Angela Carter

And then your portrait on the back

so neutral and complete

standing full-length

posed I don’t remember where.

Eyes sky black

you stood unsmiling

suggesting there were realer worlds within.

Your books dealt much in mirrors

which might have led me to suppose

that you were one yourself

and I’d step through the flimsy sheet

that held you to your words

and turn and, face inside your face,

watch the empty space where I had been.
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© Tim Jones

Published in Boat People, HeadworX, 2008. Reproduced here with permission.

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As I noted in March 26th’s Tuesday Poem post, I am currently running a series of poems in response to works of art, which will include a note from the poet. This week’s poem and note is from Tim Jones.

You can find out more about Angela Carter by clicking on her name and reading Tim’s note.

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Poet’s Note: from Tim Jones

“When I was younger, I went through phases of intensively reading the entire oeuvre – or as much of the oeuvre as I could lay my hands on – of specific authors.

One such author was Angela Carter (1940-1992), who is probably now best known for her late novel Night at the Circus, but whose earlier novels veered closer to science fiction. At a time when I was finding out about feminism, I found Angela Carter’s strongly but unconventionally feminist fiction both fascinating and challenging. The photo that made such an impression on me was on the back cover of The Passion of New Eve, her 1977 science fiction novel (though “science fiction” is a pale term to use to describe Carter’s lush, highly symbolic fiction) – and the poem reflects my fascination with the questions of masculine and feminine identity found both in this novel and throughout Carter’s fiction.

I get the impression that Angela Carter’s fiction isn’t as well known or widely read twenty years after her death as it deserves to me. If you’d like to know more about her and her work, check out this Scriptorium profile of her by Jeff VanderMeer, or this shorter 2006 profile in the Independent (UK).“

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About the Poet:

Tim Jones is a poet and author of both science fiction and literary fiction who was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Among his recent books are fantasy novel Anarya’s Secret (RedBrick, 2007), short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008), and poetry anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press, 2009), co-edited with Mark Pirie. Voyagers won the “Best Collected Work” category in the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards, and has been selected for the “Books On New Zealand” exhibition at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair. Tim’s most recent book is his third poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained, published by Interactive Press (IP) in late 2011. He is currently working on his third short story collection and, with P.S. Cottier, co-editing the anthology The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, to be published in 2014.

To find out more about Tim and his work, visit his blog, Books In The Trees.

To read 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.

UK/AUS/NZ

With the mass market edition of The Gathering Of The Lost recently published in the UK, I’ve been re-posting a few of the features from last year’s Blog Tour.

Today’s post is one of my favourites and was also the final stop on the tour, with the wonderful Kate Elliott, author of the Crown of Stars, Crossroads, and now Spiritwalker Fantasy series.

Why a favourite? Because it deals with world building, of course—and world building, as much as magic, defines the Fantasy genre, as I shall argue below. 🙂

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“Building Fantastic Worlds—“It’s A Mystery”

Over the past few weeks, at various stops on The Gathering of the Lost blog tour, I have discussed a number of facets of the story, including environment, war, romance, friendship, history, adventure and writing strong women characters. Yet all these aspects could equally well apply to any writing genre, from contemporary realism to crime to historical fiction. The element that really distinguishes FSF, especially when a story departs from this-world-as-we-know-it, is world building.

But how do compelling and intriguing worlds come about—the ones where arguably the world is as much a character as any of the personalities that appear within the story. Logic suggests there ought to be a formula, one any aspiring world builder can follow so that adding two and two will result in—hey presto—a fantastic world. Right?

Rather than an enthusiastic and positive “yes,” my initial response is more cautious. There are certainly ingredients that distinguish the worlds that have really seized my imagination. For example, an extreme physical environment dominates Ursula Le Guin’s Winter in “The Left Hand of Darkness,” as it does Frank Herbert’s Arrakis (“Dune”) and Robin Hobb’s Rain Wilds (The Live Ships series and now the Rain Wilds Chronicles.) But before we can go “extreme physical environment: check,” we have to consider worlds like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The landscapes are reasonably diverse, but not extreme, yet Middle Earth has retained its place in our collective imagination for nearly sixty years.

When thinking about what makes the world stand out, I find myself coming back to Tolkien’s layering of myth and history in Middle Earth, which results in a sense of continuity beyond the present adventure. I also return to the strong association of “culture” with each new landscape: hobbits and the Shire; the differing elven cultures of Rivendell, Lothlorien, and Mirkwood; the dwarves of Moria and ents of Fangorn, the human societies of Rohan and those of Gondor. At one level many of these groups comprise separate species, but they are also distinct cultures; the way they both shape their world, and are shaped by it, reflects those distinctions.

