Life in the Realm of Fantasy

January 14, 2013 · 7:03 pm

The Terry Pratchett School of Prose

One of the earliest influences on my sometimes smartassed style of writing was Sir Terry Pratchett, O.B.E.‘s watershed fantasy series, Discworld. Sir Terry takes J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and William Shakespeare, as well as mythology, folklore and fairy tales, and mashes them up in this hilarious series of tales. There are 39 books in this trilogy! Talk about prolific!

Discworld is a flat disc balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A’Tuin. Oh my goodness – what opportunities for mayhem were locked in that kernel of a plot! The series begins with “The Colour of Magic.”

One of my favorite books in the series is “Mort.” It is the 4th book and is the first to give Death the main storyline.

As a teenager, Mort had a personality and temperament that made him rather unsuited to the family farming business. Mort’s father, named Lezek, felt that Mort thought too much, which prevented him from achieving anything practical. Thus, Lezek took him to a local hiring fair, hoping that Mort would land an apprenticeship with some tradesman; not only would this provide a job for his son, but it would also make his son’s propensity towards thinking someone else’s problem.

The conversation between Lezek and his brother Hamish as they discuss Mort’s future in the opening pages is hilarious and quite revealing in its simplicity. In this snippett, Lezek and Hamish are observing Mort as he attempts to frighten some birds away from the crop.

“He’s not stupid, mind” said Hamish. “Not what you’d call stupid.”

“There’s a brain there all right,”Lezek conceded. “Sometimes he starts thinking so hard you has to hit him round the head to get his attention. His granny taught him to read, see? I reckon it overheated his mind.”

At the job fair, Mort at first has no luck attracting the interest of an employer. Then, just before the stroke of midnight, a man concealed in a black cloak arrives on a white horse. He says he is looking for a young man to assist him in his work and selects Mort for the job. The man turns out to be Death, and Mort is given an apprenticeship in ushering souls into the next world (though his father thinks he’s been apprenticed to an undertaker).

I love the snarky way Pratchett takes clichés and runs with them. He grabs the boring, bland, overdone themes of western literature by the tail and swings them. When he sets them down they are SO much more fun to watch!

What I have learned from the Terry Pratchett school of prose is that dialog tells us as much about the speaker himself as it does about the words expressed. In the quoted passage above we see enough of the two men who are speaking to have some idea of who they are. Pratchett gives us the personality and demeanor of the character in those simple lines. We can see them, fully formed in our minds eye as they speak. .

That is the hand of the master, and it is what I someday hope to be able to bring to my own work. The important thing to remember is you must read the works of the masters, because if you have no idea of what good writing really is, you can’t write it. Read the best works in your genre and continue writing your own stories and never let the struggle of getting your work out there take away the joy of writing it. It’s not easy, going indie, but it is so rewarding!

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Filed under Books, Fantasy, Humor, mythology, writer, writing

Tagged as adventure, Discworld, fantasy, fiction, humor, literature, mythology, Terry Pratchett, writing

January 9, 2013 · 6:26 pm

Building the Beast

I have been suffering with a cold for the last week and so my writing output has dwindled to nearly nothing. I have gotten some work done, but not the amount I had hoped for.

I worked on a scene requested by my editor, Irene Luvaul, for Huw the Bard, one to liven up a dull stretch just a bit. I didn’t want to put Huw through the wringer again when he has already suffered so much, and he was so close to making his way to Billy’s Revenge, but she was right – a bit of tension would add to the interest.

So I alternately thought and slept on it for more than a week, trying to force my plague-ridden body peck out a few lines with merit to them.

I couldn’t think of anything.

But then a passing paragraph toward the end of Billy’s Revenge I – The Last Good Night (under revision again, cleaning up the manuscript, thank you Carlie Cullen for volunteering) gave me the idea for a strange creature with which I could freak out poor naive Huw. (Having the right editor in the first place solves SO many problems further down the road.)

Firesprites.

But this meant – you guessed it – Building the Beast. The only trouble was, I didn’t really know what one looked like – after all they were only mentioned in passing as being a nuisance.

