to remember that there was a character in one of the Darkover books by Marion Zimmer Bradley who was left handed, too - but she wrote so many Darkover novels that I'm not sure where I saw it now.
I'm not sure how much of a spoiler it is to say that a major character in Game of Thrones is also forced to become left-handed - but after that, my mind goes blank. The list I remember had a lot more characters on it than this, but googling has so far not been helpful.
In my own fiction, I wanted there to be a genetic component to the magical powers that some of my characters have, and also for the powers to be fairly rare, so I linked the powers to left-handedness. The characters are also allergic to cold iron, which gives them a disadvantage to go with their magical advantages over ordinary mortals.

Portal Fantasies

I've just been reading the blog of Phenderson Djeli Clark, at pdjeliclark.wordpress.com. On 11th September she was talking about her experiences of trying to get her novel published - an Egypto-Nubian fantasy with a word count that enabled it to be split into four separate novels, and with a lot of black female characters - the Daughters of Sekhmet sound like fun!
I sympathise greatly with her struggles with agents and publishers - but one of the reasons that was suggested for why the book was not taken up was that it was a portal fantasy.

Now, I spent many hours as a child sitting in my mother's wardrobe trying to get to Narnia, so I'm naturally in favour of portals to other worlds. That's why my own first attempts at serious fantasy involve portals. Some of my characters live in Hay-on-Wye, the secondhand booktown on the Welsh Borders (on the grounds of 'write what you know', as I've been working in bookshops in Hay-on-Wye for around twenty years now), but they have a whole other life in the fantasy world of Ytir - one that they're reluctant to return to, for various very good reasons.

Like Phenderson Djeli Clark, I toyed with the idea of setting my story wholly within the fantasy world, which involved a huge amount of re-writing - but in the end, I decided I wanted the Hay-on-Wye parts of it, dammit, and I was going to have them. Which involved even more re-writing to get it back to the shape it had before (though I hope rather better written after all that work!).* And, despite the kind rejection letters that told me I was almost there as far as professional publishing was concerned, I decided I wasn't getting any younger and I wanted the stories to be out there and available - which is why I went the Smashwords route.
She's had some supportive comments about the portals, so maybe they're not the liability they're thought to be.

*as David Gerrold once said: "Remember, the first million words are just for practice!"

Leafing Through My Mental Bookshelf

Dancing Beastie, who has the wonderful blog of the same name about life in a Scottish Castle, has been talking about writing, and how to decide what it is you want to write. She described it as "leafing through her mental bookshelf" for the books she loved - the books that she wanted to emulate when she wrote something.

My mental bookshelf has all sorts of things cluttering it up - but when I start thinking about it there are a few common themes.
One favourite writer, right back as far as the early 1980s, is Katherine Kurtz, author of the Deryni fantasy series. What I like about those is the way she blends fantasy with medieval historical detail.
For more historical detail, there's Sharon Kay Penman - who I love for all her books, but particularly the Welsh trilogy.
There's Rosemary Sutcliff, too - another writer who makes you feel that you're there, in the Roman villa or Bronze Age hillfort. She's also very good at dogs. There's a good dog character in nearly every one of her books.
And then there's Mary Gentle, who takes historical detail and fantasy and science fiction and archaeology and blends it all into one mad whole in her Ash stories - but it's a mad whole that makes glorious sense.
Finally there's Joy Chant, who wrote the wonderful Red Moon and Black Mountain, in which children from England slip across into an alternate fantasy world to fulfil their destinies, but in a way that is very unlike CS Lewis. When she was asked why she wrote fantasy, she said something along the lines of: "When I write, that's what comes out."
Which is pretty much what I find when I sit down to write, too.

Writing Magazine - "It must be magic"

The Writing Magazine does a regular column about writing different sorts of fiction, and this month the "Fiction Focus", by Margaret James, was on Fantasy writing.
Now, fantasy writing is something I think I know a bit about. I've been reading it since childhood, and trying to write it for about ten years. The article is a beginner's guide - but so disappointing, even when that is taken into account.

She starts off gradually, for those people who are not fantasy readers at all, with some examples of alternate history. Robert Harris's Fatherland is very well known, of course - but where's Harry Turtledove? He's written a lot more excellent alternative history than Robert Harris ever did.

Then Margaret James gets into the meat of the article. "There are at least three gradations of fantasy writing," she says, "from reality-based fiction, through to fiction which links our world to an alternative reality, to heroic fantasy set in an invented world in which not even the laws of classroom physics need apply."

For reality-based fiction, she mentions The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, which is based on a Russian fairy tale. All very fine - but where is Charles de Lint's Newford, for example?
She goes on to talk about time-slip fiction, with no examples of that sub-genre at all, so how about Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, a children's story set at a girls' boarding school? That story was so good it got onto Jackanory, the children's BBC series that read a book a week for many years. In fact, when I look at Goodreads, there is a list of 617 time travel stories, and just among the children's examples there is Moondial by Helen Cresswell, The Children of Green Knowe by LM Boston, and Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett, all of them made into TV serials. Or for adults, how about Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, or Tim Powers' Anubis Gates?

