Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Lud In The Mist with Juliet E. McKenna
226 Plays2 years ago
This month we're joined by the author fantasy author Juliet E. McKenna, creator of several epic series including The Tales of Einarinn, The Aldabreshin Compass sequence, The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, and The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. Juliet talks to us about one of the very first examples of what we might term "modern fantasy" - Hope Mirrlees' 192 novel Lud In The Mist. Juliet and I talk about where Lud sits in the canon of fantasy - we compare it to Tolkien, for example, and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, as well as other modernist literature from the post-WW1 years of the 1920s.
There is talk about borders, the liminal spaces between spaces, and the reconciliation of our own prejudices and biases, as well as of silly names and Mirrlees's "interesting" approach to worldbuilding. Juliet talks to us about her own writing experiences, with particular reference to English folklore, myth, and the countryside, which is prevalent throughout her work and none more so than her current Green Man cycle of novels and her forthcoming Arthurian novel The Cleaving. We also discuss fantasy emerging from other cultures and parts of the world, and how writers should approach the writing and representation of other cultures.
Elsewhere, The Judge takes a break from her advisory talks and gives her own opinion and analysis of Lud In The Mist, which places the idea of laws, frameworks, and legal structures at the heart of the novel. We have two writing challenge winners in Doug Van Aarten and Jo Zebedee. Lastly, to coincide with the 40th anniversary release of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, Captain Kirk is having trouble getting hold of the Division 4 football results, and lays the blame squarely on a certain green-blooded, pointy-eared crew member.
Next Month
In October we'll be joined by the author Steven Hall to discuss his smash hit debut novel The Raw Shark Texts.
Index
[00:00 - 43:53] Juliet E McKenna interview Part 1
[43:53 - 45:17] Voicemail 1
[45:17 - 1:01:13] The Judge's Corner
[1:01:13 - 1:02:24] Voicemail 2
[1:02:24 - 1:05:47] Writing Challenge Winners
[1:05:7 - 1:07:09] Voicemail 3
[1:07:09 - 1:48:55] Juliet E McKenna interview part 2
[1:48:55 - 1:51:01] Credits and close
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello everybody, and welcome to Crohn's Cast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones, and this episode I am on my own. Christopher is not around at the moment, so we're going to be plunging on with the episode just with our guest, who is Juliet E. McKenna. She's joining us to talk about Hope Merle's 1926 novel, A Ludd in the Mist.
00:00:46
Speaker
So, hello, Juliet. Hello. Juliet is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds in the UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written 15 epic fantasy novels so far. Her debut novel in 1999 was The Thief's Gamble, which began The Tales of Aynaren. This series was followed by the Aldebression compass sequence.
00:01:11
Speaker
The Chronicles of the Lascari Revolution and the Hadramal Crisis trilogy. In 2018, The Green Man's Air was her first contemporary fantasy novel rooted in British folklore, and this began an ongoing series. As well as novels, she writes a wide variety of short stories and novellas, enjoying forays into darker fantasy steampunk and science fiction.
00:01:35
Speaker
She regularly attends science fiction and fantasy conventions and is a reviewer for genre magazines. She comments on book trade issues and has served as a judge for major genre awards, as well as the next Green Man book. She's currently working on The Cleaving, which is a feminist retelling of the Arthurian myth, which is to be published in May, 2023.
Plot of 'A Lud in the Mist'
00:01:58
Speaker
And we will be talking about Hope Merley's 1926 fantasy novel, Love in the Mist.
00:02:04
Speaker
A Lud in the Mist follows the prosaic and law-abiding inhabitants of the titular town, which sits at the confluence of two rivers called the Dapple and the Door. The town of Lud is rocked by an influx of what is called fairy fruit, literally a forbidden fruit that is rich with symbolism and which is said to cause hallucinations and sickness in anybody who consumes it. The fruit comes from the bordering land of the fairy.
00:02:29
Speaker
Existence the citizens of love have thought to banish from their thoughts and mind using the rationality of the law. The story follows the town's mayor Nathaniel Chanticleer, who becomes embroiled in the smuggling of the fruit and uncovers shadowy acts from the past of the town that undermine the town's conviction that the land of the fairy does not exist and he's forced into a reconciliation of his beliefs.
00:02:52
Speaker
Lud in the Mist has been described as a prototypical British fantasy novel and despite being reasonably unheralded at the time, it has become hugely influential on the growing
Fantasy Fiction Roots and Trends
00:03:03
Speaker
fan... it became hugely influential on the growing fantasy genre and is now considered a classic of genre fiction and its many fans include Neil Gaiman who described it as one of the finest fantasy novels in the English language. So welcome along Juliet.
00:03:18
Speaker
And well, we'll start with our usual question. Why did you pick Love in the Mist? I'm increasingly interested in the roots of fantasy fiction. It's what I write, it's what I love, it's what I've been reading and working with for decades now. And one of the most interesting developments, I think, in the genre at the moment
00:03:46
Speaker
is the way in which both readers and writers are going beyond what we might call the Tolkien template. Certainly as a reader, I learned to read when I was three years old, not because I was any sort of child prodigy, but because I have a brother who is two years older than me and he went to school at the age of five and learned to read and I just picked it up by osmosis at the same time. So I've been reading
00:04:15
Speaker
fantasy fiction. I started with books of tales of English, British folklore, edited by the likes of Alan Garner from my earliest days. You know, cut my teeth on things like the weird sound of Brizzengarmen, all of the classics of English literature, children's English literature. And now I'm in my late 50s, mid late 50s,
00:04:41
Speaker
There is a limit to what any writer can bring me that is new about a high heroic tale of a quest, a hero's journey, what we might refer to as the Tolkien template. But there is so much
00:04:55
Speaker
other interesting, different fantasy going on at the moment being written, as writers from other cultures, other countries, diaspora writers, are exploring the fantasy traditions of their own cultures and bringing in a whole lot of new and interesting and different perspectives. Writers like Zen Cho, like Aliette Dubodard,
00:05:20
Speaker
And one of the things I'm seeing in a lot of English writers, by which I mean writers who write in English, so some of this is also happening with North American resident writers, is looking at what the roots in English myth and folklore and landscape myth and folklore that has also fed into fantasy fiction and seeing what we can learn from that.
00:05:47
Speaker
And some of the earliest fantasy tales before Tolkien are actually fascinating reads if you're following those threads back. And for me, Lud in the Mist was definitely one of those. Right, OK. There's a lot to unpack there. I think first thing to do, this is probably a question that I'm guessing most of the people listening will be able to answer in some way or another. But it's worth asking, I think, what do you mean by the Tolkien template?
Tolkien's Influence on Fantasy Genre
00:06:18
Speaker
The hero's journey request. Now actually Tolkien was doing some very interesting things with the classic quest narrative himself.
00:06:27
Speaker
Primarily, the quest is not to get an item. It's not looking to retrieve the Holy Grail or equivalent. It's actually to destroy it. The hero's journey is not something that Tolkien created. So it's more than that, isn't it? It's not just the basic structure of the novel. There's something else about Tolkien's work, particularly The Lord of the Rings, that made it so pervasive and influential.
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's the secondary world, it's the magical elements, it's the non-human races, it's the... I suppose as well.
00:07:06
Speaker
pluralism. Yes, and also the archetypal struggle of good versus evil, which actually I think it does Tolkien a disservice to say that is all he is doing. You're certainly looking at that, but there are nuances and complexities in the Lord of the Rings, which I think deserve acknowledgement. Some of those nuances and complexities actually get flattened out
00:07:35
Speaker
in some of the fantasy that was written in the 70s and the 80s. Yes. There's a point at which some epic fantasy ended up a bit like a 19th generation photocopy. Yeah, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. You lose the clarity, you lose the precision. It becomes ever more lo-fi, doesn't it, as you filter out the copies.
00:08:05
Speaker
Okay, I think we've got a good grounding there and I think we'll take that back to Ludd in due course. There's one other thing I wanted to just get a definition on and that was landscape myth and folklore.
Landscape Myth and Folklore in Fantasy
00:08:18
Speaker
Now, I see this being a very popular thing as well at the moment, but again, we should probably just play with the definition of that phrase and how it's manifesting in the genre at the moment.
00:08:37
Speaker
I'm particularly English, landscape myth, because I think that's pertinent to this book. Yes. Well, one of the interesting things about using myth and folklore as a source is the
00:08:53
Speaker
extent to which it doesn't tell you stories. It tells you incidents. It gives explanations of things. It has small scale, limited anecdotes, if you will, such as, since we've already mentioned the wizard of Rydingarman, the wizard at Alderly Edge. Now, there is the tale of the farmer who is riding home from market and the wizard stops him and what needs to buy his white mare
00:09:21
Speaker
And he is taken to see sleepers under the hill. And I don't know if I need to avoid spoilers for the... We are fully unashamedly spoiler rich. So we discuss everything with all spoilers all the time.
00:09:39
Speaker
So the farmer pockets a treasure from the cavern under the hill, and that then kicks off the story. Now, the story of the farmer coming home and the wizard wanting to buy his horse and the sleepers under the hill is a narrative, it's a myth, it's folklore, that actually is attached to quite a few different places around the United Kingdom. And if you think about places like Wayland-Smithy,
00:10:09
Speaker
There are all sorts of folk myths associated with that, such as, you know, if you leave a horse there at midnight with a silver sixpence, you will come back and you will find it has a new set of shoes. The White Horse from Uffington Hill is supposed to get its shoes there once every hundred years. But none of these are plots. None of these are extended narratives. They are incidents. They are snapshots, if you like.
