Right now I’m very pleased to finally be starting Brandon Sanderson’s Words Of Radiance, which is Book 2 in the Stormlight Archive series.

As you may recall, I loved the first book in the series, The Way of Kings when I read it in 2011, as reported on here, so have been looking forward to getting into Book 2 for some time.

I’ve also been re-reading Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree, which I loved as a teen — it’s great reacquainting myself with the story & deciding what it is was that spun my wheels as a young adult & whether it still all stands the test of time. 😉

How about you, dear readers? What is your book-de-jour and what do you like or not like about it?

“An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.”

~ Francis Bacon (the artist), 1909 – 1992

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To read the full article this quote derives from, check out Brain Pickings:

Artist, Francis Bacon, on the Role of Suffering and Self Knowledge in Artistic Expression

The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series has been exploring the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. In the series, each entry is accompanied by a quote from the books in which the place appears, currently either The Heir Of Night or The Gathering Of The Lost, or both.

Today, with the Winter Country, we have reached our penultimate stopping place for the great Haarth traverse. 😉

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Winter Country:  vast steppes in the north of Haarth, inhabited by the Winter People

“He still shivered, remembering how the wind had raged, hurling snow and ice across the land and driving his party before it, further and further from the Wall until they came to the boundaries of the Winter Country. Many perished before they got there and the Earl knew that all would have died if the Winter people had not taken them in.”

~ from © The Heir Of Night, The Wall of Night Book One: Chapter 15 — The Darkness of the Derai
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“The dream was thinning, Malian thought, the Keep of Winds and the Derai world withdrawing into the whiteness. She could hear the bluster of the wind over the Winter Country and smell the smoky interior of a Winter lodge. Yet still she lingered, unwilling to cross back.”

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Prologue

… in my back yard.

And it’s the very best. 🙂

The white wisteria in bloom

~ by Rebecca Fisher

Introduction:

Chuck ran for five seasons between 2007 and 2012, surviving the 2008 Writer’s Strike as well as the surplus of spy-related material that came out in the early-to-mid 00’s. It had plenty to contend with, including Alias, 24, Kim Possible and Spooks on television, and Spy Kids, Johnny English, Mr and Mrs Smith and Agent Cody Banks on the big screens.

For a while there, we all seemed to be obsessed with espionage-related entertainment, and though Chuck was a late-comer to the bandwagon, it managed to outstay all the competition; ending just as popular culture shifted its attention to emo-vampires and Sherlock Holmes.

Premise:

Charles “Chuck” Bartowski is a normal guy working in the electronics department of the local BuyMore. Average job, average friends, average life. Things wouldn’t be too bad except that he’s still hung-up over getting kicked out of university after his best friend Bryce Larkin framed him for cheating on an exam.

But then one day, completely out of the blue, Chuck gets an e-mail from Bryce. He opens it, and unwittingly has an entire database of government secrets downloaded into his head. (Just go with it). Turns out that Bryce was a rogue spy for the CIA, and the last thing he managed to do before his death was send a stolen file to Chuck’s computer.

Now every time Chuck sees or handles a random object that has a link to international espionage, he has “flashes” in which his brain downloads pertinent information about various criminals, assassins and terrorists. Yeah, it’s pretty much exactly what happens to Phoebe Halliwell on Charmed, except with super-computer technology instead of witchcraft.

Chuck and his two bodyguards. Guess which one he likes more.

Enter Sarah Walker and John Casey. The former is CIA, the latter is NSA, and both have been sent to retrieve what’s been dubbed the Intercept. Once they find out that it’s permanently lodged in Chuck’s head, they become Chuck’s undercover bodyguards instead – Casey as a sales clerk at the BuyMore, Sarah in the hotdog parlour across the road. And just to make things really interesting, Sarah poses as Chuck’s girlfriend to explain their near-constant togetherness.

Story:

Needless to say, you’ll need to suspend your disbelief if you’re going to enjoy Chuck. More Get Smart than Spooks, more James Bond than The Bourne Identity, this show has fun with the spy genre, infusing it with comedy, pratfalls, wisecracks, and romantic complications.

