Tag: fantasy

Summer 29: scattering

Matthew ELeave a comment

Zann, my truest love,

I took my long branch and weaved as many colourful flowers as I could into the twigs at the end of it. It wasn’t easy, and I had been swearing continuously for about ten minutes before I found a technique that would work. At last I had a long colourful banner, about twelve feet, that I could wave in the air. I took it up to the downstream tip of the island, and waited for a boat heading up to Crideon.

It wasn’t a perfect plan. The river was wide, and the best currents to travel in were near the banks. Someone on a boat might see me and still not want to come out into the middle of the flow to help me. But it might work.

As it happened, the problem wasn’t that the riverboats were unwilling to come out from the bank, but that they weren’t there at all. When I was working on the docks, and later when I did guard duty out on The Tongue, I would see dozens of boats a day go past the city. The fighting must be keeping people away. I waited there for hours, seated on the sand with my flowery branch.

And a boat did finally approach! It was a trader, hugging the north bank. I jumped to my feet and flailed the branch around like a maniac, scattering flowers, trying to attract their attention. It was pretty far away, but they had a man on watch and I could tell that he saw me. He called to someone else, and another fellow joined him, and they both watched me bouncing about waving my branch. The boat stayed on its course, though. When it was drawing even with the island, the first man waved back, finally, and pointed at me with both hands, and then pointed downwards, pointing at my feet. He gave me a little salute-like wave and the boat passed behind a point on the island.

He meant something, but I didn’t know what. What about my feet?

Maybe he meant that I should stay here and wait. I could do that.

I waited, for hours. The island was far enough from the city that the afternoon mists were all a thin white that didn’t do anything but smell like trees. It didn’t help the sailing visibility, though, so I had almost given up on any boats coming by when I heard, “Hoy! The island!” from out on the water.

“Hoy!” I called back.

A large dinghy sailed into view. A bearded man was at the rudder. “Do you mind getting wet?” he said. “I don’t know how close I can come.”

“That’s fine,” I said, wading out. “Thank you!”

He grinned, and a woman near the mast threw me a wooden ring on a line. The boat was coming around the island, but I had my arm through the ring and it pulled me along. I swam out, trying to work my way up the rope. The boom swung past the two of them, and the woman helped me aboard.

“Thank you, again. I’m Ybel.”

“Ybel. Glad to help. I’m Coy and this is my husband Lasl. What were you doing on that island?”

“Oh. It’s a long story. I don’t mind telling you, but it’s a really long story. I’m a Rosolla Guard, at the Palace, and I’ve been out of the city for a while, doing all kinds of crazy things. Someone who dislikes me stranded me on the island. What’s happening in Crideon now, do you know?”

“Rosolla Guard, eh? Hm,” Lasl said. “That’s interesting. As far as I know your people are all sealed up in Cas Crid with Lord Clear and a brown glow around the whole area keeping everyone out. So you’re coming back to the city… to do what?”

“A brown glow? Oh. I’m coming back to, well, to try to put things right. I don’t know how. But I can’t just let everything fall apart the way it’s doing.”

“Because of your oath?” Coy asked.

I thought about it. “No. The oath is nice too. I just have to do this.”

I was lying on my back in the bottom of the dinghy. I could have sat up, but every now and then Lasl and Coy felt it necessary to do a sailing thing where the boat changes direction a little and it yanks the boom over top of the hull and everybody has to duck. I never know when to duck. So I just stayed down all the time.

“Brave of you,” Coy said. “I say ‘brave’. Do you prefer ‘foolish’? ‘Suicidal’? ‘Simple’? Or should I stick with ‘brave’?”

I laughed. “Any of those. I don’t know. I’ve been in a lot of unusual situations. I don’t know what can be done. But it doesn’t feel like I have much choice about it.” I paused. “And, there was a time when I let a couple of people down. I cared about them a lot. I still do. But I wasn’t there for them when they needed me, and now it’s too late. But it isn’t too late for the people I know here.”

They nodded. Still keeping their eyes on the water ahead.

