Witch World by Andre Norton — A Retrospect

Back in the 1970s, after reading Lord of the Rings had changed my world, I naturally went looking for similar books. Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series proved invaluable, not only for the old classics they reprinted, but also for the many other authors and series Carter name-checked in his various introductions.

One of these was Witch World by Andre Norton. There were six books available then, in a uniform paperback edition by Tandem, and I bought and devoured them, one by one. Later, when I started frequenting the SF/fantasy bookshop Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in Soho, I found a seventh volume in an imported edition.

I didn’t revisit the Witch World series for many years, until I recently reread all the books I have. I also discovered, through the wonders of Google, that the series is now substantially larger than it was. That gives me new targets.

Andre Norton (1912-2005) was born Alice Mary Norton, but changed her name, first professionally and then legally, to Andre. Prejudice led many women writing in SF and fantasy in the 30s, 40s and 50s to either adopt male pseudonyms (like James Tiptree Jr) or use initials (like C. L. Moore) in order to disguise their gender. Norton worked as principally as a librarian (including a stint in the Library of Congress) until becoming a full-time author in 1958 — by which time she’d had 21 novels published. Most of these were SF or fantasy, and many for what would today be described as the YA market.

Witch World

In 1963, Norton published Witch World, a fantasy novel with slight SF elements. A man named Simon Tregarth, on the run and desperate, accepts a bizarre offer — a gateway that will take whoever uses it to the world in which he truly belongs.

Simon finds himself in the land of Estcarp, an ancient country ruled by a council of witches, that’s fighting for its life against neighbours on all sides. Most especially, though, they’re fighting against the sinister Kolder, with their mind-control and outlandish technology — technology that Simon’s in a far better position to comprehend than anyone in Estcarp.

As a former military officer, Simon has plenty to give his new compatriots, as he fights with them against the Kolder. He also falls in love with one of the witches, Jaelithe, who renounces her vows to marry him.

The second book, Web of the Witch World (1964), continues the story of Simon, Jaelithe and their friends, as they take the battle to the Kolder and discover that these, like Simon, have come through a portal from an alternative world (though a different one).

This opening duology was followed by a trilogy — Three Against the Witch World (1965), Warlock of the Witch World (1967) and Sorceress of the Witch World (1968) — which focus on Simon and Jaelithe’s triplet children. Having fallen foul of the council of witches, they flee over the mountains to the even more ancient land of Escore, from where the people of Estcarp had long ago come.

Escore is a country that was long ago riven by wars between mages of almost godlike power. They’ve left the land a dangerous place, with servants of the Dark roaming everywhere except for a few safe havens where a kind of fae-folk live.

The siblings ally themselves with these and offer their own strengths — Kyllan as a warrior, though with some magic, Kemoc a scholar of magic lore who can channel power, and Kaththea a witch of immense potency. Each is the protagonist of one of the books, showing them finding their strength, overcoming the Dark and finding love.

In between the duology and the trilogy, however, Norton did something remarkable. Year of the Unicorn (1965) is unmistakably set in the same world as the other books, but not only does it involve none of the same characters or locations — it’s set on a different continent.

The connection is that the land of High Hallack (a loosely confederated group of feudal lordships) has been invaded from across the ocean by Alizon, Estcarp’s northern neighbour. The main character, Gillan, appears to have originated from Estcarp, but was (for unknown reason) brought over as a baby by the raiders.

The lords of High Hallack have done a deal with the mysterious Were Riders to drive out the raiders, and the price is girls to be their brides. Gillan, facing a future of boredom and lowly servitude, volunteers to be one of them, and among the Were Riders her innate witch powers begin to blossom.

The seventh book I found, Spell of the Witch World (1972) is a collection of three shorter pieces all set in High Hallack or the lands around. The main character of one of the stories, like Gillan, is of Estcarpian origin with witch powers, but the others have no connection with Estcarp. The three stories involve two main themes — people displaced by the war and encountering magical powers.

Thoughts on Rereading Witch World

So, having reread the books, what are my impressions? The negative, first: the writing really isn’t very good. This applies both to the language itself and to the story structure. Most of the books involve long stretches of infodump, and the second and third volumes of the trilogy begin with the current point-of-view character giving a long synopsis of what’s happened in previous books.

They’re also written largely in a rather awkwardly archaic language. To be fair, this was fairly common in fantasy when Norton was writing, but there seems little point, since the characters are obviously supposed to be speaking in their own natural languages.

On the other hand, the stories are good, and the characters are well drawn. Unusually for the times, as well, there’s a good balance between male and female characters. Even Le Guin’s Earthsea series, from a similar era, were originally quite male dominated, although this changed in later books. Norton’s women have plenty of agency and often play crucial roles in the outcomes of the stories.

The Importance of Witch World

There are three elements to this series which, I believe, make it absolutely crucial to the development of epic fantasy.

One is the now-familiar blend of action, high stakes for its world, romance and strong characters. This could describe any number of fantasy series over the past thirty years or so, but I can’t actually think of any earlier example, with the possible exception of William Morris’s fantasy novels of the 1890s — and they didn’t have the high stakes.

Another element that’s common enough in fantasy today but which, as far as I’m aware, originated in the Witch World is the Sisterhood of powerful sorceresses — not evil, but with their own enigmatic agenda. In a very real sense, the witches of Estcarp are the ancestors of the Aes Sedai and innumerable similar organisations.

The third thing — one that had a profound effect on me, when I first read the series — is the concept of setting independent stories in separate parts of a secondary world. Although obviously there had been examples of characters journeying to remote parts of their world (in Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, for instance), I’m not aware of anyone who’d simply set stories in widely spread locations, much as a primary world author might set one story in New York, one in London and another in Tokyo.

