Following on from my world-building piece about ‘Sasha’, I thought I’d do something similar for the ‘Cassandra Kresnov Series’.

Obviously there’s a fair few scientific improbabilities in Cassandra’s world, starting with Earthlike planets of roughly similar gravity, atmosphere, etc. My technical excuse is that the primary scientific improbability (faster than light travel) gives humanity such a wide range that even if such worlds are a million to one, humanity now has access to tens of millions of stars, so logically there are quite a few million-to-one shots inside that range. But the real point of a story like Cassandra’s is not to ponder scientific accuracy, it’s to tell a good story. So long as it’s vaguely plausible, science shouldn’t get in the way. Besides which, no one has any real idea how many Earthlike planets there are… maybe there’s plenty, just waiting for us to figure a way to reach and colonise.

Tanusha is one such planet. We never really see the planet because we’re concentrated where most of the people are, in the city of Tanusha. Tanusha has 57 million people at the time of ‘Crossover’, though even by ‘Killswitch’ it’s gone up a million or so. It’s a boomtown, and was planned that way from inception. For one thing, environmentalists have it wrong when they oppose large cities, putting people into big cities keeps them out of the countryside, so all environmentalists should be fans of skyscrapers — cities that aren’t allowed to grow upward will grow outward instead, eating natural land as they go. Dense cities are also more economically productive, which is not to say farmers are unnecessary (though with futuristic hydroponics, synthetic food replication etc, who knows?) only to say that the more we move into the future, the less significant farming becomes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product in any economy. That still leaves us with mining, but again with nano-tech and replication technologies, who knows where minerals will be coming from?

Read the rest of it on my blog…

I used to say ‘I have re-read this novel every year since I first read it, when I was 12.’ And that used to be true; but then last year, for whatever reason, I didn’t get round to my annual re-read. And this year’s nearly over. So I’ve decided to go through it again, before I run out of year.

Now, the point of this post is not to talk about the novel as such, so much as to flag up these beautiful, nay exemplary Pauline Baynes cover illustrations. Let me hear you say ‘oooh!’ (‘oooh!’). Click on them and they should become enlarged.

This was the edition in which I first read LotR (my mother’s old edition, I think). When I discovered it again in a charity shop [thrift shops, I believe they’re called, Stateside] for the absurd price above indicated I couldn’t resist buying it, and adding it to the four (or five; I’m not sure) editions of the title I already own.

But I hope it’s not merely rank nostalgia that makes me say: it’s a lovely cover. Even the Victorian Playbill title font works. I love the way there’s an outer frame of stylised trees (with orcs lurking in the roots) surrounding an inner frame of stylised trees, itself surrounding a vertically stacked perspective of more trees, houses, hills and mountains. The visual idiom is a perfectly pitched Edwardian-Medieval, spot-on for the novel. And there’s a canny little visual push-pull about the way the picture invites the eye to run up from the miniature figures at the bottom through the landscape they must traverse to the mountains at the top, at the same time that the words of the title invite the eye to work their way down from ‘The’ to ‘Rings’. Very clever.

The back is lovely too. Those kiln-shaped mountains and towers! Like pottery models. And the sea-blue barrenness of peaks and troughs. I suppose imagery from the cinema versions will, nowadays, tend to overwrite other visual realisations; but for me these pictures will always hold a special place.

I’ve written a post on my blog about the world building that went into the land of Lenayin, from my novel ‘Sasha’. Rather than posting the whole thing here, I’ve put in a link, and an excerpt.

‘I can’t think of many fantasy novels where the people live beneath the rule of a king, but are ambivalent toward him and his authority. Because fantasy novels tend to be in love with the power of kings, and in love with the feudal system that sustains it… and sure, there is a lot of romance surrounding a position of such extreme authority. But the reality of such systems, of course, is that much of what we perceive as romance from that period of European history (picture glamorous king in crimson cloak on prancing white steed), was in fact propaganda by those kings who wanted to make themselves look good, and semi-divine, for obvious reasons.

Though power itself can be glamorous, much of the romance surrounding that power was in reality bullshit, and much of the manner in which kings actually ruled was cruel, arbitrary and unenlightened, to put it mildly. A good king could certainly be better than a bad king, but the system itself doesn’t allow much of what we would consider today ‘liberal open mindedness’ — you’re either loyal, or you’re dead, and that applies to those living beneath good kings and bad kings alike. George RR Martin is one fantasy author who grasps this extremely well in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. But a lot of fantasy, sadly I think, tends to swallow the propaganda whole, because the propaganda is pretty. Perhaps this just goes to illustrate that there is a statue of limitations on the offense caused by nasty political systems. Fantasy writers glorifying Nazism would get into trouble. Feudalism, not so much.

And yes, I am just stirring.