Beyond Selidor

This week's linkpost is all Terry Pratchett. I came to his writing later than most, as I was in my early twenties before I read a single word of his. A good friend of mine and I had made a deal: he would watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I would read Pratchett. I think it was a good deal for both of us. I started with Guards! Guards!, and never looked back. My favourite Pratchett book is Small Gods, for all the qualities that made Pratchett such a powerful writer: warm humour, a perceptive understanding of human nature, an intelligent way with words that included rather than excluded, and a patience with human frailty.

This is a Storify of Pratchett's last tweets. (Warning: bring tissues.)

Here Nymeth provides her reminiscences at Things Mean A Lot.

Jo Walton recalls her first meeting with Pratchett over at Tor.com.

I also liked this piece by Julie Beck at the Atlantic.

The obituary at the BBC is here.

As usual, xkcd says in a few words what would take me several thousand.

I think, however, that Abi Sutherland says it best:

He saw the monstrosities of our world: economic inequality, racism, sexism, religious bigotry, the abuses of narrative and myth. And he made them irresistibly ludicrous, laying them relentlessly out until their inner absurdity smothered them, until the least bizzare and most reasonable thing in the story was that it took place on a disc resting on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a giant space turtle.

He was both wise and kind.

The world could do with a bit more wisdom accompanied by kindness.

The internet! What a marvel it is! So full of wondrous and interesting things! Things that make me go !!!, apparently!

There is papersky's review of Dune! And Ursula Le Guin's thoughts on a female Prospero! (I love Le Guin, and The Tempest is my favourite Shakespeare play, so this induced a swoon of geektastic proportions!)

We've got a couple of insightful posts about the Arizona shooting on Tiger Beatdown, while John Scalzi's written some good stuff about Sarah Palin's 'blood libel' comments. He's also got an open thread about Obama's Tucson speech.

Now, in case anyone needs a unicorn chaser of sorts, Neil Gaiman and Amber Benson are in the same place. Be still my geeky, geeky heart.

I've been away in London for the past week, neglecting my internetting, and have discovered all sorts of fantastic things to which to link upon my return.

First up, Abigail Nussbaum's further (spoilery) thoughts on Inception. Then we've got an interview in Honi Soit (my own old university's student paper) with Dichen Lachman.

bebopsamurai has a great five-part review/critique of The Last Airbender which is well worth reading. Part 1 is here.

I shall clearly have to start reading Tamora Pierce's LJ. Here's a post she wrote about writing female characters.

Great post on ABC Unleashed about the whole Wikileaks phenomenon. It's been bothering me that most of the newspapers discussing the revelation of the horrific facts about the Afghanistan war have not even bothered to mention that all this was done through Wikileaks. It's kind of relevant, you know?

Here's papersky on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

This is exactly what being a Whedon fan feels like. (Via Tiger Beatdown.)

This is me on the ABC Bookshow blog talking about 'updating' Enid Blyton's books.

And that's it for today. I'm going to sit at home drinking lemon, honey and ginger drink and try to beat this awful cold I seem to have picked up.

It's odd when you return from an internet-free weekend to find out that Epic Drama of Epicness has been unfolding online. But that's what happened with the latest round of Amazon vs the Publishers/Authors/Readers/People Who Are Dubious About the Kindle.

I'm not really sure of my opinion about the matter, and I think there's blame on both sides, but I'll let you all make up your own minds with a series of posts by John Scalzi about the fight between Amazon and Macmillan over the price of ebooks. As usual, half the good stuff takes place in the comments of the posts. Scalzi is as erudite as ever, summing up the situation (as he sees it) with wit and knowledge. Charles Stross sums up matters as he sees it, while Tobias Buckell gives us his take. Of course, the Tor editors are all over it. Scott Westerfeld's take on the matter contains the hilarious observation that Amazon should've known that 'when cutting off publishers, don’t start with the one that has the most science fiction writers. We will blog you dead!' I couldn't agree more!

[ETA: I knew that Hal Duncan wouldn't disappoint.]

And now for something completely different! Jo Walton's written some great posts on the first three Earthsea books, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore. She (and her commenters) make some really interesting points about Le Guin's fabulous series. I, for one, have been saying for years that Le Guin's work is cold; she's not a comforting or consoling writer, and yet somehow that's a far greater consolation than a more 'cozy' book might be. Earthsea never talks down to its readers, and as the series progresses, you can see Le Guin seriously engaging with, reflecting on and realising the limitations of her own philosophy. She saw the flaws in her own books (especially in regard to feminism) and corrected them accordingly. It's a brave author who can do that!

Okay, over and out!

I've got a life post, a post about my birthday books (where I mostly whine at Robert Harris for the audacity of not being Steven Saylor) and an announcement post on Longvision.

Here's Neil Gaiman being awesome (when is he not, really?). Here is Justine Larbalestier's list of new blogs she discovered in 2009. I'll probably end up following lots of them.

My mum emailed me the link to this great New York Times article about Katherine Paterson, the new 'ambassador of children's literature' in the US. Her advice? Spend time reading to your children. I love Paterson. Her novel Of Nightingales That Weep was a staple of my childhood. I could probably quote it from cover to cover if I thought about it.

