You never stop worrying about your kids, even when they’re adults…
A world-hopping, bad-ass, spell-slinging mother sets out to rescue her kidnapped adult son from a dragon lord in Kate Elliott’s action-packed fantasy The Keeper’s Six—forthcoming from Tordotcom Publishing on January 17, 2023. Read an excerpt below!
Fellian is a Lamplighter, able to provide illumination through magic…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Kate Elliott’s newest fantasy novella Servant Mage, now available from Tordotcom Publishing!
“One spark. Two sparks. Three. This is what it takes to ignite a revolution.”
A reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale, “The Tinder Box” tells the story of a witch at the heart of an incipient rebellion—and all of those to come.
Transforming history into a fictional universe means the writer begins with a template of known places, people, and events. In previous essays, I’ve some of the questions I’ve been asked about how I adapted the story of Alexander the Great into a gender-spun space opera: Which aspects of the setting are meant to represent real places and historical situations from the past (part 1)? How many of the characters are analogs for the historical actors (part 2)?
What events from Alexander’s history did I keep? And why-oh-why are modern (as well as historical) easter eggs worked into the text, some of which may seem wildly out of context or meme-ishly frivolous?
Transforming history into a fictional universe means the writer begins with a template of known places, people, and events. The three part essay “Excavating Unconquerable Sun” answers some of the questions I’ve been asked about how I adapted the story of Alexander the Great into a gender-spun space opera.
Last time I discussed the places and events that represent real places and events from the past. Today I’ll be getting into the characters and their historical analogs.
The three-part essay “Excavating Unconquerable Sun” answers some of the questions I’ve been asked about how I adapted the story of Alexander the Great into a gender-spun space opera.
Which of the places and events represent real places and events from the past? How many of the characters are analogs for the historical actors? Why are modern (as well as historical) easter eggs worked into the text, some of which may seem wildly out of context or meme-ishly frivolous?
Transforming history into a fictional universe means the writer builds using a template of known events, places, and people. To begin with, when adapting real history into a fictional universe it is crucial to make sure any reader can enjoy the story without prior knowledge of the history. At the same time, a writer can weave aspects of the specific history into the story so readers who do know the history can catch references, allusions, asides, and jokes that play into or against what we know of the historical events and people.
Jess Brightwell and his friends and colleagues have rebelled against the Great Library, which controls access to and dissemination of all written knowledge in the world. Once a beacon of light, the Library has become a despotic and oppressive force controlled by despotic and cruel men who mean to hold onto their power by any means necessary.
At the end of book 3, Ash and Quill, Jess, his identical twin brother Brendan, Obscurist Morgan, and royal Dario make a secret decision to pretend to betray the other members of their group in a desperate gamble to infiltrate the Library’s home base. Jess and Brendan switch places (as identical twins can theoretically do).
Roxanne Longstreet Conrad, also known as Rachel Caine, passed away on November 1st, 2020 after a long fight with a rare and aggressive cancer. We started this read-a-long to share Rachel’s words with more people. The author of 57 novels, she reached millions. The Great Library is a small but mighty part of her oeuvre. Thank you for reading and remembering Rachel with us. Here is a statement from her family and loved ones.
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The principle of Chekhov’s Gun has become a truism in writing. In a letter to a friend, the Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”
The prologue of book one, Ink and Bone, introduces our protagonist Jess Brightwell, son of a book smuggling family, his father, and his twin brother. Why does Jess have an identical twin brother? The brother is one of several Chekhov’s guns placed in the series. At the end of book three, Caine makes this one go off to great effect.
We return for book two of Rachel Caine’s five volume Great Library series. In book one Caine introduces her alternate history set up: The Great Library of Alexandria, which in our historical timeline was destroyed in late antiquity, not only survived into the modern era but thrived and eventually took control of all permitted transmission of knowledge in the world.
This speculative idea is the foundation of Caine’s story. She uses it as a springboard to do what science fiction does best: Ask questions about the present day. Who controls ideas? Is knowledge more valuable than people? Is progress inevitable? Will authoritarians prevent technological and social advances in the name of stability, if by stability they mean their own grip on authority? Does power corrupt? Is the sky blue? This list barely scratches the surface of the questions Caine asks in the series, and we hope readers will chime in with their own observations.