To be honest, this still isn’t very common, but the idea was a revelation to me. I’ve taken it even further, setting stories on each of the seven continents of my own secondary world. I’m not sure I’d have thought of doing this without Andre Norton.

More Witch World

For various reasons, in the 80s I stopped searching for imports of fantasy books, and it was only recently that I discovered what I’d missed. Besides the seven books I’d read there are no fewer than nineteen more Witch World novels, some by Norton alone and others in collaboration. In addition, short stories about the Witch World, by Norton and others, have been published in seven collections, besides Spell of the Witch World.

So it seems I have plenty of catching up to do with Estcarp, Escore and High Hallack — and who knows what other lands?

Flashbacks — Love Them or Hate Them?

Whether you’re reading a book, watching a film or following a TV series, one thing seems increasingly consistent — the story isn’t told in sequential order. Perhaps it’s just an occasional flashback, or perhaps the entire story is being told in multiple timelines, but the journey from A to B is rarely a straight line.

Now, I love a good out-of-sequence story. One of my favourite quotes is that “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”1 I do recognise, though, that it can be an extremely confusing and annoying approach when used badly.

So how do flashbacks and multiple timelines work, and how can they be used most effectively?

Simple Flashbacks (or Flashforwards)

Sometimes there’s only one flashback in a story, or else they’re scattered sparingly throughout. And, like pretty much anything in the way you tell a story, there are right and wrong ways of doing them.

A flashback shouldn’t be used because you want to show something cool, nor because it’s easier than weaving the information into the story in a more integrated way, such as dialogue. A flashback is only needed when its events need to be seen, not merely referred to, and there’s a compelling reason not to bring it in until this point.

One of the uses of flashbacks that I always hate (normally in films or TV shows) is when a brief flashback is stuck in simply to remind the viewer of a past event relevant to the current events — on the assumption that viewers have the memory of a goldfish with dementia.

This isn’t always wrong. The cascading flashbacks that accompany the reveal of the twist in The Sixth Sense worked well enough for me (or, at least, would have done if I hadn’t guessed the twist nearly an hour earlier2). But don’t just use a flashback because you don’t trust your audience.

And what about flashforwards? That would be when you tease an event that’s yet to come, and it can be effective if you’re very sure of what you’re doing. The only times I’ve used a flashforward have been as part of a more complex multiple time structure — which I’m coming to next.

Nonlinear Storytelling

One of the things authors are regularly told nowadays is not to start their story at too early a point. This wasn’t always the case. Many Dickens novels, for example, start with the main character being born and growing up, before getting to where anything interesting happens.

Today’s fashion in stories, however, is to start just before the point everything changes for the main character, whether that’s undertaking the quest, being told about the murder or meeting the relevantly gendered person of their dreams. Everything before that, we’re told, is back-story and therefore of very limited relevance.

The advice on where to start is generally good, but it’s not necessarily true that anything before is back-story, and certainly not that it’s irrelevant. Sometimes it’s simply that the story begins long before the right place to start it. For instance, the character’s childhood may actually be an essential part of the story, but not something you want to introduce the reader to before establishing the crucial events. In this case, you may want to scatter the earlier story throughout the main narrative.

This is the approach I took with At An Uncertain Hour.3 The “present” narrative is actually a very short period of less than twenty-four hours at the very end of the story. The 1st person main character, the Traveller, is facing the culmination of everything that’s happened to him over the three thousand years of his immortal life.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the flashback chapters can just be tossed in at any point. For one thing, what’s going on “now” and “then” should reflect one another in some way, as well as explaining one another. Besides the sections that simply relate earlier phases of the story, some of the flashbacks explain the Traveller’s attitudes and personality, while others comment on what’s happening in the “present”.

And the answer to the mystery that’s been set up in the “present” is actually revealed in a scene that happens three thousand years earlier.

Just like individual flashbacks, nonlinear storytelling can be done well and badly. Badly done, it can confuse the reader or viewer (it has the potential to be even more confusing in visual form than in writing) if they can’t tell what’s present or what’s past, or can’t see the point of the flashbacks. Whenever you’re using flashbacks (or flashforwards) of any kind, it’s essential to establish at least the when and where, if not the why, within seconds.

For my money, the best exponent of nonlinear storytelling4 is Iain Banks — with or without his M. Most of his best novels fill in the crucial events that are driving the present, with the solution often found in the past.5 One of his SF novels, Use of Weapons, begins in the middle and proceeds alternately forwards to the end and backwards to the beginning. I was slightly miffed when I read it, since I’d already used that structure myself, though with considerably less success.

Linear or Nonlinear?

Not all stories need to be told in the same way. Some proceed confidently from A to B, without any thought of diverting by way of Q or X, and that’s fine. Even those might fill in some details about the past, but without necessarily taking us back in time.

Other stories, though, have a more complex relationship with time and sequence, and for these a straight line simply doesn’t cut it. So, if that’s how your story needs to be told, then tell it that way — but remember that the techniques involved are much harder to get right.

If you don’t, you risk confusing your readers — and writing sins don’t get much worse than that.

1 I never knew where it came from, though. I looked it up for the purpose of quoting it here, and apparently it originates with Jean-Luc Godard.

2 Does that make me specially perceptive, or the twist weak? I’m not sure, but in fact guessing it didn’t spoil the rest of the film for me.

3 And also in the novel that’s currently resting between first and second drafts — but I haven’t got that quite right yet.

4 No, I haven’t read every author who uses nonlinear structure, and I’m perfectly happy to accept that your favourite is also brilliant.

5 It’s not remotely a coincidence that I was reading Banks’s brilliant novel The Crow Road at the time I began At An Uncertain Hour.

A City as Old as Time

You come across it constantly in fantasy. An ancient city, dreaming in its senescence. A city so old that no records have survived of when it was founded. A city as old as time.

