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Uprooted with Anne Perry Part 1
273 Plays1 year ago
We're back after the summer break, and are joined by Anne Perry, the publishing director at Jo Fletcher Books, to talk about Naomi Novik's 2015 fantasy bestseller, Uprooted. Based upon aspects of rural Polish folklore, Uprooted follows Agnieszka, a plain village girl who is shocked to learn that she is to be taken away to live with The Dragon, a powerful and distant wizard who lives in a tower at the edge of the valley, and protects them from a malevolent and expanding forest.
Anne, Peat and Dan discuss the feminine voice and perspectives the book offers, from friendship to romance, and why this was unusual when it was initially sold in 2014. We talk about the malevolent Wood, its echoing of Mythago Wood, and how it spawned an era of new, female oriented fantasy. We also discuss the various aspects of the male characters, and how outward hostility can hide redemptive transformation, when the female enters into their domain in the correct way.
The Judge offers a brilliant talk on a topic very relevant to writers of all stripes, namely the issue of copyright of characters, showing cases as diverse as Sherlock Holmes, Only Fools And Horses, Discworld, and Spawn.
Lastly, Captain Halfmilkcarton insists that Lt Bungalow clean up his mess, without much success.
Join us next time when we'll continue our talk with Anne Perry, talking about the state of publishing in 2023, how this affects authors, booksellers, bookshops, and the pros and cons and indie and self-publishing.
Index
Anne Perry Interview [0:00:00 - 55:37]
Skit (55:45 - 58:37]
The Judge's Corner [58:38 - 1:14:36]
Credits and close [1:14:37 - 1:15:12]
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Updates and New Format
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everybody. Before we get on to the proper business of this episode, I have a short notice for our listeners. First of all, thanks for your patience in waiting for this episode. Balancing my day job with my family and my writing over the school summer holidays isn't all that easy. And so something's had to give, which resulted in an unplanned break in Cron's cast output over the last couple of months.
00:00:24
Speaker
But we're back and we've got some excellent episodes lined up over the next few weeks and months. And I hope you can join us for that.
Introduction to 'Uprooted' and Guest Anne Perry
00:00:31
Speaker
Secondly, following some listener feedback, we're trialing some changes to how we release the episodes. Several people said they would prefer shorter episodes, but without compromising on the content. So we are going to split our future interviews across two episodes. The first to cover the guests chosen book or film and the judge's corner.
00:00:52
Speaker
and the second episode to cover the guest interview about their own life, career, and expertise, as well as any successful challenge entries where relevant. While Anne Ruan Ultra's skits will be spread over both episodes. With that in mind, I hope you enjoy this episode on Naomi Novik's novel, Uprooted with Anne Perry.
Plot and Themes of 'Uprooted'
00:01:29
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Kron's Cast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Pete Long. Today we're talking about Naomi Novick's 2015 novel, Uprooted, a high fantasy story based on Polish folklore.
00:01:49
Speaker
The story tells of the village of vernick, on whose outskirts lies a powerful wizard called the dragon. The dragon protects the village from the encroaching malevolence of the nearby forest, known simply as the wood. But his protection comes at a price, for every 10 years he selects a girl from the village to take into his tower.
00:02:08
Speaker
Agnieszka, a village girl, fully expects her attractive and talented friend Kasia to be taken, and is shocked and guilty when she is selected instead. But she soon learns from the dragon that she has her own magical gift, one that allows her to make her own path no matter how dangerous it is. Together they deal with political dealings at court, teach each other magic, and seek to end the threat from the malevolent wood.
00:02:32
Speaker
The book won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2016 Locust Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the 2016 Mythopofic Award in the category of Adult Literature. It was also a fantasy for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
00:02:49
Speaker
And joining us today is Anne Perry, the director of publishing Quercus Books.
Guest Anne Perry's Role and Perspective
00:02:54
Speaker
Anne is a writer, editor, publisher, mentor, and a former literary agent with more than 10 years of experience in the UK publishing industry.
00:03:03
Speaker
She founded the award-winning and proudly Hugo losing blog, Pornokic, the independent press, Jurassic London. Pete's smiling at that. And the literary prize, the Kiches. Her writing has appeared in 1001 TV shows you must see before you die.
00:03:22
Speaker
and it's appeared on tor.com among other places. She has received publishing awards from the Kim Scott Wallen Prize, the Hospital Club, the British Science Fiction Association, the British Fantasy Society, and the Joaquin Moraga Intermediate School. Second place, short story category, 1992. Bravo! Welcome along, Anne. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. What a wonderful litany of awards you have behind you.
00:03:49
Speaker
especially that last one, you're clinging on tightly to that one as well you should. Very proud. That story was a shameless rip off of an HP Lovecraft short story that I read and fell madly in love with and decided to gender flip and entered into a short story competition.
00:04:08
Speaker
We've said it before, but the great ones always steal. They don't borrow, they steal. That's what Dostoyevsky who said that. The good ones borrow, but the great ones steal. I've seen that. Everyone really. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's everyone. It's just, it's just basically true. I want to clear everybody steals that statement. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody claims it for themselves. Hey, so lovely to see you. Thanks for joining us.
00:04:36
Speaker
And you picked Uprooted, which is a bit of a, well, funny book, strange book, we'll get onto that. It's similar to a couple of other books that we've had on in the past, which again, perhaps we'll come to. I'm thinking of one in particular, but we'll see if you pick up on that. So you tell us, why did you pick Uprooted to talk about?
00:05:00
Speaker
Oh, a whole bunch of reasons. First and foremost, because I love it. I was the underbitter on it when it was on submission in 2014. I desperately wanted to publish it.
00:05:11
Speaker
Sadly, that honor went to another publisher, but I loved it so much that I kept the submission copy that I had been sent on my Kindle for years and reread it a couple of times when I sort of needed a comfort read just because it sort of meant that much to me. It's the, to this day, it's still the submission, the one that got away. Every publisher has one and that's the one that still sort of gets me. I still wish I could go back in time and find another way to win that book at auction.
Cultural Influences and Impact of 'Uprooted'
00:05:39
Speaker
So that's one of the reasons. Another one of the reasons is because it feels very significant actually in modern science fiction and fantasy, particularly fantasy writing, in that in 2014, when it came through on submission, we weren't seeing a lot of books that were like it. And it was certainly the very best of its kind that I had read at that time. But again, there were very few that I had read that had come from modern authors, which were based in folklore, but Eastern European folklore, so not necessarily sort of
00:06:09
Speaker
particularly British or sort of like the American idea of what British fantasy, British medieval fantasy ideas were. This comes from a slightly different background. It privileges the female experience, the female gaze, privileges female friendship, which was not something that we saw a ton of in fantasy at the time. It privileges the romantic relationship between Agnieszka and the dragon.
00:06:35
Speaker
But it's not about that. And it has a really, I think, quite moving ending. And so for all of those reasons, I was very drawn to it then. And I continue to be quite drawn to it, even though what Naomi Novick did with this book, we now see much more frequently. We see many, many more books now that obviously are based on mythology and fairy tales coming through and being quite successful. We see a lot of these books that privilege romantic relationships.
