Born in 1949, Teresa Edgerton made her debut in her forties, at the end of the 1980s with the first Celydonn trilogy – also known as the Green Lion Trilogy.
Apparently Edgerton is a regular at Renaissance fairs, a tarot reader and a puppet creator – in addition to having worked as a psychic – and her first novels construct a secondary Dumasian world of alchemy and intrigue.
The three volumes come out for ACE types – which in 1991 published Goblin Moon, a stand-alone novel that is probably Edgerton’s most popular and beloved work.
With its sinister magicians, romantic intrigues, a masked hero that recalls the Scarlet Pimpernel and an urban and eighteenth-century setting, the novel belatedly fits into that interregnum of which I have written in other posts – that period when the fantasy it is popular but not yet imprisoned in a standard scheme designed to please an audience who simply wants some variation on the theme. These are the glorious years in which the market was testing the waters, and on the shelves appear different and exciting works that then, mysteriously, disappeared. Continue reading
Crippled dictation
My latest update of the Ubuntu System has somehow crippled some of the tools I was starting to use.
For some mysterious reason, I can’t access the settings panel of the system, in particular I can’t select the microphone I am using with my PC.
But the hardest hit is the sudden decision Google Docs took not to accept dictation through my system anymore.
This was an excellent tool for doing quick work – such as translating short texts and writing short pieces, and I was counting on the thing…
Instead, nothing.
This means spending long hours checking documentation and assorted blogs and websites instead of doing what I should be doing.
My, this is frustrating.
Enough, back to trying to find a solution.
Thinking in maps
I am currently reading a book1 that’s extremely interesting, and that touches on a variety of interests of mine – from history to current events to maps and geography to good old worldbuilding.
It’s called Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics, and was written by Tim Marshall.
The Italian branch of Amazon was offering the ebook edition for less than the prize of a small ice cream, and there is no ice cream parlor here where I live anyway, and so I grabbed a copy2.
The book is a good antidote to the horde of experts in geopolitics that crowd our pubs and bus stations and Facebook every time some issue of international politics is at hand3, and provides the basic tools to understand stuff like conflicts old and new, ethnic confrontations, migratory processes and Ivan the Terrible’s attack as defence theory, among many other things.
Great stuff.
It’s a nice, quick and very to the point crash course in the connection between history, geography and politics.
“What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other.”
It’s also good as a took when you have to design your own world, as it makes it very clear that politics and geography go hand in hand even in fantasy worlds.
Good book, reasonably cheap in ebook, and highly recommended.
- I am actually reading two – one upstairs and one downstairs, as I usually do. ↩
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together with two others. Isn’t there a saying that ebooks come in threes?
Anyway, it was a massive discount, I spent less than five bucks for three non-fiction books that were on my list. Good haul! ↩ - these are the same that turn into football coaches when the championship begins, and can be handy should the need for a virologist or an engineer arise in Facebook discussions. ↩
Reading fantasy – future plans
My friend Mauro (who also happens to be a fine game designer and an equally fine writer) just turned forty and he made a long list of fantasy novels he intends to read or re-read in the next five years.
I suggested a few additions to his list, and was absolutely impressed by his commitment and his ability to plan ahead.
Or by his cheek.
But let’s say he’s much more committed than I am,and much better at planning and sticking at it.
Could I do something similar? Continue reading
Pariah Elite
There is a concept in imaginative fiction that has been intriguing me ever since I learned of its existence: pariah elite.
I found the definition in the classic Encyclopedia of Fantasy by Clute & Grant:
A group which, though despised and rejected by society, remembers and preserves the secret knowledge necessary to keep the world from ultimate Thinning. In other words, members of PEs are despised and rejected precisely for that which they retain: their knowledge of the Secret History of the World, their Talents, their memory of the Elder Gods, their familiarity with the old True Names and the real Map of the territory (which allows them to escape the minions of the false king), their direct descent from the Elder Races, their memory of the way through the Labyrinth, their access through Portals to the Golden Age … But they sometimes do more than retain the past; it is always possible that the PE may be the Secret Masters of the world.
A lot of stories I enjoyed as a young man discovering fantasy and science-fiction hinged on the idea of a pariah elite: the Morgaine Books by C.J. Cherryh and the Birthgrave books by Tanith Lee, the old Foundation books by Ike Asimov, the Uplift books by David Brin in which the whole of humanity is sort of a pariah elite.
I sometimes toy with the idea of writing something based on this idea. Continue reading
Karavansara 