00:10:34
Speaker
and English myth is absolutely full of these and they are frequently tied to the landscape because they are explanations of a prehistoric feature, stone circles, we have the roll right stones in cotswolds which are supposed to be knights who are turned to stone and that is a pervasive feature of myth and folklore.
00:10:58
Speaker
It reminds me of the talk we had a couple of months ago with John Gerald on Nifago Wood, which is very, you know, it deals with a very similar phenomenon, I suppose, but it teases out that continuing, a continual and continuing narrative than the method of hyper narrative or metanarrative out of all of the myths
00:11:20
Speaker
put in chronological order over the history of England and it plucks out the metanarrative to which we are contributing even now. Englishness has that very peculiar, we mentioned this a couple of months ago about England being a Mongol nation and that sometimes used as a pejorative but we decided that it wasn't because it was the ability of the English
00:11:43
Speaker
nation to absorb things and then reinvent itself. And everybody who comes to be able to play a part in English history becomes a part of England's story and carries on. People from all over the world and different cultures and England continually absorbs, reinvents and carries on. So let's bring it back to Ludd then.
Liminal Spaces in 'A Lud in the Mist'
00:12:06
Speaker
And so how is Ludd building on this landscape myth and folklore, particularly in England then?
00:12:13
Speaker
Well, it's a liminal place. It's a place on the borderlands. And because it has this river dapple, the river dapple comes from fairy and flows to the sea through, what's it place? Dormar? Dormar. Dormar. Dormar. Yeah.
00:12:40
Speaker
So the Oremare is the country, the fictional country, and Lud in the Mist is its capital. Is the town, that's right. You know, you have the debatable hills, the boundary of Doromir and the Restylae fairyland. So this is a, it's a liminal place, it's a borderlands place. And again, that is one of the things that has always been a rich source of stories. Twilight, at dawn and at dusk, it's dangerous.
00:13:13
Speaker
So that I think is where the the the tide to the landscape comes in. And Ludd itself is a very, it's a long established, it's a well established, it's a civilised, it's comforting, it's a solid place. And when the characters are taken out of
00:13:40
Speaker
takes the characters out of Ludd, they get into strange places, the debatable hills. And that's where the danger lies. But then the danger comes to the town itself. It starts to undermine and erode the certainties of the people in the town itself. So the landscape, places where people are and are not safe, are integral to the story. The setting, I think, is very important here.
00:14:10
Speaker
It did seem to me to be a story very much, I think you use the word borderlands and it seems to me to be a story about borders itself in the geographical sense. So there is a liminal borderland in which Doraemare and the fairyland
00:14:32
Speaker
are kind of converging. But there's also, there are borders around the way that the Luddites, and I do wonder if Hope Merlies was, you know, using that pun intentionally. I think so. They're called Luddites and they're very, yeah, they're very closed minded. Yes. Which is, you know, this is the other instance of the border. So the border is geographic.
00:14:59
Speaker
But it's also in the attitude and the outlook of the Luddites, the citizens of Ludd. They are very close-minded. They're very fearful of what lies beyond their own borders. They don't have any new information coming into the town other than what comes via the river, which they can't stop.
00:15:22
Speaker
legal frameworks to build up a way of thinking that prevents them from having to consider the strange, possibly dangerous people, inhabitants, information, products that are beyond their physical borders. And that's a problem for them. I also think the story looks at the extent to which people need to establish boundaries for themselves.
00:15:52
Speaker
in what they are and are not prepared to do for themselves the choices that they make and also the boundaries that they're going to set in relation to what they're going to accept from other people. Okay, so let's add a bit of specificity to that then. What are you thinking of specifically in the text about that? You're thinking about Nathaniel? Yes, the
00:16:20
Speaker
Nathaniel is the mayor of Ludd and he embodies this very structured framework that governs the way that the town thinks.
00:16:37
Speaker
And as he progresses through the book and he uncovers the truth about what is happening with respect to the fairy fruit, so this forbidden fruit that's being illicitly imported into the town, he has to change his understanding of, well, his view of the outside world, essentially.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yes, but there's also issues with the very odd character, Endymion Lear. Yes, he's the physician, isn't he? He's the physician, or is he? He comes and goes and he sort of claims authority and is given almost access to various people.
00:17:22
Speaker
Which in many ways, you know, why is he trusted? He claims authority without necessarily being entitled to it. As the story sort of unfolds, it becomes more and more apparent that he is a very dubious character. And if people actually had set a few more boundaries, the girls, the women are allowed to, in many instances, not allowed to stand up for themselves.
00:17:51
Speaker
they are expected to basically be good girls and do as they are told. That's encapsulated by the finishing school, isn't it? Yeah. Nathaniel's son, who basically runs off and explores and goes places. He's spoiled brat in many ways.
00:18:21
Speaker
So if he had actually been given a few more boundaries and a bit more structure and not so indulged, a lot of the boys are indulged in this story. So boundaries being set, having the foresight, the self-knowledge to set one's own boundaries,
00:18:46
Speaker
but also to look at where boundaries for other people are being set. Does that make sense? I think it does. I think it's...
00:18:56
Speaker
I think that's correct. I would also say that it's about choosing the right boundaries. Because the town is bounded by its closed-minded way of thinking, thinking that the Fairyland does not exist. So we have shut that out of our way of thinking.
Themes of Boundaries and Archetypes
00:19:16
Speaker
And the Fairyland, we don't really see it until in a kind of dreamy way towards the end of the novel.
00:19:24
Speaker
We don't really see it. So it kind of exists as an avatar for the unknown, the fearful, the other, the strange ways of other worlds. So we don't really see it. But as soon as you close your mind off to thinking that those things, you start thinking that things don't exist and they can't affect me, then you're creating the wrong sort of boundary for yourself. Yeah.
00:19:50
Speaker
So it's about choosing the right way to bound your thinking and bound your actions. And then there is the sort of, well, yes, I know what the rules about fairy fruit are, but actually I'm going to make an exception just for me because I'm special. And that's a very dangerous way of thinking. We were mentioning about talking before and there were certain things I thought that
00:20:15
Speaker
directly, I don't want to say informed because I did talk with one of our friends on Crohn's, The Big Pete, who's a voracious fantasy reader like yourself and very knowledgeable about the genre like yourself. I thought that there were future echoes of some of the things that Tolkien created and I thought
00:20:41
Speaker
You said a lot of the boys were indulged in this book. And I think that's largely correct. I think there's an exception in the character of Luke Hemphon. Yes. Yes. Well, I got very strong vibes. Sam Gamgee vibes often very strong. He's an under gardener, just like Sam Baggins is gardener.
00:21:10
Speaker
He is clearly working class. He's very, very affectionate and loyal towards his master, and he ends up in
00:21:20
Speaker
sort of in an indirect way, being one of the heroes of the story. So I got very strong Sam vibes off of Luke. I don't know whether you thought there's a connection there. Pete seemed to think that there wasn't and I was looking too much into it, but I don't know. There were a lot of echoes there. I doubt that there is a direct line from this book to what Tolkien was writing, but I would say that both Tolkien and Hope Mirelies were drawing on the same well springs.
00:21:49
Speaker
You're bearing in mind that Tolkien started writing what became the whole myth corpus, the whole fall of gondolin, the ideas that ultimately arrived in Lord of the Rings. He was writing those since the First World War. This book was written in 1926. And so both of them
00:22:14
Speaker
are writers who will have been drawing on the tradition of the faithful squire in the sort of high heroic mythic medieval romances. That relationship, you know, the hero and his faithful squire is a very, very long established one. And the faithful sidekick, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, it's a common
00:22:46
Speaker
parry. Yeah, yeah, I'm just trying to avoid the word trope. Yeah, but when you see writers, one of the things about archetypes and stereotypes, you know, stereotypes are one dimensional working with an archetype, you can still be working the same archetype, you can actually make it your own, make it distinctive. And I suspect that's what's going on here. It's well, I thought that Luke hempen was very distinctive. And yeah, I think there are
00:23:17
Speaker
There are a lot of archetypes in here. Oh yes, it is a book absolutely crammed full of them. It is, yeah. There's one passage at the beginning of, we mentioned the First World War, and this book was published in 1926. And if you look at the original cover design, which you can find on Google, if you do a Google image search for Lud in the Mist, it's very much in the modernist style.
00:23:44
Speaker
And it would have been a contemporary piece of work to writers like Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot who were writing about the aftermath of the First World War. So I think there's something, you know, I do get the feeling that this fear of the other that is characteristic of the citizens of Ludd, of the Luddites,
00:24:14
Speaker
There's a line to be drawn there between the aftermath of World War I and what happens in the book. There is a line at the beginning of the novel where Merlies is talking about
00:24:29
Speaker
A dutchman she talks about the typical citizen of the 17th century dutchman who enjoyed the the art and the spirituality of colonized people so people who have been colonized by.
00:24:49
Speaker
his people, and unbeknownst to him, had the same blood coursing through his veins as the people who he believed were somehow lesser than him. Well, that's a pracy of what's happening in
00:25:06
Speaker
and the fairy land so the fairy land is seen as that well it's not even acknowledged as existing but it can i think we can take it to be lesser somehow lesser than the citizens of blood i thought that particular. That particular line had echoes of things like lovecraft as well as there's a strong sense of the thing that terrifies you is also running through your is also part of you.