Now, I only had three passing references in BR1 that talked about these creatures, but those few sentences told me quite a bit about them, actually.

So when I thought about it I realized I did have enough to build one. I just needed to assemble the parts.

1. They are either elemental creatures, or poisonous creatures, one or the other. I say this because they are called ‘FIREsprites’. Yet, logic tells me they can’t be made of fire, or there would be no forest. Therefore, they must be poisonous, and the poison must be an acid that burns like fire.

2. They must be small. Otherwise King Henri’s horse would not have stepped into a nest of them and thrown his rider.

3. Something about them makes people think of fire, and it must be something bad, because Lackland and the people of Waldeyn feel compelled to kill the entire nest when they find them, sort of like fire ants only bigger and badder. But they must be something that one lone woman (Lady Mags) could deal with, with only the aid of an amulet.

I always think it’s better when the folks who actually have to deal with them tell me what they look like, so here is what Matt St. Couer told Huw and I about firesprites.

Matt said, “Now we need to herd them to the center of the nest and get them bunched up in as tight a group as we can. Don’t touch them, whatever you do. The slime on their skin will burn you like the hottest fire, and there’s no stopping it from eating your flesh away. That’s why they’re called firesprites. The wounds keep putrefying, and amputation is the only remedy. Water helps but only if you get the water on the affected area right away, before the poison has done too much damage. I’m talking minutes here, and you have to really sluice the wounds to get the poison off. Sadly, they never seem to nest near water.”

Ulleen said, “They like to nest along roads because there’s not so much foliage and they get more sun there. The sun heats their nests and hatches their eggs.”

“They don’t look much like a sprite, do they,” Huw said, thinking they were interesting but not really fairy-like. “At least, not what I always thought a sprite should look like. They look more like naked chipmunks with hairless tails. But their skin is pretty, all shiny and coppery like that.”

“I think they were named that because when they’re looking for grubs and such all you see is a little flash of copper as they disappear into the brush,” Ulleen replied. “I’ve always wondered about that too.”

Now as far as actually building the beast goes, I have quite a lot of dragon parts lying around my office, and I can assemble a dragon in no time at all. I will even stick wings on it, if you like your dragons airborne. But dragon parts are far too large for this project, so I’ll have to look elsewhere.

Somewhere in here I have a box with everything one might need to assemble a demon.

I think this is the box.

Yes!

I’m partial to waterdemons. They’re quite fun to put into a fight-scene and some of their components will be perfect for the job. Clear, gelatinous skin is exactly what these little guys need, and I have a lot of it in this box. If I take some of that and turn it all coppery, it will actually be kind of pretty, in a hairless chipmunk sort of way. With the addition of a really strong acid to the gelatinous goo I think we’ll have a cute little firesprite!

I love arts and crafts time!

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Filed under Adventure, Books, Dragons, Humor, knights, mythology, writing

Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, dragons, humor, literature, magic, writing

January 6, 2013 · 5:05 pm

Oh, the Agony

The Aspirin Shop © 2012 Connie J Jasperson All Rights Reserved

Yes, we now find ourselves in the deepest depths of January. The days are short and dark, and my desk is piled high with the visions and revisions of my current works-in-progress. I stare at the mountain of work that demands my attention and my mind is consumed with solving that eternal paradox, “Who gave me this damned cold? Which little germ-factory that I call a grandchild is the culprit?”

Alas, the responsible party is most likely sitting in his kindergarten class having a snack and discussing tactics for beating “Lego Star Wars” with his mates while Grandma suffers the agonies of the damned.

In the meantime, cold or no cold, I must somehow wind up the tale before me. My characters have already been through quite a lot, and they aren’t in tip-top condition. Still, they have a job to do and they are going to do it or die in the process.

At this juncture my characters are lurking high in the branches of fir trees outside the stone walls of a mountain keep, observing the small village surrounding the castle they need to enter. They need to decide how to enter the haunted castle, and they need to make a plan for getting to the rogue-mage and eliminating him. Once he is dead, the spells he’s layered over his guards will be broken and my team should be able to leave safely.