“And I count you two in that. You’re really helping me here, and I owe you a debt. And I’ll make good on it.”

Lasl waved it off. “We just did a bit of sailing. We sail all the time. A little run downriver because a fellow on a trader told us that some other fellow was caught on an island? It’s no great thing.”

“In that case, I’ll forget your names.”

They laughed. “There’s still a place near the docks that the laurans and gangs haven’t discovered,” Lasl said. “Come have a drink with us, and we’ll talk about some items of interest, and we’ll say it’s even.”

“Glad to,” I said, and we came around a bend, and there was Crideon, with the sun setting behind her, and the afternoon mists blue and green in her streets.

All my love,

Ybel

Summer 28: leafslime

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

I tumbled through the hole in the darkness, and landed on mud. The sunshine was bright here, and I squinted as I stood up. Somehow I was still wearing the same clothes from when Ellewen and I had entered the laur. How long ago? I couldn’t tell. I checked that my coin was still hanging around my neck: it was.

Greenery was all around me, long reeds and big leaves coming down from somewhere above. I was on the shore of some water… probably a river. I knew this place, actually. I could see houses on the opposite shore, and the shapes of the hills… this was one of the islands in the Crideon River, some miles downstream of the city. I had never been here before, but I had seen the islands from the land. I tried to remember, did anyone live here? Had I ever seen smoke or farms or anything here?

I took a step and slipped in the mud, plastering river muck and leafslime all over myself. Tried to get up, slipped again, and completed the job of bedaubing myself from head to toe. I laughed and stood again, more carefully. I felt pretty good, unexpectedly. I was healthy. Wande and Jhus were fine, wherever they were. And, whatever kind of wars and intrigues were going on in Crideon, it didn’t have anything to do with me. I was just taking a nice walk around an island. Could I even get off the island? Who knew? Maybe I could swim it. I could just walk away from everything.

It sounded good. The greenfolk didn’t know how to rule in Crideon, and the people of Crideon didn’t know what they were dealing with in trying to drive the greenfolk out. The Rosolla Guard was a snakepit inside the larger snakepit of the palace. Ellewen and Ambe and my other friends could all take care of themselves. And I could go somewhere else. North, maybe, back to the Boltmarch.

I sat down on a rock and chewed on a blade of grass. If I did leave, it would mean that I was giving up on ever tasting the Sauce again. And that would leave a large hole in me. Right then, though, with the sun shining on me, and smelling the wind off the river, that didn’t seem so bad.

My fingers found the coin on its old leather thong. Of all things, that little pissard Ran was on my mind. Did I remember right, that his whole neighbourhood had been destroyed by all the fighting in Crideon? Was Ran dead? It might have been something that I imagined. But.

He did live in Crideon. He was in danger. A lot of people were in danger. And somebody had to do something about it. And that somebody was me. I couldn’t just sit on this island eating reeds. I had to, I had to, well, I didn’t know what I had to do. Just that I had to do it. I started looking around for a branch.

Love,

Ybel

Summer 27: maw

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

After that, there was a long period of nothing. I wasn’t really conscious, but once it was over, I could tell that I had experienced some kind of time. Eventually I became aware of… a place, that seemed dark and looming, like Ambe’s lair beneath the palace. At first I remained still, dreaming. I didn’t feel ashy. I felt normal.

I looked up, and there she was: Jhusdhe, sitting there, scowling at me and kicking her legs.

“Jhus!” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry, Jhusdhe. Are you all right? Where’s Wande? Is she all right?”

“Be silent. It is the great failure of my mater that I cannot pretend not to know you. But I wish to hear no words from your savage maw.”

I straightened, and rose to an awkward sit. “I know you don’t like me. That’s not important. But what happened to you? I was looking all around–“

“I will have silence from you.” She was wearing a green playfrock I didn’t know, not ripped or dirty or anything. That was a good sign. It meant she and Wande were somewhere that their comforts were being seen to. And she seemed, well, not happy obviously, not Jhus, but lively. “You are an ill-bred puppy who has been bumbling through the snow, and now you are here.”