But surely that’s nonsense. Cities don’t really last that long, do they? Don’t they come and go, lasting a few centuries before being overtaken by the new city on the block?

Well, sometimes they do, but not always, and maybe not even usually. If we look around our own world, there really are cities here that, if not quite as old as time, are extremely ancient indeed. But not senescent. Cities are dynamic affairs, and the most ancient are often also the most modern.

How Old Can a City Be?

There’s no doubt that cities can be extremely young — even barely out of their adolescence. I live not far from a city that was planned and built in the 1960s, and there are many similar examples around the world.

This is anything but a new process. The ancient Greeks, for example, were forever founding new colony cities, and the Romans continued the process, while it was a similar story in many other parts of the world. And, needless to say, even the most ancient city must have been young once.

On the other hand, there are also many ancient cities. Just restricting it to Europe and the Middle East as the area I know most about (China, India and many other parts of the world can boast the same), there are towns and cities that have been thriving for thousands of years. In England, most towns, villages and cities go back a minimum of a thousand years, and often two thousand.

London, for instance, is around two thousand years old (and there’s evidence of much earlier settlements there). Paris is a similar age, as are many other cities of Western Europe, while further south, Rome, Istanbul and Alexandria are among the major cities founded between two and three thousand years ago.

There are much old cities, though. Athens and Jerusalem both go back well beyond three millennia, while Damascus is around five thousand years old — the oldest capital city in the world. But all of these are children compared with Jericho. The city is believed to have existed (with defensive walls) as far back as 9,000 BC — and it’s still there.

Names Have Been Changed — or Have They?

For the most part, settlements whose histories are measures in the thousands of years will have completely different names now from what they were called in older times. This can be seen very clearly in England, where the names given to towns by the Romans are rarely recognisable, and even most listed in the 1086’s Domesday Book, are radically different.

On the other hand, it’s often possible to follow a thread. The evolution of Roman Venta into Winchester is clearer is you remember that the V was pronounced w, while the “chester” ending was simply tacked on by the Anglo-Saxons to indicate a Roman site. And a few have changed very little. The evolution of Londinium to Lundenwic (“wic” meaning a port) to London is hardly radical, for instance.

Most of the ancient cities I’ve mentioned have been known by the same or similar names as long as records go back — though, of course, we’ve no idea what the Mesolithic settlers called Jericho. In general, the more prestigious the city, the more consistent its name seems to remain.

The biggest exception in that list* is Istanbul, which has previously been Byzantium (or more correctly Byzantion) and Constantinople (more correctly Constantinopolis) — and this illustrates a significant reason why a city’s name might change.

Each of these changes of name was a deliberate political act by a powerful man. Roman emperor Constantine the Great chose the old Greek city of Byzantium as his new capital in 330 and rebranded it with his name (literally “Constantine’s City”), while Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed its obviously Greek name in 1930. Ironically, the new name was also Greek in origin — eis ten poliv, meaning “to the city” had evolved into Istanbul.

In general, ancient cities in fantasy worlds tend to keep the same names throughout their history. This isn’t necessarily as unrealistic as it might seem — but it might be a good idea to throw in a few name changes, to keep it real.

Plus Ça Change

Civilisations tend not to stagnate (or, at least, they don’t last long if they do) and cities are the same. Perhaps the most ancient-feeling city I’ve ever visited is Venice, even though it’s younger than any of the cities on the list above. Wandering around, it felt as if age had soaked into the walls.

On the other hand, even Venice hasn’t actually stood still. Quite apart from innovations like the motorboats plying their trade (gondolas are strictly for the tourists), the more outlying parts of Venice — the Lido and the Mestre, for instance — are as contemporary as anywhere in the modern world.

Today, if you wander through cities like London, Paris or Rome, you’ll find ancient buildings — sometimes intact, sometimes in ruins — rubbing shoulders with modernist creations of glass and steel. In fact, you don’t even need to visit a great city for that. My home town’s centre contains buildings ranging from the 16th to the 21st centuries, and there are older buildings in nearby towns.

A living city is constantly changing, evolving, keeping the best and altering the rest, like a living thing. That’s likely to be true of the cities in a fantasy world, too — assuming, of course, that they’re human cities. A race to whom a millennium is merely the blink of an eye may well live in a dreaming city as old as time.

But not human cities. We don’t stay still — and nor do our creations.

* It might seem that Paris is also a major exception, as it was normally called Lutetia by the Romans. However, its full name was Lutetia Parisiorum, after the local Celtic tribe, the Parisii — not such a big change, after all.

The Quels — Expanding the World

Lately, prequels seem to be everywhere on TV. There’s nothing new about prequels, but in the past few months we’ve had (with varied results) prequels for Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and The Witcher.

“Quels” (sequels, prequels and paraquels) aren’t restricted to any one genre, but they seem particularly prevalent in SF and fantasy. And there are reasons why that’s so — whether or not it’s a good thing.

The History of the Quels

The word sequel has been around for centuries, derived from the Latin for “follow”, but it originally meant simply “that which follows” (“The journey began well, but the sequel turned out to be disastrous.”). Its use in the modern sense seems to have arisen with the European novel tradition, and examples are far too numerous to need mentioning.

Prequel is a modern word, but there are a few earlier examples. For instance, Shakespeare technically created a prequel series by writing Henry VI parts 1, 2 and 3 and Richard III some years before the historically earlier plays Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. A prequel is specifically a story created later that takes place before the original. So, for example, The Hobbit isn’t a prequel to Lord of the Rings, as it was published earlier, whereas Star Wars episodes 1-3 are certainly prequels to the cooler episodes.