Culture plays a vital role in defining Le Guin’s Winter and Hobb’s Rain Wilds, too, as does the historical and legendary continuum on Dune. So—a distinctive or extreme physical setting with a layering of myth and history, and/or culture. Perhaps some building blocks for creating fantastic worlds are emerging here.

But although the latter elements also form part of Catherynne M Valente’s Palimpsest, and to a lesser extent China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun, they pale beside the sheer imaginative creativity of both worlds: the piling of the bizarre onto the weird or downright whacky. Another building block, right—only now the author has to juggle physical extremes with those of the fantastical and it would be very easy to drop any or all of the balls. Easier still if one begins to consider Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking Glass worlds, which are based around playing cards and chess, or Paolo Bacigalupi’s future-dystopian Thailand where it is the vision of technological and bio-engineered genetic change that defines the world and compels the reader’s attention.

So how do the disparate elements that may—but don’t necessarily all, or always—comprise FSF world building get pulled together to create the worlds that absorb our attention and colonise our imaginations?

My short answer, culled from the film “Shakespeare In Love”, is: “It’s a mystery.” Because the actual answer seems nebulous and probably unsatisfactory—that the essential ingredient is a spark that leaps from the writer’s imagination, to the writing on the page or screen, and from there to the reader. In fact there is no formula able to guarantee that the necessary spark can and will be struck.

In terms of the “how to” employed by different authors, I suspect there are as many approaches as there are writers. Some will plan and design extensively in advance, while others allow the world, like the characters, to evolve as they write. My own world building is a mix of the instantaneous, the unexpected vision of a world or character that leaps into being, followed by the evolutionary—where the world unfolds, a little like a map unrolling, as the characters encounter it.

The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick

In terms of The Wall of Night world the first concept began long ago with a vision of a twilit, wind blasted environment garrisoned by keeps illuminated with inner light. Yet as to what lay inside the vast strongholds like the abandoned Old Keep of Winds—that knowledge only came when the storytelling began and the first characters actually went there. The world building evolved through their experiences: what each character saw, heard, smelt, touched—and was also touched by—and tasted, as well as her or his curiosity or need to learn what they did not already know.

Yet surely—you may argue—the world already exists outside the characters’ experience of it, in the author’s mind for example. And to an extent it does, in my case because of that first vision of the Wall of Night. Conversely though, the southern realms of Haarth, which come to the fore in “The Gathering Of The Lost” (The Wall of Night Book Two), and the romance of the road that stretches “from Ij to Ishnapur” evolved through the unfolding story, not via prior planning. Ursula Le Guin, in “Steering the Craft,” talks of the creative process in terms of ‘pulling ideas out of the air’—so perhaps the world of Haarth was there in the ether all along, waiting to be discovered. But after that initial flash of discovery, I had to begin the process of writing in order to explore its realms, cultures and frontiers.

I am forced to conclude that world building does contain an element of mystery. I can check all the boxes—yet still that vital spark may not be there. It occurs to me though, that I do not look on any aspect of storytelling as box checking. So perhaps that is the vital spark: whether manifesting in an instant or evolving over time, the worlds that I pull from the air have colour, texture and depth. In the moment they appear they are real. And although by no means assured, that sense of reality is the key to ensuring a world is also real on the page—and may become real for the reader as well.”

“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear.”

~ Freya Stark, 1893-1993

To find out a little more more about the fascinating Freya Stark, click on her name.

On Thursday I posted on “Five Books That Changed Me”, one of which was Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless In Gaza.

In the interim, someone remarked to me, “What an odd name for a book.”

To which I began to reply, “It alludes to…”

And someone else present put in, “The Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah, of course.”

“Ye-es,” I said, “ultimately. But the more direct allusion is to the poem by John Milton, Samson Agonistes, which includes the phrase: “Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him//Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves …”

So the book title alludes to the poem, which retells the biblical story—which together made me reflect that one of the elements I love in literature is the way a story may have added depth through allusion of this kind to preceding works, whether it is prior works of literature, or sources such as the Bible, or—as is often the way in speculative fiction—to myths and legends.

So long as they’re out of copyright, of course… 😉

The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth series features locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth.

This week the series continues with places that begin with the letter “B.”

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Black Tower: fortress and original ducal palace in Caer Argent, said to date back to the Old Empire; located in the Southern Realms of Haarth.

.