Chuck tries to be helpful.

Most of the obstacles faced come about due to Chuck’s fish-out-of-water experiences in the world of espionage, and thankfully the writers don’t feel the need to turn him into an instant expert. Armed with only his technological know-how and some sheer dumb luck, Chuck occasionally gets to save the day, though the real heroics are usually left to the professionals.

And though most episodes are standalone stories, a long-running arc is eventually introduced in which it’s revealed that there was a lot more to Chuck’s expulsion and Bryce’s betrayal than first appears…

Characters:

Zachary Levi carries the show as the sweet-natured Chuck, who is simultaneously delighted and terrified by the new direction his life has taken. Australian Yvonne Strahovski manages to combine Sarah Walker’s lethal efficiency with real warmth and vulnerability, whilst Adam Baldwin was a shoe-in for the role of John Casey. (He’s basically a slightly-less-psychotic version of Jayne from Firefly).

Chuck and Casey – this is how they usually interact.

It’s in the relationships between these characters that things are taken a bit more seriously. Chuck pines for Sarah, but she has a dark history of her own that’s gradually revealed over the course of show. Chuck’s relationship with his beloved sister, Ellie, is strained when his double-life starts interfering with hers.

Even comic relief characters such as Morgan Grimes (Chuck’s best friend) and Ellie’s boyfriend (nicknamed Captain Awesome because he’s good at everything) get their own moments of three-dimensionality.

Conclusion:

Chuck is tailor-made escapism for your average twenty-something male nerd, in which a shy and self-effacing everyman is treated to wild adventures and a gorgeous love interest, all because he’s just such a nice guy (seriously, that’s the reason Bryce sends him the e-mail that changes his life).

The show only just manages to edge itself into the “sci-fi” genre thanks to its use of the high-tech McGuffin in Chuck’s head, but as it’s filled with geeky pop-culture references and actors who have since become familiar faces in genre film and television, I thought it would be acceptable to include Chuck in this particular column.
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Next Time: Game of Thrones

I can’t believe I haven’t covered Game of Thrones yet!
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About The Reviewer:

Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com and her They’re All Fictional blog.

To read Rebecca’s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, as well as preceding reviews, click on:

Big Worlds On Small Screens

Day of Delivery

It wasn’t simply your name
or how it arrived at twilight,
a dream, somehow Jungian,
instinctive and ancestral.

It was my whole day:
a journey, a crossing,
a boy who appeared
and forgot to check
for danger. A thrash of brakes;
the way the boy slipped
beneath my silver bonnet;
the way I was emptied
of breath: this was a landscape
as uneven as the beginnings
of motherhood.

And the way the boy reappeared,
unscathed, smiling, moments later
and ran away: this was a window opened
on a newly decorated room, the paint drying,
a cot emptily expectant, a mobile waiting
to play its music, and a woman
in a chair rocking herself to sleep.

(c) Siobhan Harvey

Reproduced here with permission

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As I said last week, fine poems should be read and heard more than once. So I’m continuing with my current series, relooking at poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010. Siobhan Harvey’s Day of Delivery first posted here on March 20, 2012, and also included a “Poet’s Note” that had evolved from an earlier “Poet’s Corner” email feature that I ran for a year or two. I reinclude it here:

