And, yes, they say make your blog entries short and pithy, but when I get my rant on it's hard to stop, Explains why the books tend to break the 200,000 word barrier, certainly.

And before I start, the Shadows of the Apt Wiki has just had a superb facelift, so go check it out!.

OK, apropos of nothing save my recent Christopher Priest binge, secondary worlds for real, or for make believe:

Getting past any initial objections about considering the reality of fictional worlds, when sundry children found their way into Narnia this was presented as a real place. You’d have to stretch the text past breaking point to find an interpretation where it was all, as Edmund originally claims, just a game, imagination by consensus. Narnia exists, insofar as the books are concerned. It’s a real place, as real as the “real world”, and indeed set within a wider multiverse of linked worlds (and aren’t those parts of The Magician’s Nephew actually more intriguing than actual Narnia itself?).

There are similar stories where the balance of probabilities tilts strongly the other way, though: that the fantastic world is the product of imagination, or even mental disorder. This can also be found in work intended for a younger audience. The film Bridge to Terebithia, for example, is pretty much impossible to interpret as a genuine fantastical encounter. Although we see the world the children “visit” it’s  explicitly all in their heads.

Or the reality of the secondary world is up for grabs. Of the “big three,” for example, Wonderland could go either way, although as it is essentially a satire (indeed a mirror, in the 2^nd) of the real, a “realist” argument possibly carries more weight. On the contrary, Neverland and Oz are both presented as very real (save perhaps in the best-known filming of Oz, where they chicken out) and both Barry and Baum go as far as to present their fantastic worlds as superior and preferable to the actual one. It’s a bold move that I think would cause difficulties today – the idea of children retreating into a fantasy world being a good thing would catch a lot of flak from conservative critics (1).

Fiction aimed at adult/older audiences also shows this uncertainty. Leaving aside Walter Mitty(2), whilst the phenomenal film Pan’s Labyrinth looks on first viewing to be about a child escaping a traumatic home environment by taking refuge in her fantasies, it’s quite possible to watch through on the basis that it’s all real, and arguably that brings a more satisfying (certainly less depressing) closure to the film.

For me, I’m an unregenerate fantasist. A secondary world presented as a therapeutic tool or delusion to be escaped from in order to find wholeness is always a bit of a let down for me – “it was all a dream” sort of thing. Terebithia was a well-made film, and heavy with meaning and poignancy and all that, but at the same time the Scooby Doo of it left me feeling empty. Just my personal take, but I’ll go some distance to find a reading that will give that world reality.

Iain Banks pulls some interesting sleight of hand with some of his early “mainstream” books. On the face of it, The Bridge is a look into the damaged mind of an accident victim trying to find his way out of his own injury, and that’s the standard reading I think. The world of the Bridge that we’re presented with, however, is fascinating and bizarre, a kind of mix of Kafka and Gormenghast stretched over the unending structure of the title – it seems almost too much to be just a fleeting construct. The world is a satisfying one in its own right (lord knows there have been straight out secondary worlds with less depth (length, breadth?) than that of the bridge.)

What precisely is going on in Banks’ Walking on Glass is even more uncertain. It’s like Lao Tzu and the butterfly – anyone’s guess as to who is dreaming who. Banks, of course, has something of a unique relationship with the bookshelf, having his two personas, ostensibly genre and non-. Whilst a number of his “non-M” books are solidly rooted in the real world, one wonders how much of a sly game he’s playing with the critics. Transitions, the latest “non-M”, has a great deal of topical relevance, but although it sits there on the general fiction shelves it’s surely a stretch to read it as anything other than flat out world-switching science fiction. With that in mind, it’s worth a re-reading of The Bridge and Walking on Glass with an eye to the reality of the fantasies presented.

The secondary world can also decline in reality as a series goes on. M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, for example (3), kicks off with some epic far-future dying earth fantasy that could link arms with Jack Vance or Michael Moorcock, but each iteration of the setting brings more uncertainty and a greater distance. The very reality of the world is explicitly malleable, the issues at stake become more nebulous and less epic, the heroes less classically heroic, until we are left with “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium”, locked out of the world that we have known, left with nothing but the real, and maddening, unfulfilling whispers. At the end of our journey, we are forced to ask if any of it was actually real, or just our own delusion (4).

