Introduction:

I have been hearing the name of Rowena Cory Daniells for some time now, as one of the exciting new authors of speculative fiction to emerge out of Australia over the past few years. The Chronicles of King Rolen’s Kin was released in 2010. Her new trilogy The Outcast Chronicles (Solaris) is being published in August, September and October of this year.

But Rowena is no newcomer to speculative fiction: she has been actively involved since 1976 when she jointly set up small press publisher Cory and Collins, as well as being involved with the Aurealis Awards and the establishment of Fantastic Queensland.

You can find out more about both Rowena and her new trilogy, The Outcast Chronicles, below her guest post. But right now I am absolutely delighted to welcome Rowena to “…on Anything, Really” to share her thoughts on “Fantasy, the Poor Cousin of Science Fiction.”

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“Fantasy, the Poor Cousin of Science Fiction”

by Rowena Cory Daniells

It is time fantasy was rehabilitated as a genre?

I attended a literary event recently. When a librarian heard I was a fantasy writer, she said: ‘Oh, fantasy, that’s the sort of book you feel guilty reading. You know it’s bad for you, but you read it anyway.’ She went on to talk about readers who turn up at the library and have read all of the Wheel of Time and are looking for more series they can devour.  She was referring to the big fat High Fantasy books, so loved by readers.

And so despised by reviewers.

Everyone has heard the China Mieville quote: ‘Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious… He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader (Miéville, PanMacmillan).’ *

It should be said here that in the past if you were a writer, (with a publisher who was willing to publish your books) you wrote what the publisher contracted you to write and High Fantasy sells.

Nowadays, you can self publish and reach an audience. It may not be large, but there will be someone out there who likes your stories. Or you may strike a chord with readers and word of mouth will turn your book into a best seller. So the range of fantasy books available and the blurring of the genres is marching on at a great rate. Even back before technology opened publishing to the masses, people like Mieville (Perdido Street Station, 2000) and VanderMeer  (City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris 2001) were pushing the boundaries of fantasy.

Mieville did his PhD thesis on “Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law.” In an interview in Believer Mag he says: ‘I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.’

While Mieville sets out to entertain, the issues that concern him naturally creep into his work. Writing a book is a long process. The writer has to be passionate about the characters and their dilemmas.

I read somewhere that the role of the artist is to hold a mirror to the world so that we can see ourselves more clearly.  Sometimes there are truths we don’t want to see, even when they are presented in fiction. The strength of the science fiction genre is that it can hold a distorted mirror to the world and through this we can see more clearly because we are distanced from that which disturbs us.  I believe the fantasy genre can also serve as a distorted mirror to help us see ourselves.

Anyone who has read Terry Pratchett will agree this is what makes his books so powerful. Even as you laugh, you are groaning because his observations are so accurate.

Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser

Back in the 70s, when I had my book store, I discovered Fritz Leiber. I read everything of his I could find. One of Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories has stuck with me, thirty years later. It appeared in “Swords in the Mist” and was called Lean Times in Lankhmar.  Out of work and down on their luck, our two intrepid heroes have to take steady jobs. The Mouser becomes hired muscle for a thug, who shakes down priests. (What is delightful here is that the Mouser puts on a bit of weight and acquires a little pot belly that rests on his thighs when he squats down. I love this touch of humanity). Meanwhile, Fafhrd becomes an acolyte of an obscure god known as Issek of the Jug. Due to Fafhrd’s musical training, the god acquires a following and starts making money, which leads to conflict with the Mouser. The ending had me laughing aloud. It was a scalding commentary on organised religion.

Another writer whose books remain vivid in my mind is Mervyn Peake. His Gormenghast trilogy was so obsessively detailed that even now, when I catch myself slipping into obsessive details I think: ‘I’m getting a bit Gormenghast.’

What these authors have done is use the fantasy genre to comment on society. This is what I’ve tried to do in The Outcast Chronicles. It is still a ripping read, because I love a good story. I like to put my characters in situations that test them as people.  And I can do this in fantasy because I build my secondary world specifically designed to test them.

So I think it is time to embrace fantasy. It doesn’t have to be a guilty read. Let’s just enjoy the genre.

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(Disclaimer, I have not read every fantasy book ever written so I am sure to have missed some of your favourite).
*See an analysis of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies with Tolkien’s books here.

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About Rowena Cory Daniells:

Rowena Cory Daniells

Rowena Cory Daniells has been involved in speculative fiction since 1976 she set up the small press publishing house Cory and Collins with Paul Collins. Working as Paul’s assistant gave her an insight into the travails of Independant Press publication and a great respect for anyone who does it. Since then she has run a bookshop, then a graphic art studio where she illustrated children’s books, and had 6 children in 10 years. Then she sold nearly 30 children’s books and a fantasy trilogy. Her latest fantasy trilogy is with Solaris. With her husband, Daryl, she works in R&D Studios.