00:07:02
Speaker
in a way that they weren't necessarily 20 years ago, that privilege female friendships in the way that they were not necessarily 20 years ago. And it felt quite new for its time. And so that's one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about it. Specifically, what was different about it, not now in 2023, but in 2014? So you mentioned setting.
00:07:33
Speaker
I'm nothing gets away from me. You're working in the UK, but you don't have a UK accent, do you? That's correct. I'm from California originally. You're from California. OK, so you mentioned that the American idea or the American perception of British life, perhaps, or British folklore, British fantasy, but in
00:07:54
Speaker
from the perspective of Britain or more widely a European, a lot of European folklore actually has quite a lot of similarity. There may be discrepancies in with respect to the particular settings but
00:08:07
Speaker
a lot of the broader ideas, i.e. the forest being a place of regeneration, where it is both perhaps malevolent and that force for transformation. That's not something that's specific necessarily to Eastern Europe or to Britain or any other place. I mean, that's probably quite a cross-cultural thing, which is probably why the book did so well, not just in Europe, but in America as well. I think
00:08:35
Speaker
It's interesting that Novik draws on both sides of the pond, I suppose. She's from New York, is that right? That's correct. New York, New York, so she's a New Yorker and also got Polish ancestry. Her mother was born there. Is that duality of perception, of the experience that made it a little bit different for you?
00:09:01
Speaker
I think so. I think I think you've certainly touched on something. There's absolutely the universality of the sort of the wood, the deep, dark, mysterious wood. I mean, obviously, you see that all all through mythologies in many, many different parts of the world. I mean, I was, as you were speaking, of course, I immediately started to think about mithago wood and that's the that's that's the book that we've already covered on another episode with John Gerald.
00:09:29
Speaker
He talks about Mythago Wood with us. And yeah, immediately I was drawn to that as a comparison.
Character Analysis: The Dragon and Agnieszka
00:09:36
Speaker
Sorry. No, no, that's quite all right. But that's definitely, there's certainly a legacy, excuse me, in both folklore and in sort of fantastical modern retellings of folklore or fantastical fiction that takes its inspiration from folklore, the sort of malevolent wood.
00:09:55
Speaker
So I think what particularly spoke to me about this wasn't just the malevolent wood, but the fact that it was very, very clearly set in a malevolent wood that was not meant to be in a sort of English-esque setting. And that
00:10:11
Speaker
really made it stand out at the time. Another book that came in on exhibition not long after this one actually was The Bear and the Nightingale, of course is based on Russian fairy tales and has a very similar sort of sense of place where it's privileging a way of interacting with that idea of the mythological wood, but from a perspective that again is not one that we saw a lot of in the 80s and 90s. And again, I think of
00:10:40
Speaker
I think because Mothago Wood has this sort of outsized place in my imagination, as it does with pretty much anyone who's ever read it. I mean, once you read Mothago Wood, it's sort of the Ur text for stories set in the woods. This is actually quite a nice companion piece for Mothago Wood. You said this is the
00:11:01
Speaker
One of the things that is always picked up on with Mothago Wood is the lack of female characters in it. Well, to an extent, you have to take that with a huge dollop of salt, because it's about damaged men. That's the point of the book. But it's very much centered on the male experience in that post-war period. And here we've got the female experience, which is very much loosely based upon a beauty in the beast,
00:11:30
Speaker
type partnership between her and the dragon. In fact, it's very similar to the Beauty and the Beast story because Agnieszka is chosen by the dragon as the one girl, 17-year-old girl, who is to be taken to his tower and effectively imprisoned. So it's a bit like Rapunzel as well. She's taken away and locked away in the tower.
00:11:56
Speaker
She's supposed to be, well, she comes back changed after a while. And the captor is the dragon, big scary name, a strange wizard who lives on the outskirts of the village. And he is, well, Peter and I were exchanging messages about uprooted. And the first time you come across the dragon, he's quite the piece of work, isn't he?
00:12:25
Speaker
It's a very good way to describe him. So, yeah, well, tell us your perception of the dragon, you know, why he is the way he is. And this is a book about transformations in many different ways. And the transformation that happens to people physically, we have physical transformations, we have sometimes we have moral transformations, and we have transformations with respect to personality and
00:12:51
Speaker
and romantic transformations as well, which is tied into that idea. So maybe could you tell us a little bit about why the dragon is such an interesting character from Nieszka's point of view from the female perspective? Well, I think what's particularly interesting about him, so I'll start from my own perspective just as a reader and someone who's, of course, reasonably familiar with the Beauty and the Beast.
00:13:18
Speaker
tale itself, sort of thinking about the fact that he's essentially immortal. He's about 150 years old, I believe. He's been there for 150 years. He's going to be there for another 150 years or longer. He believes he can't change. He believes he's just stuck there. So he's going to watch the world change around him, but he has to stay there and do what he does.
00:13:42
Speaker
It's a very difficult thing for him to, I mean, he feels like he must and he's made his peace with it to a degree, but it's still a very difficult thing for him to have internalized. And so, you know, he comes across as grumpy, as frightening. And as a sort of a sidebar to that is the fact that the characters all know that when he takes a girl into the castle, they disappear for 10 years and they come back changed. And that's what Nieszka knows.
00:14:11
Speaker
what she learns, what she realizes as she goes and she begins to change is not that they're going into the castle and they're being transformed in some sort of monstrous way. They're learning
00:14:24
Speaker
to want more from life than their small village. And so the dragon is revealed to be actually quite a lonely person because what he does is he takes these young people who have their whole lives ahead of them, gives them the gift of knowledge and of education and then sends them out into the world. And they all find that that means that they don't want to go back to their little town anymore and that, you know, it starts out with a kind of loneliness and sort of curdles into bitterness for him.
00:14:53
Speaker
her realization that the the transformations that are that are occurring to these women are not bad that you know from the parochial view of the people in her little village they may seem like terrible transformations because they're taking the girls away ultimately forever but they're not doing so to the detriment of the young women themselves they're not making them bad people they're not depriving the families of them in a you know a
00:15:20
Speaker
cruel way. These are just as happens with lots of young people, you know, they go away for a while, they come back different, they want more out of life than the small town they came from. And so from the perspective of the people in small town, that's a loss. That's very noisy outside tonight. It's a loss that could be even, you know, considered a tragedy. But from a larger and shall we say,
00:15:44
Speaker
from a different perspective, not necessarily one that's more educated or knowledge, but from a different perspective, that's, that's what growing up is. It's learning about the larger world and deciding what your place in it is and realizing that maybe your place in it is not where you came from. And so what's interesting, if you'll forgive me for going on a bit of a tangent, I think what's interesting, Agnieszka and her voyage, of course, is that
00:16:07
Speaker
she chooses a different path entirely. She goes, can I spoil the ending? Am I allowed to? Oh, we do spoilers. Every guest asks this and the answer's always the same. Yes, spoil away. But she eventually becomes the equivalent of Baba Yaga. She also becomes a wizard in the forest helping to keep the malevolent forces there at bay.