But it can go the other way. I give you Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, where the main character is a Londoner who has a breakdown and ends up torn between the demands of the real, and the fantastic “Dream Archipelago” as he tries to address his own past and identity. Simple. Except it’s Priest, so it’s not at all. The protagonist has written an ‘autobiography’ that is not only inaccurate but takes place in the Archipelago, another world. The “him” in the Archipelago has memory issues and has to rely on an account he wrote that is set in our world. Although I suspect the mainstream reading of the book is “real world man with mental health issues suffers from delusions” it can be read the other way, it really can.

And then Mr P brings out The Dream Archipelago, and, very recently, The Islanders, the first a collection of stories set in the Archipelago’s fully detailed world (with no concessions at all to the real one) and the second a purported travel guide interspersed with short fiction, much of which relates to the stories and characters of the original, making the whole enterprise something remarkable and possibly unprecedented as a literary endeavour. But the Archipelago has its own reality, however much it cannot be mapped or quantified.  It is that rare thing, a modern secondary world – not an alternate history, not a possible future, but a world that (post-Affirmation) has no concrete link to ours, and yet is recognisably on a par with our 20^th/21^st century existence (5). Indeed — and with the caveat that, like Gene Wolfe, you can’t take anything Priest writes at face value — arguably Islanders is more fantastic than Archipelago – there’s one story pair, mentioning no names, where the Archipelago original seemed to be strongly indicative of repressed traumatic memories in the narrator, but where it’s Islander “counterpart” pretty much says, “No, that horrifying crap was real.” Priest has therefore given us a world that has gone from a dream of mental imbalance to a self-contained reality over three volumes. Of course, his next one, should he revisit the islands, might turn it all on its head again.

(1)   Unless, possibly, that fantasy world had strong Christian overtones.

(2)   Unrelated, but it is an odious thing when someone is described in the press as “something of a Walter Mitty character,” because this seems to be wheeled out specifically to describe a shyster who has taken advantage of other people and ruined their lives, but whom we are apparently supposed to dismiss as a harmlessly deslusional/loveable rogue. Digression over.

(3)   Firmly on my list of “You Must Read This” books/series.

(4)   The reworking "A Young Man's Journey to London" (in Things that Never Happen) is cited by some reviewers as Harrison 'making peace' with his earlier genre work, and though I can't comment on this, not being up on the history, it's a welcome reading but not what I took away from the story. To me it seemed to be continuing the trajectory of the original story, taking us further out and killing/excising Viriconium altogether. I found it an unsettling read but I'd be happy to find I was reading it wrong.

(5)   There is a whole extra post in this topic.

Janine already has a body of work out there, of a somewhat different sort, but shortly she will be bringing out her first Arabian Nights fantasy, Heart of Flame, which was published as an ebook by Samhain on 20^th December 2011, and will be out in paperback later this year.

JA: Hi Adrian. Thanks for having me here on your blog!

AT: So, honing my interviewing skills: What's the lowdown on Heart of Flame?

JA: Well, it’s a fantasy-romance  – you can probably tell that from the cover style, heh.  My heroine, Taqla, is a sorceress  in 9^th century Damascus. When the Amir’s beautiful daughter is kidnapped by a djinni, she agrees to help merchant-traveller Rafiq ( a Sinbad type) rescue the girl, because she’s fallen in love with him. But she can’t tell him that. She can’t even let on that she’s female – she’s in magical disguise. They set off on this quest which ends up becoming more complex and dangerous and crazy as they go on, dragging them into wilder and weirder places – swamps, ancient temples, desert ruins, cities halfway across the world — and getting them into seriously deep trouble with undead emperors and pagan gods and hungry ghouls. This is all before they even tackle the djinni…

AT: This is a departure from your previous writing?

JA:  Yes; there’s a lot more plot … and a whole lot less sex. My normal genre is erotica. Heart of Flame is a romance, and it’s not even a straight romance because there’s so much of the magic/monsters/adventure element. So, cross-genre. But the romance is still pretty steamy. If you read the uncensored One Thousand and One Nights, there is an unabashed sexual element there.

AT: The mythic Middle-east is an area I've not seen a good take on in a while, in fantasy fiction. Where are you drawing your setting from?

