Every area has its share of eccentric characters. When I used to drive past a row of old, rambling family houses on the run in to my local town, I’d nearly always see an old lady out at the front in all weathers, pruning her roses and trimming her hedge, or turning over the soil with a rusty spade. She had wild hair and wore a threadbare cardigan that was several sizes too large for her. Most people round here recognised her, even if they didn’t know her name. Suddenly she wasn’t there any more, and word filtered out that she’d passed on, been found in her bath by someone or other. Those houses are huge. Most get turned into flats these days, part of that modern, dismal attrition which strips the aesthetic out of provincial towns and turns them into the merely functional.

Some friends of mine with a large family were looking for a new home. They trawled through all the bigger houses in their price bracket around town, including the one that had belonged to the eccentric woman. Afterwards, the mum asked her four-year-old which one he preferred. He replied that he liked the one where the old lady was smiling at him from the bath.

After completing the latest draft of The Scar-Crow Men, the next Will Swyfte book, I took a week off to re-charge in one of my favourite UK locations, the Penwith peninsula on the far tip of Cornwall. Some time in the surf, local beer and good food, with a lot of reading and a trip to Tate West thrown in.

It did the job – which is good because I’ve come back to several projects piling up on my desk. More on those later.

“Each successive volume I read makes me fall further and further in love with Chadbourn’s overall vision, an immense narrative tapestry that utilizes countless mythologies, folk tales, legends, philosophies in what is in many ways a complex reimagining of the fantasy epic for the new millennium, built not only on extremely intelligent uses of well known and lesser known gods and tropes but even more importantly, on ideas“.

From the ever-perceptive Robert William Berg at Rob Will Review.

Plus Another favourable review of World’s End from Justin at fantasyliterature.com.

On matters of meaning and a golden age of fantasy – at Babel Clash.

On Babel Clash.

At Babel Clash.

Over on the Borders Babel Clash blog, I’ve been putting forward the idea that it’s time for fantasy and SF to go their separate ways:

It makes me wonder, though, if it’s time for fantasy and SF to dissolve the marriage of convenience. They came together in an age when there was a limited number of speculative fiction books on the shelves and the two genres huddled together for support. But as Charlie Stross points out, they’re very different in outlook – one stares out to the world, one peers into the unconscious.

Of course, members of the SF community who speak openly about that kind of thing might find it a double-edged sword. Fantasy thrives in sales terms, and those big secondary world epics that Charlie Stross mocks give a lot of bookstore cover to what may be perceived as the more challenging of the SF fare – especially at a time when three senior editors (two in the US, one in the UK) tell me they’re no longer really in the market for SF for sales reasons.

For the next two weeks, I’m going to be guest-blogging at Borders’ Bookshop’s Babel Clash alongside acclaimed SF author Justina Robson.

For a start we’ll be talking about putting the reality into fantasy, but after that we could go everywhere and anywhere.