00:16:26
Speaker
and she becomes a version of the dragon herself and in that way they are able to, he comes back to her at the end and they're able to approach each other as equals finally but she has to both learn from him and then move away to the city and have adventures on her own and continue her own quest and bring it to a conclusion and then decide what she wants her life to be before she's able to bring him back into it.
00:16:49
Speaker
This is a very long and windy way of answering your question. It's a great way. You touched on so many pertinent points there. You really nailed it. She is one particular point that you brought up.
00:17:06
Speaker
sort of like being jumped around in my mind is that, of course, Agnieszka goes back to the village. I mean, the woods by the village, but she doesn't follow the rest of the girls in deciding, okay, the village is no longer enough for me. She goes to the city, she comes back and
00:17:23
Speaker
when we were talking about the different routes, the Polishness of it, I mean something that struck me when I was reading interviews of Novik talking about this book is how much of it's rooted in her family history and her mother's sense of grief that
00:17:43
Speaker
she's been separated. And we're leaving Poland and going to America.
Modern Fantasy Themes in 'Uprooted'
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah. And the immigrant story is Agni Ishka is able to live the fantasy of I've left my homeland, but I've come back, I've reconciled. And I'm sort of wondering, like, I mean, we're talking about the new things just represented. I think in the last 10 years, we've seen a lot of fantasy that's
00:18:07
Speaker
drawn very heavily on migrants or second generation experiences, like would you consider this a early forerunner? Yeah, absolutely. And you're for exactly the reason that you just you just laid a finger on so nicely is that I mean, she definitely Naomi Novak when she was writing it, you know, it's clear that she was pulling from
00:18:29
Speaker
If not a familial, then a cultural memory. There is a sense of loss there that is very clear throughout the book. I think it's one of the reasons why I responded to it so strongly emotionally when I was first reading it was that it's a very emotional book about home and about what home means and what it means to leave and come back and how your relationship with the place that you left is never the same and so on and so forth.
00:18:55
Speaker
So definitely all of that is there. And then you're absolutely right that we've seen more and more of that in in fantasy literature. And there's, you know, there's always been a degree in the sort of even the sort of Joseph Campbellian sort of like idea of what fantasy is, you know, the hero of a thousand faces who leaves and comes back. The hero's journey is always always about leaving something behind and then returning to it.
00:19:20
Speaker
and returning to it changed. Exactly. And so this is, you know, certainly part of the story that we've been telling for generations. But it's, I love the fact that what we're seeing with books like Uprooted and books that have followed from Uprooted is
00:19:36
Speaker
is looking at it from new perspectives. And sometimes that's new perspective in terms of the authors. We're seeing authors who haven't necessarily had voices in fantasy fiction before, who are being published, who are being brought forward, and having their stories about home and leaving and returning and the cycle perpetuating itself over and over again and being able to put their imprint on it. And so I would very much agree that I think Naomi Novick's uprooted in two degrees, spinning silver as well.
00:20:05
Speaker
which is much more involved in Jewish folklore. They do quite a lot of that. Yes. There does seem to be a revisiting of more old fashioned fairy tales and treating them with a bit more respect, you know, moving away from the Disney vibe.
00:20:26
Speaker
spin on the fairy tale and I suppose Disneyfied is probably a loaded term because there's a hell of a lot of difference between let's say Snow White in 1937 and retangled for example from like 13 years ago or even frozen you know that's the Snow Queen but it seems to me that yeah there does seem to be a yearning to return to the authenticity of
00:20:50
Speaker
Real folk and real folktales there's talking of snow white i think there's a kickstarter campaign by johnathan pajo the artist to read. To release a new an updated for not updated but a new edition of snow white day is very very classical says going right back to the brothers green before brothers green.
00:21:11
Speaker
and really emphasising the antiquity of it, the ancient symbolism of it. I really liked some of the things you said in your précis of the dragon and his relationship with Nieszka. Reading some of the reviews of Uprooted, it certainly
00:21:32
Speaker
it was controversial for a lot of people because the dragon, he's grumpy and he's rude and he's 150 years old so that might make you a bit grumpy and rude but nevertheless a lot of people say it goes beyond that and actually he's abusive and he certainly he gives Shnieszka both barrels on a number of occasions he calls
Complex Characters: Prince Marek and The Wood
00:21:52
Speaker
her
00:21:52
Speaker
Dirty, he calls her a slut, not in the modern term, but the slut is in the old fashioned term for somebody, for a female who is very dirty and untidy. Nevertheless, not a nice thing. He calls her horse-faced, he calls her a lunatic, he insults her all the way through it.
00:22:13
Speaker
But, as you said, he acts as that point of transformation. Now, to a modern audience, I see the dragon as being representative of
00:22:25
Speaker
Patriarchy, right? And that's clear what he is. He's in a tower and more than that, he's at the top of the tower. He lives at the top of the tower. So he represents a hierarchy and he's at the top of it, certainly in that little village. He's the most powerful wizard. He represents the patriarchal hierarchy on the face of it. It's all bad.
00:22:44
Speaker
But he also represents culture because he's the wizard. He's not just bad male at the top of the tower. He also represents culture, which is the thing that stops nature in the form of the wood from encroaching into human civilization. So I think it's a really sophisticated view on what nature, culture, and patriarchy is because it's the culture
00:23:12
Speaker
that whips somebody into shape after plucking them from their obscured or backwater existence exactly like Belle in Beauty and the Beast and transforms them into something that is much more useful to society but also much more knowledgeable about the world and she is enslaved in that period where she's learning is so clever because she's actually enslaved inside the tower
00:23:36
Speaker
She's kept in prison. And that's exactly what you're doing when you're learning. When you're a student at university or when you're at school, you're caged by this rigid framework, by this rigid structure that transforms you into something, spits you out after 10 years, and then eventually you get useful at the other end. And she's able to take that into the courtly drama aspect and out into the wood.
00:24:03
Speaker
Let's go on to the wood, actually. So what did you think about the portrayals of the wood itself? I love it. I love the depth and the darkness of it. I love the malevolence of it. I love the fact that when Kajia is transformed and she's trapped, she blames Nieszka. That part of our relationship with the wood is informed by the fact that everything that
00:24:28
Speaker
Agnieszka thinks about it is colored by the fact that she feels responsible for what happened to her friend within the woods. And, you know, the driving force of the book is her desperate need to find a way to save her. And everything else that happens is, is in service of the fact that she needs to atone for what she believes to be, was her fault in having Kazia be trapped by the woods. But I love, I love the malevolent force of the woods. I love
00:24:58
Speaker
I love the fact that it sort of hearkens back to sort of, again, medieval or even older ideas where, you know, you have a little town that's kind of the last bastion of civilization before something very old and very unknowable that's just waiting for you. You set foot in the woods, you may not come back. And, you know, if you're a peasant in the 11th century, it may be because Barry eats you. And I love that.
00:25:27
Speaker
what Novick does with this book is that she takes that sort of ancient fear of the woods and finds a way to make it comprehensible to a modern reader. So it's not just that it's a bunch of ignorant people who are afraid of the dark. This is actually a monstrous
00:25:47
Speaker
feature of the world that is literally out to get people. That's exactly what nature is. It's not just get people, it takes people and it doesn't just kill them, it makes them into part of it. Exactly.