JA: It’s a fantasy version of the real 9^th Century Middle East – and let’s be honest, it’s very much the Thief-of-Baghdad, Golden-Voyage-of-Sinbad Arabian Nights. I’m not an Arabic historian. My starting point was a translation of the traditional 1001 Nights, strongly larded with the Ray Harryhausen-era  Hollywood movies I grew up with.

I also used a lot of 19^th Century Orientalist art, by people like Jean-Léon Gérôme, as inspiration. These are wonderful, photo-realistic-looking paintings of a Middle East that was only just opening up to the Victorian West. But again, even those depict an exoticised, prurient, filtered version of reality, intended as entertainment as much as education.

I did my historical research too, I hasten to add!  Philip Hitti’s History of the Arabs was my bible. It’s just full of the most wonderful incident and detail. I love it. And I’ve been lucky enough to visit Syria and Jordan and Egypt. I did call on those experiences.

AT: How does your setting contrast to its historical counterpart?

JA: I’ve been historically accurate where I can – I use some historic personages like Caliph Al-Ma’mun, and the scholar Ibn Ishaq of the House of Wisdom, who sets my heroes off to find the answer to a riddle — though I did mess with the dates very slightly. The main thing I bore in mind was that I was writing in a mythological setting, so facts were subservient to the Arabian  Nights ‘look’ of the thing. Rafiq fights with a scimitar (which were really a later introduction: Arabic swords at the time were straight). He drinks cardamom-flavoured coffee with fellow merchants (coffee probably hadn’t reached Baghdad from Yemen at the time).  He plays backgammon and smokes a hubble-bubble pipe (tobacco an obvious anachronism, and the water-pipe was a C16th Indian invention). But honestly, that sort of thing is as integral to the Arabian Nights as genies and magic rings – I couldn’t do without them!

AT: What sort of fantastical elements can we expect  — a lot of fantasy at the moment is relatively low-magic and gritty — where does Heart of Flame fall on that scale?

JA: Hah! Old-fashioned high-magic fantasy, I’m afraid. My heroes travel on a magical silver horse, otherwise they’d never reach the places they have to go to. Taqla uses her sorcery to get them out of all sorts of trouble. They meet various monsters, including one holy one, that come out of Arabic and Persian legend. They parlay with an animated statue and a dead man made of flies. And then there are several djinn … and that scary scary angel …

AT: What would you give as your sources of inspiration?

JA:  My inspiration as a writer has always been Angela Carter. Lyrical but totally unsentimental, she lulls you with her fairy-tale prose and then sticks you with something really cruel. In Heart of Flame you’ll also find some sneaky nods to my other favourite writer, H P Lovecraft: there’s a copy of The Necronomicon in the House of Wisdom (under its Arabic name, of course) and the ghouls are Lovecraftian as well as Arabic. This may be the first time anyone has ever snuck the Cthulhu Mythos into a romance novel.  I would like to think so!

AT: How about film and TV depictions of similar settings. For me, I'd put forward the Hallmark Arabian Nights TV Movie as a surprisingly good shot at the genre.

JA: Yes, I enjoyed that: lush, clever and romantic. The tattooed genie from their Aladdin stayed with me as the mental image of my djinni antagonist. I’ve also watched Pasolini’s artsy 1974 version (lots of boobs), but didn’t much like Prince of Persia despite the pretty CGI scenery. The fact that their entire cast was white struck me as … inexcusably cowardly.

My favourite version is still The Thief of Baghdad: given that it was made in 1940, its cheesiness is completely excusable.  Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have a movie version of Heart of Flame with Ray Harryhausen animated monsters!

AT: A great deal of fantasy settings that include a middle-eastern-ish culture tend towards the "religious fanatic adversary" type, and obvious, in the West, that entire part of the world is a sensitive cultural and political issue. Has that influenced the book, and how did you approach that?

