Alison Sinclair

This is the first month’s anniversary of Darkborn’s publication, and last night I did my first Google search on the title and noted that a number of people have already reviewed it. I’d like to thank you all. Even if you didn’t care for it, I still very much appreciate the time and attention you put into reading it, thinking about it, and writing about it. And of course, if you did like it … well, I’m human (when not being something else for literary impersonation purposes), susceptible, and even more appreciative. 

I’m afraid I’ve been rather un-interactive; in fact, I more or less jumped in a hole and pulled it in after me. The first three novels I published were not only in the early days of the internet but stand-alones. By the time Legacies was published, I was deep in Blueheart. By the time Blueheart was published, I was trying to subdue Cavalcade. When I received reader and reviewer feedback, it was on a story that was completed in my mind and characters that had safely arrived, deservedly or undeservedly, at their destinies. Not on a story that was still working itself out and characters that were still developing. I had one critical comment pre-publication, quite offhand and definitely not intended to have the effect it did, that made me realize how easily my nerve could fail me in taking the trilogy where I want it to go. (I usually know where I want my characters to end up early in the writing, but the getting there is rather like the famous cartoon of the mathematical proof on the blackboard that has, in the middle, “And then a miracle occurs”.) So I’ve been – and continue to be – a bit skittish. Particularly since, instead of establishing the trajectory for Shadowborn over the summer, I’m in the midst of what has turned out to be a complex and substantial rewrite of Lightborn.

But it’s time to bunt myself out of the hole. Start Twittering again (I’m alixsinc – note the c – on Twitter and alixsin on identi.ca). Turn comments back on. Post photographs. Tidy up the blog. Finish posts and book-notes that are cluttering up my hard drive. Get over to tor.com and chip in my 2-bits-worth on some of their fascinating articles. Get the website upgrade done, which involves making a final decision on Dreamweaver (if it will condescend to accept my license key), Dokuwiki, or WordPress as the publication engine. So many more options since I first learned basic HTML. Can’t promise much over the next month, alas. Aside from Lightborn, I’ve summer courses in pharmacoepidemiology and Bayesian statistics. And I mean to get myself into a kayak at least once a week, before the water freezes once more. And since I’m in Montréal, I have a natural deadline to climb out of my hole: Worldcon 2009, Anticipation. Going to be fun!

The official publication date for Darkborn is tomorrow, and I have finally got the page on line at my website, although the complete redesign I had been working on is still … being worked on. My love of bold design is at war with a cautious austerity born of knowledge of my own artistic limitations. Plus, after some two years of writing from the perspective of characters who do not see as we do, and therefore obliged to forego my usual repertoire of colour-words and visual references, I find cycling through Xaos fractals and tiling background patterns quite hypnotic.

And the website redesign – with transfer to a more modern CMS (probably WordPress) – is competing with revisions to Lightborn, incubation of Shadowborn, revisions to a technical document, and readings in Bayesian analysis. Plus the random sleet of particles of inspiration that seem to be particularly intense when I have things I must get on with … and the fact that spring has finally arrived, and the waters have thawed.

The artist is Mélanie Delon.

Publication date May 5, 2009. Pre-orders from: Amazon | Borders | Barnes and Noble | Powells

When, back in the winter of 1999/2000, I received the letter telling me that my publisher was declining the option of my next novel, I set it down on the kitchen table and headed off for another 28 or so hours in ICU. The devouring intensity of my daily work immured me against any sense of disappointment or panic. I certainly didn’t imagine it would be nearly a decade before I would publish another solo novel. But to my delight, last month Anne Sowards at ROC took on my first fantasy novel, Darkborn, and its sequels, Lightborn and Shadowborn (see SF Canada news).

