Following the TV success of Game of Thrones SF Signal”s Mind Meld has asked several fantasy authors – including me – what books would make an excellent weekly series. Some interesting responses…

James Barclay, Jasper Kent and me answering questions about writing, fantasy, music and life.

There are ethical problems wrapped up in writing historical fiction. Should you use a real, once-living person as a character in your fiction? Their lives reduced to nothing more than plot points and themes? In essence, a human being’s existence shackled to the pursuit of the writer’s own ego?

Would you want some future author to make you the bad guy in their little story, the walk-on joke, the mumbling idiot, the obstacle?

And let’s face it, we don’t even know what the people around us are truly like, never mind those who existed hundreds of years ago. In those cases, we often only have a few scraps of paper to sketch out the things they did, with little hint to their motivation.

This becomes even more of an issue in fantasy, where the historical characters are divorced from the realities of their lives. It’s something I’ve certainly struggled with while writing the Swords of Albion books, which utilise a host of real people from the Elizabethan age. To be honest, even after writing I find it hard to decide if it was the right thing to do. I justified it to myself by my attempts to make the historical figures as true to how contemporary accounts described them, but that still leaves a great deal of psychological gap-filling.

The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men are set around the Court and Government of Queen Elizabeth, but she plays only a secondary role. I have less interest in the cosseted lives of Kings and Queens than I do in the men and women who do their bidding.

The stories concern spies, who had, for the first time, become a powerful weapon of the state in this era. And so in the first book one of the central characters is the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, a dour, puritanical man who suffered much personal misery in his life, but who gave his all in service to the Queen. His successor in The Scar-Crow Men is Sir Robert Cecil, a clever, cunning politician who battled against prejudice and mockery for his hunchback and short stature – the Queen called him her ‘Little Elf’. These two men represent different approaches to power and control, one quite honorable, the other self-serving. They act as counterpoints to the flawed, vacillating central character, the spy Will Swyfte.

Swyfte’s friend is the acclaimed playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine among other plays. He was something of a rising celebrity at the time. He may have been a spy (there is some evidence); he may have been gay. In the books, Marlowe is another counterpoint to Swyfte, a man slowly being destroyed by the dark business of spying and the demands placed upon him by service to the state. Marlowe allows the reader to see Swyfte’s strengths and flaws more easily.

Despite my antipathy towards the lives of Royalty, the fact that important people play important roles is inescapable in this era. The common man was mainly concerned with simple economic survival. And so, as Swyfte travels the known world in his spying, we encounter James VI of Scotland (and future James I of England), Philip II of Spain and Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV of France. Each one responds – and responded – in different ways to their regal status, and again, each one allows us to see Swyfte in a different light.

Dr John Dee is a key figure in both books, and the third, to come, and he really is the link between the history and the fantasy. Dee, who tutored the young Elizabeth, was both a scientist and an occultist, an inventor and mathematician who communed with angels and cast magic circles. Many of the themes I’m tackling have Dee at their centre.

There are others – Sir Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, the Earls of Leicester and Essex, the master criminal Laurence Pickering, the King of Cutpurses, who may or may not have been an invention of the Elizabethan equivalent of the tabloids. Each one was chosen carefully for what they said about Will Swyfte, in the same way that any writer chooses supporting fictional characters.

I hope I did them justice, but know in my heart I didn’t. No writer could.

When I decided I was going to write an historical fantasy, the attractions of the Elizabethan era were many. It was, for one, a time very much like our own, when society was going through massive changes – a rapid increase in new technology changing the way people lived their lives, foreign wars over resources and in pursuit of power, religious intolerance and religiously-motivated acts against the state funded by foreign powers, heightened surveillance at home, a fear of foreigners among the common man, rising wealth for a few but near-poverty for many, and massive leaps forward in art, literature and music. Not only would we understand the Elizabethan man and woman, there were stark resonances with our own age that would add a nice layer of complexity to any story.

Spain was the sixteenth century equivalent of the US, a global superpower influencing geo-politics at many levels. Under King Philip, the country ruthlessly pursued power and wealth, invading Portugal and putting pressure on France and the Low Countries while exploiting the New World’s resources of gold and silver. Though a devout man, Philip was not averse to using religion as a cover for some of Spain’s more aggressive actions and thereby keeping his subjects firmly behind him.