Once inside the keep, they will have to make their way through the halls, killing off the bespelled guards as they come to them until they have finally met the mage they have been sent to kill.

They’ve already fought a dragon and been caught in an avalanche. They’ve fought many other elemental creatures and each other.

Now here they are, poised on the edge of finishing this adventure and Grandma’s too stoned on NyQuil to concentrate long enough to get them to where they can kill the evil bad dude.

This could take a while.

It’s just so much wo-o-o-ork…..

Actually this game looks fun. I think I’ll just rest in the play-room for a moment….

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Tagged as adventure, Art, Brittain, fantasy, humor, knights, Legos, literature, Star Wars, writing

January 4, 2013 · 8:31 pm

Vegans and Version Control

2013 has kicked off with the usual spin through the blender of life. I’ve begun a 31 day journey into the vegan lifestyle, and so far I’ve not noticed anything missing from my life other than dairy – giving up cheese is my one regret. Four days into it and I’m still committed. Not sure if I’ve lost any weight, but I don’t feel puffy so that’s something. Unfortunately, with the return of my thyroid tumor (benign) and a writer’s lifestyle ( I WRITE about athletic people) my chances of losing any weight are slim without both changing my diet and my level of activity. Walking is now a part of my day, walking and thinking about where my stories are going. At this point it is unlikely the tumor will be removed again, but one never knows. When I had the first one removed in 1981 I lost 50 lbs in 3 months.

Health issues aside, writing is also a real spin in the blender. I have 3 books in various stages of the editing process and two being formatted for print. Oh, the Agony! I am working on three or four different things every day and lets be real, I get sidetracked quite easily. It’s difficult to make the transition from my fantasy life to reality, and wait–is that a Rainbow YouTube video? Whoa, Munich in ’77…. Ronnie James Dio… Ritchie Blackmore….

Ahem.

I also have to make several revisions for Forbidden Road as suggested by my Beta Reader, and then Carlie Cullen will receive that one back for final approval.

The best thing (sarcasm) is when I get an email from one of my editors and I attempt to save the attachment in the wrong file! Believe me, proper version control is crucial in this business! I do this by saving a file in a separate folder for each step in the editing process and labeling them in a particular way that never varies. Let’s say I am saving a new file for Forbidden Road. It is the fourth time Carlie Cullen has seen it, and I have completed the revisions per her suggestions. This is the path and how I label each step in the process:

>Forbidden Road > File Folder> FR 4th Edit Complete > FR Ch 1 4th edit CC – cjjasp complete

I will attach that file to an email and Carlie will sign off or suggest further revisions. If she sends it back with further suggestions then a new File Folder will be created, for the 5th version.

If I had the sort of relationship with an editor I have with both Carlie and Irene when I was first starting out as a full-time writer, many problems I am still dealing with in my earlier work could have been avoided! But it is all a learning curve. The longer we do this the more we learn and the better we get at avoiding the little pitfalls of being an indie author.

I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien would have been as easily distracted by random YouTube videos as I am.

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Tagged as adventure, health, humor, literature, vegan lifestyle, writing

January 2, 2013 · 7:31 am

Which was that, anyway….

742px-L_Spada_Concierto_1615_Louvre As a mostly self-educated old lady, I’ve had to learn some real lessons, regarding the words ‘that’ and ‘which’. I finally managed to rid myself of the inadvertent overuse of the word ‘that’ in my writing, but in the process I find I have become a ‘which’, as opposed to a ‘witch’, which my children will tell you I have always been. Irene Luvaul, dear friend and editor on ‘Huw the Bard’ has spent many hours noting instances where I inappropriately used which instead of that.

Sigh.

I’ve spent 59 years using these two words improperly!

So, when DO we use the word that in an appropriate and defensible fashion? After all, too many that’s make the prose boring and forgettable. Some people say you must NEVER use it, but Irene says they are incorrect.

So does Grammar Girl, (Mignon Fogarty) on her awesome website for writers with questions. This website is an invaluable resource for folks like me, with some education, but no memory of what that education actually taught us.

There are instances where only that will suffice. When do we use the word that?