Paraquel 1 refers to a connected story that takes place at the same time as the original. This can work in various ways:

  • The same story from a different POV, such as Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which tells the story of Hamlet from the POV of two minor characters in the original play.
  • A connected story that takes place at the same time as another. For example, Gunther Grass’s Danzig novels, starting with The Tin Drum, are all set over much the same time-span, and main characters from one book sometimes make cameo appearances in others.
  • A story set during a lacuna in the original work (sometimes also called an intraquel). For instance, in the Chronicles of Narnia, the whole of The Horse and His Boy technically takes place during the final chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

What’s the Attraction of Quels?

So why do writers feel compelled to write other works derived from an existing one? Either their own or someone else’s — one of the earliest deliberate prequels I’m aware of 2 was Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre.

I’m not talking about a straightforward series that was always going to be a series — even if it grows bigger in the process (coughMartincough). I mean why, having told the original tale, would an author want to write more? Well, apart from the most cynical answer.

I think the most common answer is simply the desire, both by the author and the readers/viewers, to know more. This may simply be wanting to know what happens to the main characters after “The End”, but it may also be a fascination with exploring what made the characters what they are. This seems quite common with fictional detectives, with everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Endeavour Morse being portrayed at a younger age.

In fantasy, though, it’s often that the world created seems too big to be contained by a single novel — or even a single series. The author (or other authors) want to explore what’s going on in different periods, or different parts of the world. Andre Norton, for instance, began her Witch World series in a small group of neighbouring countries, but later not only explored more of that continent, but also wrote remotely connected stories set on another continent.

Very often, though, the fascination seems to be with exploring events that were originally merely mentioned as distant history. The three prequels mentioned at the start of this blog are all of this type 3 — the stories of the Targaryen dynasty, of the forging of the Rings of Power, and of the Conjunction and the creation of the first Witcher. With varying levels of success, it has to be said.

I’ve experienced both the lure and the opportunities this process creates. Many years ago, an off-the-cuff comment in a novel I was writing resulted in my world growing suddenly by three thousand years and three continents, and led directly to my novel At An Uncertain Hour. In this case, however, the “prequel” is already published, while the original still isn’t quite ready.

So are these kind of quels a good or bad thing? When they work, they can offer an intoxicating exploration of a boundless landscape. When they don’t, they can be an embarrassment that sours the original work.

My view — by all means create your prequels, sequels and paraquels — if you have a good reason to do so and really believe you can pull it off. Because in the end, just like any book, film or TV show, quels will stand or fall on their own merits, not because of the work they’re derived from.

1 I thought I’d coined the word paraquel, but when researching this blog I found it cited on Wikipedia. Then again, I’ve used the word online in various contexts over recent years, so maybe that’s where Wikipedia picked it up from. Or maybe great minds really do think alike.

2 It’s entirely possible there were earlier examples — even much earlier. I’d be interested in knowing what they were, but please don’t shoot me down for missing them. I haven’t even come close to reading every book.

3 As opposed to the Star Wars prequels, which appear to have been part of Lucas’s plans from the start, at least in general outline.

End of a Draft — and About Time Too

A few days ago, I wrote the final words in the first draft of the novel I’ve been writing for — well, a long time. Far too long. But finishing a draft is still special, even when it should have happened years ago, so it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate.

This is a sequel to At An Uncertain Hour, with the working (very working) title of The Empire of Nandesh. Looking back at my files, I find I started it just slightly over nine years ago. At that stage, I had plenty of time to write, but shortly after I began my self-employment as a copywriter.

And that’s the problem, of course. I’m writing all day, and it takes a lot to encourage me to write more when I knock off in the evening. Lately, I’ve been doing pretty well if I’ve managed a thousand words a week. Sometimes the count has been zero.

Nevertheless, I’ve kept going with this novel, inching towards the end, and I’m finally there. And, of course, like most first drafts, there are masses of things wrong with it. At some point, I’m going to have to pull the whole thing to pieces and rewrite it.

But not yet.

What’s It About?

When I began and started posting the chapters, as I wrote them, on Fantasy-writers.org, I came up with a blurb — the kind of thing that might go on the back cover. In fact, although it needs a bit of tweaking, it’s not impossible that’s precisely what it may eventually be used for:

  • Tollanis (aka the Traveller) feels uncharacteristically dubious about helping to fight against the evil sorcerer-king Nandesh, and he’s not too sure about his ally Kargor, either.
  • Nandesh, in among his plans to conquer the world, seems to have a personal grudge against Tollanis, although the two men have never met.
  • Fandis, Nandesh’s lover and bitterest enemy, dreams of the day she can kill him, even while she spurs his ambition higher.
  • And, perhaps scariest of all, Tollanis’s ward Lanza is a seriously frustrated teenager.

A few things need changing, particularly in the description of Fandis, but that essentially describes the starting positions. Nandesh is really the consequence of a decision the Traveller made at the end of At An Uncertain Hour, while Lanza and Fandis are almost complete mirror-images in their relationships to Tollanis and Nandesh, respectively. Other major characters include Kargor (as mentioned), who’ll become even more important in subsequent novels, and the young king Dranaliel, who’s learning to become a king and an adult at the same time.

The current frontrunner for the actual title is Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth. This is a quote from King Lear — in full, “How sharper than a serpent’s tongue it is to have a thankless child.” And essentially the novel is all about dysfunctional parent-child relationships. Some literally parent-child, some surrogate, some extremely twistedly so, and the dysfunction ranges from lies and secrets to abuse and murder.

But I don’t want to give too much away.

What Next?

As I’ve mentioned, this novel will require major surgery in the second draft. The individual story arcs need considerably more work done on them. The four POV characters (all 1st person) aren’t as well developed as they might be. Nandesh, for example, isn’t yet very convincing as a psychopath, and one (very pleasant) preparation I’ll be doing for the revision will be to reread Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory to get the true psychopath feeling.