00:26:02
Speaker
yeah she says sometimes people come back from the wood and they're changed in some malevolent way you know they they have they've they've become murderers or something's changed you know like the countenance has fallen and they've become vengeful for some reason something's switched as a result of of going into the darkness which i find part of an interesting strain of um american speculative fiction the
00:26:28
Speaker
fear of this entity that takes individuals and forces them to become part of hive mind for want of a better word. It's reminded me a lot of Jim Butcher's Codex Valera and I mean you can take it as far back as Starship Troopers if you want. It
00:26:50
Speaker
It seemed an interesting way of using this very old threat out of folklore with a very present modern day one. Do you think that's a particularly American
00:27:06
Speaker
angle on speculative fiction? Wow, that's such a great question. I don't feel prepared to go off at great length about this. I do think that there is an element of, you know, for those of us in the United States who grew up interested in fairy tales and folklore, there are
00:27:29
Speaker
like many people, you get to be the recipient of an extraordinary sort of mix of cultures and cultural stories. And one of the things that certainly I was exposed to in the US when I was growing up, when I was sort of desperately seeking out
00:27:44
Speaker
fairy tales and folklore, the gorier, the better, obviously, was that I would find collections that included Native American or indigenous Canadian stories, as well as the stories that were more well known through, you know, Grimm's fairy tales and Anderson, Hans Christian Anderson.
00:28:09
Speaker
And so one of the while you were speaking, actually, Pete, one of the things that I was thinking about was a version of the Wendigo that I read when I was a little girl, which was it made no sense to me, I'd never heard of the Wendigo before. And I just remember being having my tiny mind blown by the story because it was
00:28:26
Speaker
terrifying and it made no sense. It was in scary stories to tell in the dark, the one that's famous for its terrifying illustrations and it was just two or three pages long and it's two men out in a snowy field and the wind starts blowing and they huddled together because they're terrified of what's going on out there and they can hear the wind blowing and then one of them starts to say, oh, it's calling me, it's calling to me and the other man says, don't go out there, you're not hearing anything, it's just the wind. And finally the one man
00:28:57
Speaker
cats tend it anymore and he throws himself out of the tent and the wind stops and the next morning the other man gets out of the tent to try and find what happened to his friend and all he can see are his running footsteps in the snow
00:29:09
Speaker
but there's more and more space between each footstep until finally they vanish. And that was the story of the Wendigo that I first read. And nothing sort of speaks to me of sort of the malevolent other more than a story like that. And sort of the idea of the wood in Uprooted very much sort of speaks to that. There's just, there's some sort of evil influence out there that for some reason wants you, but we don't know why. We never really will. It's kind of complicated. I like the idea. I like the hive mind.
00:29:39
Speaker
point that P mentioned because everything is connected in the wood. We should probably mention the silver heart trees because they're quite a cool invention and not what you'd
00:29:53
Speaker
they can sort of run against type, I suppose, because they don't, they're not described, they're described as being quite beautiful. You know, they're shining, they have large silver trunks, they bear big golden fruits, and you don't, it's almost like fool's gold, you know. There's this idea that it's quite enticing, but behind that there's a rottenness, there's a corruption that bleeds into whoever it takes.
00:30:19
Speaker
But the tree can talk to the rest of the woods, and there are these creatures called walkers, which are almost like foliate people, aren't they? And then you have the praying mantises, which were very cool as well. She does write a good action scene. She does. Well, have you read her Temeraire novels, the Bullionic ones? Yeah. She certainly cut her teeth learning how to do amazing action sequences. They are very good.
00:30:53
Speaker
But the last act of the book is essentially, well, not the final, you know, the epilogue, but the last act is essentially one long action scene. The siege at the Dragon's Tower. It goes on for quite some time. And you have the Baron, I think it was the Baron's name. Remind me of the Baron at the end who asked to marshal his troops to stave off Prince Marek. Yes, I don't recall his name. Just call him the Baron. The Baron.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah, the Baron, the Baron's fine. Yeah, that one long action scene and lots of magic and death and necromancy and everything's going on and she packs a lot into that last scene. It's well done. It's interesting because I read
00:31:42
Speaker
I also, in preparation for our discussion this evening, I went through and read some reviews and some reader reviews on Goodreads. And it was quite interesting because as with so many books that many people love, many people do not love them. And so there were a lot of five star reviews and a lot of one star reviews. And it was quite interesting actually seeing some of the one star reviews where people were complaining about how things felt kind of rushed at the end. And the book can, I think, be pretty clearly divided into three significant parts. And I wonder,
00:32:11
Speaker
This is an aside on structure, but I wonder if, you know, in the modern day and age, if somebody might have tried to talk her into turning it into a trilogy rather than a single book to stretch out a lot of the reviews on Wikipedia say this could have been a trilogy. And I think it could have been, but I mean, you read the interviews of her and she was coming off finishing the nine book series. And I think the idea of writing another series to her was absolutely not no way. She loves endings.
00:32:39
Speaker
This was the way to get her ending, write some single books. And for me, I felt it was, sorry, go on. I do have a particular soft spot in my heart for fantasy books that go as completely ambitious as a trilogy, but in one book that we can do it all here. And I forgive the rushing with those books. It is rushed, but I forgive it. Yep, absolutely.
00:33:06
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of action to get through in that final. The siege act, that's essentially act three. Act three is just a siege with act two being the courtly drama and act one being Nieszka and the dragon, yeah, teaming up and learning about each other. Should we talk about Prince Marek? Because I mentioned him as an aside.
00:33:29
Speaker
And I think one of the main themes, and Pete touched on in his introduction of the book, is that, well, we mentioned transformation, but we mentioned that, that, well, there's more to the characters than meets the eye, let's say.
Character Dynamics: Agnieszka and Kasia
00:33:45
Speaker
And all of the characters, it's funny that some of the reviews saying, oh, the character is actually quite flat and one dimensional, but I didn't get that at all. It seemed that they were being set up
00:33:58
Speaker
almost as you get the facade, but then there's something else lying underneath. And all of the characters, or most of the characters seem to have that. Certainly Prince Marek, the facade is ripped off almost immediately with him. So tell us about Prince Marek and what you think of him and how he stands in contrast to the dragon, because I think that's an interesting contrast of the male characters.
00:34:23
Speaker
don't want to keep coming back to Beauty and the Beast because I don't want it to seem to anybody who's not read the book that uprooted is simply sort of a take on Beauty and the Beast, but I do think that quite a lot of what she's doing is, as you sort of mentioned earlier, it's in dialogue with kind of the Disneyfication of fairy tales, and with Beauty and the Beast, certainly in the the famous Disney version, you've got the Beast who's, you know,
00:34:47
Speaker
has all the appearance of horror, but, you know, heart of a true and a good person inside. And then you have the Gaston character who is incredibly handsome, but looks, you know, is a monster inside and his brutality and his, his evilness is revealed slowly throughout the course of the film. And America's a really interesting one because he, he, you know, just to be really, to speak in broad generalizations, he follows quite a lot of that, that track.