Beside Spain, England was a small nation with ambition and pluck, but little real power and no great wealth. Thanks to Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic church, the nation lived in a near-constant state of fear of either retribution from the Catholic powers of Europe or insurrection within from Catholic agitators. Young priests were being trained in foreign seminaries and sent to England to foment revolution and to spy. The Government feared Philip’s expansionist policy and rumours of an invasion of England began long before the Armada set sail.

This was a dark time of terror and sweat and deceit. Yet in a sequence of stories that were essentially about duality, I could also look to the other, more positive face of the time. This, too, was the English Renaissance, with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Bacon and other writers blazing a trail, alongside composers like Tallis and Taverner, and architects like Inigo Jones. There was a great deal of enlightenment after long centuries of moral repression. Brothels were tolerated, including one composed entirely of young men. London was growing at an astonishing rate – faster than it could truly cope – and had become one of the great cities of Europe. So it was an exciting, vibrant time too.

The stories were to be about the point where fantasy collided with reality, but the more I researched, the more comparable and contextual collisions I found – socially, culturally, religious, political. Any fantasy – any story – needs a rich world and plenty of innate conflict. It was all here.

And while England was increasingly embracing what would come to be science, it still had the supernatural fears of past centuries at its back. The Elizabethan era was really the point where the country was caught between reason and unreason, hope and fear, past and future.

With the idea of a country trying to move forward while held back by the hooks of a superstitious past came the opening for my antagonists, the otherworldly Unseelie Court. Their existence was encoded in every myth and legend and folktale; the English had always lived in fear of the Fair Folk. But under Queen Elizabeth, England wanted to break free of their shackles and move into a new, brighter age.

Next time I’ll look at some of the historical characters who populate The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men and why I chose them.

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.

You don’t want to seem like a nutter when you’re on public radio. So when the host asks me – as they always do – where do you get your ideas from, I steer clear of the truthful answer: “psychic connections through the aether” or “hypnagogic messages dictated by our mysterious overlords“. I usually mutter something about stumbling across an interesting fact. Always go for the boring option. It keeps you out of the coats with no arms.

But we can speak honestly here. We all know about the mysterious connections in life. The stuff that goes on behind all those scientific processes. The weird, inexplicable occurrences lurking in the corners of day-to-day existence. The gods and imps and fairies and demons that we like to call other things because, you know, that whole coats with no arms thing…

When I say “the universe speaks to me”, I mean it speaks to all writers, all musicians, all artists. We each tend to put a different face on it, but it’s the same voice. So where do my gods and fairies and demons lurk?

In pubs with stone and timber and glowering locals and beer with strange names. In deep rural life which city folk think is backward, but is wild and dangerous and so removed it might as well be another planet. In bands that you might stumble across in the back rooms of pubs and never hear from again. In stone circles, crumbling ruins, lonely pools, old houses. Across those city liminal zones – industrial estates under sodium at 3am, empty, broken-windowed factories and wasteground with rainbow-streaked puddles. In black-faced, mirror-glassed morris men and biker gangs. In snatches of music heard after midnight. In moots and meets and markets held under moonlight. These are the places where stories are born. These are the locations where my writing gods live.

And for a specific example, here’s one of the inspirations for Age of Misrule…

The Dancing Did remain one of my favourite bands, a quarter of a century after they split up. Characterised as “neo rustic pagan bop” or “a cross between The Clash and Steeleye Span”, you can find out more about them here.

Their album, And Did Those Feet, is little-known but essential, particularly if you like fantasy or any of those things I listed above. The lyrics are clever, witty and poetic and deal with ancient things encroaching on the modern world – listen to ‘The Wolves of Worcestershire‘ or ‘Charnel Boy‘. A remixed version with a booklet and additional tracks is available from Cherry Red.

The Dancing Did’s thematic equivalent today may well be Cornish collective Kemper Norton though the music is very, very different. I came across them through the regular ravings of Warren Ellis, another fan. More inspiration. I bet they never imagined they’d be dragging a story about Elizabethan spies and Faerie into the light…

Mark Charan Newton, actually.

Over on his blog, Mark has incited a firestorm with the posting “Why Science Fiction is dying and Fantasy Fiction is the future”, which has attracted fierce responses from Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, Adam Roberts and many others.

Here’s my response:

Surely there is no finer sport than ramming sharpened stakes into the cages of the SF community!

So really when we talk about SF vs fantasy, we’re talking about SF vs secondary world fantasy. That undercuts the initial argument even more, because I was told by a publisher very recently that sales of secondary world fantasy are also in decline – slow, certainly, at the moment, but consistent. Fewer secondary world fantasies are going to be bought. The argument then becomes, which is declining faster – “fantasy” or SF, and that’s not a very fun argument at all.