Getting a novel (a trilogy!) accepted is as much a kick as it was the first time around, when Deborah Beale bought Legacies and the as yet unconceived and unnamed Blueheart. When I think about it, even after 6.5 SF novels, I shouldn’t be surprised to be writing fantasy, given that I’ve been reading it as long as I’ve been reading SF. Possibly longer: though I’m not sure it counts being assigned to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Grade V, thereby successfully immunizing me against any interest in the series until, as a teenage skeptic, I greeted the ending with a resounding ‘ick!’. Around the time I was rejecting Narnia, I was loving Le Guin’s classic Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, full of lucid language and many-levelled subtleties, and Patricia McKillip’s wonderful The Riddle-Master of Hed. McKillip’s characters were the kind to walk around in one’s mind, not just Morgan and Raederle and Deth, but all the supporting characters: Mathin, Reed, the Morgol, Lyra,  … even those whose names I can’t remember. The year I read it, too, I was intensely homesick; Morgan’s loss of the land-rule of Hed, the sense of every root, twig and farmer, was more than a plot point to me.

Then there was Tolkein. My local bookshop in Edinburgh – I think it was Munroes of Morningside – had a copy of The Hobbit, puffin edition, with a sepia wash line drawing of a dragon on the cover. I am now enlightened enough to know the drawing was the author’s own, but then I mentally catalogued it as one of ‘their books’ – dull, worthy books that adults thought children ought to read. It was Ursula Le Guin’s essay "The Staring Eye" that hooked me on the Lord of the Rings in my last year in undergrad. I recall meeting Faramir over a venerable NMR machine with a taped sign "Wipe sample before inserting"; I was a less than diligent chemistry student that week. The ‘looks dull’ stigma also attached itself to Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword – it was a Newbury winner, after all – and delayed my finding my way into the fascinating land of Damar. One of the attractions that fantasy has always had for me is the importance of place; the setting, the land, as a character in the story.

Some years later, I couldn’t pass by a book that started, "The worst thing about knowing Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him every day at work." Thus I discovered Barbara Hambly. I found myself in Philadelphia and Darwath at the same time, and Gil’s deductive reasoning to the heart of the mystery around the Dark delights the scientist in me. But my favourite Hambly bit still has to be this piece of build-up-and-twist, from Dog Wizard:

A thing loomed suddenly from the darkness, a huge shape stooping under the seven-foot arch of the ceiling. Even the pallid light shed by the nodule that dangled, like a third eye, from the front of the platycephalic skull threw no more than a firefly sheen on the stretched, squamous green of its hide. Spider, dragon, and eldritch nightmare; chisel teeth glistened on the lipless muzzle; four long arms, four massive hands thick with claws between which writhed clusters of wriggling tentacles. Those hands, Antryg knew well, could crush a man’s skull. It raised one as it stepped forward.    

"Do you have any idea," Antryg gasped, leaning against the wall for support, "what the hell is going on?"   

"Not the slightest," the monster replied.   

There are more books, many more books; I could reminisce for at least another two or three hours, but shouldn’t, not at this hour. First thing tomorrow I have a date with some imaginary people expecting me to get them out of the various fixes I’ve landed them in.

One of the joys of a book by Lois McMaster Bujold, like a film by George Lucas, is that, once you’ve seen/read it through once or twice for the story, you can then start peering into the corners of the screen for all the lovely details. While The Sharing Knife, or at least the first 2 volumes, will probably not replace Barrayar and The Paladin of Souls in my list of favourites, the more I think about it, the more I find, and the more I find, the more I appreciate how the details of the worldbuilding undercut the apparently simple story and give the novels their elegaic feel.

To those who have not yet run across a review, Beguilement begins with an eighteen-year-old girl, Fawn Bluefield, in a very traditional fix, albeit for a reason entirely congruent with her character. She has fled her family farm and is heading, on foot, to a large town, to begin a new life. She is snatched from her road by the servants of a malice – a relict of a long-ago act of hubris by a powerful mage-king – and rescued by Dag Redwing Hickory, whose people, the Lakewalkers, have dedicated their lives to the slaying of malices as they appear. Between them, Fawn and Dag bring down the malice, but in such a way that they are bound together, and very shortly begin to fall in love. They’re an unlikely pairing, the naieve but clever young girl and the scarred, grim veteran three times her age. (And if you’re strongly averse to spoilers, do please go and read the book now, and then come back, because I can’t discuss details without getting into detail, though I try to tread lightly).