00:25:35
Speaker
I think that's, it's always like going back to the great line from Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil is down the center of every individual human heart. So you think that evil is encased, embodied somewhere else, not in yourself, it's embodied in somebody else and something else, something that's lesser than me, but that's false.
00:26:00
Speaker
dangerous assumption to make, then you find out that actually it's part of you as well. I think there's something going on. I mean, that's a classic Lovecraftian theme. So stories like The Shadow of Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness all have narrators who find out that the
00:26:17
Speaker
the monster is somehow in them as well. It's part of the bloodline. And I think there's something going on there in Ludd as well. I mean, how closely do you think Ludd sits with other modernist texts of the day and drawing on that aftermath of World War I?
00:26:35
Speaker
I didn't get any Lovecraftian echoes at all because there is a fear, there is a hostility, I'm not a Lovecraft fan for many reasons. What I got from this is it's in relation to literature of the 1920s.
00:27:03
Speaker
is this is an exploration on how you come to terms with change because if you look again at the opening of the novel
00:27:13
Speaker
Ludin Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It had an ancient guild hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered in ivy. When the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot. It had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red and tawny sails. It had flat brick houses. Not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves with each generation under their changeless antique roofs.
00:27:37
Speaker
It had old arches framing delicate landscapes that one could walk into and a picturesque old graveyard on the top of the hill and little open squares where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levies attended by birds and lovers and insects and children. So you have it had more than its share of pleasant things. So I find there is a great deal of affection for Ludd and the
Literature Themes of the 1920s
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah, it is a it is home, it is a safe place, but change is inevitable and change is frequently destructive. And if you try and resist change in it, indeed, with the Luddites, and I don't think there is any doubt that she was really I think that was very deliberately chosen in the same way that he's master Nathaniel Chanticleer.
00:28:36
Speaker
And that's something else to pick up on in terms of the use of language and style. I think it's coming to terms with change, because a lot of the literature of the 1920s is basically there has been this complete dislocation from the end of the long 19th century, the golden Edwardian pre First World War, the long golden summer, all the rest of it.
00:29:04
Speaker
So I think that is where this fits in terms of that school of literature. Well, it's coming back to that idea of borders, isn't it? Yes. So how strongly do you police your borders, I suppose? Not just geographically, but also how much, I mean, the geographical borders are a good metaphor for borders in general, because they are
00:29:33
Speaker
limits on how much information and how many people you want to let in and out of any one particular place. And you've got to get the balance right. Because, as you said, change can be traumatic and catastrophic. But if you don't have any change at all, then your state or your individual state or the nation state cannot revivify itself. And so it becomes ossified.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, it dies. So there's a lot, a lot in the midst, the town has got it. It's got it wrong. It's it's tilted too far in one direction. And it's over the course of the book that Nathaniel Chanticleer will come to him in a second. He realizes that you have to go beyond the thing that you understand, in order to revivify yourself and replenish your
00:30:29
Speaker
your own state. Sorry, you're an individual person and the state as well. Now, let's go back to Nathaniel then. You mentioned his name. Yeah, it's an interesting name. It reminded me, it took me back to A level English when we studied the nuns priest's tale. Yeah, I think this is one of the aspects of this book which modern readers might struggle with.
00:30:56
Speaker
Because that's simply one example of elements in the text that there is a presumption of familiarity with.
00:31:07
Speaker
which I think is one of the things that does date it. Yeah, I am familiar with the myth of Renaud and Chanticleer because again, I think I was doing Chaucer in O-level English and I have read a lot of myths and the like. I would be very interested to know if you did a sort of straw poll of particularly readers under, say, 35.
00:31:35
Speaker
Who knew it? Because... I suspect if they're not literature students, the answer would be no. Yeah, it's surprising how rapidly things drop out of common currency. I mean, I am assuming to you that if I said to you that a place was like the Maristoleste, you would know what I was referencing.
00:31:56
Speaker
Indeed, yeah. Right, a friend of mine whose son is now, this was about four or five years ago, her son is just turning 30 now. They met, they were actually working in the same place, and they met in the canteen, sort of in the middle of the afternoon, and there were only people in there. And she said to him, God, it's like the Maristoleste in here. And he went, what? And she told me this, and only basically, yeah, my son's Maristoleste, not a flicker, don't know it at all.
00:32:26
Speaker
And I sort of started asking their contemporaries, if I said the Maristolest, would that mean anything to you at all? And they just looked at me completely blankly. And I think that this is one of the things that, yeah, there are Shakespearean references in this text. There are various references
00:32:51
Speaker
names that have been used, which inform the text if you know, if you understand them, if you know that they're there. I mean, it's not as bad as T.S. Eliot, where you really do need a whole set of names. Yes. But it's insightful media to work your way through a single podium. Yeah, quite. But I think that's one of the things that does actually date this and does would certainly risk putting up a barrier.
00:33:20
Speaker
between modern readers coming to this. It's a funny book, isn't it? When it comes to the naming of... Sometimes you think, well, okay, so there are references to Chaucer, to Shakespeare, several others as well. There are, I think it was... Burrows, I think, is referenced as well.
00:33:47
Speaker
Some of the names are just, they're so completely on the nose and overly twee that it goes in the completely the other direction sometimes. So I'm thinking of, well, the name fairy land and fairy fruit is to the modern eye is so on the nose for a fantasy novel that it's almost kind of jarring. And then you've got the funny
00:34:09
Speaker
funny names like Farmajibity and Diggery Carp. Yes, it's odd, but again one of the things that you get that I saw, you get some of that reminds me of C.S. Lewis.
00:34:25
Speaker
because there are curious jokey punning names in Prince Caspian in particular which if you have the Latin are actually quite good jokes and if you don't they're going to clear the top of your head by a good six inches. I mean it's not, one of the other things that reminded me of was Gormanghast
00:34:48
Speaker
which again, yeah, I mean, he, I hope Merely's nowhere near so over borders Mervyn Peake does.
Worldbuilding: Past vs. Present
00:34:58
Speaker
But again, I think it's what Peake was writing in
00:35:06
Speaker
the 40s. Oh, 40s. Yeah. Well, that is at least when the Titus, the Gorman-Gast books were actually published. So again, you've got to wonder how long he'd been working on these, how long these ideas have been sort of percolating, formulating in his, you know, as part of his work. So again, I think you can see that this is
00:35:35
Speaker
part of a form of literature that was, again, they were all sort of drawing on or showing the same influences at that sort of period. In terms of style, there are a lot of literary references in light. Gaiman, when he was praising the book, he said, Miralee's demands a lot from the reader. It's clear, but it's paid over 10 times if you put the effort in and you're able to draw out the references.
00:36:05
Speaker
Which I think is fair enough. But stylistically, in another sense, I think it's quite different from more modern fantasy tastes in the way that the world building is presented. There's a lot of, well, we start with info dump, essentially, don't we? There's a lot of information about lud, the geography of the place, the rivers, people.
00:36:31
Speaker
It's in many senses, it's again drawing on the literary tradition that Tolkien and Lewis were drawing on at the same sort of time, because it's an omniscient point of view. It's quite a remote third-person point of view a lot of the time. But novels then were
00:36:53
Speaker
And it is very, very heavy and very, very rich and multilayered in terms of physical description. And actually, if you go back to the Lord of the Rings, you will find page after page where there is almost no dialogue whatsoever. And again, I think this is a reflection of the times in which it was written.
00:37:15
Speaker
because modern fantasy or modern literature is incredibly dialogue driven. And if you trace that development, you will find that that stems from the prevalence of first cinema and then TV. And the ways in which novels across all sorts of schools of literature started to use dialogue changes with the introduction of visual storytelling.
00:37:45
Speaker
and through film and TV, that the plot is carried by the dialogue, and that increasingly happens in books as well. Now, 1926, yes, there were films, but cinema was in its infancy. Oh, there were no talkies. No. So I think to create the image in the reader's mind,
00:38:11
Speaker
All you have is the words on the page, and that is why you get this very rich, lyrical, multi-layered, full of detail of colour, full of detail of texture, full of detail of scent description that you almost never find in contemporary literature. Or certainly you don't get it to anywhere at the same extent. And you are being told a story, you're being shown a story, you're being invited into a world.
00:38:40
Speaker
you are not hearing the story being driven by dialogue. Do you think that mode of storytelling is now extinct because of that? I don't think it is because some writers are coming back to it almost. One of the interesting things about storytelling styles is that when something has been
00:39:08
Speaker
um explored uh pretty much as far as it can go then people writers react against it and try and find something else uh now there are not many writers who can do an omniscient point of view well it is very tricky to do joe watson is one hurt for me who does um
00:39:29
Speaker
But I just read, I've reviewed for Passac magazine, a novel called In the Heart of Hidden Things by Kit Whitfield. And that's coming out anytime now. And that is a modern fairy tale. And it is set in Geerford, which is a place in England, probably, that could be anywhere from Georgian to Victorian times. And the fairy smiths.
00:39:59
Speaker
have to keep the fairies at bay with cold iron. And people are still trying to farm their land and pay their rent and all the rest of it and they have all the usual tricks, challenges of modern in the sense of post-medieval life to deal with. But there is this other
00:40:22
Speaker
realm as well. And as I say, yeah, this basically has just been published. And it's again, it's omniscient, it's discursive, it's elusive. So these things come back. But there are significant differences in the world building for a book that is doing many of the same things now to the
00:40:52
Speaker
world building in Love in the Mist. In fact, I would not wish him to stand on Julie Harsh. I'm not even sure. I think you're flattering Hope Miralise by saying there was actually world building going on, because in the nicest possible way, I feel a great deal of this book. She just made it up as she went along. Now, yes, to a certain extent, we all do that. But the
00:41:17
Speaker
balance of the narrative structure, the way characters come in and out, the extent to which things are not foreshadowed. Bluntly, every editor, any editor that I have ever worked with, would send this script back with a sheath of notes about structure, about balance, about coherence of world building.