Fair warning: In the post itself there will be mild spoilers, but we will do our best to minimize them for those of you who may not yet have read the books because we really want to entice you into reading the series. However, in the comments section feel free to discuss the book with spoilers. Please hold spoiler comments about later volumes to when those posts are made in subsequent weeks. Thank you!
Zoraida Córdova and Kate Elliott would like to invite readers to join them here at Tor.com for a six part read-along (not counting this post) of Rachel Caine’s five-volume Great Library series.
Libraries as archives of records and writing appear early in history in places like Sumer, Egypt, and Zhou Dynasty China. One of the most famous of these ancient libraries is the Great Library of Alexandria, founded and built by Ptolemy I and his son Ptolemy II, and expanded into a daughter institution the Serapeum by Ptolemy III. For a while the Great Library was probably the largest library in the Mediterranean and Western Asian world (the Ptolemies surely intended it to be so), but under later Roman management the institution fell into neglect and eventually was destroyed and most or all of its scrolls burned. This decline and destruction happened in stages rather than in a single riotous act but the end result for us in the modern era remains the same: A great repository of knowledge was lost.
As her jumping off point, Caine uses the existence of the Great Library in her foundational alternate-history premise: Instead of being lost, the Great Library not only survived but thrived and eventually took control of all permitted transmission of knowledge in the world. The opening volume of the series, Ink and Bone, begins with a prologue set in 2025, and the main story’s “present day” takes up the narrative six years later.
We’re pleased to share Kate Elliott’s introduction to Liz Bourke’s essay collection, Sleeping With Monsters—some of which are taken from her column here at Tor.com. Bourke’s subjects range from the nature of epic fantasy—is it a naturally conservative sort of literature?— to Mass Effect’s decision to allow players to play as a female hero, and from discussions of little-known writers to some of the most popular works in the field.
Bourke herself writes that the collection’s purpose is ”to be a little loud and angry. To celebrate the work of women in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) field. To offer a snapshot, a limited glimpse, of what I think is best, most fun, most interesting.” A provocative, immensely readable collection of essays about the science fiction and fantasy field, from the perspective of a feminist and a historian, Sleeping With Monsters is an entertaining addition to any reader’s shelves, available July 1st from Aqueduct Press.
“Finding the courage to write fiction sometimes means finding the courage to fully admit the staggering range of your doubts and fears, and to see them for what they are: an expression of a part of yourself so entangled with your ambition and creativity and drive that the two can never fully become extricated.”
“I like to think of any given person not as a single discrete and thus finite entity but as a multiplicity of ever-shifting selves. Because we can continually grow and change, we are never static, and thus we are in constant communication with our past selves, our current self and its versions adapted to the various niches and angles of our lives, and our anticipated future iterations who are themselves capable of branching into infinity.
There is a lot of cross-talk in our heads. Wherever ideas come from (and I really don’t know), they arise out of and in conversation with the deepest levels of this chatter. These wellsprings contain some of the purest and clearest expressions of our inner selves, the waters we want to tap for our most expansive creativity.But that chatter can create a lot of fences, too, ones we keep slamming into when we thought we were promised open ground running all the way to the horizon.”
I wrote the above lines in a 2014 NaNoWriMo-related blog post titled “Finding the Courage to Write Fiction.” On this first day of NaNoWriMo 2016, I want to return to them.
The cold equations of “realism,” some claim, suggest there is little scope for women taking an active and interesting role in epic stories set in fantasy worlds based in a pre-modern era. Women’s lives in the past were limited, constrained, and passive, they say. To include multiple female characters in dynamic roles is to be in thrall to quotas, anachronisms, Political Correctness, and the sad spectacle and dread hyenas of wish-fulfillment.
Is this true?
[How can women characters fit in epic fantasy settings based on a quasi-historical past?]
The main character who is orphaned or has no significant contact with family (left behind, estranged, dead spouse or child as motivator, etc) shows up frequently in SFF novels, and understandably so: Such characters don’t have to take anyone else’s life or needs into account as their adventures unfold. It’s easy to just pick up and go when you don’t have anyone relying on you, or when your decisions don’t immediately impact the lives of people you care about.
I’ve written this kind of character myself, but with Court of Fives I specifically wanted to write a story in which the main character’s family is intact and present, and therefore plays a part as one of the complicating factors in her journey. What happens when a choice we need to make will hurt someone we care about? How much will we risk for those we love?
