Babel Clash

It’s that time of the week again where we bid farewell to our current guest and welcome our new guests to the blog. 

Thanks for spending time with us Naomi and best of luck on your current projects (manga and child!).   Not sure if this is your first, but as a new Dad myself, enjoy the time as much as you can because it goes by too quickly!  Feel free to take a moment and plug any current or future project (your new manga series looks great!).

So, who’s next on the blog?

First, we have the author of Neverland, Douglas Clegg! 

Joining Douglas is the author of The Reincarnationist Series, M.J. Rose!

Please give them a big welcome to Babel Clash.  With it being Halloween season, who knows what they may have up their sleeves!

Hello all! I am so excited to be back blogging here again, and thought I would start things off by sharing a little taste of this last weekend’s New York Comic-Con, where I was lucky enough to be on a hugely fun panel with Jim Butcher, Joe Abercrombie, Peter V. Brett, Deborah Harkness, and Brandon Sanderson that roamed all over the fantasy field. Shawn Speakman took video:

NYCC Panel Video: Fantasy Authors from Suvudu on Vimeo.

NYCC Panel Video: Fantasy Authors Part II from Suvudu on Vimeo.

If there were any bits of the panel you would like me to explore, or questions you would have asked if you were there, hit me with them!

And for my part, I have a question for all of you: our moderator Betsy Mitchell had asked us for questions, and one of mine we didn’t get to explore was, how do you engage with fans and invite them into your work/world, which is a topic near and dear to my heart, because it’s something I want to do since that leads to heaps of awesome things (like the spectacular entries I’ve received for the Temeraire fanart contest whose winners are going to be announced this week! watch this blog or my livejournal for some very very shiny examples. ♥)

So, since I didn’t get a chance to ask the other writers on the panel, I ask you guys! What do your favorite authors do that invites you in, what gets you engaged and passionate about your favorite books?

So it goes, as Vonnegut said.  Another fun-filled two weeks is coming to an end.  I really enjoyed having Lou, Ginjer, and Jeremy on the blog these past two weeks.  Their knowledge and insight into the publishing business was eye-opening and entertaining, to say the least.  I learned a lot from their posts and am really excited to see how the next few years look for the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres.  You’re all welcome to come back to the blog whenever you feel the urge chat books (or dish trade secrets).  Thanks again for taking time out from your schedules to blog with us.

Babel Clash readers, don’t forget to check out the many books from Pyr, Ace/Roc, and Night Shade, and help support the books these editors feel passionate about.  I know I will because I want to see what they’ve got coming next!

I know Lou has posted a farewell post, but Lou, Ginjer, and Jeremy - feel free to spend a few monents plugging anything you really want our readers to know about.  Thanks again for everything!

Then, starting tomorrow, we have the return of Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire Series, to the blog!  I know she spent her weekend at the New York Comic Con, so I’m sure she has plenty to tell us about it!  Naomi, welcome back!  We look forward to reading your blogs!

Naomi and Claudia, we still have a day or so to wrap up.  Thank you for the conversation.  It’s been fun.  Before you go, please share a little bit about your latest book or project.

Also, what would you say to those readers who’ve not read your work before?  What can they expect from your stories?

I’m glad to see your post about pirates and the anthology.  When it comes to archetypal fantasy characters, pirates are not represented much anymore.  We see far more knights, barbarians, wizards, thieves and assassins than we do pirates.  I wonder why that is.

What other fantasy archetypes are underappreciated in today’s novels?  My vote is for ninjas.

Back to pirates, one book that features them that I’m eager to read is Tim Power’s On Stranger Tides.  From all I’ve heard about it, it’s outstanding, but I haven’t had any luck tracking down a copy.

Naomi, you say, “they set up the steampunky universe and vaguely-bruiser Holmes well both in the trailers and in the opening — the whole thing had a brush of fantasy.”

I started thinking about your own work and how you integrate the familiar (Britain, China, etc.) with the fantastic to create something new.  What do you find to be the biggest advantage of using historical places over ones entirely fictional?

Also, if you choose to use a historical location, do you feel compelled to achieve a level of authenticity?  Is that one of your bigger challenges when writing?

Have you read the Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes?  His Victorian detective fantasy featured the most eccentric and unreliable narrator that I can recall.  For a reader to solve the mystery before the detective, you would need to identify the narrator telling the story.  The narrator played an active role in the story but not in the way that you might expect.  The narrator had a playful tone, and every other character in the story was colored and twisted by his odd point-of-view.  The book became as much as a game as a novel, and a very good one (both a good game and good novel).

So any world-building seems to be shaped largely by point-of-view.  So we can only understand the created world through a narrator’s lens.  Can you think of any fantasy novels where the fantasy world looked very distinctive from chapter to chapter, depending on which point-of-view character was on center stage?

Thank you again, Patrick.   Please check out his new novel, the Breach.

Our next guest is Naomi Novik, author of the widely beloved and critically praised Temeraire novels.  Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings fame has optioned the books for possible film adaptation at a later date.  The first in the series is His Majesty’s Dragon.

Tune in tomorrow to learn the topic of our latest discussion.