We use it when we have something called a ‘Restrictive Clause’. So now you want to know (as I did) what the heck THAT is!

Quote from Grammar Girl, “A restrictive clause is just part of a sentence that you can’t get rid of because it specifically restricts some other part of the sentence.” She goes on to give a specific example of a restrictive clause: “Gems that sparkle often elicit forgiveness.” See? Not just ANY gems elicit forgiveness in this sentence, but only gems that sparkle. It is restricted to one kind of gem.

So, now we know about restrictive clauses, but what about nonrestrictive clauses? Again we turn to Grammar Girl and she says, “A nonrestrictive clause is something that can be left off without changing the meaning of the sentence. You can think of a nonrestrictive clause as simply additional information.” Again she gives the example, “Diamonds, which are expensive, often elicit forgiveness.” The word ‘which’ isn’t really necessary, as the meaning of the sentence would not be changed if you left it out. “Diamonds are expensive, but often elicit forgiveness.” Sometimes the sentence is better without the extraneous word.

I still make a mish-mash of things as they fall out of my head and into my book, but I take comfort in knowing I am not alone! Writing is a journey, and I learn something new every step of the way.

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Tagged as adventure, Art, humor, literature, writing

December 28, 2012 · 8:42 pm

Party On!

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year! As my favorite author of all time, Charles Dickens,English novelist (1812 – 1870), wrote in his epic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

If that doesn’t describe 2012, nothing does! So, let the revels begin! I will be celebrating the New Year with a small dinner party as I finally make that commitment to go fully vegan for the 31 days of January. If I find my health improves I will stay on the vegan diet permanently. It just so happens that this group is evenly divided between carnivores and vegans with those bearing the Y chomosomes being the carnivores.

So on Dec. 31^st I will spend the day making a dinner for the husbands AND a dinner for the wives! This will be an adventure. I will make a chicken marsala, and mashed red potatoes with grilled asparagus for the men and a curry and maple sweet potato soup for the ladies, along with salads and fruit for everyone. I make my bread vegan now anyway. I will keep you all posted on my progress with this new (to me) way of eating.

So put on your party hats and bring out the noisemakers! What better way to start the New Year than to enjoy a fine dinner, a brisk game of Monopoly and the company of friends?

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Tagged as Art, humor, Monopoly, parties, vegan

December 22, 2012 · 1:11 am

Alton Brown, the Futility of Stone Calendars, and Chocolate Chile Cookies

As Homer Simpson once said, “Mmmm… chocolate….”

I love to bake cookies, and I have found the tastiest cookie ever. I spent the end of the world baking cookies, just on the off-chance that the world would not end, and Christmas would arrive. If that were so, I would need to serve cookies and coffee to random guests as they might appear over the impending holidays, so better safe than sorry. The picture above left is for Chocolate Crackled Cookies, and is not only made with yummy chocolate, there is Roasted Saigon Cinnamon and Ancho Chile Powder in them. The odd sounding combination works perfectly!

Of course, Alton Brown tells us that when the Mayans and Aztecs were not killing time with chiseling long-range calendars, they were known to drink hot chocolate spiced with chilies. Of course, most Meso-Americans were quite busy with religious obligations and had very little time to pursue hobbies such a stamp collecting or assembling jigsaw puzzles, so calendar chiseling may have offered a diversion from the endless social rounds of war and ritual human sacrifice. Heck, even a simple ball game tended to end badly for the loser, so I’m sure a bit of hacking away at the old boulder with a hammer and chisel offered some relatively safe relaxation.

You know, I think the fact that the Mayan Calendar was chiseled into stone and ended on 12-21-2012 is a perfect reminder as to why we don’t use stone anymore for things like long-range calendars and day-planners. After all, stone is a finite medium! There is only so much stone available at a given point for a chiseler to chisel upon, so it stands to reason that at some point the calendar chiseler will run out of stone and the stone calendar will end.

Anyway, I find the Google Calendar to be much less trouble than a stone to fit into my purse, seeing as it is available on my phone, my laptop and my pc as well as the Android. Unfortunately, I am no longer allowed to plead ignorance in regard to appointments I’ve made and forgotten about. I get email reminders 2 days, 1 day and 2 hours in advance, along with pop-up reminders. The phone dings, and I (like Pavlov’s Dog) automatically reach to see what conditioned behaviors the digital-leash is encouraging me to exhibit now.