00:41:46
Speaker
It does not hold up to the sort of rigorous interpretation that I think a modern novel that was trying to do the same thing would be subjected to. And that's not necessarily a criticism, but I think it's one of the indications that actually we need to see this as a piece of writing of its own time.
00:42:14
Speaker
and judge it on its own merits of its own time. Okay, well, as we will draw this part of the show to a close, we'll just come back to the beginning. So we'll come full circle because you said that Love in the Mist is coming full circle itself in a way. I mean, you mentioned that with, sorry, I've forgotten the name of the book you just mentioned, it's just being published.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yes, In the Heart of Hidden Things. So even though a book like Ludd stylistically is definitely of its time, the themes of these, let's say, elder states books of the genre
00:43:07
Speaker
they can still provide rich influence and ongoing influence within the confines of the genre and possibly further than that. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, if you if you are going to pick out themes from this story, you've got the evils of unearned power, you've got the dangers of self indulgence, you've got how people deal with a threat. And these are all things that contemporary fantasy in many different ways is still exploring.
00:43:37
Speaker
Well, that's very encouraging, I think, personally. Right, I think it's a good time to stop. So we will take a pause and we will join Juliet a little bit later in the show. Hello, SFF Chronicles. This is James T. Kirk of Earth Starship USS Enterprise.
00:44:03
Speaker
I'm phoning about Mr. Spock. He's useless. Plus, I think he's after my job. So if he phones you, don't heed what he says. I'll give you an example of what he's like. Last Tuesday, the printer on deck three stopped working and I said to him, Mr. Spock, order some ink cartridges. Pronto, do you know what he said to me?
00:44:28
Speaker
Mwah, mwah, mwah. That would be a logical captain. Mwah, mwah, mwah. The failure is the result of a paper jam. Mwah, mwah, mwah. So I told him, know your place, Spock. When I say to do something, you do it. Then he was all like, mwah, mwah, mwah. I'm dead. They look at me and stuff. But he's phoning you right now to give out about me, hasn't he? Oh, he's such a liar.
00:44:54
Speaker
Who are you contacting, Captain? Nobody, no. Nobody just, um, just, uh, uh, uh, making a note in the captain's law. Carry on with their duties inside and close the door after you. Sorry about that, SFF Chronicles. Anyway, I'm way better at space exploration commanding than Spock. Over and out. Hello. Welcome to the Judge's Corner with me, Demaris Brown.
00:45:23
Speaker
If you've been a regular listener of the Crohn's cast, you'll know I've given talks on legal matters we, as authors, need to know about, which I've alternated with talks on aspects of the law we can use in our stories. This month is different. The first of what I hope will be an occasional series looking at legal matters found in specific books, starting with the novel discussed in this month's podcast, The Fairytale Fantasy, Ludd in the Mist by Hope Millies.
00:45:51
Speaker
To recap the backstory of the novel, the land of Doraemare and its capital, Lud in the Mist, are ruled by an hereditary merchant class after their forebears overthrew the reigning Duke Aubrey some two centuries before. They govern by means of a Senate
00:46:07
Speaker
but with complete disregard for the separation of pairs, and their leader, the mayor and High Seneschal, is also the chief magistrate, a position held by the main character, Nathaniel Chanticleer, as the book opens. Although the setting is a fantastical Never Neverland, it's decidedly English in feel, with a technology and general flavour of the 17th early 18th century.
00:46:32
Speaker
Fortunately, the legal system the merchants develop, taking as their basis the primitive code of the dukes, is greatly simplified from the reality of those centuries.
00:46:43
Speaker
There are some non-English anomalies in the dorimerite legal system. We see a murder trial, but although there is a clerk of arraigns, presumably in charge of the paperwork as well as swearing in the witnesses, there appear to be no lawyers involved for either side. Nor is there a jury, but instead the case is decided by the entire complement of magistrates, or judges. Both terms are used interchangeably.
00:47:08
Speaker
though in English law they are very different beasts. And these are apparently also the Senate members, at that point 11 of them. And the murder case isn't brought and prosecuted by the authorities as such. Here in England it would be in the name of the Crown, in the US, the state or people, but rather it's an individual who initiates the action and is described as the plaintiff, a term formerly used in civil proceedings.
00:47:35
Speaker
Arrest warrants exist, but in the countryside these are both issued and executed by lawmen in a mix of legal and constabulary duties, and whatever their other responsibilities, their farmers and blacksmiths, not lawyers or clerks. And in another mingling of reality and fantasy, a character points out that she can't be tried twice for the same crime.
00:48:00
Speaker
This doctrine has been an important principle of English law with only minor exceptions since the Norman Conquest, though after 2005 retrials are now possible for serious offences such as murder where there is new and compelling evidence. However, the principle is effectively sidestepped in Ludd because there the criminal charges are very specific as to how an offence is committed, which isn't the case in real life.
00:48:27
Speaker
So being acquitted of murdering someone with the sap of Osias is no bar in Ludd to being tried for poisoning him with berries. Notwithstanding these anomalies, it's clear Mirlies knew something of the real law of England and Wales, and she mentions aspects of the present and past machinery of justice which might not occur to modern writers.
00:48:49
Speaker
For instance, she refers to the fact that it was against the law for the Mayor to leave Ludd, except on circuit. That is, in his judicial role, he was also required to go into the countryside to hear cases. This kind of itinerant justice, where judges travel on a set path from town to town, has been in existence in England from at least 1170. It originally served a number of purposes.
00:49:15
Speaker
not least, saving officials from having to take offenders, witnesses and jurors all the way to London, and in a greatly modified form it continues to this day.
00:49:25
Speaker
Another instance of the use of real law, albeit strictly historical, occurs when a book causes consternation among the ruling class and all the copies are burned by the common hangman in a procedure copied from the continent but first established in England in 1634. Writings had been burnt in public by the authorities long before that. Books by Martin Luther were burnt in 1521
00:49:51
Speaker
in the churchyard of St Peter's, for example. But a work by William Prynne so incensed the court that the Chancellor said, I condemn it to be burnt in the most public manner it can be. I wish it may, in respect of the strangeness and heinousness of the matter contained in it, to have a strange manner of burning. Therefore I shall desire that it may be burnt by the hand of the hangman.
00:50:16
Speaker
And that fate for objectionable or seditious writings continued through the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1795, the printmaker and satirist James Gilray was able to use the idea of it in his work, The Crown and Anchor Liable Burnt by the Public Hangman, in order to ridicule William Pitt and other politicians.
00:50:38
Speaker
And while the printer in Lud in the Mist was heavily fined for his offence, he was fortunate in not attracting the punishment which might have been imposed on the author had he been found at the time. That author later says he believes he would have been burned with his book, a penalty which wasn't inflicted in England, though the reality was bad enough. In 1628, one author was beaten, branded, fined, imprisoned, his ears cut, his nose slit, and he was set in the pillory and whipped.
00:51:08
Speaker
But the most important feature of real law, which Murleys uses in the novel, actually forms the wellspring of the plot, the little-known concept of a legal fiction. Mostly, these are pragmatic devices to allow a court to disregard a true fact, which is a hindrance to achieving a desired outcome, by substituting a fiction which softens the rigidity of the law and avoids the necessity of actually changing it.
00:51:34
Speaker
In all common law jurisdictions, courts may extrapolate from precedent or from the acknowledged or inferred intent behind a statute, seeking the spirit rather than the precise letter of the law. So for example, if a horse were exempt from certain tolls on a bridge, a court might hold that horse was a generic term covering all equines, so a mule could also cross for free. A small extension to serve justice perhaps, but already the beginning of a legal fiction.
00:52:05
Speaker
That then might be taken further, so in another case a cow is deemed to be a horse, or perhaps if the animals are forbidden to cross the bridge on the Sabbath, a court might deem a particular Sunday to be an extended Saturday to allow it.
00:52:19
Speaker
Obviously, judicial creativity of this kind ought to be kept under close control, and modern real-life examples are somewhat esoteric, and there's considerable confusion in distinguishing such fictions from laws creating principles which might otherwise seem at odds with reality, or where the law invokes legal presumptions to decide a case where the true facts are unclear.
00:52:44
Speaker
In Ludd, however, these legal fictions appear to derive not from court decisions, but from statute. Though since the legislature and judiciary are actually the same people, it's perhaps a distinction without a difference. More importantly, they're not used as means to achieve justice in defiance of a too strict law, but are themselves rigid and very patent absurdities.
00:53:09
Speaker
The most important fiction in Ludd arose because the merchants who overthrew Duke Aubrey believed the degeneracy of his court was caused by the fairy fruit brought to him from fairyland. As a consequence, under the new regime, all things fairy were considered taboo, and in particular, in the eyes of the law, neither fairyland nor fairy things existed. Though clearly they did exist, and as with most problems, ignoring them didn't make them go away.