There are other things. Like At An Uncertain Hour, this novel involves extensive multiple timelines, and the tie-ups between periods don’t quite work, while I’ve skated too much over some aspects of the “present”. And, like all my first drafts, it’s far too short on sensory description.

But I won’t be starting with that right away. I have a number of shorter pieces clamouring to be written, ranging from short stories to novellas, and I’ll be devoting myself to those for a while.

Then I’ll need to decide whether to come straight back to this novel or push ahead with some stage of another. The current position is that this book’s sequel The Tryst Flame (yes, I wrote them out of order) is finished and done, apart perhaps from a couple of tweaks. The next two sequels, Children of Ice and Dreams of Fire and Snow, exist in rough form but, like this one, need a lot of work, while there are three more novels required to complete the octology — and the next one introduces a major new figure.

So I have plenty to occupy myself over the coming years. I just hope I can find ways to speed up a bit, otherwise I’ll need to live to well over a hundred to get everything finished.

The End of the Matter — Iain (M) Banks

I recently finished Matter by Iain M. Banks. Nothing unusual in that — I’d read plenty of his books, with or without the M. In fact, that’s the point. I’d read all the rest. Although nowhere near the last chronologically, this was the last one left I hadn’t read.

It Started With a Signature

I started reading Iain Banks in the mid-90s, after buying Whit at a signing I’d found myself in by pure chance. It was, unfortunately, the only time I met him, meaning I couldn’t ask him anything about his books, something I’d have loved to do later. I did make a joke about the book in its bag looking like a box of chocolates, and consequently got a book signed by Iain “Cadbury’s Selection” Banks.

After that, I read his works extensively — at first mainly the mainstream novels, and later the science fiction works as well. Or, to put it another way, the books by Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks. According to a TV interview I saw, the M stood for Menzies (pronounced Mingies, to rhyme with thingies) and he’d always used the initial. However, his publisher persuaded him to drop it, so that when they insisted he had to use a different name for his SF books, he sarcastically suggested Iain M. Banks. Which they accepted.

He had a big impact on me. When I was writing my novel At An Uncertain Hour, its non-linear structure, interweaving different time periods, was largely based on what I’d learnt from how Banks used the same technique, especially in The Crow Road.

Banks quickly became one of my two favourite living authors, alongside the equally awesome Mary Gentle. A status which, unfortunately, ended in 2013.

My Last Banks

At that point, I still had a couple more books to read, including Matter, which for some reason I had in a huge doorstop of a hardback, a fact that probably influenced why it was still unread. However, for reasons I didn’t initially understand, I continued not to read it. I suspect, though, it was subconsciously that I didn’t want to have no more Iain Banks books to look forward to.

That wasn’t a good enough reason, though, and I’ve now completed my collection. Like much of his science fiction, it involves a far-future civilisation called the Culture, an example of his tendency to take traditional dystopias and twist them so that they’re not scary. Whit, for example, involves a cult which, though rather silly, is actually quite benevolent.

The Culture is a society that’s run by machines — but it all works beautifully. A post-scarcity anarchy, it offers both its organic and technological citizens the freedom to follow their desires, without the need to work for a living. What many of the more powerful AIs choose to do is keep all the systems running. It’s as simple as that.

In fact, many of the most interesting characters are AIs, especially the ships. Culture ships have strong and often quirky personalities, which is reflected in the ridiculous names they give themselves. Among the ships that feature in Matter are “Now We Try it My Way” and “You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave”.

As in many of the Culture books, most of the action takes place away from the Culture — it’s a utopia, so not much fun as far as exciting stories go. In this case, the action centres on a Shellworld (a hollow, artificial planet consisting of concentric levels of habitats, down to the core). Focused mainly on levels 8 and 9, which is inhabited by a society with a roughly late-Victorian level of technology, the action starts with the assassination of the king.

The story thereafter follows his three children — Ferbin, the son who witnessed the assassination and has fled seeking help; Oramen, the younger son made puppet king by the assassin; and the daughter Djan Seriy, who’s grown up in the Culture and returns with all its high-tech to sort things out.

These are roughly human, but we’re also presented with a splendid array of decidedly non-human intelligent species, including one best described as like stinking, mouldy carpets. But the intrigues down in the Shellworld aren’t quite as minor as they might seem, and the book ends with a climax that shakes the galaxy.

The single most powerful impression I’m always left with from most Iain Banks books, and especially the Culture novels, is simply how much fun he seems to have had writing them. Matter is no exception. Every page explodes with ideas that range from unbelievably cool to delightfully absurd, and it’s a joy to read, from the light-hearted moments to the shock of violence and mayhem as the story proceeds.

So now I’ve no more Iain Banks books to read for the first time — but, of course, many are long overdue for a reread. I’m sure I’ll find plenty more in them next time around.

Gavrilo Princip and Jenkins’ Ear — How Wars Really Begin

A large proportion of fantasy novels involve warfare, and the reasons for those wars starting depend largely on the genre — but they’re usually quite straightforward.

If it’s traditional high fantasy, there’s a war because some Evil Overlord wants to conquer and oppress the world, usually for no very clear reason, and the opposing side is steadfastly determined to resist. If it’s grimdark, on the other hand, the purpose of war is simply because everyone wants power, or even just an excuse to kill and loot.

Now, none of those reasons are totally implausible. Wars are sometimes fought defensively against pure aggression, while power and bloodlust are certainly often motives. But, in reality, the causes of wars are much more complex and multi-layered — and the reasons why people think they’re going to war aren’t always the actual reasons.

Helen of Troy and the Hellespont

One of the first known fictional wars in human literature was described by Homer, nearly three thousand years ago, as having been the Greeks and the Trojans. Now, stories of the Trojan War may well have had their source in a real war in the late Bronze Age, but what Homer described was essentially fictional. And it was started by the abduction of a woman.