So now I that I have digressed and wasted copious quantities of time by baking, criticizing the Mayans time-keeping system and eating chocolate cookies, I will sit in my office and write a post (one day late) for my Best in Fantasy blog, this one examining the best book covers of 2012. There is some mighty fine artwork out there and indie books are just as beautifully covered as the books published by the ‘Big 6’ publishers.

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Tagged as Alton Brown, Art, Chocolate Cookies, humor, literature, Mayan Calendar

December 18, 2012 · 8:25 pm

Charles Dickens was an Indie Author, Too

Few people are aware that one of the most famous and inspirational books in the English language was originally self-published, and didn’t do as well as the author intended. Charles Dickens began to write A Christmas Carol in September 1843, and completed the book in six weeks with the final pages written in the beginning of December. Unfortunately he was feuding with his publisher over the meager earnings on his previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Because of that, Dickens declined a lump-sum payment for the tale and chose a percentage of the profits in hopes of making more money. He then published the work at his own expense. It was as expensive then as it is now to publish quality print books and high production costs netted him only £230 (equal to £19,128 today) rather than the £1,000 (equal to £83,164 today) he’d hoped and needed, as his wife was once again pregnant. A year later, the profits were only £744 and Dickens was deeply disappointed.

Formatting was as tough in those days as it is now and Dickens was unhappy with the first edition of the tale. It contained drab, olive colored endpapers that Dickens felt was unacceptable. The publisher, Chapman and Hall, quickly replaced them with yellow endpapers but those clashed with the title page which was then redone. The final product was bound in red cloth with gilt-edged pages and was completed only two days before the release date of 19 December 1843.

I take comfort in knowing that the man who wrote the most powerful story of redemption in my personal library was an indie author too. Self-publishing is much easier nowadays, but nevertheless it too is fraught with costs and formatting difficulties. I have one last little formatting issue to solve in the Tower of Bones on page 361, and then I will be able to okay the final print version of it. Wonky formatting is the curse of my life!

This is the time of year when I watch every single version of A Christmas Carol that can be found. Alastair Sims, George C. Scott, Patrick Stewart, Mr. Magoo and now Jim Carey occupy the small screen and remind me of what is really important in life – love and family. Even Mickey Mouse has warmed the cockles of my heart in the role of Bob Cratchitt.

And now, I must go wrap presents by the flickering light of my television, as once again the Ghost of Christmas Present leads Mr. Scrooge to see what he should have seen all along – that Christmas Spirit is a year-round emotion, and has less to do with cash flow and Black Friday Shopping and more to do with charity of spirit.

If you are feeling charitable, I would recommend these fine charities:

The Salvation Army

The Union Gospel Mission

Clean Water for the World

There are so many worthy charities, and any gift you make to them will benefit millions of people. I live in the lap of luxury, and I know it. I have a good roof over my head, a reliable income and a healthy family. I am grateful for all these blessings, and if you are similarly blessed, I encourage you to make some donations to your local charities as a way of giving thanks!

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Tagged as adventure, battles, Brittain, literature, writing

December 15, 2012 · 7:43 pm

Punish me no More

I was reminded about the book, Finnegans Wake, in a blog I regularly read. James Joyce wrote the classic novel, and James was a man who loved words. He loved words the way I love Ritchie Blackmore and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He couldn’t get enough of them and when old words didn’t suffice, he invented new ones. Puns, those low class examples of verbal violence, became an art form under the pen of James Joyce.

Robert MacLean’s most recent post for his fascinating blog on morality, humor, and art, ‘The Devil’s Pleasure Garden’ is on Fellini, and Shakespeare. He rambles though Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fellini’s 8 ½ , and lightly touches on Luis Bunuel. I enjoy MacLean’s morality crises – his angst has led to some of the finest blog posts on creativity out there!