"As for stories set in both our own world and in a fantasy world, linking the two, the Harry Potter and Twilight series are the obvious contenders here," Margaret James says. But surely Twilight should go into her first category of reality based fiction set in this world only? And what about Narnia and the most famous wardrobe in all fiction, or Alice in Wonderland? Or for adults, Neil Gaiman's London Below in Neverwhere, or Guy Gavriel Kay, or Barbara Hambly's Darwath series?

And for heroic fantasy, she chooses Lord of the Rings. She says herself it's the "obvious role model" - but heroic fantasy has come on a long way since all those sub-Tolkien quests with Halflings, elves and dwarfs, and if a writer wants to start writing heroic fantasy now, they'd be better advised to read some of the more recent work. What about Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, or even Robert Jordan's immensely long Wheel of Time series, or Raymond E Feist, or Tad Williams, or Robin Hobb, or George RR Martin...?

Some of the advice she gives is good, however - but it doesn't just apply to fantasy. The reader has to be able to identify with the characters, even if they're in love with a sparkly vampire or three feet tall with hairy feet. "[We need] to believe we're reading about beings which share our human traits, both the good and the bad, and with whom we can empathise," she says, and later, "We need these stories because they explain us to ourselves."

If someone who has never written fantasy, but would rather like to try, takes this article as their guide, I'm not at all sure that what they produce would be publishable.

George RR Martin's Reading List

While fans of Game of Thrones are waiting for the next book, they often ask George RR Martin for recommendations of other books which are like the mammoth epic fantasy series.
I came across the list of 33 books that he has chosen on Huffington Post, and was delighted to see some old friends there:

No. 1 on the list is pretty obvious - it's Lord of the Rings.
However, it was No. 3 that made me go 'squee' - it's Jirel of Joiry, by CL Moore, the first fighting heroine in fantasy. She was wearing armour and beating up the bad guys long before Brienne of Tarth was a twinkle in her creator's eye!
Then there's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser - the barbarian and thief duo in the seedier quarters of the city of Lankhmar and beyond (and without Lankhmar, there would probably be no Ankh-Morpork). This series is by Fritz Leiber, and it's great fun.
Watership Down, by Richard Adams, made me stop and do a double take, but after you've got over the "But it's all about rabbits" stage, this actually does make a lot of sense - there are rabbit legends, different warrens with differing political systems, and complex interactions with other animals as Hazel, Fiver and the others struggle to establish their own warren.
A Wizard of Earthsea is another magical and detailed world, this time by Ursula K Le Guin. The classic Wizard School, with an archipelago of islands, dragons - and the white characters are these weird barbarians with a strange religion, who don't get on well with the rest of the islands.
Then there are a couple of Arthurian stories - the classic Once and Future King, by TH White, and Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff (one of my all time favourite children's authors). Another favourite children's author is Alan Garner, and The Wierdstone of Brisingamen is also on the list.
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake, also makes a lot of sense, with that convoluted and inward looking castle and a huge cast of grotesque characters.

He finishes off with some historical fiction, including classics like Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who wrote rather more than Sherlock Holmes stories), Nigel Tranter's Scottish history, Bernard Cornwell, the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser (being the further adventures of the cad and bully Flashman from Tom Brown's Schooldays, full of footnotes about the real history, and great fun).
Another favourite author, Sharon Penman, is mentioned for Lionheart (about King Richard, of course) but I think I'd recommend her Welsh trilogy Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning - that is, if a reader is prepared to spend the last 200 pages of the last book sobbing, like I did (partly because I knew the history, so I knew what was going to happen to the characters). But anyone who's been through the Red Wedding would be able to cope with that, I think!

So those are my old favourites - which makes me think it really is time to start tracking down some of the other titles on the list which I haven't read. The Lies of Locke Lamora has already been recommended to me as something I might like (it's by Scott Lynch). I've also read one or two of the Conan stories, and I keep meaning to get round to the Dying Earth by Jack Vance.
Lovecraft I might leave to one side, and I suspect that Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique is similar to Lovecraft, so not my glass of tea.
Daniel Abraham's name is new to me, though, and his book Shadow and Betrayal is mentioned. So is Patrick Rothfuss and The Name of the Wind. Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold sounds promising, too.
Then there's Thomas B Costain and The Silver Chalice, Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (I love Howard Pyle's artwork, and pirates. He also did illustrations for Robin Hood). Frank Yerby's Goat Song (about Ancient Greece) is next, though I think I prefer my Ancient Greece as told by Mary Renault.
Rosemary Hawley Jarman, with Crown in Candlelight, rings a faint bell - I may have read it once. I know I've heard good things about Stephen Pressfield - the Afghan Campaign is recommended, but one of his earlier books was Gates of Fire, about Thermopylae.
The Serpent Dreamer by Cecilia Holland is next - and it's nice to see a mixture of male and female authors on this list.
Then there's Sacred Band, by David Anthony Durham. It has a dragon on the cover, which looks promising. The Devil's Oasis is by Bartle Bull, and appears to be set in Egypt. And finally, there's the Iron King by Maurice Druon.