“Where are we? I can’t tell. I was in–“

“You are too stupid to understand. But you cannot stay here. There is a way out, there.” She pointed. “Go. And stop looking for us. You don’t deserve to find either of us, and my poor mother does much better without you.” And she looked away in that infuriating way she has, where the conversation is over and you don’t exist anymore.

I looked where she had pointed, and there was a long spoon, lying silver against the darkness. For a long time I didn’t dare go near it, with Jhusdhe there. What if she knew? She would never keep my secret, I knew that. But I had to do something. I leaned over, reached out. Touched it. But my fingers went in, it wasn’t a spoon, it was a spoon-shaped hole in the world and I was reaching through it. And then I was falling through it. I closed my eyes against the sudden brightness.

When I opened them, I could see that I was no better off.

Love,

Ybel

Summer 26: sared

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

Ellewen and I stood at the bottom of an ugly hill in a strange, pink-skied realm. Dark green clouds scuttled to block the brown sun, and we stared at a spiky fortress across the plains. Unholy, garlic-like fragrances rose from the ground about us. Ellewen stood patiently, and if he had been a human instead of an unearthly laur–I mean, instead of a greenfolk–he would have been looking at me expectantly.

I figured that I wasn’t going to get any idea of what to do from him, so I had to take the lead myself. I thought about investigating the fortress in the distance, and then I thought it would be even better to not investigate the fortress, so I started off in the opposite direction, around the hill. Ellewen followed.

“Do we have a way of going home?” I asked him, as we stepped around the rocks. “When we want to?”

“Oh yes,” he answered. “It would actually be much more difficult to remain for too long. We aren’t wanted here.”

We had a choice of paths between different withered, rocky hills. The pass to the left looked a little easier, so I took that one. Ellewen’s shadow fell beside me. It was an ugly purple colour. It looked like there had been a structure here. The rocks were tumbled blocks and walls and timbers. One of the timbers had fallen to create a narrow bridge through the area. I could see sparkles from debris in the rubble, and… a familiar smell?

A sound from up ahead: boots on the rocks. Ellewen sighed.

“Who’s there?” I called.

The most beautiful man in the world bounded up onto a scarred boulder. He had long copper hair flowing down past immaculate cheekbones to equally emphatic shoulders. His skin was the green of a stagnant pond and his eyes the grey of burned corpses. It felt like I had never wanted anyone more. “Still here, flower-grower?” he said, ignoring me and addressing Ellewen. He was carrying some kind of… I don’t know what it was. It was made of metal and wood, and he pointed it at Ellewen like a weapon.

“As you see,” he answered.

“Can you help us?” I asked the stranger. “We don’t really know why we’re here, and–” and he knocked me down.

I don’t know how he did it; he wasn’t anywhere near us. He just acted, and the air struck a sharp impact all along my left side, and I fell backward. I lay there in both pain and pleasure, trying feebly to get up.

Something was under my hand, something strange-shaped. I put it in my pocket.

“It’s nothing for me to kill you and your pet,” he said to Ellewen, “but if you go now I may not bother to try.”

“I think we’re just going,” Ellewen said. “If we–” and he looked at me. “Oh.”

“Whaf?” I said. “Elleven?”

“Ybel,” he said, kneeling beside me, concerned. The lovely man grunted in impatience and made his weapon make a noise.

I tried to push up with my hands, but it didn’t work; my hands didn’t seem to be able to make any force against the ground. I looked down. Where my lower arms used to be, there was only ash. It didn’t hurt. Some more of my right arm crumbled as I watched it. “Heff me,” I said, and ashes puffed out of my mouth. “I’m sared!” I said, and laughed. I don’t know why I laughed.

“It will something something,” Ellewen said. All the sounds went quiet. The sights were turning grey. The last I saw was a flash from the man’s weapon as the ash completed my body.

All my love,

Ybel

My Top Twenty Books of 2025

Matthew ELeave a comment

Well. Around twenty, anyway.