Three thousand years of literary critics and historians have found this implausible — no-one would have gone to war over a woman. The real cause (assuming there actually was a war at all) must, they say, have been a dispute over control of the trade routes through the Hellespont (now called the Dardanelles) which gave access to the lucrative markets of the Black Sea. Troy was situated on the Hellespont, thus controlling access, and the Greeks wanted to take it from them.

Now, the Hellespont theory is almost certainly true (assuming there was a war), but that doesn’t actually rule out the abduction of Helen as a cause. Trade is all very well, but it’s not going to inspire your soldiers to go and fight a war far from home for ten years.

On the other hand: the vicious barbarians carried off my wife — not just “a women”, after all, but the Queen of Sparta. If they’re willing to sink that low, will your wife be next? Or your daughter? Who’s going to come and make sure they never get the chance?

Now, that’s what inspires people to make sacrifices and go to war.

Crusading and Ears

The same pattern occurs time and again through history. The Crusades, for instance, were again as much about securing trade routes as about religious zeal, but it was the mobilisation of Christendom by a succession of Popes that sent generations of kings, barons, knights and commoners to the Holy Land. Well, that and the promise of total pardon by God for whatever you did on crusade, however heinous — which explains why the crusaders behaved so appallingly.

Perhaps the most bizarrely named war in history was fought between Britain and Spain from 1739 to 1748. Known in Britain as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, it was fought primarily over competing trade interests in the Caribbean, as well as similar competition in colonising North America.

As far as the 18th century “man in the street” was concerned, however, it was actually fought because, several years earlier, the Spanish had cut off the ear of a captured British sea-captain called Robert Jenkins. The government, and more especially the South Sea Company, deliberately played up the incident to fan resentment against the Spanish — and got the war they wanted.

Gavrilo Princip and Railway Timetables

The claim that a war couldn’t have been caused by the abduction of one woman seems unconvincing in an age when a world war was caused by the assassination of one man. On 28th June 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot dead Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the cause of independence and unity for the Southern Slavs under the leadership of Serbia.

Although there was no evidence that Serbia had been behind the assassination, Austria held them responsible and declared war. Russia then declared war in support of Serbia and Germany in support of Austria — making the bizarre opening move of invading Belgium, which resulted in the UK declaring war in support of Belgium.

The reality was that the Great Powers of Europe had been preparing for war for many years. The essential issues were, as usual, competition for resources and for influence on the world stage. Attempts to reach agreement, such as the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 which carved up Africa (without actually consulting any Africans, naturally), had run out, and everyone was ready for war.

So why invade Belgium? Well, as the historian AJP Taylor has pointed out, the state-of-the-art way of mobilising troops at the time was by rail, and that meant mobilisation could only take place via pre-planned infrastructure. The German plan for war, which they’d presumed would be against France, involved coming through Belgium, so that was their move, dragging Britain, France and ultimately the US into what had been a central European war.

Wars Start in Complex Ways

Hopefully, the few examples I’ve given will illustrate the complexity that can exist in the causes of wars. The underlying reasons are usually economic, although issues like religion, national pride and the desire for Lebensraum may play a part. But there’s also bound to be a cause for public consumption — something enough to fire up ordinary people and make them willing to go off and fight a war they probably won’t personally benefit from.

So, if you’re creating a war in a fantasy novel, should you imitate history? Well, I certainly wouldn’t recommend creating anything as bizarre and complex as the First World War — no-one would believe it was plausible. And you certainly might not want to subject your readers to a long treatise on local economics.

There’s nothing wrong with a good, old-fashioned war between good and evil in a fantasy novel. I enjoy reading them — and I’ve even written a few myself.

On the other hand, your war might feel a little more realistic if you drop a few hints about what else might lie behind it. After all, even Dark Lords intent on extinguishing all light from the world must need food and resources to rule their empires.

The Dark Is Rising — a Retrospective Review

I recently revisited a children’s fantasy series I first read in the 1970s — Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence. I loved it in the 70s, but what would it be like now?

Fortunately, aside from a few elements that felt a little old fashioned, it held up well. It’s a rather odd series, though. Although such terms weren’t in use back then (at least, not in the UK), it seems to vary between what would now be regarded as middle grade and young adult, and from traditional adventure to surrealism, with some books sharing very few characters in common.

And it all works beautifully.

Susan Cooper was born in 1935 and is, at time of writing, still alive. After attending Oxford University, where she became the first woman to edit the university magazine Cherwell, she worked as a journalist (Ian Fleming was her boss at one stage) before moving to the US in 1963 to marry an American academic. Cooper’s literary output is extremely varied, spanning adult and children’s fiction, children’s picture books, biography, drama and screenplays. She’s been given or nominated for many awards, including a nomination for the high-status international Hans Christian Andersson Award.

The first book in the series, Over Sea, Under Stone, was published in 1965. Written initially for a contest in honour of E. Nesbit (though never entered for it), it’s a fairly conventional children’s adventure with a few magical elements, Three children, siblings Simon, Jane and Barney, are on holiday in Cornwall with their “Great Uncle” Merry (the relationship is entirely honorary). Just as in innumerable Enid Blyton tales, they become involved in a race with the “bad guys” to find a very special treasure.

The difference here is that the treasure is the Holy Grail, a few people on both sides have magical powers, and the context is an ongoing war between the Light and the Dark.

The ending of Over Sea, Under Stone implied a sequel at least, but it wasn’t until 1973 that the second book was published, and may not have been what Cooper originally had in mind. The defining book from which the series takes its name, The Dark Is Rising has a different setting and an almost entirely different set of characters. Not to mention an extremely different tone.