JA: It’s impossible not be aware of current events and political attitudes, even when writing a historical fantasy. I did try to be careful. Well, you know me: I’m not naturally the soul of tact and sensitivity…

I mention mosques but don’t set any scenes in them. I mention the Qu’ran once, but I don’t mention the Prophet.  I use the word “God.” My heroes aren’t pious but they are respectful Muslims. The thing to remember is that the Islam of the 9^th Century Abbasid Empire, the “Golden Age of Islam,” was not the same as modern fundamentalism. It was urbane, scholarly and tolerant. Jews and Christians of various sects were part of society.  People drank wine. And Caliph Al Ma’mun imposed a rationalist, non-literalist theology, heavily influenced by Greek science and philosophy.

So yeah, it’s possible that I might offend someone. But you can’t stop people taking offence if they want to. My intentions are certainly positive, for what it’s worth. Rafiq and Taqla are my heroes, after all.

Okay, I’ve probably burbled on enough. Thanks, Adrian!

Brief diversion on the writer's art to look at these two characters, a brace of Beetle-kinden politicians. Unprepossessing stuff, surely.

However, what the two of them, bitter rivals as they are, demonstrate is the ability of characters to get completely out of control. Along with many writers, I've often gone off on one about the plot and characters having a life of their own, and I'm never sure whether people think this is just authorial poseuring or what, so:

If you've read as far as the Scarab Path, you'll remember these two. Jodry is one of Stenwold's allies, and he kicks the plot of Scarab off by prompting the Khanaphir expedition that Che is a member of. Helmess is the man whose thunder he's stealing, an opponent of Stenwold and all round less reputable character. That's the first we hear of either of them.

Except of course that's not true. However, it was the first I wrote of either of them. And, if you've got as far as Sea Watch you'll know that they both become rather important characters thereafter. Their shared achievement, however, is to somehow concoct an Apt-powered time machine and make subsequent appearances before their intended first outing.

I was writing the first draft of Scarab Path (then called Sacred Servants) at around the same time as my agent was helping me get Empire into shape, and one of his suggestions was an early chapter in which Stenwold gets heavy in the Assembly, Churchill stylee, and for that I needed a foil. It could have been anyone, but i had this chap Helmess Broiler kicking about, and so he got the job. The man of suspect loyalties became a more concrete antagonist, and of course, if you've read Sea Watch, you'll know where that all goes to.

Similarly, Jodry Drillen was new-minted for Scarab Path, but then I ran into something of a timing issue in Salute the Dark. Stenwold returns from his jaunt to the Commonweal and is met by Lineo Thadspar, the old Speaker for the Assembly. Except that Salute had a rejigging in which the order of some sections changed, and abruptly Lineo was basically bedridden when Stenwold needed to chew his ear off. Before I could put in a casting call, enter Jodry Drillen, already with his eyes on the Speaker's newly vacant sandals, handling Stenwold like a professional.

It's very likely that without those chance substitutions and additions, neither character would have become sufficiently fleshed-out (literally, in Jodry's case) to become the major players they are in Sea Watch and beyond: twin careers in politics born entirely out of editing necessity.

I'm not going to lie to you, it's been a rough ride. I'm slick with blood up to the elbows, and my normal protests that the story unfolds of its own momentum, with minimal fiddling from me, are starting to sound like the officer who tries to shed his guilt by claiming he was only obeying orders. There have been a lot of crunch points in the books so far (look at how Salute the Dark turns out) and The Air War is going to have its share, but book 9 has some moments that sent me away from the keyboard for a bit of a lie down until my hands stopped shaking. I've said goodbye to a few friends, over the last handful of months (2).

After all, we're getting towards the end of the final plot arc. These things are only to be expected.

There's a lot of work ahead, obviously — first off I've got to print it off and re-read it on paper, to pick up all those inconsistencies that have crept in, and ensure it's actually as satisfactory as my memory currently claims it is. In the meanwhile, I'm revisiting 8 while I go through the edits on that, which makes an interesting juxtaposition, as book 9 is somewhat of a sequel to 7 and 8 together.

Next stop: Book 10 — "Seal of the Worm", a phrase that Air War will illuminate somewhat. However, I'm hopeful that I'll get some short stories done first so watch this space.

(1) or: "whatever the hell we end up calling it", but I'm quite happy with "War Master's Gate".

(2) This is sounding a bit like JK Rowling's dire portents during the Harry Potter series. Yes, it's true, General Tynan does put Dumbledore on the crossed pikes. It's dramatic necessity.