00:53:41
Speaker
That first legal fiction is directly responsible for the second. If the Lord deems that fairy fruit has no existence, bringing it into the city can't be an offence. Yet the fruit can have a deleterious effect on the people who eat it. Not simply the outrageousness to the bourgeois mind of wild doings under the moon, but also madness and suicide. So the magistrates needed to make possession or trafficking in the fruit a crime.
00:54:11
Speaker
The dilemma was solved by the completely ridiculous legal fiction that turned fairy fruit into woven silk and therefore contraband. This leads to a farcical situation in the novel where the legal action against a woman accused of having fairy fruit
00:54:27
Speaker
or, rather, of receiving contraband goods, is clogged by all the foolish complications arising from the fiction, as many days were wasted in a learned discussion of the various characteristics of gold tissues, stick tough taffetes, figured satins, wrought groganes, silk mohair, and ferret ribbons.
00:54:50
Speaker
The third legal fiction seen in the novel is The Oldest, found in the first volume of the Acts of the 25th Year of the Republic, Statute 5, Chapter 9, which, incidentally, is similar to the old way of denoting statutes in England, which refer not to the year they were enacted, but to the reign of the monarch. For example, 34 Edward I would refer to an act made in the 34th year of Edward I's reign.
00:55:35
Speaker
But the dead, being dumb, feeble, treacherous, and given to vanities, if any mare at a time of menace to the safety of the dorimerites, behold by his colleagues to be any of these things, then let him be accounted dead in the eye of the law.
00:55:42
Speaker
The legal fiction is set out in full in the novel.
00:55:52
Speaker
This legal fiction serves the plot more directly than the others, since by being accounted dead, the mayor can now leave Ludd, allowing him to investigate a possible murder, and then search for his son, though obviously that could have been achieved without the sheer lunacy of this legal fiction. And once again, Merlies takes the joke further by having him wrapped in a shroud, laid on a bear, and carried to his home by four of the senators in a mock funeral.
00:56:20
Speaker
Merley's is clearly poking fun at ruling class with these ludicrous legal fictions, but she's also aiming at the law itself, and perhaps not only the law within the novel. Chanticleer's father, enduring parallels between the law and things Faerie writes that, Faerie was a delusion, so was the law. It was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose.
00:56:44
Speaker
and Merleads adds later, the law plays fast and loose with reality and no one really believes it. But if she's satirising the law and its failings,
00:56:56
Speaker
she is ambivalent about its use. Chanticleer himself says that the law, with a capital L, is the homeopathic antidote to delusion, and respect for the law ensures that a weak character who is in thrall to a supposed murderer nevertheless allows an arrest warrant against his Svengali to be executed rather than give him warning.
00:57:19
Speaker
And not only are two murderers delivered up to justice thanks to the law, but Chanticle prevents his daughter being sold as a slave, with a strident, you have no right to do this, since she and her fellow crabapple blossoms are only in the elfin marches, and they cannot be sold until they have crossed over into fairyland itself. His daughter cries, Father, you have saved us, you and the law.
00:57:45
Speaker
The law is not an ass, at least not always. It also gives protection to the vulnerable.
00:57:53
Speaker
As far as this ambivalence is concerned, I wonder whether it's simply coincidence that the novel was published in 1926, immediately after, and was presumably written during, the great modernising programme of legislation in England, which swept away centuries of arcane and frankly baffling law about land, trusts and estates, culminating in the 1925 Law of Property Act.
00:58:19
Speaker
is perhaps noteworthy that when Chanticleer saves his daughter and her friends, he finds himself giving a learned dissertation on the law of property as observed in the Elfin Marches. Here, property presumably means personal property or chattels, which would encompass slaves, which the girls would otherwise have been. But it's very tempting to think that news of the 1925 Act was acting on Murley's subconscious, if nothing more.
00:58:47
Speaker
As well as these points where Merlies is deliberately dealing with the law and legal issues, there are a couple of other legal terms slipped into the novel, though possibly by chance not intent. Many of the characters have outlandish names, such as Pug Walker and, my favourite, Bold Breaches.
00:59:06
Speaker
But there, among them, is pie powders, which might seem just another strange concoction. But a pie powder court was once set up specifically for the duration of a fair or market to deal with all civil and criminal matters arising out of the event, such as brawls or disputes between traders.
00:59:27
Speaker
The odd name of pie powder, in its various incarnations and spellings, being a corruption of the French pied-poudre, that is, dusty feet, those of the wanderers and vagabonds who might be found at such fairs.
00:59:41
Speaker
These pie powder courts dispensed speedy justice, often from the nearest pub. From the 16th century, the Hand and Shears in Smithfield was the court for the great annual St Bartholomew Fair, first held in 1133, which later became notorious for its criminality and general debauchery, leading to a lot of business for the court, until the fair was suppressed in 1855.
01:00:06
Speaker
The second legal term is much more likely to be unintentional since it's peppercorn, which is a common enough word as a spice. But it's also a byword for a nominal sum in a legal contract, especially as to rent.
01:00:21
Speaker
and for me, not legal as such, but redilent of justice, the name of the suspected murderous gibbety, which invokes the idea of the gibbit or gallows, and also perhaps the flippity gibbit, a notorious demon mentioned in King Lear.
01:00:39
Speaker
So there we have Lud in the Mist, a mix of real and imaginary law, with a hefty dose of the utterly ridiculous, a sprinkling of legal terms, and possibly a soupson of satire, a veritable hodgepodge, which is, incidentally, yet another legal term and has been since at least 1292. In talking of the novel Lud in the Mist, we simply can't escape the law.
01:01:14
Speaker
Hello, SFF Chronicles, this is James T. Kirk of Earth Starship USS Enterprise again. I just wanted to let you know that Mr. Spock has been robbing the newspapers from the canteen. You've probably been wondering why the Sligo Weekender keeps going missing. Well, it's because Mr. Spock has a light fingers. And I'll tell you how I know it. It's him. Every Monday, he knows the score for all the division of four club matches. That's the truth.
01:01:42
Speaker
Try him out the next time you see him. I wouldn't mind, but he's well able to buy his own. Sorry, Captain. Do you mind if I borrow the Weekender? I just want to see who went to the top of Division 4. Um, uh... No, the Weekender. I don't have it. But it's right next to you. Oh, uh, yes, yes. So it is, right. Take it and leave me in peace. I'm busy. There's a problem with subatomic wormhole, and for God's sake, knock the next time.
01:02:12
Speaker
Yes, Captain. Anyways, SFF Chronicles, Mr. Spock is a thief over and out.
01:02:29
Speaker
We have two writing challenge winners for you this month. The August 75 word challenge was on the topic of water and the victorious entry scarcity and value is being read for us by its author Doug Van Arten, aka Parson. We also have the winner of the July 300 word challenge, a beautiful peon entitled In My Heart and My Roots, written by one of our good friends, Joe Zebedee. Joe's entry is being read by Christopher.
01:03:05
Speaker
scarcity and value by Parson. The asteroid miner Rockhound was weeks from its base searching for a golden bonanza when it was hauled through both primary water tanks. With only a week's water reserve, Rockhound started a furious search for a big enough asteroid to process for its life-giving water. Five days later,
01:03:32
Speaker
A right-sized one was spotted, and a desperate computer spectral analysis begun. When the results came in, Spaceman Smith muttered everyone's feelings. We're doomed. It's solid gold. In My Heart and My Roots by Joe Zebedee
01:03:56
Speaker
Don't go, they told me. People don't return. But the forest called, in my heart and in my roots, and, in the end, I went. Along the dark path into the heart of the woodland, nothing moved, except the air that wound around me, filling my nose, my throat, infecting my breathing so that it became thick and unnatural.
01:04:18
Speaker
Was this what had stopped people returning? This choking? I didn't care, truth be told. Grief had made me detached. The forest's loneliness felt a blessing compared to the inquiries as to how I was coping. The helpful hands bringing dinners to ensure I fed myself. Waking to mornings where my dreams had been bare of you.
01:04:39
Speaker
Ahead, a clearing waited, full of mushrooms, the thick air above dancing with their spores. Behind them, something forced its way into the clearing. I knew the heavy limbed height of you, the shock of blonde hair turning to grey. Where my dreams were bereft, the clearing was not, and you were ahead of me, silent, watching. I could go forwards, that was where the others had went, those who were missing to their loved ones and then beyond the clearing.
01:05:09
Speaker
My heart and roots urged me to my feet, but a gentle shake of your head made moats circling the air between us. I stopped, mid-step.
01:05:19
Speaker
Behind me, I had people who loved me enough to try to feed me, to ask how I was through the lonely days and nights, and the knowledge that you were gone, and I alone. Step by a king's step, my eyes never leaving you, I backed to where the air was sweeter. One day, this path would be mine again, in its right time, and you would be there, waiting, but not today.
01:05:47
Speaker
Hello again, SFF Chronicles. This is James T. Kirk of Earth Starship U.S.S. Enterprise. I just wanted to let you know that Mr. Spock has been drinking and partying, and I've got video footage of him seeing Smokies living next door to us. At three in the morning, mind you, with work the next day, it's shocking behavior for a Starfleet officer.
01:06:10
Speaker
I don't want to put ideas into your heads, but you should definitely sack him, or write him out of the plot anyways. Or whatever it is you do. Sorry, Captain. I hope you don't mind me interrupting, but I don't think Spock did anything wrong. Sure, even the Vulcan should be allowed a few drinks and a bit of fun. Not if you're an officer in Starfleet, or any other type of official. And I do mind you interrupting. What the hell are you doing in here?
