Month: July 2015

Not an ordinary fantasy trilogy – Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Series

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I mentioned this series when I wrote my post on Wednesday, and since then I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot.  The Soldier son trilogy isn’t for everyone, and I know some people who were never keen on it as it was a big departure from Robin Hobb’s other books set in the Three-Kingdoms, or those on the Live Ships and Dragons of Bingtown.  The Soldier Son novels, despite being works of fantasy, are set in a relatively modern world with rifles and guns, and Hobb develops an unorthodox main character from that which you’d normally expect from a fantasy series.  However, these novels strengths are that they cover a lot of issues that we would recognise from our own world, and really make you think about our own perceptions to those same issues. I don’t want to give too much away, but the conflicting issues in these novels are between the progress and development of the modern world on the one-side, and the traditions and magical beliefs of a land that is coming …

Great Borderlands and frontiers in novels – Part 1 : Fantasy

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For the past week and a half I’ve been staying in a small cottage up in the wild hills of Northumberland, one of England’s two counties that lie on the border with Scotland.  Evidence of previous animosity between the two countries are all around, not just with Hadrian’s Wall that runs through the borderlands, but in the number of castles and fortified buildings that lie festooned over the countryside.  My own cottage that I am staying in still has arrow slits in the outbuildings, a relic from its past when the inhabitants needed to defend themselves from the periodic raiding parties from the Scottish North. This has made me think about borderlands in literature, and what a great location they are to set any novel.  Obviously history is full of hostile frontiers, and next week I will go through a few of those and show some examples.  But equally this works well for fantasy novels, and here are just a few great examples of fantasy novelists that have used this topic so well. Mordor, Middle …

A great review for Roman Mask in the Daily Mail

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I’m writing this from a small cottage, nestled in the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland, and even though it is late July, the weather has been disappointing and chilly, so I have a fire blazing in the fireplace.  It is a beautiful part of the world and I was hoping on showing you some great pictures of Hadrian’s Wall that runs through this county, unfortunately when I visited the Wall yesterday it was absolutely pouring with rain and I had to halt the exhibition – even the dog wasn’t too keen on going out in it as it was so heavy.  Still, never mind, I’m up here for another week, so there should be ample opportunity to re-visit the Wall. The week hasn’t been a total loss anyway, because I received my first review in a national newspaper (The Daily Mail) for my novel Roman Mask. Unfortunately, I had no idea the review was coming out in the newspaper and because I was in the wild hills of Northumberland, by the time I heard about in the late …

The City – Stella Gemmell

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It had taken me a while to purchase this novel, and get around to reading it.  David Gemmell, Stella’s late departed husband was one of my favourite authors, so I’m not sure why it had taken me so long, surely I should have been eager to buy it as soon as it came out…but I didn’t. I think the reason why was in case I was disappointed, and then the final link to her husband’s great writing would be gone.  But I shouldn’t have been so reticent, Stella Gemmell has proved with her first solo novel, The City, that she is a writer in her own right now, and I won’t hesitate to purchase more novels from her in the future. Stella Gemmell has previously worked with her husband on many different projects, and finished David Gemmell’s last trilogy on Troy posthumously, so I knew I wasn’t dealing with a novice when I picked up her novel.  However, with her previous work I was never quite sure where her influence started and his ended, but …

Ancient Roman sites to inspire you…

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Whilst writing my novel Roman Mask, I was inspired by many of the great ancient sites that can be found all around Europe and the Mediterranean basin.  This is by no means a complete list of all the wonderful sites that are in existence, but here are a few that inspired me… Rome, Italy.  How could I start anywhere else?  The ancient city that was at the heart of her Empire has to be on everyone’s list of places to visit if they are interested in Ancient Rome.  So much still remains and is easily accessible in this fantastic city.  The Colosseum was incredible, but as it was built later than my novel was set I couldn’t use it for research, but it still gives an amazing perspective on the sheer power and dominance that Rome held over the world at the time.  The Augustan palace on the top of the Palatine Hill nearby was very useful for me, and stretches all the way to the ancient forum at the centre of Ancient Rome.  But …