Rowena likes to support the writing community so has served on the management committees of Romance Writers of Australia, the Queensland Writers Centre, and the Brisbane Writers Festival. She was one of the founders of Fantastic Queensland (FQ) which runs Clarion South, and served on the Aurealis Awards for five years. She has established a national genre award, and set up national workshops and pitching opportunities, as well as running workshops on writing at national SF conventions, schools and libraries, and World Con 1999.

Together with Marianne de Pierres, she was a founding member of the VISION writing group which went on to form Fantastic Queensland. She and Marianne also formed ROR, the national critiquing group.

Rowena lives by the bay in Brisbane, with her husband and six children. She has studied the martial arts Tae Kwon Do, Aikido and Iaido, the art of the Samurai sword.

She has a Masters in Arts (Research) and received a Distinction in Drama Screen Writing unit through Griffith UNI. Currently, she is an Associate Lecturer at Qantm College.

To find out more about Rowena and her work you can check out her website, here, and her blog, here.

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About The Outcast Chronicles:

This series follows the fate of a tribe of mystics, the T’Enatuath. Vastly outnumbered by people without magical abilities, the mystics are persecuted because ordinary people fear their gifts.

This persecution culminates in a bloody pogrom sanctioned by the King who lays siege to the Celestial City, last bastion of the T’Enatuath.

A fantasy-family saga, the characters are linked by blood, love and vows as they struggle with misplaced loyalties, over-riding ambition and hidden secrets which could destroy them. Some make desperate alliances only to suffer betrayal from those they trust, and some discover great personal strength in times of adversity.

The first novel, Beseiged, is out this month, with Exile and Sanctuary following in September and October respectively.

To view the trailer, click here:

Christchurch SpecFicNZ-ers, plus award bling 🙂

Yesterday we had the first SpecFicNZ meetup we’ve managed in Christchurch for quite some time in the post-earthquake ethos of generally disrupted lives, and certainly significantly fewer places where it’s possible to hang out and have fun.

So it was good just to get together and talk about what we all love—speculative fiction (SF/Fantasy/Horror) in all its forms, including writing it which we all do. We also took the opportunity to celebrate some Christchurch speculative successes over the past few months including:

• KD Berry winning the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent, primarily for Dragons Away (Bluewood Publishing)
• Jane Higgins winning the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards’ Honour Citation (YA) for The Bridge (Text Publishing)
• and The Heir of Night winning the Gemmell Morningstar Award

And I think we all enjoyed seeing some of that bling on the Christchurch speculative fiction table. 😉

More importantly though, it was nice to re-establish a sense of being a community and decide to ‘do it again more often’ — we’ll be aiming for a regular first Saturday of every month get-together gig at Under the Red Verandah cafe, but watch the SpecFicNZ site for more details: or better still, join up and go on the email.

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Rowena Cory Daniells

So that was yesterday.

Coming up tomorrow I have a guest post by Rowena Cory Daniells on “Fantasy, The Poor Cousin of Science Fiction”

I have now had a sneak preview and can tell you that Rowena has put together a great post — so be sure to check it out.

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And then later in the week…

Ripley Patton

Yes, there should be another guest post on Thursday, this one from Ripley Patton who—as some of you may already know—is currently embarked on a kickstarter for her YA novel Ghost Hand.

I’ve invited Ripley to come on “…Anything, Really” and post on what she was trying to achieve, as an author, with the Ghost Hand story—aka the “big idea” behind the book.

There will also be more information about the kickstarter but in the meantime, you can check out the project—and the fabulous, ‘just revealed’ cover by Kiwi artist Kura Carpenter—right HERE.

On Wednesday, I was absolutely delighted to learn that my friend and fellow poet Rhian Gallagher had won the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry 2012 for her collection Shift, published in 2011 by Auckland University Press.

You can read the official announcement for all the winners on the BooksellersNZ site, here:

And here’s what the citation said:

“The poems offer elegance, mysteriousness, musical harmonies, satisfying quietness and subtle emotions. Sounds and themes stitch the collection with an assured and unifying touch. You fall upon little autobiographical traces in the shadows, traces that are both moving and intense.”

Way to go Rhian!

For more re Shift, Rhian, and her work, check out the following links on my blog:

•  Tuesday Poem: “Windowpane” by Rhian Gallagher, October 24 2011
• Tuesday Poem: “Between” by Rhian Gallagher, June 29, 2010
• “Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson” (by Rhian Gallagher). July 10, 2010

In addition,  I featured Rhian and Shift when I was guest editor for the Tuesday Poem Hub on August 23 last year. You can read the poem Butterfly, here.