01:06:41
Speaker
I was just dropping back to Weekender, and there's an article in here about the British Prime Minister drinking and partying. Seems harmless enough. That's not the same as what Spock was doing. Because, inside, Mr. Spock was drinking and partying in private. The human leader was doing it in his work place. There's a world of difference over and out.
01:07:10
Speaker
Welcome back to CrossCast. We are here with Juliet McKenna. We've been talking about Lud in the Mist, my home mirror lease. And now we're going to talk a little bit about your own writing journey, Juliet. I wanted to talk about the Green Man series. And I must admit, I've put my cards on the table. I have a slightly vested interest here because about a year or so ago, I completed a manuscript for a novel called The Green Man.
01:07:40
Speaker
Aha, indeed. And I was scoping around for comp titles, as you do when you're looking to sell. And they came across The Green Man by Juliet E McKenna. And I thought, oh, no, surely not. Not written the same book, surely.
01:08:00
Speaker
So I was very relieved to find out that yours was a contemporary fantasy and an ongoing series because my own is set in the 14th century and is more like the name of the rose than anything else. So I was very relieved. But there are commonalities between the two and it's going to go back to that old chestnut we were talking about when we were discussing Ludd.
01:08:24
Speaker
And that's the landscape myth in folklore. Mine is very much tied to, excuse me, the landscape myth and folklore of England once again. And I get the sense that that is a strong vein running through the Green Man books as well. So perhaps that's a good place to start. So can you tell us about the series, please? It's very, it's completely unlike things that I've written before. I have been writing epic fantasy.
01:08:54
Speaker
It's the evolution of these books, these stories are completely unlike anything I've done before. The very first seed, acorn, if you like, was I was invited to write a story about the modern phase guide to surviving humanity, I think is the title of the anthology, a story about Fay,
01:09:22
Speaker
in the modern day guide. Did you say? Yes. Ah, OK. See if I can grab a copy off the shelf. Well, that's I mean, again, thematically, that sounds quite quite appropriate in discussing Love in the Mist. Yeah. And I had I had not a clue. I had no idea what story I might write for this anthology. No inspiration at all.
01:09:52
Speaker
And then when I drive to and from where I live, I pass a stand of oak trees. And one of these oaks is always out of sync with the others. It gets its leaves later. Its leaves turn orange in autumn. They go brown in autumn later. This one tree is always out of sync with the others. And I was driving home and I was chasping,
01:10:20
Speaker
writer and friend was in the car with me and I made some joke and he commented about this tree and I made some joke about yeah well yeah that was obviously got a very lazy dry hat and Chas laughed and yeah we went on with whatever it was we were doing and then I suddenly thought the other thing that was happening at the time where I live in the Cotswolds
01:10:48
Speaker
was a lot of wrangling about putting a new road through. And this was causing a lot of upset because the plans that certain members of the County Council were trying to drive through, which would coincidentally open up a large chunk of land for housing development, was not what anyone who actually lives there, lives around here, wants or needs. We need a different road scheme somewhere else.
01:11:16
Speaker
And this has been going on forever. And I suddenly thought, what would a bunch of dryads do if someone tried to put a bypass through their own grove? And so I wrote the story in about, and this was literally within 48 hours of the deadline for this anthology. I wrote the story down, yeah, 6000 words or whatever it was, bang. And it just sort of came to
01:11:41
Speaker
came to me, I sent it in saying, look, this is extremely rough, but if you think you can use it, you know, something we can do with it, then let me know. And they said, no, it's brilliant. It's great. It's exactly what we're looking for. And so that, I suppose, was the start of thinking about the relationship of the myths and folk tales that are integral to the British landscape coming into conflict with modern world. And in that story, there is a throwaway line
01:12:10
Speaker
literally half a line about if a dryad has a daughter, she is another dryad, but if a dryad has a son, he is a mortal man who has to go out and make his way in the world. And it's a complete essay. In this short story, it's half a throwaway line. And that idea would not let go of me. And quite a long time after that, I was on Hodion Island where my father was living and working at the time. He was butler in an Irish country house.
01:12:38
Speaker
And when his lordship and the family were off in one of their many other properties around the world, we would go and have holidays and stay there. And I went out one morning for a walk around basically a thousand acres of Irish oak woodland. And I was out for about an hour and a half. And by the time I came back, I had the entire plot of the Green Man's area in my head. And that has never happened to me before or since.
01:13:05
Speaker
And this book, the idea, the character of a modern working ordinary working man with one foot in the mundane realities of everyday life and one foot in the supernatural that he can see into the supernatural would not let go of me. And the more I thought about it, the more interesting I found it, because I've been reading a lot of urban fantasy ever since it started being written, which is 20 odd years ago.
01:13:34
Speaker
And again, to go back to what we were talking about about fantasy, when a genre, a subgenre has been worked on by many talented people who have explored as many of the possibilities, aspects, angles, differences as they can find, which I think has probably reached that point with urban fantasy.
01:14:02
Speaker
The classic werewolf vampire supernatural girl, sorry, supernatural lovers of a human female, those triads, triangles, various polygons. I'm not finding a lot new that I haven't really come across. This is not said that current fantasy is in decline. People are doing some very interesting things in it.
01:14:31
Speaker
But for me, I suddenly thought, actually, if you gender flip that and you have a human male surrounded by supernatural female powers and you do not have to go very far to find a teen of those in English folklore, you know, from Jenny Green Teeth through to all of the the tree spirits, the nature spirits, they're all embodiments of various feminine archetypes.
01:15:00
Speaker
And all of a sudden you get... It's a bit like a myth I go with again, isn't it? Yes. And again, yeah, basically, yeah, I have not come up with this idea hasn't sprung fully fallen from my forehead like Athena from the head of Zeus. I'm not the first to do this. I won't be the last. But also I live in the Cotswolds. I live in a very, what?
01:15:26
Speaker
externally seems to be a very privileged and wealthy and secure, not to say smug, part of the world. And there is a lot of that, a lot of that is true. Equally, there is a lot of a rural poverty and tension and there is a definite underclass locally of people who used to find employment in the factories and farms and the local economy. And most of that has gone.
01:15:56
Speaker
And again, one of the things for me about writing any sort of fiction, and I choose to write fantasy fiction, is it's got to have some hinterland, it's got to have some... I don't write message fiction because that's as dull to write as it is to read, but a good story has to have texture. And again, looking back at Blood in the Mist,
01:16:21
Speaker
You've got you've got the narrative and then you've got the themes and the subtext about change and all the rest of it. If you're writing about the modern English countryside, you can explore a lot of other themes and subtexts as well. And again, I'm not the only writer doing this. Liz Williams and the Fallow Sisters novels, they're set in Somerset. And again, you've got this tension between the haves, the have nots, the countryside, the town,
01:16:50
Speaker
in her writing that these are all ideas I think we need to think about. And in many ways, it's far easier to do that through writing a good story than some polemical blog post or boring everybody sent to us on Facebook. I think that's fair enough. Yeah. I'm aware that we've focused necessarily
01:17:20
Speaker
on England and the folklore and myth of England with a couple of hat tips to Ireland as well. But back at the beginning, you mentioned that there are people, diaspora writers, writers in other parts of the world. And we do have listeners from other parts of the world as well. We have from North America, South America, from different parts of Europe, from Australia and New Zealand.
01:17:49
Speaker
I mean, let's talk a little bit about how fantasy writers are drawing on things like landscape myth and folklore, but from different parts of the world. Yes, well, I'm probably not as well read in this as I might be or should be, because one of the dreadful things about being a writer is it takes up all your reading time. But you've got writers such as Zen Cho,
01:18:15
Speaker
She's written some Regency fantasies which are absolutely very very entertaining where you have the clash of Regency England with Empire and her most recent novel Blackwater Sister is a contemporary fantasy novel
01:18:36
Speaker
which deals with Malaysian folklore and myth and the intrusion of the supernatural and the fantastic on the modern world and modern individuals. And that is a terrific read. I haven't read Marlon James' Red Wolf, Black Leopard is it? I can't remember the title. Black Leopard, Red Wolf, I've read it.
01:18:58
Speaker
It's very strange. Yes, it's on my To Be Read list. It's very strange. I enjoyed it tremendously. It's outrageously violent.
01:19:10
Speaker
But I thought the richness of the world and the sheer difference of that world compared to what you and I would know very well as European focused high fantasy, that was what struck me the most was how different. While we're talking about global fantasy, global SF, I want to
01:19:38
Speaker
think about it from a writer's perspective for a moment. There are this is something that comes up on on SFF chronicles on crons on the boards the writing boards from time to time people want to write about either characters or worlds that are outside their own heritage. Let's put it that way. Yeah, there's a there's a bit of attention there about cultural appropriation. Now, I
01:20:07
Speaker
personally think that cultural appropriation, if it's done well, is actually a good thing because we should always try to learn and imagine ourselves in what? Well, I would say if it's done right, it's not cultural appropriation. OK, OK, so let's put it that way. That's probably a more elegant thing. I have actually recently been dealing with this directly myself. I've got a novella coming out from Newcom Press called The Golden Rule, and this is Steampunk.
01:20:36
Speaker
And one of the things that concerns me is overstating it. I find Steampunk a very interesting offshoot of fantasy fiction.
01:20:51
Speaker
Not least because I cut my teeth on writers like H. Ryder Haggard and King Solomon's Mines and the novels of She and the late Victorian tales of Daring Doom. I read odd chaps in parts foreign.
