Lucy Sussex has written a very short review of Heart of the Mirage for The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, appearing yesterday (Sunday). I am tickled pink to be in The Age and to have a writer as talented as Lucy say nice things! The review ended with: For those jaded with genre fantasy, Larke provides fare that is fresh, strange and intriguing.
There have been some interesting comments added to my last blog entry on the difficulties of language of a period, and Gillian had some words of wisdom over on her blog. I liked the comment Karen (author of Kingmaker, Kingbreaker duology) made about some things being invisible, no matter what world you are writing about - cows and horses are fine, but the moment you mention something like kangaroos, you're doomed. You've made the place Australia, and nothing is going budge the reader out of that slot.
I think this is one reason why fantasy seems sometimes to be so much the same in setting: oak trees are fine ("invisible") and so are wolves and generic bears and wild boars and the north being colder than the south. None of those things grates on the reader. Include kangaroos or armadilloes or giraffes and all of a sudden you are no longer in a land called "Cavalaria" or "M'grith". Have your hero fight a battle with a savage tiger during a hunt, and you've got to be in India. Have your heroine watch the toucans in the tree outside her castle and you'll have your reader shaking their heads in despair. You have placed them somewhere real and not at all fantastical in the way they expected.
The challenge is to provide a setting that is different, yet doesn't carry a load of baggage with it. The aim must always be not to jerk the reader out of your world and into his/her own.
About Me
- Glenda Larke
- Malaysia
- My life has been described by one of my editors as “impossibly exotic” – although really it is not my life, but me, that’s the exotic. I’m the uprooted plant, the exotic who doesn’t belong, always living in someone else’s backyard...
An Australian living in Malaysia. Writer, traveler, environmentalist. Author of The Isles of Glory trilogy (The Aware, Gilfeather, The Tainted); The Mirage Makers trilogy (Heart of the Mirage, The Shadow of Tyr, Song of the Shiver Barrens) and, writing as Glenda Noramly, a stand-alone book Havenstar. The latest trilogy is called The Watergivers in Australia and the Stormlord trilogy elsewhere: THE LAST STORMLORD, STORMLORD RISING, STORMLORD'S EXILE
Havenstar
You can buy my first published book (now out of print) as an eBook for your kindle, most ereaders, iPad etc.
CLICK ON THE COVER for the link to buy.
3 comments:
Wootie toot toot! Lucy hit the nail right on the head!
Karen
In this context, are you "allowed" to rename the visible creatures? Is calling a tasmanian tiger a... wolfcat, say, at all the same thing as 'calling a rabbit a smerp'?
Something I've been pondering.
Interesting question, Kathleen. To me, it's not quite the same.
There's no point renaming a rabbit because it is "invisible" anyway. A Tas.Tiger, though, needs to be renamed if your fantasy world is not Australia. I have been pondering this myself, and I think I am going to do just that sort of thing in a future series.
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