About the Poem: The Poet’s Note—

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry,” W. B Yeats

While compiling a first New Zealand poetry collection for publication, my life was consumed by the wrangle I conducted with myself. I needed to row, deliberate and re-examine a lot: which poems to include; which to discard; which to edit and how; which to write from scratch. ‘Day of Delivery’ is a poem which falls into the latter category. Compiling the poetry collection, it became clear that I needed to write ‘Day of Delivery’ because it would maintain the themes of family and ancestry which underpin the book, particularly the section, ‘My Son and I’ in which it’s placed. In truth, however, it’s a poem which I’ve struggled with wanting and not wanting to write ever since the experience behind the poem occurred 6 years ago. In 2003, while driving along the undulating Tripoli Road in Tamaki, Auckland and with the afternoon sun low and strong enough to nearly blind me, a boy ran out in front of my car. I put my brakes on, but not before the child disappeared under my bonnet. I can still feel the panic I experienced, exacerbated as it was by the certainty that I’d killed somebody. As I fumbled to open my door, however, the child reappeared and ran away. Dramatic and surreal perhaps, but it took on extra, poetic intent because that happened to be the first day I instinctively knew my son was going to be born. Since, my mind has fused the two events, and so the poem attempts to balance the near death of the mysterious boy with the coming life of my son. Even as I write this, I know the reason I long disputed the need to pen ‘Day of Delivery’ lay in the fact that its grave confessional – that I almost killed another human being – would be inextricably entwined with its completion. That internal argument ended once ‘Day of Delivery’ was written, and there was release in letting it out into the world.” 

— Siobhan Harvey

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Siobhan Harvey is the author of, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014), which was winner of New Zealand’s richest prize for poetry, the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Also recently released, with Harvey as co-editor, is Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House NZ). Her other awards include runner up in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition, runner up in 2012 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (Aus) and runner up in 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition. Her work has recently been published in Books Unbound, Evergreen Review, Pilgrimage (Colorado State University Press), Segue (Miami University Press), Stand (UK), Structo (UK) and the New Zealand Poetry Society 2014 anthology, Taking Back the Sky. Her creative nonfiction has been published in magazines in New Zealand and America, and is a finalist in the 2014 Landfall Essay Prize, as well as being Highly Commended in 2013 Landfall Essay Prize, and runner-up in 2011 Landfall Essay Prize. Between 2006 and 2013, Harvey co-ordinated New Zealand’s National Poetry Day. She lectures in Creative Writing at AUT’S Centre for Creative Writing, and has a Poet’s Page on The Poetry Archive (UK), here: Siobhan Harvey.

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To check out the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

credit: Patty Jansen; reproduced with permission

The recent “blood moon” (full lunar eclipse) of October 8, together with this wonderful photo taken by Australian writer, Patty Jansen, got me thinking about the importance of the moon in Fantasy.

Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain immediately sprang to mind, because a significant feature of the book is the red moon:

“In the cleft between the peaks there was a glow like fire. As they watched the moon rose, and with a shock of horror and disbelief the children saw that it was red.”

I tend to think of Red Moon and Black Mountain as Kids/YA fiction because I first read it at that age and two of the three protagonists are definitely “junior”, but I understand it was published as adult Fantasy back in the day (1970-1.) It also won the Mythopoeic Award in 1972, perhaps not surprisingly since the Award is for works that best exemplify “the spirit of the Inklings” and I have always felt that Red Moon and Black Mountain owes a considerable debt to both JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Having said that, the story also has its own distinct voice, especially in Oliver’s story arc amongst the Khentorei of the plain. I really enjoyed the story when I first read it and still have my 1982 Unicorn edition. (The cover is really cool, too, but I couldn’t find it on the web.) If interested, Erin Horáková posted a great retrospective on TOR.com in 2013, which you can read here:

Forgotten Classics: Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain

Another Fantasy for younger readers where the moon is a pervasive influence is Alan Garner’s The Moon of Gomrath(first published 1963), in which the Old Magic is also moon magic—a power that Susan, one of the two main characters, gets caught up in:

“She has ridden with the Shining Ones, the Daughters of the Moon, and they came with her from behind the north wind…”

Isn’t that wonderful and mythopoeic? Later Susan learns more of her power:

“…this is moon magic and we wear a part of it.” She held out her wrist, and Susan saw a white bracelet there. “Our power waxes, and wanes: mine is of the full moon, the Morrigan’s is of the old…You are young and your bracelet is the young moon’s. Then you can be more than the Morrigan, if you have courage.”