‘“‘The  island of Emer,’” Malian murmured, knowing that this foothold in the Argent had been the dukedom once, during the troubled centuries that followed the Cataclysm, when war had surged back and forward across what was now Emer. Control of the island with its command over the river and surrounding countryside had been one of the great prizes, but the Black Tower was an Old Empire structure and had never fallen… ’

~  from © The Gathering of the Lost: The Wall of Night Book Two; Chapter 35  — Caer Argent

I saw this question “oot thar” somewhere on t’interwebs and thought—what fun, I should do it on “…Anything, Really.” So here goes…

Five Books That Changed Me (Warning: This Is not An Exclusive List!)

CS Lewis’s “The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe”:

I still recall the sheer wonder and delight of that moment when, together with the character of Lucy, I first stepped through the back of a wardrobe and into a snowy wood, illuminated by a solitary lamppost—and a few moments later met a faun (at age 8 I had to look up what a faun was!) carrying an armful of Christmas presents. That moment sparked a lifelong love of fantasy that eventually inspired me to write my own fantastic stories.

Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”:

I was a precocious reader and so first read Pride & Prejudice at age 9—and again, still remember laughing out loud over Mr Collins’ proposal to Lizzie Bennett. I have reread the book many times since then and each time I discover a new layer of enjoyment, most particularly around Miss Austen’s acute and ironic eye for the frailties of human nature—and am impressed by the way her writing still “speaks” to us, two hundred years on.

Robert Graves’ “Homer’s Daughter”: 

I first read Homer’s Daughter somewhere in my teens and loved that not only was the central protagonist a young woman, but a young woman who was using her wits to survive in difficult circumstances—and better still, subsequently wrote/composed (according to the story) The Odyssey based on her experiences! I found this all seriously cool, especially the way Graves wove the threads of myth and the events in the later part of The Odyssey into a story that had a sense of real history—what I now call “legendary history.”

Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza:

We mostly remember Huxley for Brave New World, but I found  Eyeless in Gaza a defining reading experience. I struggled to come to grips with its disjointed chronology and unsympathetic characters, yet the narrative came together in the later stages to the extent that I still think it is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. And it certainly taught me that sometimes it pays to persevere, even with a work that may not initially appeal.

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness:

Another compelling read, one that opened up a new style of Science Fiction for me—not “space opera”, but serious speculation about the nature of space travel (eg juxtaposing the “ansible”, faster-than-light communication, with sub-lightspeed travel) and the nature of how societies might evolve with differing sexual, social and political absolutes, as well as the sociological-anthropological responsibility and vulnerability of the outside observer in an alien world. And did I mention—beautiful, spare, powerful writing.

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So there you are—that’s my first take on five books that changed me.

How about you: what are your five, (or initial five anyway), or even just one?

Recently, under Just Arrived, I posted on receiving an Advanced Reading Copy of Juliet Marillier’s first short story collection, Prickle Moon — due out this month from Ticonderoga Press.

I also talked about how I enjoyed one of the stories in the collection, Juggling Silver, when it came out in Tales for Canterbury in 2011, and re-quoted the excerpt I had used for the “A Peek Inside Tales For Canterbury” post series. You can read that Juggling Silver excerpt here.

As I also noted in the Just Arrived post, Prickle Moon contains 14 short stories, some previously published like Juggling Silver, but others—like the eponymous Prickle Moon and the final tale, By Bone-Light—written specifically for this collection. The collection also includes two non-genre stories, Letters from Robert and Jack’s Day, as well as a novelette, ‘Twixt Twilight and Water, that is set in the world of Juliet Marillier’s “Sevenwaters” series.

So what did I think? Well, I loved it, dear readers, especially all the genre stories—of which I think By Bone-Light might just be my favourite, not least for its fresh look at the fairytale character of Baba Yaga. I also very much enjoyed Prickle Moon, liking the way it wove considerations of class into Fantasy material, and found Twixt Twilight and Water “just right.”

As some of you may know, generally I am not a big short story reader, but I did find myself wanting to read the next one. These are magical, diverse, hopeful tales and I have to say, I was very impressed by Ms Marillier’s skill as a short storyteller: she never pitches her arc too high to deliver within the short story confines, or leaves the reader with that dissatisfied feeling that somehow part of the story is missing.

If you have enjoyed Juliet Marillier’s novels, and enjoy mainly Fantasy speculative fiction with a strongly Celtic but also romantic flavour, I am “pretty sure” that you will enjoy Prickle Moon.