The book I’m currently reading is Iron Flame (Rebecca Yarrow), second book in the Empyrean series. I’m on page 40 and the book enjoys a bountiful 637 pages, so I conclude that I’m not finishing it today without heroic effort, effort which I am disinclined to provide just to increase this year’s book count by one. So I can put this year’s book list to bed.

I read 69* new-to-me books in 2025. That’s low for me. I’m usually up over a hundred. It seems eventually mental health struggles will affect one’s reading habits. Anyway, the number isn’t the point. Maybe in 2026 I’ll be reading books like a fiend, but they’re mostly rereads or really long books that I’ve been meaning to get to. Kristin Lavransdatter and Infinite Jest. And my final count will be like twenty. That would be fine.

Here are the best books I read in 2025, loosely ranked from less best to best, with commentary where available.

Hemlock and Silver (T. Kingfisher) Kingfisher is a fantasy machine these days, keeping ’em coming good and fast. This one’s up to her usual standards but I wasn’t really feeling the poison-and-mirror themes.

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (Alison Goodman) I had to look this one up to remember which one it was. It’s one of these books you get a lot of these days, with a plucky heroine turning this or that benighted historical period into something we’d like better (complimentary). This one’s set in the Regency era, and is particularly energetic.

All the Birds in the Sky (Charlie Jane Anders) I suspect Charlie Jane Anders may be good at this, and I will have to investigate her bibliography more deeply.

The Tainted Cup; A Drop of Corruption (Robert Jackson Bennett) I’m a sucker for a Nero Wolfe pastiche, which this turns out not exactly to be, but it’ll do until one comes along. I’m not in love with this world, with its militaristic society, sea monsters, and biotech magic, but they’re well-written fantasy mysteries, so I will overlook much.

Wild Cards: House Rules (George R.R. Martin, ed.) The Wild Cards series has gone pretty far from its roots to get to this one, involving strange goings on in a mysterious house off the English coast, but I’m committed to Wild Cards for life, and I’ve never regretted it.

The House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune) I was hoping for something more, I don’t know, fanciful, fairy-taleish, than this found-family romance, but that’s not the book’s fault; the book’s perfectly good.

To Love and Be Wise (Josephine Tey) I may have more to say about this one in a separate article, but it’s a well-crafted Golden Age murder-mystery, only without a murder. That’s not often done.

The Averoigne Chronicles (Clark Ashton Smith) I had long been curious about Smith’s fantasy stories set in pseudo-medieval France, and I finally got the chance to snap them all up in one volume. Summary: weird! In a good way.

Advocate (Daniel M. Ford) Book Three of Ford’s Warden series, which I’ve been enjoying. I hope there are more, because the story of Aelis is clearly not over.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix E. Harrow) You’ve got to love that title. Promises a lot. And the book mostly delivers, even if it is kind of a conventional exercise for contemporary fantasy.

Written on the Dark (Guy Gavriel Kay) I’ve described Kay as the greatest living fantasy writer in English, and this book, an adventure in medieval France (it was a medieval-France kind of year for me) strengthens his case yet again.

James (Percival Everett) I read this at around the same time I read Big Jim and the White Boy (David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson). They’re both retellings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim. And both quite good; the only reason the Walker and Anderson doesn’t appear on this list is because it’s a comic book, and this list is for prose. (Nothing against comic books. I love comic books. They’re great.) It’s a tribute to TAoHF that people consider it worth reinterpreting in this way and creating books this good in reaction to it.

Fourth Wing (Rebecca Yarros) YA fantasy about a girl who becomes a dragonrider. Like with everything that’s been done a thousand times, all you have to do to stand out from the crowd is to do it well.

Woodworking (Emily St. James) Much-praised novel about a trans woman trying to figure things out and getting reluctant help from the trans girl who’s one of her students. It’s a really good read.

Space Oddity (Cat Valente) Sequel to the previous Space Opera, which was also great. Tons of fun in a Douglas Adams kind of way.