As you may have picked up from the Morrigan reference, The Moon of Gomrath references magic from the Celtic cycle and like its predecessor, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and Elidor (which I discussed here before, in Encountering Fantastic Worlds), was one of my favourites as a Junior reader. I know some reviewers found aspects of the story opaque and the magic very strange—but I loved it: not least, I suspect, because of Susan’s central role.

Still sticking with Junior fiction, a more recent work where the moon is central is Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets The Moon (2009), another Mythopoeic Award winner in 2010—although it draws on classic Chinese myths rather than those from the western tradition. Beautifully told, the book weaves a number of traditional stories into the tale of Minli, who goes on a quest-journey to find the Old Man In the Moon and change her fortune. Along the way, she is joined by a dragon who can’t fly and meets a number of friends and helpers, from an ox boy to a king.

The moon also features prominently in Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean At the End Of The Lane (2013), which won a British National Book Award and Book Of The Year in 2013, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 2014:

“Moonlight spilled onto the stairs, brighter than our candle flames. I glanced up through the window and I saw the full moon. The cloudless sky was splashed with stars beyond all counting. “That’s the moon,” I said.

“Gran likes it that way,” said Lettie Hempstock.

“But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full…”

“Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says its restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,” said Lettie.”

Hmm, I think there may just be something magical about that moon, and maybe about Gran, too—but no spoilers! If you haven’t already read this book, then hie thee and read it for yourself: I’ll be surprised if you’re disappointed.

“Until the sun dies and the moons falls…” Yes, indeed, not one moon but two are a—if not the—defining magical influence in Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song For Arbonne, but it is in The Summer Tree, the first novel in his Fionavar Trilogy (another tale that draws on the Celtic mythos) that a crimson moon rises at a vital juncture in the book:

“Above the eastern trees of the glade of the Summer Tree, there came the rising of the Light. And on the night of the new moon, there shone down on Fionavar the light of a full moon. As the trees of the forest began to murmur and sway in the sudden wind, Paul saw the moon was red, like fire or blood, and power shaped that moment to its name…Red moon in the sky on new moon night, so that the glade of the Godwood could shine and the Summer Tree be wrapped below in mist, above in light.”

Moon magic is also an important part of The Gathering Of The Lost, both in the defence of the hill fort in the earlier part of the book and later when Malian walks the path of earth and moon:

“The moon was a glowing, aqueous shield reflected in the heart of the pool as Malian stepped barefoot onto the moon track that stretched across its surface. The water from the cup had been cool fire, traveling down her throat, and now moonlight shimmered along her veins…she could see threads of power spinning out ahead of her. It reminded her of Yorindesarinen’s silver path through the Gate of Dreams, which Jehane Mor had called a ropewalk across vast deeps. Now Malian felt the rough strands beneath each footstep, even though her eyes told her that she was walking down into the water, descending to the heart of the reflected moon.”

So there you are, proof—if proof were needed—that the moon in all its aspects is an essential element of Fantasy.

And this is only a quick selection: I’m equally keen to hear your favourite instance of the moon and/or moon magic featuring in your Fantasy reading.

My 1 November post is up now on the Supernatural Underground — and my subject is:

Supernatural Couture!

Because…“In books, too, attention to couture detail is often part of the background fabric (he-he) of the storytelling.”

Enjoy the fun—and share your favorite costume either here, or there. 😉
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“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

~ Virginia Woolf

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I really like this quote;  I hope you enjoy it, too. 😉

The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is exploring the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each entry is accompanied by a quote from the books in which the place appears, currently either The Heir Of Night or The Gathering Of The Lost, or both.

Right now the series is traversing the great plains of “W”–which is also the final traverse of the series. Including today, there are only three entries left!

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Wildenrush:  a major river in its own right and tributary of the great river, Ijir
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“She had been dreaming deeply, reliving the rain-spattered evening five years before when she and Linden, the Spring singer of the Winter people, had walked into the River’s northernmost trading post on the Wildenrush and found Cairon of Ar sitting by the autumn fire.”
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~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 30 — The Welcome Cup