This tells of Will Stanton, a member of a very large family (it’s revealed that he’s the seventh son of a seventh son) who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he’s actually the last-born of the Old Ones, ancient magical guardians of the Light, who must be ready when the Dark comes rising. Where Simon, Jane and Barney are barely aware of the magic around them, Will dives deep into its heart. While learning his role as an Old One, he must search for six objects of power that can drive back the Dark. And he finds that the moral choices aren’t always easy, with the Light sometimes acting questionably towards individuals in order to defend the world.

The first two books in the series have only one real link: Merry, who appears in the second book as Merriman and is gradually revealed through the series to be Merlin. The third book, however, brings all the characters together.

In Greenwitch, the Grail has been stolen, so Merriman takes Simon, Jane and Barney back to Cornwall to search for it. He also brings Will with him, who as far as they know is just some random kid they have to keep their secret from.

Much of the siblings’ quest has a similar tone to the first book, while Merriman and Will are searching the magical world, including a hazardous trip to the deep ocean. However, the heart of the story is the relationship Jane develops with the Greenwitch, an ancient ritual idol that’s actually conscious. In the end, it’s Jane’s kindness to the Greenwitch that saves the day.

The fourth book, The Grey King, changes direction again. Sent to the west coast of Wales to recuperate from a serious illness (engineered by the Old Ones, his supposed allies), Will meets a strange, magical boy called Bran, who proves to have a very unusual origin — and to be crucial in defeating the Dark. The events that play out in the Dyfi Valley have almost the air of a Greek tragedy. As Will, Bran and Bran’s dog Cafall (with eyes that can see the wind) search for the golden harp that will wake the six sleepers, powerful warriors of the Light, the passions and jealousies that go back to Bran’s origins play out to their conclusion.

The final book, Silver on the Tree, is also partly set in the same location, but this one is distinctly weirder. Everyone is together for the final confrontation with the Dark, with Simon, Jane and Barney being drawn more thoroughly into the magical world.

The strangest part of the book comes where Will and Bran journey into the Lost Land, a country that was long ago overwhelmed by the sea, to regain the crystal sword of Light, with which Bran can defeat the Dark. The Lost Land proves to be a strange place, often more surreal than magical, and this unearthly spirit carries on into the climactic section.

So what makes The Dark Is Rising series special? Well, the depth of blending of Arthurian legend, Celtic mythology and epic fantasy was less common at the time than it is now, and Susan Cooper handles it beautifully. The magic is vividly lived in as we learn it along with Will. The characters are good, too — even Simon, Jane and Barney, who could have been somewhat clichéd, come over convincingly. And the children are faced with complex moral issues which, again, were less common then than now.

Most of all, though, I think it’s Cooper’s powers of description and sense of place that really makes this series special. Of the three main locations, two (the Thames Valley in Buckinghamshire and the Dyfi Valley in Wales) were places she’d lived in, and they’re vividly present in the writing.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was writing about her homeland from abroad. Above and beneath the fantasy, these books are a love song to the landscapes she’d grown up with. These are intensely visual books.

Yes, the series is a little old fashioned. In general, the children represent the comfortable middle-class privilege usual in older children’s fiction, although Cooper does occasionally try to move beyond that. The narrative also has a bit more head-hopping than would be normal today.

The climax of the series has been criticised, too, with the final confrontation strangely static, and its aftermath perhaps a bit of a cop-out — all neatly put away, instead of any anticipation of the children growing and learning from what they’ve been through.

Even so, the five books of The Dark Is Rising have been a joy to revisit, and would be well worth new readers trying out. Whether you’re a child, or an adult who understands that great books have no upper age limit.

What Can I Call This World?

Like many fantasy writers, I have a world I come back to over and over again. It has plenty of space for stories, after all, what with seven continents and thousands of years of history. And it’s name is… the Traveller’s World.

Not very inspiring, really. It just refers to the fact that the most recurring character I write about in it is called the Traveller. No fancy, evocative name, as so many fantasy worlds have.

Or do they?

There’s actually absolutely no reason why most fantasy worlds should have a name — other than the convenience of referring to them. And “the Traveller’s World” fits that requirement.

Who Calls It That?

From time to time, on fantasy writing forums, someone will introduce an idea with “My world is called X or Y.” And my first reaction is always “Who calls it that?”

That’s not a frivolous question.. Think about our own world. We call it Earth — or do we? If we were speaking French, we’d called it Terre, an entirely different name. Multiply that by the dozens of major languages spoken on Earth (or Terre), let alone the thousands of languages overall, and the difficulty of pinning down a single name becomes apparent.

One solution, especially used in science fiction, has been to use the Latin Terra, on the assumption that Latin is the “universal language”. That’s a very Eurocentric view, though. Latin isn’t the universal language in Asia or Africa, or among the indigenous peoples of Australia or the Americas. Nor even in eastern Europe.

No, there’s no common name for our planet, and the same would be true of any world that’s anything like it. A world that consists of more than a handful of countries, where everyone inexplicably speaks the same language.

But Don’t All Worlds Have a Name?

People who insist that fantasy worlds should have a name usually start with the big ones — Middle Earth, Narnia, Westeros. None of which is actually the name of a world. Narnia and Westeros are both kingdoms, while Middle Earth is a continent.

Some worlds do have a name. For example, Fritz Leiber used the name Nehwon (“nowhen” backwards) for the world of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Leiber, though, was writing in omniscient, and Nehwon is what he tells us the world is called. As far as I remember (though I may be wrong) none of his characters actually refer to their world by that name.

There are other exceptions, but not many. Many of the “world names” are, like the first three I mentioned, merely a convenient way of referring to the worlds the stories take place in.

Why Should a World Have a Name?