The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery
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1. Taranaki (and cloud), Wanganui, 15 April 1986

Studying Aberhart, Cloudboy takes up a camera, empties land
of everyone except his mother, pictures the bare pathos of
what remains in photography, in black and white clouds.

2. A Pair of Godwits

Studying Palmer, Cloudboy wings his mother to canvas
desolate as a godwit’s flight; below cadmium sky, in oily air,
they nest until the pull of somewhere else – a cloud – rises
them to portray each other at the edge of the world.

3. Aotearoa – Cloud

Studying Albrecht, Cloudboy paints a shed of cloud
as solid as his mother’s nerves; inside, they draw,
eat, dance and sleep secure in the knowledge
they’ve sewn themselves into skin thin as white paper.

© Siobhan Harvey
Reproduced here with permission
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As I noted in March 26th’s Tuesday Poem post, I am currently running a series of poems in response to works of art, which will include a note from the poet. This week’s poem and note is from Siobhan Harvey.

You can find out more about the work of New Zealand artists Laurence Aberhart, Stanley Palmer, and Gretchen Albrecht by clicking on the artist’s name.

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Poet’s Note: from Siobhan Harvey

“An intregral part of our landscape, our sense of belonging, clouds continue to remain invisible to many. Parenting a child who, at 5 year’s old, became fixated with the firmament and the pictures he could unlock there, the manner in which so many other people disregarded the clouds was made apparent to me. At the same time, as my son charted (what became for him) the exceedingly fraught terrain of his first primary school, during which his nephology was viewed by peers and teachers alike as esoteric and divorced from the everyday, I realised that in cloud-watching my son had become something akin to the focus of his obsession. At 7 year’s old he received a diagnosis – ASD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder. That latter word, disorder, continues to feel like the true dysfunction to me, for many reason, not least of which is that when I took my son to the newly opened, newly renovated Auckland Art Gallery, we discovered his passion for the clouds replicated time and again in the photographs, paintings and imagery upon the walls. The cloud, we both understood then, is not the matter of dislocation or peculiarity, but the inspiration for and genesis of creativity, ‘The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery’ is part of a much larger body of nephological poems which I’ve written over the course of the last year or two and which, individually, like little clouds journeying hither and thither, have found homes in magazines in New Zealand, Australia, the US, England and wider Europe.”

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About the Poet:

Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011) and the book of literary interviews, Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010). She is also the editor of Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House, 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Asheville Poetry Review (US), Best New Zealand Poems, Five Poem Journal (Ned), Landfall, Stand (UK), Structo (UK) and Turbine 12. She was runner-up in the 2012 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (Aus), 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition, 2011 Landfall Essay Prize and 2011 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize (US). She has a Poet’s Page on The Poetry Archive (U.K.), here: Siobhan Harvey.

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To read 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.

UK/AUS/NZ

As you know, with the mass market edition of The Gathering Of The Lost recently published in the UK, I’ve been re-posting a few of the features from last year’s Blog Tour.

This post was first published on American writer Mur Lafferty’s blog and subsequently translated into French as well—but since Mur has subsequently revitalized her blog  it is now only available in English here.

Given it is also “Women in Genre” month, it seems particularly timely to re-post the article now.

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“Writing Strong Women in FSF & The Wall of Night Series

When The Heir of Night, the first book in The Wall of Night quartet, came out in the UK last year, its SFX reviewer remarked: “there’s no discussion or worthy treatise on why women are not just equals but head the Earl’s Honor Guard – they just are.”

Exactly! I thought—because if the society really is equal then its members won’t debate or question that norm, they will accept it as status quo. In the context of the story, the discussion or worthy treatise then becomes clear for what it is, an intrusion of the authorial voice. And it is probably one of my most strongly held beliefs that the purpose of fiction is to tell the story—if one wishes to moralize, argue, or instruct then that is the realm of the pamphlet and op-ed.

Conversely, one of the advantages of writing speculative fiction is that one can then actually speculate—for example, by writing a society where male and female are equal.

In terms of how women are often portrayed in FSF, I have felt for some time that the genre struggles to depict a diversity of female characters and particularly struggles with so-called “strong” female characters. Too often these are confined to the cardboard cut-out “butt-kicking chick” (aka the “kickass heroine”) or the “witch/adept/mage with superpowers”—and very often with a strong “romantic” or “sexual” element to the problems they encounter. 

All too frequently—depressingly so—these supposedly strong women prove incapable of saving themselves or resolving difficulties that their skills/powers should enable them to overcome. The resultant rescue remains the preserve of the warrior or mage love interest, or even the “precocious kid,” and the “strong” women characters turn out to be no more than window dressing, a lip service that fails to deliver when the chips are down.