MacLean also mentions James Joyce’s incredible monster-piece, Finnegan’s Wake, quoting the delicious pun “…when they were jung and easily freudened.” I realized when I was re-reading MacLean’s blog today that the reason so many people despise puns is that for a pun to be funny one has to know what the pun is about. If a reader has never heard of Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud that pun will go right over their head. They get a sour look and say “I despise James Joyce – I don’t know what people are thinking calling him a genius.”

When people don’t understand something that makes other people laugh, they feel somehow inferior and they hate it. So my job is to not make my readers feel ignorant, and yet still write in such a way that my work is not ‘dumbed-down’. Humor is essential, and I usually love a good pun, but since the key to enjoying a good pun is knowledge and you can’t guarantee your readers will have that knowledge, it’s best to avoid puns when writing.

But for me, humor is crucial to keeping me interested in the characters. If you are going to have your characters grimly going about their work, with nothing to brighten the mood you have immediately lost me.

Shaun Allan’s brilliant work, Dark Places, is a classic example of how an author can blend humor into the darkest events, and keep his readers’ eyes on his book.

I find myself injecting humor into my work, not in a calculated way, but because it naturally flows there. Macabre humor is what keeps my family together at times—that ability to laugh at the worst times keeps us slogging through the strangest twists and turns of life. Oh, it’s a little embarrassing at times, but it gets you through it. And that is what happens with my characters. Lackland, Huw the Bard and indeed all the Rowdies rely on their sense of humor as the way to find logic in the worst of events.

In Tower of Bones, the sense of the ridiculous surfaces several times when the characters are under the most stress. Friedr is one of my favorite characters in the TOB series, as he is the most in touch with his sense of humor and his frequent lack thereof. Christoph was born with a joke falling out of his mouth, and humor is his armor.

Good grief! I just said “one of my favorites” – all of my characters are my favorites! Even the evil ones!

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Tagged as adventure, Art, battles, fantasy, humor, literature, mythology, writing

December 12, 2012 · 6:32 pm

The Alternative Guide to Alternate Realities

Today we are going on a voyage, visiting three very different realities, or as I like to think of them, Blogs. We are on a progressive blog tour, guided by the incredible Ross M. Kitson, author of the Steampunk fantasy, The Infinity Bridge. Part I of this tour is today, here on Life in the Realm of Fantasy.

Part II will be tomorrow Dec 13, 2012 at www.alisondeluca.com – Alison Deluca’s wonderful blog.

Day III will be at Ross’s own blog http://rossmkitson.blogspot.co.uk

I encourage you to check out these blogs and follow this post through all the realities it travels through!

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Alternative guide to Alternate Realities 1: Literature

Ross M. Kitson

One of the key aspects of my latest book, The Infinity Bridge, is the existence of parallel universes or alternate realities. As the book is written for the teen market upwards (MG/YA is the latest term, to avoid the patronising ‘kid’s book’ I suppose) I spent a good while musing about whether to include a meaty information dump in the next about the ideas of alternate reality. And here’s an odd thing- the more I thought about it, the more I realised that as an idea in fiction/TV/film it is so thoroughly established that I didn’t need to bother!

I think my first exposure to the idea of alternate reality came in the form of comics (which was pretty much my first form of literature anyhow). I’m going to ramble about those in a separate post—for this one I’m going to focus on alternate reality in books.

The idea that history may have taken a different course, and the ramifications of that, have been a popular theme for centuries. The first works about the topic popped up in Victorian literature (N Hawthorne’s short story ‘P Correspondence’ and C Holford’s ‘Aristopia’) but the real boom in the topic came in the pulp science fiction of the forties and fifties. During this time some awesome writers, including Heinlein, L Sprague De Camp, Poul Anderson, Andre Norton and Larry Niven turned their hand to the topic. In many of these works we have protagonist able to cross between the alternate realities, often armed with knowledge of their own historical variant, via portals or machines. In some tales they are ‘police’ figures (the best example of this being H Beam Piper’s Para-time books, which I read recently and absolutely loved) trying to address some renegade or some disruption, whereas in others the individuals are more passive in their roles, thrown into the new reality and learning of its variance as the reader dose.