It’s-just-a-romance has been the tenor of some of the commentary on the novel, romance being generally disrespected. But this romance, and this is where the details come in, isn’t just-a-romance: it strikes at the very survival of the Lakewalkers, in particular. For the Lakewalker magic, the powers that allow them to slay malices, is inherited, and as Dag’s brother is not slow to point out, that means that at best Dag and Fawn’s children will inherit a half-portion of his considerable powers. They have strong prohibitions on intermarriage, and in reaction, Fawn’s people, called (disparagingly) farmers by the Lakewalkers, have developed their own prejudices. As Dag’s aunt Mari says, Lakewalkers have two duties: to kill malices, and to give birth to the next generation able to do the same. And because of the nature of their magic, for each malice killed, a Lakewalker has to die, even if not at the same moment. Their hope of victory resides in, as Dag reflects, running out of malices before they run out of Lakewalkers.

And the details, those lovely details, suggest that the Lakewalkers may be losing their war. Dag’s seniority puts him in contact – and conflict – with the patrol leaders, whose constant theme is how strained their resources are, how slender their reserves of manpower. Lakewalkers’ traditional means of finding malices involves walking in search patterns, designed for a certain number of men and women, now being walked by fewer. The great losses of Dag’s life occurred when a malice slipped through the search-patterns, twenty years ago. Whether because of their own declining numbers, or because of their expanding territories – as farmers push into new territory – the Lakewalkers are overextended. And any delay in finding a malice increases its dangerousness, since by consuming living creatures, including men, it learns and grows. During Legacy, Dag finds himself confronting a malice more highly developed than any he’s seen before, and is struck by its beauty, its realization, and its deadliness. Shortly thereafter, he falls victim to a new form of malice-magic, devised by a malice that has absorbed Lakewalker knowledge into itself. Malices learn – albeit only as individuals. Lakewalkers do not, as Dag acknowledges ruefully, when taken by surprise by one of Fawn’s inspirations. He thought he knew what he was doing, he says, but it may be that he was only doing the same thing, over and over.

It’s not circumstance that Fawn is the innovator. She’s farmer-born, and farmers have grown beyond their purely agrigarian roots and are continuing to develop technologically while Lakewalkers remain static. Part of that is Lakewalker dedication of resources towards their long war, but another part is their aversion to doing anything at all that might call a likeness to their mage ancestors, whose hubris ruined the world. That includes building permanent structures, practicing agriculture, or trying to enlist the support of the farmers they protect to extend their own resources. To Fawn’s eye, their lives are materially impoverished, and their diet – heavily dependent on the ubiquitous plunkin – monotonous. A farmer craftsman was responsible for Dag’s essential arm-harness. Dag’s fine wedding shirt, woven by Fawn’s blind aunt, is an object of covert fascination to the Lakewalker councilwomen (lovely detail). Farmers are responsible for the growth of towns, for agriculture, for glassmaking, and leatherwork. But, another undercutting, their concentration in towns and their skills and innovations, makes their vulnerability to the malices dangerous both to themselves and the Lakewalkers.

So all of this challenges the unquestioning validation of the relationship that a conventional romance offers, with the elegaic sense of a world threatened and in decline. Dag and Fawn are not the first Lakewalker-farmer pairing, but all the others they hear of have been driven apart. It’s more than simple prejudice, and convention, it’s the survival of their world that’s at stake. If one couple are allowed to stay together, the argument goes, how many others will follow suit. To anyone who’s thinking that LMB wouldn’t play it that way, I’ll ask: Who is proven right about the sharing knife? What does that say about the integrity of the world and its peoples’ understanding of it?

Can the two of them make a difference? Fawn at one point asserts, defiantly, that it’s not having the right answer that matter, it’s asking the right question. Her right question leads to a lifesaving action, although not for the reason that she, or the reader expect. Fawn is bright, innovative and learning, and Dag’s powers are expanding. Another undercutting: he is thoroughly spooked by the new manifestations, as are the people around him, fearing that it is too close to the magic practiced by the mages who ruined the world. He lives in a static, circumscribed, and defensive world. And so, as Fawn had to leave a family who undervalued her, Dag arrives at his own point of departure. Which gives the ending of the two books an agreeable symmetry and sets up books three and four.