00:35:14
Speaker
Initially, you see a handsome man who seems to be the embodiment of everything that is princely and good and noble and he Becomes he reveals himself to be quite a Selfish and brutal and violent person very selfish And so so if we if we see the book as being in part in dialogue with and sort of engaging with and trying to dig into those tropes then there's certainly a
00:35:44
Speaker
that duality, the dual characters in fairy tales, and particularly in Beauty and the Beast, but in many others, where you have the one character who looks a certain way, and everybody thinks he is that way, but he is not inside, and then the other character who's the opposite. So he and the dragon speak to each other, and they help Agnieszka herself examine her own prejudices, and they allow us as readers to examine our prejudices. So I think he's a very interesting and very well-done character.
00:36:14
Speaker
And yes, that is the impact. It's interesting that it's a psychological observation that in studies done on what they call sadistic people. So people who are narcissistic, sadistic, I forget the other two, but there are four dark personality traits. And when you get them all together, then you get a bad person. Psychopathy is one of the others.
00:36:44
Speaker
And they're able to manipulate people, especially males who demonstrate these personality traits, are able to manipulate naive young females, typically, because they're not able to yet determine what these personality traits are. And that's what happens at the beginning of this novel, where she sees him in his shining plate armor, and he's very handsome with flowing long hair, and he immediately tries to rape her.
00:37:15
Speaker
and the dragon is the complete opposite. It is similar to Beauty and the Beast in that respect and Gaston has all those personality traits as well. But Marek, in fact he's quite similar to Gaston throughout the book. Now I think about it, I think it's a really
00:37:37
Speaker
astute observation. At the end of Beauty and the Beast, when Gaston is fighting the beast on the roof, there are some really cool shots of him where his hair is lank and he's covered in mud and sweat and blood and he looks like the beast. And at the end of Uprooted, after the siege, you get the same image of Marek in his armors covered in smoke and he's spattered with blood and sweat and he looks like the monster.
00:38:05
Speaker
You know, these personality traits are revealed through the person's actions. And Nieszka gets much more wise to the world as a result. Well, I was going to say, too, that one of the interesting reveals about him is when he essentially takes the army into the wood to go rescue his brother. Yes. Knowing that most or all of the soldiers he's taking are going to die.
00:38:32
Speaker
And that too, it's so what we have there is not just not just a character who is willing to, you know, exert his power over the female characters in the novel in whatever way possible, but he's demonstrated to be as careless with life in in every respect. And so in that way, he sort of
00:38:55
Speaker
feels a bit like rebuke to authors who will casually put rape in books and say, well, you know, this is sort of set in a fantasy version of the Middle Ages. And that's what happened back then.
00:39:10
Speaker
Um, and, you know, obviously it's problematic for his character, but, you know, this is just the way life was. And I think what, what Novik is doing, um, in part is, is interrogating that to a degree. She's, you know, she's trying to say this is a bad guy all the way around. Yeah, absolutely.
00:39:28
Speaker
This is not just the way that he relates to women, this is the way he relates to everybody in his life. It's sophisticated from Novik to make sure that she's contrasting him, who is bad. He's rotten all the way through. He's like the corrupted figures. He's rotten all the way through, but it's not that the male relevance of the wood is just he's a bad egg all the way round. Not sure I say he is rotten all the way through.
00:39:55
Speaker
deeply flawed. He loves his mum. This is it. And I like how Novik interrogates how he got to be there. That once upon a time, there was an eight year old boy whose mother just disappeared overnight. And all he heard were these stories about the horrible person she was. And you know, his father wouldn't stop them.
00:40:21
Speaker
And it's clearly walked into this man for whom clearly violence is the only answer because that's the example he was given. And he spent all his life looking for this love he wasn't given. And he got the love when he won. So he was like, well, clearly, if I do something violent to win, everything is justified.
00:40:49
Speaker
And that is a very dangerous person, but if you point it the right way, it is the sort of person that society will idolize. And I think the important thing about what Novik does with his character and Agnieszka's view of him is first we see him as the bad, then we see the moments where it's like, could he possibly be a good person?
00:41:17
Speaker
And she settles that with her, this person will always be a danger to Agnieszka.
00:41:25
Speaker
That's a really good point. And you're absolutely right. And it is, again, it's certainly one of the reasons why I'm so drawn to the book and to her writing is that she's so good at nuance, at shading these characters. And she makes us almost sympathize with him. You almost get there with him and then he's revealed to be a terrible human. But it's so well done that you as a reader, or at least I as a reader, was completely
00:41:53
Speaker
drawn into the way that she was shading these characters and the way she was trying to bring nuance into what could have been a much more straightforward story. And she really wanted to make it, she wanted to make us understand why that third part of the book, why that siege mattered and what was at stake for every single person who was involved in it and doing that and shading his character, giving him that backstory and making us care about that backstory as a fundamental part of what she was doing.
00:42:22
Speaker
It is strange that we almost get to the point of sympathizing with somebody who's quite brutal and violent and has probably raped women in the past. If we take what has happened to Nieszka in the first act, it's probably not the first time he's done it. In fact, he mentions it explicitly, doesn't he? He says something about previous girls that the dragon has taken to the tower.
00:42:48
Speaker
I think, Pete, your point is true to an extent. And I think there's clearly a dialogue between Prince Marek and his audience, let's say, who root him on. So when he does something violent, yeah, you get a prize, have a biscuit, carry on. But it's only feeding what's already there. It's a bit like we had this conversation very briefly with Tade when we were talking about his book.
00:43:18
Speaker
Jack Dorr. And I mentioned Breaking Bad, you know, Pete's cats joined us. Hello, Kitty. We talked about Breaking Bad and Heisenberg and Walter White. He was revealed in the end, he was always bad. And you sympathise with him all the way through. And then you realise, oh, he was actually always bad. And the Prince Marek character is quite similar to that. It's clever writing when you almost want to root for somebody because
00:43:47
Speaker
OK, they've had their fair share of trauma, but then she pulls the rug out really, really cleverly in the last act and makes you realize that's not the way to go, actually. And it's so we should talk about his death just very quickly. And then I want to talk about the female friendship between Nieszka and Kasia, which is also really interesting. But Prince Marek's death is so
00:44:07
Speaker
I thought about this because he just almost drops dead instantly when the queen walks into the tower and touches him with her woody, rooty arm. And he just drops down dead instantly, probably dead before he hits the floor. I thought that's so strange that he would be given that instant death. And I was thinking about it. And do you think it's something to do with the disapproving gaze of the mother that knocks the golden child off their perch?
00:44:37
Speaker
that's a really nice way of putting it. It could be. I also think sort of something that always comes back to me when I read sort of a shockingly almost perfunctory death of a main character in a book or see it in film or TV is something that Joss Whedon said 20 years ago during the heyday of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where he
00:44:59
Speaker
talked about how, you know, some deaths need to be drawn out. They need to happen on screen. You need to see exactly what's happening. Some of them need to be basically short, sharp shocks. And that that's, you know, no matter how beloved the character is.
00:45:17
Speaker
at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is make, elicit certain feelings from your viewers in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but you know, your readers here, and having this villainous character just die really suddenly. It can feel very, feel a bit like you've been cheated, but it also
00:45:41
Speaker
It speaks to the realities, so to speak, realities of magical war. But the realities of war is that you're a soldier, you're fighting, and then all of a sudden you're dead. And so I think there are a lot of different ways to take it. I can imagine there are people who found that death very unsatisfying, given what a monster he is. But I don't dislike it.