01:21:10
Speaker
that again are one of the precursors to quite a lot of the elements that we find in certainly the more adventurous end of fantasy fiction. And I think we need to acknowledge that. And we also need to, if we're going to look back at those narratives, we need to look back at the very, very problematic aspects of them, because a lot of that is where the white savior narrative comes from.
01:21:37
Speaker
I wrote a short story for an anthology revisiting classics of Victorian literature. And I did a riff on the eight classic H-Rider Haggard She, Aisha, you know, She Who Must Be Evade. And I wrote basically suffragettes taking her on in a story called She Who Thinks For Herself, which meant for the first time in decades, I went back and read the original. And he gods the racism.
01:22:07
Speaker
and the imperial mindset. And this is one of the things that if this is embraced without thinking it through as part of a steampunk aesthetic, that way lie a lot of problems and pitfalls. So if I'm going to write a steampunk story, I am going to look at it from the point of view of not the empire,
01:22:37
Speaker
the empire builders, but the people who got the empire trundling wholesale across their lands, cultures and all the rest of it. Now, that is quite a challenging thing for me as a white middle class British woman, because I'm not English, I'm half Irish. That is a tricky thing for me to do. But the fact that the version of English history I learnt at my granny McKenna's knee
01:23:05
Speaker
is so wildly divergent from the version of English history that I learnt at a girl's grammar school in Trubitori, Dorset, actually gives me a starting point. But I still have to be very, very careful. So when I'm writing The Golden Rule, this novella is coming out from New Compress, in which various members of, there are African characters, there are Chinese characters, there are South Asian characters,
01:23:35
Speaker
And, yeah, I have to be very, very careful. Now, I've done all my research. I have looked at my sources in written narratives and all the rest of it. But when I wrote it, when I had it finished and I thought, yeah, OK, I think I've got this right, the first person who read it, who wasn't me, was a very good friend of mine who is Nigerian Jamaican. And she is an extremely astute, she
01:24:05
Speaker
reads and critiques in crime fiction rather than fantasy but she reads science fiction fantasy as well and we've been friends for many years and I handed that place to her said please will you read it and tell me what I have got wrong tell me you know where I need to dial things back where you know where I've got the balance wrong
01:24:25
Speaker
Because, yes, I think it is perfectly legitimate for me as a white English-British writer to write a critique of British empire mentality through a steampunk novella. But I need to double check. Now, Sensitivity Reader is a very...
01:24:49
Speaker
contentious phrase. We need a better term because one of the things, yeah, I mean, I have it about when English people have said crass things about the Irish. Oh, don't be so sensitive. And it's a dismissal, it's a negation, it's invalidating your point of view. So I think sensitivity reader, but it's fact checking, it's accuracy. What was our friend's response to the manuscript?
01:25:16
Speaker
She she was happy with it. She thought I'd done a good job. In some sense, in a couple of places, she actually thought I had I could have gone harder. And that was interesting because she thought in some places I could have gone harder, whereas my actual editor in the same places was a bit sort of, oh, do you think we might fall this back a bit? So there was a balance to be found.
01:25:43
Speaker
Well, it's interesting. I remember the chat we had with Tade Thompson a few months ago. We were talking about Watchman, but we also spoke about a lot of his work as well. And he was of the opinion that you say what you've got to say, you know, and there are bad eggs in every population, in every part of the world.
01:26:08
Speaker
And if you're trying to sugarcoat, he said he had a lot of good things to say about Japanese manga and anime comics and literature because they don't sugarcoat it. You know, if somebody is a racist, then they're going to write that that character is a racist. They don't sugarcoat it. They don't try and patronize. And he was a big fan of that. He said, if you're going to write something, don't feel like you have to be sugarcoating it all the time.
01:26:36
Speaker
Which I thought was you know, that's interesting as well, but I asked the question about your friend Because my my assumption was that she whatever her opinion of it
01:26:45
Speaker
she wasn't going to come back and attack you for it. And I think... She wouldn't have attacked me, but if she would have attacked the writing, if the writing was wrong, and that's why, of all the people I know, I gave the book to her, because I could trust her to do that. Well, there's a difference, isn't there, between separating the writer from the writing. Yes. Isn't there? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think a lot of people... Sometimes that line gets blurred, which is a mistake.
01:27:15
Speaker
I also think that you can tell, most of the time, one can tell if something's being written in good faith or bad faith. And I don't think you can really define what that is, but I'm reminded of that quote from the American Supreme Court judge, I forget the name, who said, I can't give you a definition of pornography, but I know it when I see it.
01:27:38
Speaker
And I think it's a bit like that. If you can tell when somebody is writing something in good faith, and if they get something wrong, then you can criticise, but it doesn't warrant an attack. So from the perspective of aspiring writers, especially the ones that I mentioned, because we do get this question coming up occasionally on the boards, which I think is a sign of good faith in itself, that people are asking the question.
01:28:08
Speaker
My take is similar to Tadde Thompson's. You've got to write what you've got to write. If it's in you, get it down on the page. And like you've done, you can check it afterwards. See, is it going too far? Can you go harder, like you said? Are you sugarcoating it too much?
01:28:28
Speaker
So it's an interesting balance, but I think that my touchstone has always been the further something that I am writing is from my own lived experience, the more work I have to do and the more I have to listen. In one of my fantasy novels or the fantasy trilogy, The Less Guy Revolution, there is a character who is one of the main point of view characters and he has
01:28:58
Speaker
what is in modern terms, he has cerebral palsy. And he's basically, his speech is unaffected, but he has very, very limited mobility. And he is based on a friend of mine in those aspects, a friend of mine from my teenage years, somebody I knew at school or when I was at school. And so I was reasonably sure that I could draw on things he'd said in his experiences
01:29:26
Speaker
But I also went out and looked for books, blog posts, comments, articles by wheelchair users and contemporary people to find out basically what they thought, what they felt, the things that really annoyed them.
01:29:49
Speaker
Because this was, as I say, this was very far from my own lived experience. So I had more the more further something is away from your own lived experience, the more work you have to do. And again, I run these things past a friend who is a wheelchair user and got a few comments and tweaked things here and there. And overall, I've had very positive feedback.
01:30:17
Speaker
because I have done the work, I have been respectful. There inevitably will have been things that I missed, but also because this was part of a wider story. I was not writing a story about what it is like to be a wheelchair user.
01:30:41
Speaker
I had a character who effectively was in that situation as part of a wider story. And I think that is important as well. This wasn't the central character then? Yeah, he was. He's one of the main point of view characters. Right. And yeah, he basically he has to get for plot purposes, he has to get passed over for inheriting because he is physically incapable of being a duke on horseback.
01:31:08
Speaker
So that's the driving motive. But having made that decision, I had to get that character right to be respectful of people for whom that was a day to day reality. So tell us what have you got?
01:31:23
Speaker
What are you working on at the moment? Well, the New Green Man book is with my editor at the moment, and we have yet to announce the title, indeed the cover-arm up, that's all work in hand.
01:31:41
Speaker
I do like the cover art for the Green Man books. Sorry, I have to say, I do like the cover art for the Green Man books. The cover art is absolutely lovely. Ben Baldwin is a genius. I don't know how he does it because, you know, he likes to read books, so he gets the manuscript well ahead of time. And he will send me some sketches and we will sort of discuss, you know, which character, which
01:32:10
Speaker
figure from the story he's going to illustrate and he will send me some sketches and I will sort of say, yeah, no, maybe tweak this, that, the other. Yes, you've got it. How he can tune in to my brain, the extent he does. I can't wait to see what he's going to do for the next one. A new one set in Wales, North Wales. And again, the landscape is integral to the story in some very, very interesting ways.
01:32:40
Speaker
I mean, I look at landscape very differently now since I started writing these books. He's curious. Well, we're blessed really in the UK, aren't we, with some of these ancient landscapes? Yes. It's like the Cotswolds and North Wales and everywhere else. Well, one of the interesting things about North Wales is the extent to which it isn't an ancient landscape, but it is very much a manmade landscape.
01:33:07
Speaker
go on. How does this influence the tale then? Because if you look at the history of North Wales and the quarrying and the site quarrying, until relatively recently, this was an industrial landscape. A lot of North Wales is now a post-industrial landscape and it looks bleak and remote and all the rest of it. Well, again, if you're thinking about spirits of place,
01:33:33
Speaker
which so many of the myths of any part of the Charles, the myths are about spirits of place, spirits of mountain, tree, lake, river. How are they going to deal with, particularly if these are long lived, eternal, unchanging spirits of place, people coming in and changing their place all around them?
01:34:04
Speaker
And that's as much I'm going to say about the new book. Fair enough. It sounds intriguing. OK, I think it's fascinating to write really, really. Well, I mean, when I was writing my own book called The Green Man, like I said, it set many, many, many centuries ago in the 14th century. But when I was doing my own research, yeah, it was fascinating to dip into that those ancient myths and look at the landscape and how the landscape is interpreted by
01:34:37
Speaker
Varying generations and ongoing generations of people. I think you were going, were you going to mention the cleaving? Yes. Quite nicely. This is an Arthurian novel, which frankly, I never expected to write. But I was having a conversation with an editor who sort of said, have you ever thought about writing Arthurian novels? And my response was, no.
