Here’s a brief review of The Scar-Crow Men. The book is out in the UK in May.

UPDATE:
The first UK review from Lizzy.

I’m currently hard at work on the third book in the series, The Devil’s Looking Glass, with an expected delivery date of late June for publication in 2012.

This is brilliant. Get past the talking heads at the start and see how quickly we’ve assimilated a new mythology.

Thanks to Bleeding Cool.

“On a recent field trip to the region, scientists discovered four new species of fungus that infect ants, take over their bodies and eventually kill them in a place that is just right for the organism to grow inside them.

The fungus can destroy entire colonies and leave behind gruseome ant graveyards, where twisted, dark corpses rest with their mandibles locked around leaf veins, a final act that secures the creature’s host in position before it releases spores to infect others.”

On the bright side, they go very nice in an omelette.

According to my old publisher, ebooks now account for a quarter of all sales in their science fiction and fantasy categories, and that rate is increasingly rapidly. It’s understandable with so many early adopters in this genre, though I could have guessed it with the number of ebook queries I’ve been getting lately.

So as a resource, I thought I’d list all my ebooks currently available and point to those about to be published. You’ll find that below.

I’ve also recently been talking to some colleagues about making out-of-print backlist books available. A quick skim of the files suggests I could do Lord of Silence, the British Fantasy Award-winning The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, a bunch of short stories, possibly in an anthology, the dark fantasy novels The Eternal, Nocturne, Scissorman, Underground and the non-fiction paranormal book Testimony. If you want to register any interest in these, contact me through the usual channels, or comment here, and I’ll talk to some people…

In the UK we have the full nine-book Brothers of Dragons sequence:

Age of Misrule
World’s End
Darkest Hour
Always Forever

The Dark Age
The Devil in Green
The Queen of Sinister
The Hounds of Avalon

Kingdom of the Serpent
Jack of Ravens
The Burning Man
Destroyer of Worlds

(I’m reliably informed that all these are also available in ePub format from Waterstones.

In the US, we have:

Age of Misrule
World’s End
Darkest Hour
Always Forever

The Dark Age
The Devil in Green
The Queen of Sinister
The Hounds of Avalon

Swords of Albion
The Silver Skull

In the UK, The Sword of Albion and The Scar-Crow Men will be available shortly. In the US, The Scar-Crow Men, Jack of Ravens, The Burning Man and Destroyer of Worlds will be out in the very near future.

“If you are a fan of Elizabethan England, the Fair Folk, Christopher Marlowe, spy novels, dark fantasy, swordplay, daring heroics, adventure serials, or any combination of the above, I highly recommend both novels in this ravishingly exciting, heartpoundingly intense, and extremely intelligent series–one which will stimulate your brain as well as your heart.”

By Robert William Berg.

Order with confidence.

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.

If you want to announce your new book has just been published, this is the way to do it.

[

Thanks to the always excellent John Anealio. And how many SFF books are on the shelves this month?????

I’ve been interviewed over at fantasyliterature.com by Justin Blazier, talking about The Scar-Crow Men, ebooks, psycho-fairies and folklore.

…at the Bath Spa Hotel.

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.

The Scar-Crow Men, the second of my Elizabethan fantasy novels, is out soon in the US and UK. It’s fantasy noir, renaissance punk, historical fantasy, sword and sorcery, historical urban fantasy or one of half a dozen other labels, depending on who’s speaking. Like some of my other work, the story exists at the point where the fantastic smashes up hard against reality, only in this sequence that reality is in the past, five hundred years gone, among well-documented, pivotal events.

Writing historical fantasy – to adopt the broadest label – has its own peculiar demands. We’re talking about an alien world here, with its own customs, clothes, politics, transport, weapons, social classes, art, music and economy and every aspect needs to be fully realized for the reader to settle into it.

To say this entails a massive amount of research, doesn’t begin to do the job justice. The writer needs to understand everything, both as its own thing and in context within the time period. This involves more than the invention of a secondary world fantasy, more than looking out of the window or Googling or location research for a contemporary fantasy (both of which I’ve written in the past).