00:46:10
Speaker
Okay, let's move on to Nieszka and Cassia because I think Cassia we've probably neglected a little bit so far and I think their friendship is one of the pillars that holds the novel up. You mentioned the female gaze and I think it's really interesting the way that she views Cassia four-stop but also how she views their relationship. At the beginning
00:46:38
Speaker
which is fairly straightforward, but also as it moves through the book. And it's very clear that she is able to become a worldly wise, educated, cultured, a very beautiful young woman. And Cassia, who stays where she is, becomes literally made of wood. Yeah. How do you view the transformation of their
00:47:07
Speaker
friendship throughout the book? And is it even a friendship in the beginning of the book? I'm not sure. That's a great question. And there's so much to unpack there. And it really is one of the reasons why I was so attracted to the book initially is that it has such a complicated relationship with female relationships. And
00:47:31
Speaker
Boy, hardly even know where to begin. Well, let's begin at the beginning, when there are friends in the village before Nieshka gets taken away by the dragon. Yes. I mean, she's jealous. She loves her, but she's insecure about her. She doesn't want to admit that she is jealous of her friend, who is beautiful and who's going to have this extraordinary adventure, even if it's kind of a terrifying adventure.
00:47:59
Speaker
that everybody assumes Kasia is going to, everybody has always assumed because she's the most beautiful and the, you know, the sweetest and the loveliest and so on and so forth. She's the one that the dragon is going to sweep away because that's what dragons do in fairy tales. Do you think that Agnieszka's friendship with Kasia is in a way enabled by, she won't be here forever. I won't always be overshadowed by her. I can be friends with her because she's going to go.
00:48:29
Speaker
Well, that's a really interesting interpretation. It's not one that I had when I was reading the book, but I can certainly see the argument for it. I think from my perspective, what I saw there was more Novik's attempt to sort of unpack a bit of what can make uneven friendships work.
00:48:54
Speaker
And so, you know, there's certainly when you're a teenager, when you're a teenage girl, you know, famously teenage girls have these very intense friendships. And having the book open when these two girls are 17 means that they're still in that period where they have these intense friendships. And they've been intensely friends for a long time and it's become very fraught
00:49:20
Speaker
And, um, to, you know, to what degree it's always been fraught, we'll never really know, but, um, but what she's, what I think Novik, certainly the way I interpreted what Novik was doing was that she was trying to find a way for us to, to understand and appreciate not only why Agnieszka loves Kasia, um, but also why she
00:49:45
Speaker
why she then inhabits this incredible sense of guilt after what happens with Kazuya happens. And again, because that's such a powerful motivator throughout the entire novel for everything that Agnieszka does, that Novik, I think, is really trying to give us some insight into the insecurities that Agnieszka feels alongside the love and the admiration that she feels. She's also jealous and she also is
00:50:15
Speaker
you know she she dismisses herself and perhaps it's because people have told her that she's not as pretty and not as smart and not as talented and perhaps because she's internalized all of those things or perhaps she's just told herself these things um but either way she loves and is jealous of her best friend and um it's a it's a shock to her system when she's the one who gets taken away by the dragon
00:50:41
Speaker
And it's a shock to Kajia's system too. It's a shock to both of them. And the story is in part about both of them dealing with the fact that everything that they had been told about what their futures would hold.
00:50:52
Speaker
is if you'll forgive me uprooted in an instant by that one decision that of course the dragon coming along all he's looking for is someone with a bit of magic to them and it doesn't matter nothing nothing else matters to him and that's what that's what he takes Agnieszka for and and nothing nothing that Kazia has ever been told is important about her matters to him
00:51:17
Speaker
And that's a shocking, shocking thing for everybody involved. The entire town's people, the entire town, I mean, seem to be as shocked by it as everything else, in part because they don't understand what the dragon is doing. You know, they they just see this as, you know, sacrifice of the beautiful girl to the evil wizard in the tower. Yeah, well, it goes back to the idea of the dragon's culture, I guess, if you if you take the villagers
00:51:43
Speaker
an avatar for the uncultured civilization. Let's call it that uncultured civilization. And they don't understand what the dragon's doing. They don't understand what the culture is, what the magic is. And so their idea of what constitutes value in a person is quite simple. It's
00:52:06
Speaker
It's beauty, and that's not to disparage the idea of beauty because, you know, beauty is, in some ways, it is the highest form of value. But in this case, it's not. And there are other things that can be extracted out of a person to make them into something that in the end is highly useful. So after Nieszka gets into the, goes to the tower, Cassia stays and Cassia is taken by the wood and she becomes
00:52:35
Speaker
I mentioned it before, she becomes literally made of wood. So in staying where she is, she becomes literally rigid and inflexible. And how does that colour their friendship? How does that change the relationship particularly between these two women? Where one has become instantly more cultured and wise and knowledgeable about the world and one has become literally wooden.
00:52:58
Speaker
I mean, without sort of getting into the sort of very obvious metaphor, I think we can all read into it about, you know, two best friends and one leads to go away, you know, say to university or even just moves off to another town or another city and broadens their perspective while the other stays home and
00:53:19
Speaker
never really has the chance to broaden their horizons. One person, one person grows and the other becomes rigid. But above and beyond that, what we have is, is Kajiya's, you know, she becomes the jealous one. She becomes, she becomes resentful. She, she feels that she's been deprived of something that she'd been told would always be hers. And the person who has gotten it is, of course, her sort of
00:53:46
Speaker
clumsy friend who, in her mind, this is someone who served a certain role in the village and served a certain role in the friendship and all of a sudden she's not in that role anymore.
00:54:00
Speaker
and being broken out of the sort of stratified version of herself that Agnieszka was in, turns her into a different person. It begins that process of transformation that we've been talking about for an hour. And of course, Kajia, in her mind and in her heart, she already is becoming a bit rigid because she's already becoming resentful of it rather than celebrating that or doing something to improve her own life.
00:54:26
Speaker
she resents it and then the metaphor becomes complete and she is thrown into a tree. A bit, it's a bit like Narcissus, isn't it? That's the story of Narcissus who becomes the flower from looking at himself. I think we've probably come full circle on Unrouted. It's so interesting when you talk about the book because Peter and I, we did have a little bit of a moan about some of the aspects of the book and the pacing and
00:54:55
Speaker
how the characters are drawn and again thinking of the dragon in particular I really like the dragon Pete wasn't a fan but I think in talking about these things it reveals new ideas new angles about it and I think that the book's got a lot more depth than it originally
00:55:17
Speaker
appears to have. And it's definitely worth investigating if you haven't read it, even though we've spoiled the whole thing. It's still definitely worth reading. There's plenty more spoilers we could get. You can find those out. Oh yeah, we haven't given all the spoilers, have we? And plus the action scenes in the wood and the siege at the end. Just great to read anyway. Anyway, let's take a break. And thanks, that was great fun talking about Uprooted. We'll join you a little bit later on in the show.