By the time I've tracked down all of those, there's a faint possibility that George RR Martin might have finished his series!

Alex Beecroft and LGBT Fantasy

I like to read blogs, when I'm not busy doing something else, and I have a long and ever changing list of blogs that I visit fairly regularly - about once every six or eight weeks. What I especially like is finding blogs that describe people's lives or interests that are different to my own, or which talk about my own interests (which are fairly varied) in an interesting way. Over the years, I've followed the blogs of gay men who knit, American Buddhists, several women priests and ministers, craft blogs, history blogs, writing blogs....and it was a writing blog that I was reading yesterday. This was the LGBT Fantasy Fans and Writers blog. Well, I'm a fantasy fan and writer, so that was my own interest, and I wanted to see fantasy looked at from a different angle.
That's how I came across Alex Beecroft, one of the writers of the shared blog.
It was the post about morris dancing that piqued my interest, and how dancing is used or ignored in fantasy novels. Alex Beecroft is a morris dancer, so she knows what she's talking about - and she posted a scene from one of her novels which talked about morris dancing and English folklore and wells, and I immediately wanted to know more. So I looked at the books she has written, and found the cover pictures for Bomber's Moon: Under the Hill and the sequel, Dogfighters. Bomber's Moon has a Lancaster Bomber on the front cover, and Dogfighters has a Mosquito fighter/bomber - fighting a dragon!
This brought a huge grin to my face without me needing to know anything else about the story. I love Mossies! I used to go to airshows when I was a kid, and I loved the World War Two aircraft. I've seen the City of Lincoln fly (the Lancaster) and the Battle of Britain flight with the Spitfire and Hurricane, and a Mosquito. I grew up watching films like 633 Squadron and The Battle of Britain, and the one where John Mills is a Lancaster pilot, and the Dambusters (this is in addition to the swashbucklers, of course - I'm sure anyone reading this blog is starting to get the impression that I was never a 'girly' little girl).
The thing to remember about the Mosquito is that it is a wooden plane. It's made of a wood frame with canvas stretched over it - and this writer has the pilot going up against a dragon. That speaks of extreme foolhardiness, or desperation - and I wanted to know more.
I bought Bomber's Moon yesterday evening, as an ebook, and I'm already up to chapter nine. The plot is intriguing - the main character's house has been attacked by fairies/elves and he needs protection, while the other main character's lover is trapped in the elven world, trying to get home. The characters are interesting - and I have no idea how the story will be resolved, so I'll have to keep reading! My guess is that it will take more than knocking down the new extension to Ben's house and putting some bowls of milk and honey out to appease these elves!

Oh, and there is also gay sex, which is not a subgenre that I had really looked at before. As a young teenager, I read several novels by Mary Renault set in Ancient Greece, where the main characters were gay - her Alexander the Great trilogy, for instance (and I remember reading The Persian Boy, the second of the trilogy, while hoping my gran didn't look over my shoulder to see what I was reading in case she was shocked!) But that's really been my whole knowledge of gay and lesbian literature until now, apart from Captain Jack in Doctor Who and Torchwood (in some ways I have led a sheltered life). In this book the main characters are gay men, but the romance goes alongside an action filled plot - it's just that the romance happens to be between the male characters. I'm not a great fan of slushy romance, so this was much more to my taste, and I can't wait to see how it will work out for them!

Welcome to Ytir!

This is actually my second attempt to have a blog dedicated to my burblings about fantasy, history, old Hollywood, historical re-enactment, and other things that make me happy but which have nothing to do with Hay-on-Wye, which is the subject of my main blog, Life in Hay. The first time I tried this, with Gateway to Ytir, it got infected with malware from a site I'd innocently linked to - publetariat. So I shan't be going anywhere near there again!

The main reason for this blog is that, like many others in the blogosphere, I am an aspiring writer, and you can find my fantasy novels Raven's Heir and Like Father, Like Daughter on Smashwords, as well as a free short story called Ice Magic. They can be found at
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149640 for Raven's Heir
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/177675 for Like Father, Like Daughter
and
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/209213 for a free taster of my writing with the short story Ice Magic.

Morwenna is one of the characters in my stories - a frail old lady who spends most of her time at the top of a tower overlooking the sea, talking to ravens and seagulls. She can control the Element of Air, and rules her lands of Ravenscar with a velvet glove over a steel talon!
I love writing about powerful old ladies!