Our knowledge of history degrades the further back we go. Characters walk on stage and then disappear. Our understanding of events is based on often-biased accounts. And sometimes there are vast parts of life that are simply missing in contemporary accounts.

The Elizabethan Age is reasonably well-documented, particularly with regard to affairs of state. The lives of the common men and women are there too, but the information is scattered widely. While writing this sequence, I sometimes had to embark on three different strands of research for a single sentence.

The Scar-Crow Men unfolds in the shadow of the murder of the playwright Christopher Marlowe, a killing that has all the mystery and intrigue of the JFK assassination. The previous volume, The Sword of Albion (or The Silver Skull in the US), is set at the time of the Armada and the Spanish invasion of England.

Over a few posts here I’m going to be writing about what goes into creating these historical fantasies, looking at the places, the people, the milieu, not only setting the context but also underlining the basic premise that the more reality you get, the more effective the fantasy.

Domestic Goddess tip: how to get through a day of kitchen drudgery. *

(*not officially sanctioned by Nigella)

This is an interesting documentary clip from the heyday of psychedelics research in the late 50s. Take a look at the interview with the acid-keen psychologist near the end: “That’s what death will be like. And oh what fun it will be.”

Also worth checking out: Don Lattin’s book The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, RAM Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.

New Scientist is reporting “experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. ‘If the results are correct,’ says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, ‘these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.’”

Luc Montagnier, who picked up the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for work establishing that HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that suggests a kind of quantum teleportation of DNA. It imprints on water, and can still be traced even through high levels of dilution.

In effect, the water stores the information.

Naturally, a great many scientists are outraged by the suggestion – even before they’ve seen the data.

The Sword of Albion has appeared in two best of 2010 lists – at SFFworld.net and at Rob Will Review.

Edit: make that three: The Eloquent Page also listed it, as Paul mentions in the comments…

Here’s the final version of the Pyr edition of The Scar-Crow Men, by artist Chris McGrath.

Amazing editing.

Symbols and numerals have been discovered hidden in the eyes of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa after clues were found in a half-century old book.

“We are only at the start of this investigation and we hope to be able to dig deeper into this mystery and reveal further details as soon as possible. It’s remarkable that no-one has noticed these symbols before and from the preliminary investigations we have carried out we are confident they are not a mistake and were put there by the artist.”

SF writer Charlie Stross has an excellent analysis of why so many people now feel politically powerless.

He asks why is the world so clearly going wrong and why can’t anyone fix it. His proposal is that the problem can be laid at the door of corporations, which are hive organisms “constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)”

Potentially immortal, they exist mainly in the present, with little regard for the past or the long-term future, and are essentially sociopathic forms, he says. Utilising Governments and the media to achieve their ends, they have spread across the globe. And he concludes: “We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals… In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.”

Which certainly captures a huge part of the depersonalisation of the 21C world. There is another side, though, which concerns the defence of the human race against the alien invaders. The only people who can stop these conquerors are not eggheads with whiteboards or staunch, plucky workers, but politicians.

One of the central beliefs of politics is that politicians always fight the campaign of two elections ago – eight to ten years. They’re looking back to what worked and what didn’t. Their beliefs are shaped during their formative years and rarely change. But with the rapid and accelerating social and technological change of the last decade, eight years ago might as well be fifty. We essentially have 20th century people trying to fight 21st century problems.

The other issue is the decline of the political party system. Before the 1980s, political parties were mass membership organisations, numbering in some cases well over a million members. Now the main parties claim a tiny fraction of that number – and this is true across the west.

In the UK (and in many other countries), candidates are chosen from the party membership. As numbers decline, so does the talent base. Most parties are now down to a rump of unrepresentative activists, who may be decent-hearted and fuelled by a belief in their principles, but are not a deep source of the kinds of talent we need in the 21C.

So the aliens have indeed taken over, and our defenders simply aren’t up to the job of organising the resistance. Meanwhile, we face some of the worst problems ever to afflict the human race. As Charlie points out, that’s not the end of the debate, it’s the beginning…