00:55:47
Speaker
Hello? Hello? Hello? This is Lieutenant Bungalow of the Martian Space Force. Do you copy? I'll repeat, do you frickin' copy? Ah, hello Bungalow, Captain Half Milk Captain here. And you are coming in loud and clear. Loud and clear? Loud and clear? Could you not have said that 20 diples ago?
00:56:12
Speaker
They're calling all morning, I forgot to put the Tangegan back into his cage again. What? The Tangegan? Have you any idea how much mess that thing can generate? You have to be the dumbest Martian Space Force lieutenant in the history of the Martian Space Force.
00:56:34
Speaker
You're gonna have to sort that muck out. No, I won't. And I'm not dumb. I mean, by Martian standards. The audacity of you today have no gun. If I wasn't across here in the corridors of time!
00:56:52
Speaker
I grab your Uncle Waco, rip it's calm Galakka's young, golden flame. Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho! Yeah baby! And that would just be the start, ya greeble Fungaleko, son of a modern garch.
00:57:07
Speaker
Watch your language. You never know who might be listening. What are you doing in the corridors of Time Bungalow? We've a radio show to make, and it's the third best one in the Martian Space Force Broadcasting Spectrum. Or have you forgotten that too? And anyways, you won't be ripping my gumgolliger through anything, because I don't have an Angolian flame anymore. Remember?
00:57:32
Speaker
All senior officers in the Martian Space Force have their flames ceremoniously shaved before receiving their golden earwigs. No wonder you're still a lieutenant. You think after 680 years in the Force you'd know better. And what do you mean by no, I won't? The first thing you do when you get back will be cleaning up after the tan gagan. I meant no, I won't. When I said no, I won't.
00:57:59
Speaker
Yes, you win. Oh, oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well, when I came back from the corridors of time. Next week, you had the place all clear. I mean, you must have got sick of looking at the mess, so no, I won't.
00:58:19
Speaker
You just changed that outcome. Because now that I know what is going to happen, I'm not going to get sick of looking at that mess. Yeah, well, it's too late to do that now. It already happens sometime during the next seven days. Anyway, I gotta go. I've just seen Jasp, but I'm about to hop. And I mean, I haven't chapped with him, like, in ages, man. Like, I mean, well, you know, since he died. Hey, Jasp!
00:58:43
Speaker
Hello and welcome again to The Judge's Corner with me, Damaris Brown, where I talk about legal matters of interest or importance to writers. This month, I thought I'd return to the issue of copyright, which I considered earlier in the year. In particular, I'll be looking at the ownership of characters, and as ever, I'm dealing with the situation in the UK and US, though the law is likely to be similar in other common law jurisdictions.
00:59:10
Speaker
Starting at the beginning, there is, at present at least, no copyright ownership simply in a character's name. So if by chance or design you recycle a name from someone else's work, that in itself is not a breach of copyright.
00:59:26
Speaker
Having said that, I'd still recommend you think twice before doing it deliberately, especially if the original character is well known. Firstly, while this is the law as it currently stands, in the words of one recent judgement, the English courts have been careful not to rule out the possibility that names or titles might, in appropriate circumstances, be protected. And of course, any such protection is most likely to be given to distinctive or iconic names.
00:59:57
Speaker
In addition, the more famous the name, the greater the risk that people will believe the character has also been copied, which may lead to accusations of plagiarism or passing off, causing worry and upset even if there are no legal repercussions. Lastly, the name might be trademarked, in which case using it for a character could well prove expensive.
01:00:19
Speaker
As for the characters themselves, as I've mentioned before, there is also no copyright in generic stereotypes or stock characters. As one English judge put it some 90 years ago, though seemingly harkening back to Victoria melodrama, there can, in my judgement, be no copyright in the idea of a brave and handsome hero, a lovely blonde heroine, or an unprepossessing villain with dark moustaches.
01:00:47
Speaker
However, characters who are more than mere stereotypes may be protected by copyright as creations independent of the works in which they appear. That is, not merely as components of the larger copyright of the complete work. And this has been established in the US for some years. If you heard my talks on plagiarism, you'll remember I mentioned cases about Sherlock Holmes and Holden Corfield in this context.
01:01:12
Speaker
The latter apparently being the first time a character in a single, standalone novel was held to be protected.
01:01:19
Speaker
Strangely enough though, in England, despite centuries of copyright legislation, this question was only tested in June last year, an illegal action relating to the TV series Only Fools and Horses, written by John Sullivan. I thought it might be interesting to delve into that case in a little detail, as although it confirms that characters can be protected, it also demonstrates what needs to be proved in the UK before that protection is granted.
01:01:48
Speaker
Several characters from the series appeared in the defendant's interactive dining show, which led to the legal proceedings. But, most likely due to time and cost constraints, the final court documents and the hearing itself dealt only with the main character, Derek Delboy Trotter. After a case management conference, the claimant was required to set out the alleged copyright infringements in relation to Delboy's character, and five were listed.
01:02:17
Speaker
use of sales patter with replicated phrases, use of French to try to convey an air of sophistication, his eternal optimism, involvement in dodgy schemes, and making sacrifices for his brother Rodney. Set out boldly like this, these characteristics don't appear to be particularly original, which is precisely what the defence argued.
01:02:40
Speaker
Moreover, the judge had to look at how Delboy was written in the scripts, not necessarily how he appeared on the screen, divorcing him from how he was played by the actor Sir David Jason.
01:02:52
Speaker
In considering whether Delboy as a character was a literary work meriting copyright protection, the judge had first to be satisfied as to two conditions, originality and identifiability. It had to be the author's own intellectual creation and be expressed in a manner which makes it identifiable with sufficient precision and objectivity.
01:03:20
Speaker
That last bit might sound somewhat cryptic, but as I read it, it's similar to the US requirement that the character be distinctive and with consistent traits, so as to be clearly recognisable as that character by other people, not simply by the author. But it's the originality test which I find particularly interesting. The author's own intellectual creation seems an easy test to pass.
01:03:48
Speaker
I wrote the character, here are my drafts showing his development, case closed. However, that on its own isn't enough. What has to be shown is that the work reflects the personality of its author as an expression of his or her free and creative choices.
01:04:08
Speaker
So the judge went beyond the scripts and looked at how John Sullivan came to create Delboy, which necessitated considering Sullivan's own life as a young man, working in a London street market among the second-hand car salesmen and other traders.
01:04:25
Speaker
his knowledge of and insight into their language and mannerisms, their flash jewellery, their need to keep face and pretend affluence even when doing poorly, and how Sullivan's personal experiences informed the characters he went on to write.
01:04:43
Speaker
As a by-the-by, it occurs to me that it might be a useful exercise for any writer to consider how we bring ourselves and our experiences into our characters, and what elements in our lives can be used to make them more reflective of our personality and perhaps more distinctive and true to life.
01:05:02
Speaker
As well as looking at Sullivan's past, the judge examined the creative choices he made. Again, something we could perhaps all usefully consider regarding our own characters, such as having Del Boy stuck between two generations of family, his never fulfilled aspirations, his mixed feelings towards his younger brother,
01:05:23
Speaker
his use of mangled French expressions, even down to Sullivan using or adapting expressions creating catchphrases such as lovely jubbly or plonker.
