Babel Clash

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.