The Cave of Wonders

So, I’d sent the completed manuscript of Empire off to my agent, and another of these habitual long waits ensued. Mind you, if by this stage you’re not able to deal with long waits, then, well…   Actually, that’s bunkum. Hope is a curse. It inflames the senses. Sentence a man to ten lashes, and the eleventh lash […]

Last Refuge of the Snake-Oil Salesmen

Well, not the last refuge, given that our entire society, and most specifically economy, is liberally greased with the stuff, as a look at any advert (1) will show you. After all, we live in a society where the amount of money you stand to make would seem to be inversely proportional to the actual need society […]

Tolkien's Footsteps

Well, I’ve made quite enough sidelong references to the Grand Old Man of fantasy fiction that I thought I should meet him head on at some point (1) : JRR Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, friend of CS Lewis (2) and “father of modern fantasy” as he has been called.   There are few enough readers of fantasy […]

Hammer and Sickle

Some more Empire backstory The slaves found their voice. This was five hundred and thirty-seven years before the main action in Empire (1), and we know this because the main action in Empire takes place in the year 537. The slaves had never had a calendar, while they lived under the boot of their masters. Their masters’ […]

An Early Present from Santa Claws

Oh to have a reputation.   Specifically, a full half-dozen people have sent me links to the same news story, linked herewith: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7104421.stm   The obvious thought, when confronted with this, is, “slow news day.” Had the story broken a day later, then the football (1) would have squeezed it out entirely. Like the fossilisation process itself, a news […]

The Call to Arms

After the writing and the re-writing, After the striving, and the despicable cost of postage, After the rejections and the resubmissions, After all of these things, and so ad infinitum, And if your gods favour you, You may hear the Call.   The Call should, if there was any poetry or justice in this world, come […]

You take the High Road and I'll take the Low Road

…And I’ll be in Narnia before ye.   You often hear the terms “High Fantasy” and “Low Fantasy” bandied around as the two major divisions within the fantasy genre. As discussed, dividing the corpus of literature can be a snobbish business, even in (1) a genre that is itself persecuted.   The most generally accepted definition of […]

Dark Days

All this was prehistory. The unspoken pact with the monster insects that ensured humanity’s survival, and the subsequent development of the Art, is all lost to the mists of time. Not even the longest memories, not even the most complete records, bear witness. What is certain is that, having chosen a side, mankind collaborated in the […]

Based on a True Story

I’ve already gone on about the tyranny of the Mainstream State, that exiles all those that fail to conform to its rigorous aesthetic to the gulag of genre fiction. However, like all good despotic regimes, “mainstream fiction” is based on hypocrisy and lies. (1)   There are two ways of looking at this:   First, the […]

Writing Outside the Box

There is a key division in fantasy (1) writing to do with the scale and scope of the world that the author is intent on creating. This is not just about the size of the map, but more to do with what happens just beyond the map’s edge, off the page. What happens? Well, in some […]