The Outskirter’s Secret; The Lost Steersman; The Language of Power (Rosemary Kirstein) I don’t know how I got this far in life without knowing about this series. I have taken to describing it as, “It’s pretending to be fantasy for people who like science fiction, but really it’s science fiction for people who like fantasy.” I hope Kirstein manages to finish the last two books before too long.

A Gentleman and a Thief (Dean Jobb) The only nonfiction book on this list. It’s the biography of Arthur Barry, the great Jazz Age jewel thief, and it’s wonderful.

The Bright Sword (Lev Grossman) Grossman has added a new entry to the Arthurian canon with this one. I read it in February and suspected at the time that it was going to be the best thing I read all year, and so it was. If you’re into King Arthur at all, this is one you have to read.

There!

Can’t wait to see what 2026 brings.

*Acknowledge.

Summer 7: instantly

Matthew ELeave a comment

Dearest Zann,

I lay on the cart, other prisoners around me, looking up at a couple of guards with homemade spears. I had my arms raised to show them I wouldn’t try anything. The cart was already rattling down the street, a couple of men running alongside it rounding up troublemakers. One of the guards glared at me.

“So who are you fellows?” I asked him. “You don’t have uniforms, so–“

He swore and stabbed at me with his spear.

I fell back, to the side, and tried to deflect the spear with my arms. “Sorry, sorry. Not talking.”

He looked me up and down, and spat on me.

When I fell, I ended up mostly in another fellow’s lap. He was older and dressed more finely than I was. The fellow murmured, “These are the Half Sun Square Guards. New group. Rule this neighbourhood.”

“Mm,” I murmured back. “Trying to keep law and order in the midst of chaos?”

“No. Just a gang. But they have power now, around here. If you have money on you, try to hide it.”

I did have some coins, but didn’t see how I’d be able to do anything secret with it under the eyes of the guard. “Thanks, I’ll try,” I said.

In any case I didn’t have a chance, as we stopped in front of an inn and the guards badgered all of us off the cart with their spears. Several of us tried to struggle or complain, and were killed instantly.

The rest of us were driven down inside and searched. About ten of us, blinking in the darkness after staring up at the sun while lying on the cart. They didn’t do a very good job of searching, but that didn’t help because I hadn’t done any kind of a job of hiding anything. They took everything I had on me except they didn’t seem to notice the coin around my neck. They also wrote down our names and who we thought might pay “bail” for us. They called it bail but they seemed to mean ransom. I thought about lying but decided the truth might actually help me out here. I told them Candur would bail me out.

The inn was empty of custom. These Half Sun Square types seemed to have taken it over as a headquarters. We were in the common room with some broken furniture and bloodstains. One Half Sun Squarer sat on the bar, picking his teeth and staring at us, ignoring the sheaf of papers in his hand. His name was Ladal and he knew me. He was probably the leader of the gang.

Once the gangers had what they wanted from us, they shoved and kicked us down to the cellar and locked us in one of the kegrooms. Obviously there weren’t any kegs in here anymore. There were people, though; before the closing door left us in the dark I could see that there were a couple of dozen people already inside. It was crowded and smelly.

“Do they feed us?” one of us newcomers asked.

“Maybe once a swing,” someone else said. “What you do is you buy food and water from a couple of the guards who sneak around here trying to pick up a bit of extra coin.”

“But they took all my money!”

“Ay. You hide it on yourself, is what you do, if you’re going to get arrested by this lot.” Someone was crying.

I decided right then that I wasn’t going to put up with this. I didn’t know how or when, but I was tired of taking punishment every time I met someone more cruel than I was, and I was going to get out of here.

I found an empty corner and sat down to think.

Love,

Ybel

On “Harry Potter” and Wizard’s Hall

Matthew ELeave a comment

So recently I read someplace about a book called Wizard’s Hall, by Jane Yolen. Yolen seems to think her book was an unacknowledged influence on J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, of which you may have heard. I figured, well, I like Jane Yolen* and I like Harry Potter, so I should totally check this book out.