That got me thinking. Technically, my published long fiction to date represents only a single set of initial ideas — that's the advantage of a series. The original elements of Shadows of the Apt turned up in the early 90's when I ran something that looked a little like the current Insect-kinden setting as an RPG at university. Looking back, it's quite surprising just how much of that original campaign actually made it into print. For example you would probably recognise:

(Some minor spoilers for the early books)

1. The map of the Lowlands from book 1, that ispretty much the same as the one I actually used for the campaign.

2. Stenwold and Tisamon as major NPCs going under those very names (though no 'Maker' for Stenwold, I think). Stenwold was just an artificer, not a statesman, but Tisamon the Weaponsmaster hasn't changed all that much, as we see him in Empire.

3. Scuto and Kymene in something quite close to their final forms, but not those names, and indeed the plotline of Kymene as a prisoner of a fat Wasp governor of Myna was played out in the campaign, so I suppose poor old Ulther is one of my original cast too. Scylla was also there, with her face-changing tricks, although primarily as a thief and not a spy.

4. The Darakyon, very much as seen in Empire.

5. Drephos, sort of. The campaign never actually got that far, but a crazy half-Moth artificer with an unusual arm was planned as a later villain.

6. Snapbows, again sort of, although they never got into wide circulation in the game.

7. The Shadow Box, its theft (thought from somewhere else entirely), and an auction in Jerez where it would end up.

8. The grand majority of the kinden found in the books. I even have some thoroughly dreadful concept art from the time. (2)

9, The Scorpion mercenary that Thalric fights alongside the Wasp sycophants in the governor's palace at Myna. I know that's ridiculously specific for a character that doesn't even have a name, but one of aforementioned pieces of art was that guy.

The precise tech level, politics and starting status quo got firmed up a lot for the books, but having developed the world for the game I had a very well-rounded understanding of the world which proved invaluable in writing. A lot of other elements, such as Lake Limnia and its contents, were sort of waiting in the wings. The actual plot itself just evolved out of the world — once I had worked out my starting point everything fell into place — and has continued to fall into place, domino to domino, ever since. I take pains not to get underfoot, really, whilst my characters drive the plot between them, war and angst and all.

There is still a great deal of planning, replanning and going at the whole business with a spanner and a fire-axe, in order to make narrative sense of the train of ideas that flow naturally from the previous books, but within the series, simple causality, the inherent logic (3) of the setting and the pre-existing dispositions of the characters determine a great deal of what will happen next.

Of course, providence willing, there will come I time when the book I am advancing across the chessboard (4) will not be an insect-kinden one. I'm working on book 9 of 10 at the moment, and so my thoughts are naturally turning to the future, and what the next project will be, assuming anyone is insane enough to let me. Whilst I do intend to return to the world of the kinden in time (5) I'd like to visit elsewhere for a while — and that will be an interesting step given that I've lived in the one world, with the one set of characters for so long. The ideas are coming, though, and have been for some time (6) — but where do they come from?

Having now got to the point in this post where I intended to actually begin, and to follow up Mr Newton's own post, I find I have gone on far too long. Another time, perhaps.

(1) No, not 'why isn't this available where I live.'  That is a good question though, and particularly annoying to have to ask it.

(2) I also have some rather better concept art from when I was planning Sea Watch, which may even see the light of day.

(3) Giant insects, mad clockwork flying machines and people who can fly notwithstanding.

(4) The chessboard of mixed metaphors, that is.#

(5) As further evidence of my insanity I would state that I have at least three books of extra story not connected to the current arc.

(6) And believe me, it's imperative that you always write them down. I've lost at least a couple of book plots from imperfect recollection later on.

Read more about the competition here - they're looking for a synopsis plus three chapters by 20th August. If you're minded to give it a shot then, as your de facto legal advisor, I must of course advise you read all the terms and conditions carefully, as books involving dragons can go up as well as down.

Also on the Sci Fi Now website, Julie Crisp of Tor (who currently labours under the unfair stigma of being my editor there) talks about what Tor looks for in a submission, so this is probably a decent piece of research if you're minded to go for the above. Read that here.

(1) However you might wish to define it, or refuse to define it.

However, I acquired some new reading material this Christmas, and I wanted to share a couple of quotes with you, one bizarre, one serious.