Part of the sales decline is due to the intense, and accelerating, change in society, where communities are breaking down into increasingly small self-identifiable units. It’s something the music and TV industries have already wrestled with – there are no “rock” fans any more, but a vast number of tiny tribes that shelter under the rock banner. Viewing figures for TV shows plummet as the makers increasingly have to micro-target.

The challenge for the big publishers is how they’re going to build a business model that is acceptable to their shareholders when genres continue to fragment (in fantasy, say, to apocalyptic fantasy, heroic fantasy, magic-based fantasy, historical fantasy) with less and less boundary crossing and subsequently a lower ceiling of potential sales (ans: they can’t). It’s an issue that smaller publishers like Solaris and Angry Robot were specifically set up to tackle.

But in this area, I think, SF is better placed to thrive in the long term because its community is broader and more cohesive, and there is much more micro-boundary crossing to keep sales up.

Publisher and always-readable genre commentator Tim Holman reveals the full scale of the change that is sweeping through fantasy in his blog The Publisher Files. A lot has been made of how fantasy book sales are booming, but it now seems that the vast proportion of this is down to urban fantasy. Definitions are always hard to come by when you get into the sewers of genre classification, but I think what we’re talking about here is the books of, say, Charlaine Harris, which are burning up the charts in the UK on the back of True Blood, as opposed to traditional fantasy in an urban setting.

Not only that, but the trend is increasing. With sales of urban fantasy rising, Tim makes the point that it’s only natural that publishers will follow the dollar/pound/euro/whatever and buy less epic fantasy and more of the thing that most readers want.

Genres always move in cycles. Stories get tired and readers get jaded as publishers heap on more of the same. But for me, urban fantasy is really the new horror – the successor to the Stephen King-fuelled horror boom of the eighties, and drawing in some of the same kind of readers who walked away when that cycle died.

Which does cast an interesting light on next year’s World Horror Convention. The convention seems completely to have ignored urban fantasy and opted for a celebration of horror that is rooted firmly in the distant past, if the guest of honour list is anything to go by. At the least it’s a missed opportunity. At the most it’s a comment on why horror is perceived as a dying genre by many in the industry.

For all you sword and sorcery fans, here’s some rare footage of fantasy great Michael Moorcock joining space cadets Hawkwind to intone his Elric poem/lyrics on stage.

Moorcock was a part of Hawkwind for several years, and the band’s Chronicle of the Black Sword album was heavily influenced by his work. Cherry Red records recently secured the rights to release all of Hawkwind’s material, which had been unavailable for many years. More details at the Cherry Red site.

The British Fantasy Society has announced the guests for its annual Fantasycon convention, this year to be held in Nottingham, UK, over the weekend of September 18 – 20. They are:

Jasper Fforde, the genre-blurring author of the Tuesday Next series and the Nursery Crime series

Brian Clemens, the TV legend behind The Avengers, The Persuaders and Thriller.

Gail Z Martin, author of the best-selling fantasy Chronicles of the Necromancer series

The Master of Ceremonies is Ian Watson, author of many acclaimed SF novels including The Fire Worm and Whores of Babylon

To me, that looks like a great line-up. Fantasycon is one of the highlights of the UK convention calendar and is certainly worth checking out. For more information go to www.fantasycon.org.uk.

Pyr editor Lou Anders discusses “the New Fantasy” in the latest Agony Column podcast from Rick Kleffel. Here’s the direct link.

The New Fantasy is a catch-all title for a specific, grittier kind of fantasy by Joe Abercrombie, Tom Lloyd, Joel Shepherd, James Enge, Justina Robson, Matthew Sturges, Chris Roberson and yours truly, according to Lou. Listen to the podcast to get the full picture.

I’ve written a short appreciation of Robert E Howard’s Puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane, at Speculative Horizons.

UK national newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, asked me to write an article on fantasy for those not familiar with the genre. The result is here.

There’s a review of Jack of Ravens here which raises some very interesting issues.

What I’ve been working on for the last few years is an epic story covering more than two thousand years of human history, numerous mythologies, a huge cast of characters with complex motives and inter-relations, an enormous range of antagonists, monsters, creatures and Fabulous Beasts, each with their own history, and a fair smattering of mysticism, psychology and philosophy thrown into the mix.

Unlike, say, The Wheel of Time, where the books are successively numbered so you know exactly which one to read next, I’ve told this fantasy tale over a trilogy of trilogies – the Age of Misrule, Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent sequences.