Hub editor, Andrew Bell, also featured a poem from each of the three NZ Post Book Award poetry finalists, including Rhian, as the Tuesday Poem feature for National Poetry Week, here.

Right now I have a guest post up on the Supernatural Underground titled — yup, you got it 😉 — “All About… The Awesomeness of Story.”

It ranges over a reasonable degree of territory, but at heart it’s about how I stay in touch with the magic of storytelling when I’m smack bang in the middle of the “long distance endurance event” (note the Olympics analogy, please) that is writing a novel.

So if you’re interested in the writing life as well as reading the end product then this post may be of interest.

I should add though, that I had some fun with putting the post together so it is possibly just a wee bit tongue-in-cheek as well — a ‘genre-bender’ even?

But if you have fun reading it, do post a comment and let me know, as otherwise I may become disheartened and stop having fun altogether… And as we know from Buffy: “That would be Bad!” 😉

So don’t be bad —  or sad! — have some fun: —

Check out “All About… The Awesomeness of Story”

Today I would like to introduce my first book review for “…on Anything, Really” by a guest reviewer.

The book reviewed is Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel “2312”; the reviewer is Andrew Robins, whose bio appears below the review.

I hope it will be the first of many reviews by both Andrew and other guest reviewers as let’s face it: the world needs more book reviews and book features!

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Review: “2312” (Orbit 2012; 561 pp) by Kim Stanley Robinson

by Andrew Robins

This book deceived me. It starts off reading in the style of a future history, and after reading the first few chapters I was expecting this to be a story about ideas – and not characters.

I was partly right. It is a story about several very big ideas, and I will talk about these later on. But first of all a big “hats off” for the author. I ended up liking the main characters Swan, and Warham, a lot.

The author had a hard job, as one of the big ideas he was dealing with was the impact of extended lifespans on individuals and the societies that they form. I started off thinking that Swan in particular, was self obsessed and not particularly appealing. If you feel the same way when you pick up this book, then I recommend that you stick with it until you hit “the tunnel”. This section of the book was the turning point for me.  I definitely was not expecting romance to be a part of the story I thought I was reading. The introduction of this element was deftly done as part of a process of wider character development that left me more interested in the relationship between Warham and Swan than I was in the wider story.

Which leads me to my main criticism of the book. The story arc is vast and at times as a reader I was frustrated by the fact that information was being deliberately withheld from the main point-of-view character. This made it difficult (or perhaps more work is a better description) to keep track of what looked to be numerous only vaguely related story threads.
What was the connection behind the involuntary (for the most part) re-wilding of Earth, a game of lawn bowls inside an asteroid terrarium, and a pebble bomb attack on Terminator city on Mercury, for example?

If I am honest, I would say that in the end I was not wholly convinced by the motivations of the shadowy hands that were behind most of the events that were investigated throughout the course of the book.

But I am reasonably certain that I wasn’t supposed to be. I don’t think the author ever intended to wrap this story up in a pretty package, with everything explained and all smoking guns accounted for. That might have worked with a smaller story. But one of the themes explored throughout the book was “What happens when human society gets so big that no one part can ever hope to keep track of what is going on for all of the other parts?” This was portrayed as being an almost inevitable consequence of humanity’s embrace of the “high frontier” and all the problems and opportunities that this brings.

This part of the story was convincingly told – and was ultimately satisfying for me. I am a sucker for orbital bombardments, solar shields, solar mirrors and terraforming Titan (and Venus, and Mars).

Another theme deftly explored, and for me I think the heart of the book, both in terms of the individual interactions between Swan and Warham, and the wider issue confronting society as a whole, was “What constitutes humanity?”

This issue is traversed in multiple dimensions throughout the course of the book – ranging from the purely physical differences between people, to the implications of embracing elements of our more animal (and in some cases alien), nature. Add into this mix humanity’s response to the emergence of artificial consciousness, and there is plenty of room for both the story and the imagination to roam.

I ended up enjoying this book a lot. It covers a lot of ground, asks some interesting questions in new ways and in new combinations. It also delivers some compelling characters, and (for me at least), a romance that both surprised and engaged me.

Well worth a look, especially if you enjoy work by Iain M Banks, Neal Asher and Neal Stephenson.

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For more information on Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing, see his site here.

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About the Reviewer:

Andrew Robins is a long time reader and sometime reviewer of science fiction, fantasy and history. People pay him to test stuff, mainly radios – which most of the time is more fun than it has any right to be. He is also the partner of “…on Anything, Really” blog’s Helen Lowe, but the views expressed in this review are entirely his, not hers.