In her first book, the SF novel Rocannon’s World, the wonderful Ursula Le Guin makes a reference to “planets without names, called by their people simply The World…”

This applies to worlds as much as to planets, if not more so. The point is that you only give a place a name if you need to contrast it with other places. Long ago, a primitive tribe living in the centre of Asia wouldn’t have needed to know their territory was part of a continent, and so wouldn’t have had a name for that continent.

The same is true of a planet whose people can’t conceive of anywhere else. The name we use for ours originally just mean the ground, as opposed to the sky — it’s only since we’ve began to think of ourselves as a planet among others that we’ve started using the name in a planetary sense.

As for worlds that are separated from us by more than space, why would they need a name? A world’s name is only likely to evolve if its inhabitants become aware of others, whether that’s the mortal and faery worlds or locations elsewhere in the multiverse. Even if you never made the journey between the worlds, knowing would be enough to change your view — just like that primitive tribe when they became aware of peoples further away than their own continent.

Tolkien’s naming system illustrates this perfectly. The events of most of his stories take place on the continent of Middle Earth, whose inhabitants know (if only hazily) that there are others. However, he does have a more general name — Arda, which refers to the Earth as a whole. But, crucially, this is only ever used from the perspective of the Valar, who know the wider universe. None of Arda’s inhabitants, even the Elves, have any use for the name.

So what’s the point of giving a name to a fantasy world? Usually, just one: marketing. People need to be able to refer to the location, but this doesn’t need to be a practical name. Andre Norton, for instance, set many novels in the Witch World, but that was never meant to be anything more than a phrase to stick on the books.

Like… the Traveller’s World, for instance.

Which World Is Your Story Set In? — reposted

This article was originally posted on my old blog in 2015. It felt it was well worth reposting, and I hope you’ll agree.

People who don’t like fantasy often base their objections on the claim that they prefer to read books or watch films set in the real world. For these people, the dichotomy is obvious. Fantasy is set in an invented secondary world, which obviously makes it trivial and irrelevant, whereas good fiction (that is, whatever they happen to like) is set in the real world, which automatically makes it superior and relevant.

Leaving aside the fact that many of the books, films and TV shows ostensibly set in the “real world” are neither superior nor particularly relevant (the James Bond stories are nominally real-world stories, for heaven’s sake), this attitude shows a fundamental lack of understanding about the nature of fiction — not to mention the nature of reality.

My contention is that every story ever written is actually set in an invented secondary world, and fantasy (as well as some SF) is the label given to those that are upfront about it. It doesn’t matter how uncompromisingly gritty a slice of social realism a story might be, it’s set in a fictional reality, not an objective reality.

Consider two authors both writing stories about a maverick cop who rides roughshod over the rules and procedures. In one, he might be the hero who nails the bad guys that would get away if he played by the book. In the other, he might end up destroying innocent lives the rules were there to protect.

This isn’t just a matter of attitude. Depending on their views or agendas (often, but not always, the same thing), each author will create realities in which their take on the story is objectively true. The first will quite genuinely be a world in which bleeding-heart liberals are letting the crooks get away to prey on their victims. The second will just as genuinely be in a world where the rule of law is the only thing separating the good guys from the bad.

Of course, a reader who entirely agrees with one or the other point of view will interpret that fictional reality as objectively true, but another will see the opposite as being true. The point is that the difference isn’t between the attitudes of the characters within the story, but lies in the author’s primary worldbuilding. This is analogous to the way Tolkien writes about a world in which morality has the force of a law of nature and can affect the outcome of events just as surely gravity or the weather. The differences can be a lot more subtle, though.

Soap operas* are generally presented as ultra-realistic slice-of-life drama, but actually they tend to take place in an odd half-reality. Besides obvious anomalies like location (EastEnders, for instance, is set in a rearranged version of London) there are usually odd social habits that are unlike anything you’d actually find, simply to facilitate the dramatic necessities. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this, but it’s not the real world.

Most of all, perhaps, the fictional reality of a story will be determined by selecting what to put in and what to leave out. The complete reality of our society contains everything from cosy village life to inner-city gang warfare, but the reality in which a story takes place rarely includes all this. The author will select what’s relevant to go into the story, and the rest won’t exist.

This kind of selection, like the two ways our maverick cop can go, largely reflects the author’s views and/or agenda. The fictional reality of a story isn’t the world as it objectively is, but the world as the author wants it to be — not necessarily wants as a good thing, but wants in order to make a point. It’s set in a custom-made world, just as a fantasy story is, but masquerading as the real world.

Does any of this matter? I think it does. Fantasy is often accused of portraying unreality, but it doesn’t pretend otherwise, concentrating instead on using that unreality to shine a light on the world around us.

The more the fictional reality looks like our own world, though, the harder it is to make that distinction. I recall an argument I had once with a work colleague — I can’t remember the exact topic, but I think it may have been about the precise effects of particular illegal drugs. What I do remember, though, is that the killer argument presented by this otherwise intelligent person was “Of course it’s like that. Didn’t you see EastEnders last week?” To which I gently explained that it had been that way in EastEnders because that was how some author had written it, not because it was necessarily true.

Fictional reality isn’t restricted to fiction. Each of us sees the world in a slightly different way from anyone else, selecting what we admit and what we don’t, explaining events according to our own assumptions and interpretations of reality. Most of the conflicts in the world are due to the fact that we do this unconsciously and assume our own fictional reality, whether individual or broadly shared, is objectively true.

If we could learn to understand how fiction works, critique it not in absolute terms but in terms of its unique fictional reality — its own secondary world — maybe we’d be better at understanding our own and others’ unique inner worlds.

And what place better to learn how to do that than fantasy?

* The term soap opera is used with different meanings in different parts of the world. I’m using it in the usual UK sense of a continuous series (ie no breaks or seasons) about some kind of community that takes place in real time, so that, for instance, the characters are preparing for Christmas or anticipating the Cup Final at the same time the viewers are.