There are notable exceptions, of course, strong and compelling warriors and mages of the stamp of CJ Cherryh’s Morgaine, Robin McKinley’s Hari, and Steven Erikson’s Tattersail. But several of the really memorable and strongest female characters I have read do not fall into either the mage or warrior camp. I was particularly struck by Dianora, in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, who is neither warrior nor mage—yet I found her utterly compelling simply because of her personality and strength of character. I also love Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts’ Mara of the Acoma (in the Empire trilogy) who must both outsmart and outplan her enemies to survive. Barbara Hambly’s Sheera Galernas is another whose strength derives from her personality and ability to inspire, organise and lead others, rather than from superpowers.

I believe the key to writing women characters who are truly strong, regardless of whether they are warriors, mages, or accountants like Daniel Abraham’s Amat Kyaan, lies in the word “character.” As authors, if we want our stories to work we must focus on writing characters who are credible and live for the reader on the page. Female or male, we are primarily writing personalities (i.e. also recognizing that not all Fantasy characters are human) and to “work” these personalities must be believable emotionally and in terms of their motivations. Also, when it comes to writing personalities, whether strong or weak, venal or honorable, each character’s development will be shaped by a combination of factors, including disposition, events, and the mores and values of the societies within the world.

In the opening society of The Wall of Night series, the reader does find strong women characters who are warriors and others who have superpowers, because this society, the Derai Alliance, is highly militarized and also traditionally characterized by its use of magic. (Before reaching the world of Haarth, which they are currently garrisoning, they had never encountered any indigenous populations with magic ability.) So it stands to reason, in a gender equal society, that women and men are likely to be prevalent in the ranks of both warriors and magic users.

In addressing character development within this context therefore, the primary question was not: “What kind of woman is this?” Or, “what kind of man is that?” But rather, what kind of personality is this? How does a particular character function within the society and the events that are playing out? What role doe she or he play in the story and the world?

Malian, the Heir of Night, has been trained from birth to lead her House and the Derai Alliance. The story could have lain in Malian being a weak and venal character, unequal to the task—but it doesn’t. Rather she is a person who believes in the Derai cause, with a strong sense of responsibility and duty, and a willingness to shoulder the decisions that arise from that. She also discovers that she has considerable Derai magic to draw on—but I believe it is her personality that makes her a strong character, not her powers.

Similarly, Asantir the Honor Guard captain is generally seen as a very strong character. At first glance, she is also a “kickass chick in chainmail.” As with Malian though, I see her strength as being driven in part by her role, but more by her personality. She is from the warrior caste, has trained as a soldier from birth, and is an adept in the fighting arts. But in a warrior society there are many people who fit that bill. Asantir stands out because she is both a tactical and strategic thinker—using both adjectives in their military sense—but also an inspirational leader, in part because of her abilities, but mainly because of her character. Asantir has authority because of who she is not just because of the position she occupies.

As reviewers and interviewers have identified, there are also other female characters who have less personal power or ability than Malian and Asantir, but still take their place in the story with authority because of their personalities and motivations. One example is the steward, Nhairin: once a soldier (although she would say an indifferent one) but lamed in action and fortunate enough to have found a different role within her warrior society. I don’t think she picks up a sword once in the course of the book, and has no superpowers, yet several readers have suggested that she is still a compelling character.

In The Gathering of the Lost, the newly released second-in-series, the action of the story moves away from the Wall of Night and the Derai, into the wider Haarth world. In the dukedom of Emer, famous for its heavily armed knights and long history of warring states, the society is more differentiated along gender as well as class lines. (Unlike Derai society, which is largely “flat” aside from the ruling Blood.) Emerian women from the knightly and noble classes do learn weapons—the bow, the short sword and the “lady’s pike”—because they live in a warlike society, but it is unusual for them to become knights. Consequently, having a young woman as a knight-in-training does occasion discussion amongst other characters. Magic powers are also little known in Emer, so the society offered the opportunity to explore courage, strength of character and equality outside of the tropes of “butt kicking chick” and “powerful witch.”

To conclude, I believe that writing strong women is all about writing diverse and true-to-life characters. So long as an author is focused on that, and on observing the nuance of human behavior and avoiding cliché and stereotype, then I believe she or he will write great characters, some of whom may be strong and inspirational women and men. Others may be weak, fearful, dishonest, vindictive, petty or self-serving—because that, too, is part of the gamut of human experience.”

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”

~ Saint Augustine, 354 – 430 AD