Finally, Jo Walton (papersky) wrote a beautiful post about The Dark Is Rising on Tor.com. Until I got back to the UK, where it is currently blanketed with snow, I didn't appreciate one of the major plot points of the eponymous second book in this series: snow, when you're in England, is sinister and scary. There's something very offputting about the way it swallows sound, the way it makes the landscape harsh and hostile. Walton makes the important point that this excellent series is heavily rooted in the land - Cornwall, Wales and the south of England (near Windsor), and until I lived in England, I didn't really understand quite how accurate Cooper's depictions of these places were.

Some of these links are quite old, but I thought you should read them if you haven't already.

I'm talking about crime novels that explore contemporary political concerns (and more specifically, the erosion of freedom in pursuit of security) here. Spoilers for The Tiger in the Well, Farthing and the Roma Sub Rosa series abound.

So, a little while ago I whined about fantasy novel clichés and promised to write a little bit about fantasy novels that either bypass these clichés or at least reinterpret them. The first series I want to hold up as an example is Jo Walton's Tir Tanagiri Saga. They're a retelling of the Arthurian legend, but in an alternative world (Britain is Tir Tanagiri, Romans are Vincans, Saxons are Jarns etc). What's this, an original take on the Arthurian story? I hear you ask, but Walton truly does something special with familiar ingredients.

The story is told from the point of view of Sulien ap Gwien, the daughter of a minor Tanagan aristocrat and one of the 'Last of the Vincans'. The story opens with her rape at the hands of Jarnish raiders, an event which comes to colour all of her life. The raiders also kill her younger brother (and her father's heir) and destroy her home. Sulien winds up as a soldier in the 'Ala' (like the elite army) of the new young king, Urdo (the Arthur figure in the stories). During the course of the two books, Sulien helps Urdo in his quest to unite Tir Tanagiri in the face of Jarnish invasion and the loss of the Vincan legions (which mirror the ending of a Roman presence in Britain and the Anglo-Saxon invasion), as well as in the face of the encroaching new religion of 'The White God' (Christianity). So far, so predictable. It could be any Arthurian retelling.

What makes this series special is the focus on the really terrible struggle Urdo faces to unite his country. As he points out on numerous occasions, his claim to the High Kingship is no better than any other regional lord in Tir Tanagiri. Lots of books that focus on this kind of heir-to-throne-consolidates-his-power storyline seem to give their hero an air of entitlement. And they don't make the struggle seem believable. It is not enough for the king-to-be to fight simply one battle and then be in control of a country as volatile as fifth-century Britain was. Walton shows that it was a hard slog, a careful balancing act between justice and expediency, full of compromises, unlikely alliances and sheer dumb luck. She resists the urge of so many other fantasy writers to make the struggle between Christianity and 'the old religion' simplistic and black and white. Sulien herself has no time for the priests of the White God, thinking them and their religion stupid and a religion of slaves, but Walton never seems like she's on an anti-Christian diatribe. Sulien is a pragmatic heroine. She recognises that hers will be the last generation of religious pluralism, and she moves on, seeing that uniting the country is more important than fighting a religious war.

Walton's characters are all also fully fleshed out, and yet symbols and ciphers at the same time. In some fantasy, especially that written by women with female protagonists, there's often a tendency to write stereotypes rather than flesh-and-blood characters. The heroes are always pure and good, and the villains are always base and are motivated by stupid motives. In the Tir Tanagiri books, everyone has a bit of villain in them (except Urdo, who is viewed through Sulien's platonicly-adoring eyes and can do no wrong). Their actions are thus comprehensible because they are all human. At the same time, they're all symbols, in the way that characters in mediæval tales are all symbols. It's a tricky combination to pull off, but Walton manages it.

Without giving too much away, I'd also finally like to commend Walton for her heroine in this book. It's a terrible cliché, and, like many clichés, there's truth in it, that 'women's fantasy' tends to focus on romance. The central theme of much mediæval or historical fantasy is an unlikely relationship between the narrator/protagonist and a male character. It's the mechanism that drives the plot, and the tidily-wrapped up ending usually involves the heroine and the hero realising that they're in love, saving the world and ending up together. Well and good. I mainly read this kind of story, so I can't be too sneery about it...

BUT I will love Walton forever for creating a heroine who is not driven by unrequited or unrecognised love. Sulien is an entirely sexless being. It doesn't really matter wether she is turned off men after being raped, or whether she is asexual to begin with, for whatever reason, the quest to find true love is removed from the story and thus as a motivation for the series' heroine. Sulien's a thoroughly original heroine, the leader of an army, a military tactician, a representative of the old order while trying to build a new world at the same time. She witnesses enormous change during her long lifetime and she records it wryly, with affection and the rueful vision of hindsight.

Walton writes beautifully, and her story is enhanced by the various poems she sprinkles through it. (I hear you scream in horror - a poetry-spouting fantasy novel - but these poems really are accomplished. As someone who's studied Old Irish, Middle Welsh, Old Norse and Old English literature, I can appreciate what she's trying to do.) She's managed to do something very difficult for a fantasy novelist: create a new world with its own, utterly believable internal logic, an Otherworld that draws you away from reality, and yet every so often throws you back with a quote that seems drawn from your own personal experiences. I'll leave you with the opening lines of the first book, The King's Peace, which is one such quote that has a special resonance for me:

'What it is to be old is to remember things that nobody else alive can remember. I always say that when people ask me about my remarkable long life. Now they can hear me when I say it. Now, when I am ninety-three and remember so many things that are to them nothing but bright legends long ago and far away. I do not tell them that I said that first when I was seventeen, and felt it too...So I have been old by my own terms since I was seventeen.' - Jo Walton, The King's Peace, Penguin, p ix.