Firstly, I’ve got some exciting stuff coming here on the blog over the next week, including:

• Tomorrow I’ll be posting a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312” by guest reviewer Andrew Robins. I am quite excited about this as it is the first every guest review on my blog; so, a milestone.

• Next Monday, I will have a guest post by SFF author Rowena Cory Daniells on “Fantasy, The Poor Cousin of Science Fiction” featured—am fascinated by the topic and can’t wait to see what she has to say!

• And some time in the intervening days I’ll also be posting a wrap up on my six month stint as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury…

Otherwise I think the main event coming up is the Christchurch Writers’ Festival at the end of the month where I’ll be on the “Why YA?” panel with John Boyne and Jane Higgins, compered by James Norcliffe.

And just in case you missed it, you can still check out my “Fun With Friends” interview with Juliet Marillier on SF Signal, right here.

Desert Bloom

a desert blooms in you
sands the colour of rust
run through the surgeon’s hands

there are no more
thorns in your garden
but moisture has no place to go

you open your floodgates
but all that comes to your
cupped hands, tumbling
like dry petals from your strange,
unlooked-for rose

pot-pourri tears
little pieces of paper with the words

“cancer”

…………………….“fear”

…………………………………….“pain”

a desert bloom, in you

sands the colour of rust
etch roses in your hourglass

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© Ciarán Fox

Reproduced here with permission.

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About the Poem: The Poet’s Note

Before I started writing Desert Bloom a central image of a garden in a desert and a desert in a garden was clear in my mind. I found myself looking at the page like it was a block of stone with a poem inside it, if only I could carve it out.  It’s unusual for me to have such a strong, complete idea of the poem at the outset and I was terrified I would shatter it with ham-fisted chiselling.  I wanted to address the very unwelcome family elephant of cancer which was once again making its presence felt in my immediate family and I wanted to do it without making it feel like ‘made for TV’ disease-of-the-week fodder.  The particular form of this cancer was requiring a total hysterectomy and was happening so far away, amidst the red sands on the far side of Australia.  I felt helpless to offer real support but needed to express that the implications of such a fundamental change for a woman was not lost on me as I was expecting the birth of my first child.

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About the Poet:

Ciarán Fox is a poet, writer, photographer and film maker, co-editor of Catalyst literary arts journal and well known Christchurch MC — and in the latter capacity will be hosting “Survivor Poetry” at the forthcoming Christchurch Writers’ Festival. Ciarán lives in Lyttelton with his family and has a background in youth health, community development and the arts.

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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.

It’s been a while since I’ve read some non-fiction history so I was very pleased to be able to pick up “Queen Anne, The Politics of Passion” (Harper Press), Anne Somerset’s biography of Queen Anne (Life: 1665 – 1714; Reign: 1702-1714.)

So far I am about a third of the way through and really enjoying it. This is serious biography so not a light read, but Somerset writes well, incorporating detailed research into a highly readable account of the life and times of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch of the United Kingdom. (And in fact Union between Scotland and England was, I believe, achieved during her reign—although I haven’t got to that bit yet.)

A tribute to Somerset may be that although Anne herself is not a terribly dynamic personality, the biographer still manages to imbue her story with interest—and the period is certainly fascinating. So far the work is charting the emergence of political parties in national politics (in this case the “Whigs” and the “Tories”), the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe and the genius of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, as well as the cultural strength of the period with writers such as Swift and Defoe making their mark.

Anyway, on the strength of what I’ve read so far, I recommend it if you like biography and or non fiction history. But here are links to a couple of  more official views:

Telegraph Review

The Literary Review

And how about you, dear readers: what are you reading right now?

How’s your French? Passable?

If so, you might like to check out these two reviews for L’Héritière de la Nuit, the French edition of The Heir of Night.

The first is from Place To Be: Provocateur D’Envie, here

and the second from Romance, Charmes & Sortilèges – Bit-Lit.com, here

And from what my own French will permit me to glean, I think they’re both good! Handsprings and happiness. 🙂

Today SF Signal have posted the second interview in my “Fun With Friends” series in which I interview fellow SFF authors from Australia and New Zealand, with 5 questions focusing on “who they are” and “what they do” in writing terms.

My second interview is with the very well known author, Juliet Marillier, right HERE.

Amongst other matters Juliet discusses her new YA novel, Shadowfell, so even if you know her work well, I hope you’ll find something ‘new’ in there.

Aus/NZ cover

Shadowfell is just out in Australia/New Zealand and will be released in the USA in September.

Please do click through to take a look—and consider leaving a comment to support the series. 😉