01:35:01
Speaker
And he said, why, why not? And I basically said, well, toxic masculinity, overarching patriarchy, rape culture. Yeah. How many anti-feminist themes would you like me to list? And he went, excellent. And I said, excuse me. And he said, I think, you know, there's definitely time for a reexamination of that whole because again, this brings us back to a lot of the un
01:35:30
Speaker
explored roots of modern epic fantasy fiction that if you
01:35:35
Speaker
But if a lot of these elements have been carried over into epic secondary oil fiction without in many cases being sufficiently explored, the damsel in the distress, the white knight on the charger who comes galloping up and swoops her off, you can draw a line from Geoffrey Monmouth through the 1400s and French romantic poetry and all the rest of it. Then you've got Walter Scott, who is, again, an awful lot of Walter Scott.
01:36:04
Speaker
assumptions and ideas that seep into a lot of the modern epic fantasy that's written. And these ideas need exploring. So I actually, I went back and read the source text for Arthur, in particular Mallory, for the first time in decades. And things that had never struck me at the time struck me, you know,
01:36:32
Speaker
strap me between the eyes on this rereading. The tensions, well, for a start, the extent to which the landscape is fluid, it is not fixed. There are places like Camelot. Where is Camelot? Nobody knows where Camelot is. Arthur is supposedly the archetypal foundation myth of Britain, and yet so much of it relates to France and the continent.
01:37:02
Speaker
fairy and strange. There's a lot of magic in it. There are antique magic swords. Excalibur is only the start of it. There are all sorts of them.
Myths and Patriarchy
01:37:16
Speaker
The whole myth set up, the whole myth corpus is so strange and in many ways incoherent, but again frequently it's tied to the landscape and the land is important.
01:37:29
Speaker
particularly once you get into the whole, yeah, the king is the lamb, the lamb is the king. Right, yes. And the, I feel like I have to, you mentioned toxic masculinity and the patriarchy, but I feel sometimes when these things are mentioned, I have to, I feel like I have to step in and defend the patriarchy sometimes because it's only when the patriarchy is corrupted by the bad king that it becomes toxic. And the idea
01:37:55
Speaker
is that you get the noble king at the top of the patriarchy so that the land can be revivified and Arthur is the king and the king is the land. And it still sucks to be a girl because basically, you know, when I started looking at some of the female characters in the myth,
01:38:21
Speaker
And again, if you look at the myth as classically presented, both in the text and also in subsequent film and TV versions, of which there are many, many, many. The female characters only ever come and go in and out of the myth in service to the core male gaze, male focused narrative. Egrane, Arthur's mother.
01:38:42
Speaker
Nimway, who may or may not be a sorceress. I mean, there are lots of inconsistencies in different versions. So it was actually quite useful because you can take what works for what you're doing. Morgana, the other princesses, the other queens whose sons variously get slaughtered or go out and do some slaughtering. And actually, if you start looking at where these women will be when they are, if you like, off screen,
01:39:10
Speaker
They are going to be in the same places. They are going to be overlapping. They are going to have relationships that are entirely independent of the core male-focused narrative. And the more I look to that, the more interesting a narrative I could devise. Seeing the classic from Arthur's birth and the trickery with Merlin,
01:39:37
Speaker
and what Merlin does right through to the Battle of Camelan. If you start looking at that from the point of view of the women who are affected by those events, you get a very, very different perspective on the whole thing. So this is what the cleaving is doing. And one of the things that's coming out May next year, May 23 from Angry Robot,
01:40:05
Speaker
And one of the things that actually then, as I was constructing this narrative, became apparent to me was you can actually not only flag up how toxic masculinity or even benevolent patriarchy means it sucks to be a girl, but actually it doesn't do the guys many favours either. Well, I would say that
01:40:31
Speaker
If war is the default state of the nation, unless you're the actual king yourself, then it ain't going to be that great if you're a guy either. The whole Arthurian mythos is basically, if you look at the way that Arthur unfolds, it is a semi-permanent state of war, which is a very, very erosive thing.
01:41:02
Speaker
I would possibly say that that's partly metaphorical for the state of the nation. In any mythological text, it's about the revivification of the land, the revivification of the state in the face of corruption. The corruption either comes from without or within. It doesn't really matter.
01:41:29
Speaker
a bit like blood in the mist, when the citizens become so one-eyed that they consider that the corruption doesn't even exist. That's at the exact point when you're most susceptible and most vulnerable to it. So you have to be open to, well, to new information in order to revivify the state. And that happens in Arthur. That happens in the Osiris myth in Egypt.
01:41:57
Speaker
it happens in Christian in Christian myth as well and you know everywhere else you look so the war I don't you know it's a good metaphor is war for conflict isn't it it's there in in all of our modern fantasy books as well from Tolkien through to everything else so I think the war yeah I mean it is I suppose you could say it's it's corrosive because
01:42:25
Speaker
It's not great if you're if you're a man, because the chances are you're going to get sent off to some godforsaken hill to die very violently alone. And it's not going to be great for the women either back home, who are left with their own relationships to pick up. And yeah, so it's it's yeah, there's a rich vein, let's just say that vein there. Interesting. It does.
01:42:54
Speaker
raise the question, there's a strong sense of feminist retellings of, what would you say, classical stories?
Reimagining Myths with Feminist Perspectives
01:43:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's a real thing at the moment. Do you think there's a danger that it's just a fashion, or can these retellings become as, well, can they establish themselves as mythological canon in their own right?
01:43:21
Speaker
I see no reason why they shouldn't because mythic retellings, again, the Arthurian corpus, there were feminist retellings of Arthurian myth happening in the 1400s. Marie de France and other writers who basically don't get the prominence they deserve.
01:43:50
Speaker
I think one of the things that is happening with a lot of the current reimaginings of classic myth is writers, modern contemporary writers, are unpicking the Victorian overlay. And one of the, again, the Arthurian cycle is one of the classic examples, that if you look at what the Victorians did with the myth,
01:44:21
Speaker
Basically, they reformulated an awful lot of myth in service of their own world view, which is, you know, he forgot, she forgot, he forgot alone, she forgot in him. And we are the British and we have a godly right to rule any empire, stick down a flag and call this place Piccadilly. And actually, if you go back, because I did classics as my degree,
01:44:45
Speaker
And if you start looking at the myths from the point of view of what why the Greeks were telling these myths and why the Romans were telling these myths. But again, because the classics became the bedrock of English public school education, because and that comes from the Enlightenment, when thinkers wanted to find. Authoritative texts from the past that weren't the Bible,
01:45:15
Speaker
to use to support their worldview so that we are not going to be given by the Catholic Church or indeed Protestant churches that are emerging. But we want the stamp of authority from ancient texts and we're going to nab them from the Greeks and the Romans. And so actually, I think there's a lot of scope for
01:45:38
Speaker
looking at these myths and stripping away, it's a bit like stripping layers and layers of wallpaper off or varnish. You know, anytime you've done any redecorating or repainting, you know, you can sort of see the history of whoever's lived in, particularly if you ever lived in an old house and stripped away layers and layers and layers of wallpaper until you actually get back to the plaster with horse hair in it. Because I've lived in houses that old.
01:46:07
Speaker
And then you can start afresh and you can see what that means for you now. And I think that's a lot of what's going on. Well, it's been great talking to you. I think it's been a fascinating talk. I think we've covered quite a lot of good ground.
Modern Myth Making Recommendations
01:46:22
Speaker
So before we draw to a close, I'm just going to ask our usual final couple of questions, which is what are you reading now and what would be your one recommended book for our listeners?
01:46:34
Speaker
At the moment, I am rereading Lois McMaster Bujold's Fort Cozigan books. That's quite appropriate given the cleaving, isn't it? Yes. And because basically there is so much going on in the world and it's also a bit grim. They are my respite from the news and the doomscrolling at the moment and I have
01:47:01
Speaker
just finished reading memory, which means the next I can't remember what the next one up is, but I will be starting that at bedtime tonight. Books to recommend. Well, in the context of the conversation we've had today about modern myth making and fairy tales and looking at fairy tales new from a new perspective, it's got to be the In the Heart of Hidden Things by Kit Whitfield.
01:47:29
Speaker
um with a supplementary shout out for Liz Williams and the Fallow Sisters novel which the first one of those is Comet Weather um and I couldn't choose between those actually frankly at the moment. They sound like great recommendations. They are very interesting books and quite unlike anything that the majority of
01:47:56
Speaker
reading that's on offer at the moment. I will definitely have a look at those in that case. Julia, it's been lovely having you on. I've really
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
01:48:04
Speaker
enjoyed it. I think we had a great conversation and hopefully this will drive a few people to try out Lud in the Mist. Yes, it's definitely worth a read because one of the things is actually because it isn't a shaped crafted modern novel. It's full of surprises and unexpected twists.
01:48:24
Speaker
because as a reader and a writer, yeah, I'm pretty good at working out where things are going because I've had so much space. No, basically, ideas get picked up, dropped, reappear, don't reappear. This book is full of surprises. We'll leave it there. Thanks ever so much for joining us. Thank you for inviting me. Lovely. See you soon. Bye bye. Cheerio.
01:49:08
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and our special guest Juliet E McKenna. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Christopher Bean, Brian Sexton, Jay Stalaper, Doug Van Arten and Joe Zebedee.
01:49:24
Speaker
Special thanks to Brian Turner and all the staff at Crohn's and thanks to you for listening. Don't forget to subscribe to Crohn's Cast and don't forget to join the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community for free at sffchronicles.com Join us next month when we'll be talking to the award-winning author Stephen Hall to talk about his smash hit debut novel The Wildly Inventive and genre-bending The Raw Shark Texts.
01:51:11
Speaker
You know I'm better