And I’m glad I did. It’s not a big read; it’s pitched young and fairly slim. Didn’t remind me of Harry Potter at all. There are some superficial similarities, it’s true: wizard school, and a few smaller details. Mostly Wizard’s Hall reminds me of, oh, The Last Unicorn and The Riddle-Master of Hed, and other fantasies of that vintage. A Wizard of Earthsea. Same kind of atmosphere.

Basically here’s what I think is happening. I think that the main premise of what Rowling was doing with Harry Potter has not been widely enough recognized. I mean, it’s no secret or anything, nor do I lay claim to any kind of special understanding. But in North America, we just aren’t as familiar with one of Rowling’s major ingredients, and in some cases may not even know that it is an ingredient. See, the “Harry Potter” series isn’t just a fantasy series. It certainly is a fantasy series, but that’s not the only thing it is. It is two things, in roughly equal parts:

1. A fantasy epic
2. A British school story

If you’ve read “Harry Potter”, but aren’t otherwise familiar with the school-story genre, it may sound like I’ve just said something stupidly trivial. Like if I said that The Lord of the Rings was both a fantasy epic and a Middle-Earth Ring story. But that’s not it. The British school story is an actual thing, a genre on its own. Wikipedia can tell you all about it that you have to know, but my point here is that it is an established genre that Rowling and her British readers would be largely familiar with, and that it has a lot of conventions.** Rowling’s particular stroke of genius was to realize that if you take a convention-heavy genre like the school story, and marry it to an imaginative, content-rich, convention-poor genre like fantasy, you could come up with something really exciting. Which she did.

So a lot of the stuff Rowling was doing in “Harry Potter”, she wasn’t just freestyling. The Quidditch, the chocolate frogs, the Hogwarts setting… she wasn’t inventing all that out of whole cloth, on the one hand, but she wasn’t ripping anybody off on the other. She was working within her genre and adapting its conventions to fantasy. And what she came up with wasn’t like anything else in fantasy and was at the same time unprecedentedly popular. And you couldn’t explain the popularity by the strength of the writing, which certainly got the job done but was sometimes clunky.*** So how to explain it?

Well, it’s hard to explain, if you’re trying to figure out how Rowling filled up this rich and vivid world, and you don’t know that she had this preexisting school-story paradigm to keep her on track. If you’re being very generous, or you’re well-disposed to Rowling, you might just say that she has a tremendous imagination.**** Or you may very well be tempted to say that she got this from this writer and that from that writer. But it’s really much simpler than that.

Conclusion: Yolen doesn’t have a beef: you can’t start at Wizard’s Hall and get to “Harry Potter” without going through school-story-ville, and if you’re going through school-story-ville, you don’t need to start at Wizard’s Hall.

(Note: I have no idea whether Yolen is familiar with British school stories or not. She’s a writer, so my basic expectation would be that she’s read widely, and has run into Wodehouse’s Mike and Psmith or Blyton’s “Malory Towers” series or something. On the other hand: all my reasoning above. So I make no claims to have any idea what’s in Yolen’s mind with regard to all this.)
—

* try Yolen’s Briar Rose in particular, it’s very good
** not that kind of convention
*** certainly there are fantasy writers out there who are much better prose stylists, and much less popular, than Rowling. Yolen arguably among them
**** not that she doesn’t. A genre will only take you so far. She had to come up with all the details; the genre only gave her guidance for what kinds of details to come up with

Greatest Crazy Wizards of Fantasy Fiction

Matthew E2 Comments

Not sure whether to include T.H. White’s Merlin. He’s not exactly crazy, after all.

5. Fizban the Fabulous (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman) (except he was kind of faking)
4. Master Elodin (Patrick Rothfuss)
3. Arisilde Damal (Martha Wells)
2. Adept Havelock (Stephen R. Donaldson)
1. Antryg Windrose (Barbara Hambly)

Anybody else I should have on here?

Edited to add: I forgot Vic! Put in another entry on this list:

6. Vincianus Polymage (Greg Costikyan)

…from the unfinished “Cups & Sorcery” trilogy.