I’ve attempted to provide background information so new readers can drop into the story pretty much anywhere, but I think I’ve got to face up to the fact that they can’t. If you’re a new reader to Jack of Ravens, you’re just not going to get the depth, subtelty and interplay unless you’ve read Age of Misrule. You’ll certainly get a rattling good yarn, but it will lack what I intended as the author.

The problem is, the trilogies have each been packaged in such a radically different way that the casual reader would find it hard to tell that they’re all part of this massive canvas – although the excellent design for the Age of Misrule Omnibus has brought it in line with Jack of Ravens.

What I think I need to do now is get the word out more that this is one big, sprawling story. I’d hate for a reader to come to the books under the false pretences of thinking they’re starting a standalone trilogy (and only in fantasy can you use those words…) and be disappointed.

New Line Cinema has finally come to its senses and allowed Peter Jackson to oversee the making of two films based on The Hobbit. (New Line co-chairman Bob Shaye not so long ago: “Peter Jackson will never make The Hobbit on my watch”. Hand that man the silver-handled revolver.)

But…two films? Compared to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit is essentially a pamphlet. Either we’re going to get lots…and lots…and lots of shots of Bilbo meandering across beautiful New Zealand scenery, or it’s going to be less of an adaptation and more of a jumping off point. There isn’t even an obvious spot in the book to break so the first film ends on a satisfying note.

Having said that, I have every faith that Peter Jackson will ensure a great experience that is both faithful to the spirit of the book and meet the demands of story-telling in the film medium. Unlike some spineless directors who cave in at the first sign of pressure from the philistine impulses of the Hollywood money-men (Chris Weitz, I’m looking at you), Jackson has proven that quality will never be compromised.

Philip Pullman is one of the greats of modern fantasy, not just for his exuberant imagination, but because he is one of the few fantasists prepared to confront serious matters. It is impossible to dismiss his work simply as escapism. As a writer with something to say, he can compete in the wider arena of ‘literature’ and that makes him an important figure for all those interested in imaginative fiction.

This movie adaptation of his book Northern Lights crushes the best of Pullman beneath the weight of spineless, bone-headed, superficial and incompetent direction. The sheer scale of its ability to suck the magic out of a book so brimming with a powerful sense of wonder is almost breathtaking. American Pie director Chris Weitz lumbers from disconnected scene to disconnected scene with no sense of how to build character, develop drama or menace, or draw out any of the magic that is inherent in Pullman’s inventions. Instead, every frame shouts out that it is a monument to the producer’s vision that only thick people watch these kinds of films, people who would throw their popcorn at the screen if time was wasted on developing character or mood, or who would walk out in anger at the travesty of character interaction when they simply want to gorge on fast-food spectacle – which Weitz also manages to ham-fistedly destroy. The final battle on the northern ice field is so poorly framed it looks like a dust-up in a provincial shopping precinct on a Saturday night.

Weitz was involved in a little fantasy invention of his own when he said in the film’s pre-publicity that for all the changes he made, he stayed true to Pullman’s original vision. He didn’t. Cut through all the Gyptians and warrior polar bears and dust and golden compasses, and this story is about one thing: the ability of organised religion to control people and their thoughts. The brooding, monolithic presence of Pullman’s Magisterium is barely evident in the film. The book’s great theme – the thing that raises it far above a simple children’s story – is diluted to such a degree that it is barely evident, and in the end only contributes to the incoherence that corrupts the entire movie. (And as an aside, Christian journalist Peter Hitchens wants parents to know that, ‘If you buy this book for your children, don’t imagine for a moment that you are handing over a neutral story; this author has a purpose’. As if a neutral story is a good thing. You know what: parents should be warned The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not a neutral story; the author has a purpose…)

The really depressing thing about The Golden Compass is that it is blessed with such an excellent cast, all of whom are operating at the top of their game. Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra does a good job portraying a charismatic heroine, even though she occasionally stumbles over Weitz’s lead-footed dialogue. Sam Elliot as flying cowboy Lee Scorsby burns up the screen with the power of his presence, even though he too has dialogue which is cliche heaped on cliche. But the real revelation is Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter who does great work. In one scene she carries a huge weight of emotion, presence and back story in a simple glance that is quite electric (and the one point where Weitz shows he can actually direct).

The weight of the actors and Pullman’s imagination takes The Golden Compass above the screen adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with its wooden leads and ineffectual set-pieces. But it remains a crushing disappointment, stolen from us by people aiming for the lowest common denominator.