First off, I got hold of a copy of Jess Nevins' Impossible Territories. I've mentioned my love of Alan Moore, especially his and Kevin O'Neil's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (4). Now, Messrs Moore and O'Neil have essentially ransacked the whole of human fiction for their alternate history, the major maxim of which is that anything fictional in our world is real in the world of the League. Hence the 19th century government secret agent super-team consists of Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, Quartermain, Mr Hyde and the Invisible Man, for instance — but that's barely scratching the surface as the graphic novels are vastly detailed, and have an even more elaborate backstory and history extending into classical myth and even further. Now, for one with something of a shotgun education (5), what one needs is some poor sap who's done the legwork of tracking down the legion of references, cameos, glimpses and inferences and laid them out in neat typeface: enter Jess Nevins, who has written just such a volume for each of the three League books to date. The books would be entirely readable, I should point out, if one had never read a word of Wells or Verne or what have you, but there are layers and layers of additional edification there to be had, and Mr Nevins is good enough to save someone like me (6) a great deal of work.

However, have you ever had one of those days when you just can't put your finger on the correct fact, and you leave it until later, just typing any old thing to keep the spacing right, and you know you'll come back to it later? It happened to British Rail years back, when train timetables were printed up including a linking service to Outer Mongolia, because someone was asleep at the lever when the final proofreading was done (7).

Well then, Mr Nevins (who I have a vast respect for, please note) was in the middle of annotating the League's history of Orlando, an immortal who has fought his/her way through most of recorded history (8). As Orlando stabs and seduces his/her way through classical times we have entries such as:

"According to Roman myths, Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the priestess Rhea, Silvia and the God Ares, were reared by a wolf…" because Mr Nevins diligently leaves no turnable stone unturned.

And so, when Orlando reports "...I moved on, fighting for Persia against Greece at Marathon…" Mr Nevins helpfully provides:

"The Battle of Marathon (490BCE) was a major victory for the Smurfs over the forces of Gargamel, and prevented him from conquering Oz and Wonderland."

Of course, I'm not as up on Smurf-lore as I might be (9), but I hadn't even realised that they were around in 490BC.

Or perhaps Mr N was just wondering how closely his readership scrutenised his references…

My second quote, now, comes from another seasonal acquisition, being George R.R. Martin's Dream Songs, a compilation of his short fiction which also provides a remarkable picture of the long and tangled career of one of fantasy's most versatile writers. I'd like to share from you a brief quotation that gives perfectly onto the life of a struggling writer trying to crack publication, and illustrates the maxim that you should take your triumphs where you can.

"Seldom has a writer been so thrilled by a rejection. A real editor had seen one of my stories, and liked it well enough to send a letter instead of a rejection slip."

 The Martin collection is well worth grabbing, not only for the stories themselves, but for the window it grants on Martin's early writing career (and pre-career).

As a final, final note, and back to the subject of the run-up to the release of Dragonfly Falling (and you'll have noticed the facelift the site has had), you could do worse than popping over to Fantasy Book Critic, where they have a giveaway of both Empire and Dragonfly just waiting for your entry.

And (finally finally) as Mihai notes below, there is a new and detailed interview up here at Darkwolf's Fantasy Reviews, which goes somewhat into the future of Shadows of the Apt.

(1) You will be unsurprised to learn that this means that I'm writing this blog entry later than I had intended. Really, I work better with deadlines. I'm magic with deadlines. It's all this free association stuff that's difficult (2).

(2) And the recent patchiness of entries has nothing whatsoever to do with the recent release of a certain expansion for a well-known online game.

(3) And by this I emphatically do not mean 'we'll see whether I end up regularly raiding Naxxramas'. Absolutely not.

(4) If you've only seen the film, for the lord's sake check out the original.

(5) As in patchy, not hillbilly.

(6) i.e. essentially lazy.

(7) A plague on the universality of the internet! I tried to track down the actual details to this story but google would only give me actual train timetables for Outer Mongolia.

(8) Based on an amalgam of Ariosto, Woolf, Borges and others, and having a distinctly Moorcock-Eternal Champion feel to him/her.

(9) They call it "Smurfology", but frankly the little blue buggers could mean anything when they say that.