C J Sansom, Sovereign

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I don’t often read crime novels, I’m not sure why, my grandmother used to love them, but I could never generate the necessary enthusiasm for finding out whodunit.  Maybe my mind just doesn’t work that way, or I have too much sympathy for the bad guys, either way, I’d have made a terrible detective. So it’s an unusual choice of novel this week that I write about – C J Sansom’s Sovereign that features her sleuth Matthew Shardlake.  I was drawn to it because of the period of history, Tudor England in all its pomp and splendour; a court full of intrigue and danger, the land in a flux of great change and upheaval, yet beginning to erect the pillars of society that we now identify with as forever English. As this is a crime novel I don’t want to give away the plot by discussing the characters too much, because as with any crime novel, they are key to the storyline.  I’ll just say that Shardlake is an interesting and unusual investigator, hunchbacked and often …

Five types of Battle!

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There are many different ways to write a fantasy or a historical novel, but if you’re looking for a climatic finish, a great battle at the end is hard to beat, and it fits in nicely to both genres.  Here are five types… The Siege.  I love castles, great fortresses of stone with arrow slits and murder holes, battlements festooned with banners.  A great setting for a defiant group of defenders to hold out against overwhelming odds – and for an added bonus you can arm your attackers with a whole arsenal of siege engines: Huge trebuchets, deadly bolt throwers, fearsome battering rams, crafty siege towers. The Set-piece. Rows of soldiers, resplendent in their burnished armour, lined up rank upon rank, the pride of a nations strength standing proudly in the sun awaiting the enemy to approach.  Only for them all to lie dead by the end of that same day – the tragic loss that comes from man’s ambition.  To successfully describe a set-piece well will require the author to have a grasp of …

Walking along the Wall and through History…

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This may be my last Sunday update for a while, as I will be driving up to Northumberland next Sunday so I doubt I’ll be able to write my normal Sunday post.  I am very fortunate that my family own a small cottage up in the Nortumbrian hills, somewhere I can go to write, relax, and a be inspired. Anyone familiar with this beautiful part of England will know that Hadrian ’s Wall runs through the county.  It one of Rome’s most famous engineering projects and not only divided the British Isles but also continued to shape its history long after the Roman’s left our shores.  Would England and Scotland have developed separately without the Romans dividing their lands before either nation existed?  Who knows, but I doubt it.  Either way, it is an amazing example of their ambition, as well as their military and engineering might. George R R Martin says it was whilst visiting Hadrian’ Wall that he started to form the idea for the Wall that divided Westeros in his magnificent Game …

Transformation – Carol Berg

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I’ve been looking forward to writing this about this novel because Carol Berg is one of my favourite fantasy authors, and I don’t think she gets nearly enough credit for the fantastic stories and characters she creates. I emphasise the characters, because that is the strength of Carol Berg’s writing, her characters – and as far as I am concerned, that is the secret of good writing. Carol Berg’s main character in this novel is Seyonne, a slave in the employ of Prince Aleksander, a ruler of a feudal regime that presides over an Empire that has been swallowing up neighbouring states, including Seyonne’s own sixteen years before. The past sixteen years of slavery hangs heavily on Seyonne, as he had once been a leader of his people, and now he finds himself enforced to work for Prince Aleksander as his personal secretary. The two characters couldn’t be more contrasting. Seyonne, is thoughtful, deliberate, and his moral compass remains intact despite the years of demeaning and degrading service he’d undertaken as a slave to the Empire. The …

A reminder of everything that Greece has done for us…

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I certainly don’t want to join the political debate raging through Europe at the moment regarding the Greek bail-out, but I have heard a few unflattering comments regarding Greece and their contribution to the European community lately.  So I thought it only fair to remind everyone, how much we all owe to the Greeks and how their culture and ideas help shape the modern world, and that their values were the foundations upon which Western society was based. Medicine.  The ancient Greeks were the first to develop theories that could be tested by symptoms and results.  This in itself, was a massive shift forward from the previous beliefs systems held by virtually every society of the ancient world that illnesses were either punishments or gifts from their respective gods or deities.  The foundation of modern medicine, ‘cause and effect’ was born. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460 BC – 370 BC) is now considered the ‘father of modern medicine’ after he devised the ‘Hippocratic oath’ and the methodology and value system that is still in use …