The concept of parallel worlds and alternate history progressed from the pulp SF realm and into that of more popular and conventional literature. A recurrent favourite of the genre is the course of World War 2 being changed: Philip K Dick ‘The Man in the High Castle’ describes the Axis powers winning WW2 (and has a character in it who writes a book about the Allies winning!); Robert Harris ‘Fatherland’ is a similar very popular example. I’ve yet to read one where Adolf has a better moustache, however.

In MG-YA books the theme is quite a popular one too. I recently read Time Riders by Alex Scarrow in which three teens are recruited by a futuristic agency to help ‘mend time.’ The first novel explores the idea that time travellers go back in time and assist Hitler by stopping him attempting to invade Russia. The ramifications are that an alternate timeline is created, which alters the present in which the heroes occupy. My 10 year old son took the plot in his stride, and when we talked about it had no issues about the whole concept!

Purists of the SF genre would ponder whether works of alternate histories are fantasy or SF, namely is there any science behind it (I feel like Jennifer Aniston in a shampoo advert… ‘now here comes the science’).

Semantics would argue ‘alternate histories’ are not the same as ‘parallel universes.’ The idea is that parallel universes co-exist, namely they run along at the same time, whereas only one ‘alternate history’ can exist, i.e. the history has changed and continues along its new course. For me this is pretty pedantic, but since I grew up with the ideas in Star Trek, Dr Who and comics I’m hardly a hard-core sci-fi buff…

There is a school of thought in Quantum physics that gives a degree of theoretical credence to parallel worlds and alternate histories: the Many-Worlds Interpretation, or the ‘relative state formulation.’ It’s the sort of quantum theory advanced since the 1950s and sufficient to make you reach for a large spliff and say ‘Hey, man’ as someone in a brown corduroy jacket begins to explain it. Its basic tenet is familiar though- every event even at a quantum level, can go a number of ways. As a result there are a myriad set of possibilities that extend out from each other in a never ending tree. There was a famous thought experiment to do with a cat, a radioactive isotope and a vial of poison (Schrodinger’s Cat, not to be confused with Schroder’s piano in Charlie Brown). I’ve rambled enough now, so I’ll leave you to seek that one out yourself (or follow Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency where the cat had got bored and simply wandered off).

To me the popularity of the alternate history is that it forces us into questioning our world, querying about how things came to be how they are, and extending that idea from simple practical aspects (what if we flew around in airships not planes) to greater moral and ethical considerations (what if the philosophy of the Nazis were part of our own daily belief structure; what if the Americans lost the War of Independence and remained a colony of Europe, how would it alter their perspective of the world and their Constitution-based beliefs?).

I think that the idea of alternate reality, alternate history and parallel worlds is so ingrained now in our literature that it hardly needs explanation and I think a massive part of that is the progression of the idea from 50s sci-fi into the popular realms of TV and Film.

And in my next post on the topic, I’ll explore that some more….

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Part II will be posted tomorrow Dec 13, 2012 at www.alisondeluca.com – Alison Deluca’s wonderful blog. http://alisondeluca.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-inspiration-behind-adventures-of.html

Day III will be at Ross’s own blog http://rossmkitson.blogspot.co.uk and will run on December 14, 2012!

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Author Bio

Ross M Kitson is a published author in the fantasy genre, with an ongoing series (The Prism Series), a number of short stories on Quantum Muse web-zine and several stories in Steampunk and fantasy anthologies.

His debut series for Myrddin is due for release in October 2012, and is a sci-fi series set in modern day York. It is written for ages 12+, although its combination of killer androids, steam-powered airships, kick-ass heroines and action packed chases will appeal to all ages.

Ross works as a doctor in the UK specializing in critical care and anaesthesia. He is happily married with three awesome children, who nagged him incessantly to write something that they could read. His love of speculative fiction and comics began at a young age and shows no signs of fading.

You can Follow Ross on Twitter: @rossmkitson

You can find him on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/TheNuKnights http://www.facebook.com/ross.kitson.9

Ross M Kitson’s Books are available at Amazon.comUS and Amazon.comUK.