01:05:34
Speaker
As the judge noted, a great deal of thought and attention was given to the creative choice of how and why Delboy would express himself, thereby creating not a stock character or cliche of a working class market trader, but rather a fully rounded character with complex motivations and a full backstory. As to the argument that there's nothing in Delboy's makeup which is unique, the judge remarked,
01:06:04
Speaker
Even if one or more ingredients of his character, if taken in isolation, might be said to be unoriginal, it is the particular combination of all the parts and aspects set out above which makes Delboy distinctive. He therefore had no hesitation
01:06:23
Speaker
in holding that Delboy as a character was John Sullivan's original creation and passed the necessary tests allowing it to be a literary work capable of copyright protection. As a side issue, the judge found against the claimant on one particular claim. Although each individual script for Only Fools and Horses attracted its own copyright, he held that the body of scripts together
01:06:49
Speaker
collectively creating a world for the sitcom, did not establish a separate copyrightable entity. This was because they were not conceived as one overall work, and although each season's scripts were later published, the episodes were simply set out in the order in which they were written, recorded and broadcast, with no intellectual creation or artistic choice in their selection or arrangement.
01:07:16
Speaker
The judge noted that when he asked the claimant's barrister to give an example of a body of work in which an English court has held that copyrights subsisted as an imaginary world created by an author, he was unable to provide one.
01:07:33
Speaker
lawyers don't appear to have found any supporting cases in other jurisdictions such as the US either. So it seems the issue of copyright in our created worlds is, for now at least, dependent on how they come into being. If you're publishing a serial, story by story, or writing a series like the Harry Potter books, in each case where you have the ultimate end in mind and every story or book leads to the next in a preordained manner,
01:08:01
Speaker
Then even though each one is self-contained, the world created in the serial or series as a whole may well possess its own copyright. But where does this leave something like Discworld? Although Satori's novels often tie up with one another, they surely weren't conceived with a final destination in mind. There's no overarching plot.
01:08:23
Speaker
and their order of publication was, I imagine, simply a matter of happenstance as to what plots occurred to him, what stories he fancied writing at any given time, rather than as a result of any underlying structure. In practical terms, it would likely make no difference if anyone did try to rip off Discworld, but the lawyer in me would dearly love someone to be sued on that specific issue so we can find out.
01:08:49
Speaker
Getting back to the ownership of characters, I hope to discuss the question of joint authors in another Crohn's cast at some point. But for now, I'll just confirm that if you are in a writing partnership, whether under a formal agreement or one which arises from dual contributions to a work, then copyright in your characters is likely to be jointly owned. Needless to say, this can cause problems, if for instance you want to license someone to use your characters, but your co-author vehemently objects.
01:09:18
Speaker
or if you simply want to keep writing novels involving the characters without having to pay your now ex-partner for the privilege.
01:09:26
Speaker
So if you're writing with someone else, you need to consider possible issues and how you can resolve them, and make sure it's written into your agreement. Just to be clear though, people who help you on occasion with your work do not share your ownership of the characters, even if they give advice about them or suggest events which affect characterisation. Editors who do a lot of such work don't share in copyright, so your writing group pals certainly won't.
01:09:55
Speaker
However, things get more tricky if you ask someone to expand on your world using your existing characters. And the legal battles between Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane exemplify the problems which can arise if the issue of copyright isn't dealt with properly at the beginning. When Gaiman provided a script for McFarlane's then new comic book series, Spawn, he created three new characters, the bounty hunter Angela
01:10:24
Speaker
a man who would be later named Medi-Evil Spawn, and Count Nicholas Coliostro, writing their dialogue as well as their descriptions and backstory, ready for Macfarlane to illustrate them. These new characters were a success, and, unsurprisingly, Gaiman claimed co-ownership of them. Macfarlane accepted that Angela was jointly owned.
01:10:49
Speaker
But he argued that Gaiman's input on the others wasn't sufficient to create a copyrightable character, since he merely provided ideas for them, and they only achieved copyrightable status once he, Macfarlane, had drawn them, or possibly only when he actually published the comic book. His differentiating between them and Angela may have arisen because medieval spawn was derivative of Macfarlane's own copyrighted main character.
01:11:17
Speaker
and although the Count was new, Macfarlane drew him to look rather different from Gaiman's perhaps stock or whino character description of a really old bum, a skinny, balding old man with a grubby, greyish-yellow beard. As the judge at an appeal hearing pointed out, had someone merely remarked to Macfarlane one day, you need a medieval spawn, or you need an old guy to move the story forward, and Macfarlane had carried it from there,
01:11:47
Speaker
Then, just as I've already noted, there would be no chance of that person claiming copyright. But the judge held that Gaiman had done significantly more than that. And though of itself the work done was probably insufficient to create copyrightable characters had nothing else happened, it was enough to give Gaiman joint ownership with McFarlane of the finished product.
01:12:11
Speaker
Note, by the way, that this is different from the situation Gaiman undoubtedly faced when he worked under contract for publishers such as DC Comics. Under that work, made for higher situation, copyright vests in the employer publishers even when it involves the creation of original characters.
01:12:32
Speaker
The issue of character ownership again arose between the two men a few years later, when Macfarlane introduced three new figures into the Hellspawn world. Dark Ageous Spawn, Domina and Tiffany, who, Gaiman claimed, were derivative of Medieval Spawn and Angela respectively. Macfarlane argued they were completely new creations. Though as the judge pointed out, with regard to the women,
01:13:00
Speaker
All three are warrior angels with voluptuous physiques, long hair and mask-like eye makeup. All three wear battle uniforms, consisting of thong bikinis, garters, wide weapon belts, elbow-length gloves and ill-fitting armour bras.
01:13:21
Speaker
Hmm, I wonder what demographic the two men were catering for with that tawdry fashion ensemble. Anyway, setting criticisms of apparel aside, the judge agreed with Gaiman, specifically noting that these new characters would have infringed his copyright had they been developed and produced by anyone other than the defendant.
01:13:44
Speaker
As joint copyright holder, Macfarlane was entitled to use the originals as the basis for derivative works, but he couldn't thereby shrug off Gaiman's rights. Accordingly, Gaiman was entitled to an accounting of the profits earned from the new characters, even though he took no part in their creation or the scripts involving them. And that would include profits not only from the comics in which they appeared, but also such ancillaries as action figurines or statuettes.
01:14:14
Speaker
Of course, few, if any of us, are ever going to approach the Gaiman and McFarlane League when it comes to making money from our writings. Nonetheless, don't ignore the issue of character ownership. Consider how to make your characters distinctive and therefore copyrightable. And if you are thinking of getting someone to help you with them, make sure you agree copyright ownership up front.
01:14:44
Speaker
This episode was brought to you by Dan Jones, Pete Long and our special guest Anne Perry. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton and Jay Starlin. Thanks to Brian Turner and the staff of Grunts and thanks for listening. Join us next time when we continue our talk with Anne about writing and publishing in 2023, and if you do have the time to leave a star rating on your podcast platform of choice, we'd be very grateful. See you soon.