Give me your Fangorns and your Lothloriens, your Green Hearts and your Elvandars. Evoke your Haunted Forest Beyond the Wall complete with creepy weirwoods, your Steddings and your Avendesoras. Send me pleasant dreams about Totoro’s Japanese Camphor and the Forest Spirit’s kodama-filled canopy. Or, y’know, tree cities full of Wookiees instead of elves. I will take them all!
Forests in speculative fiction novels have a special place in my heart. Especially tree-cities.
Give me your Fangorns and your Lothloriens, your Green Hearts and your Elvandars. Evoke your Haunted Forest Beyond the Wall complete with creepy weirwoods, your Steddings and your Avendesoras. Send me pleasant dreams about Totoro’s Japanese Camphor and the Forest Spirit’s kodama-filled canopy. Or, y’know, tree cities full of Wookiees instead of elves. I will take them all!
Forests in speculative fiction novels have a special place in my heart. Especially tree-cities.
In real life, all forests seem magical to me. I can’t think of a culture that has not populated them with myths or religious figures. In Australia, First Nations people will tell you about ancient spirits dwelling in our forests whether tropical, temperate or dry. Proud Lebanese will tell you that their cedar forests were used for Solomon’s Temple and to build Noah’s ark. They may not know that those same cedar forests appeared in the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BC. Those heroes fought off monsters and cut down the trees. In contrast, the characters of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion travel on treeships beyond the stars…
You never forget them.
The dehydrated mini fox terrier. She was found three days after her owner, a farmer, was killed by a tipped quad bike. In the sharply sloping paddock, still hopefully licking his face.
Or the owner of a blue cattle dog with a terrible degloving injury. The dog jumped out of the back of a moving vehicle, losing all the skin from elbows to toes on both front feet. His recovery was an exercise in pain and bandaging, stitches and grafts, infections and injections. But the pain was equally borne by the man, a single, middle-aged carpenter, who took on ludicrous, long, body-breaking work hours and went deeply into debt to save his best friend.
As a vet, a writer and an avid SFF fan, I’ve marvelled at our canine connection, whether in fiction or real life. Long may it carry on, well into our actual and literary future!
Give me your Fangorns and your Lothloriens, your Green Hearts and your Elvandars. Evoke your Haunted Forest Beyond the Wall complete with creepy weirwoods, your Steddings and your Avendesoras. Send me pleasant dreams about Totoro’s Japanese Camphor and the Forest Spirit’s kodama-filled canopy. Or, y’know, tree cities full of Wookiees instead of elves. I will take them all!
Forests in speculative fiction novels have a special place in my heart. Especially tree-cities.
When I first began worldbuilding Crossroads of Canopy in winter of 2012, one motive was to hide from real-life deforestation statistics in a fantasy rainforest that was indestructible.
Imaginary trees, after all, can never be cut down.
Just as imaginary deities can never be slain.
You’ve read 1001 fantasy trilogies.
By the end of the Prologue, you’ve got a handle on the world, and by the time you hit that hook at the end of Chapter 1, you’ve got the protagonist pinned like a collected butterfly, too.
So far, in this book, your latest purchase, you’re travelling comfortably along the road of three-act structure, trotting happily at the heels of the young female star. Bramble is a member of an oppressed race. She has a special bond with horses. A warlord is after her, and the world has a fascinating take on fortune-telling, death and ghosts that would be worth exploring all on its own. How’s Bramble going to outwit the man? Your hands flutter over the crisp page; you love the sound of it turning.
At the highest level of a giant forest, thirteen kingdoms fit seamlessly together to form the great city of Canopy. Thirteen goddesses and gods rule this realm and are continuously reincarnated into human bodies. Canopy’s position in the sun, however, is not without its dark side. The nation’s opulence comes from the labor of slaves, and below its fruitful boughs are two other realms: Understorey and Floor, whose deprived citizens yearn for Canopy’s splendor.
Unar, a determined but destitute young woman, escapes her parents’ plot to sell her into slavery by being selected to serve in the Garden under the goddess Audblayin, ruler of growth and fertility. As a Gardener, she wishes to become Audblayin’s next Bodyguard while also growing sympathetic towards Canopy’s slaves. When Audblayin dies, Unar sees her opportunity for glory—at the risk of descending into the unknown dangers of Understorey to look for a newborn god. In its depths, she discovers new forms of magic, lost family connections, and murmurs of a revolution that could cost Unar her chance… or grant it by destroying the home she loves.
Thoraiya Dyer’s fantasy debut, Crossroads of Canopy, is available January 31st from Tor Books! Read an excerpt below, and check out the author’s thoughts on Marc Simonetti’s gorgeous cover, inviting you into the rainforest…
In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!
Most writers need day jobs.
If you have to have a day job, working as a veterinarian with Australian wildlife has to be one of the better ones out there! The opportunity to care for the koalas of the Tilligerry Peninsula, get bitten by butcher birds, buckle wandering albatrosses into the passenger seat, cure cancer in cockatoos and deal with dingoes was a large part of the appeal when I took my first full-time job in Port Stephens, New South Wales.
