Fantastic News

John C Wright just posted:

It appears that, unbeknownst to me, SWAN KNIGHT’S SON is up for the Planetary Award. If you maintain a blog, you can vote.

I just finished Swan Knight's Son, the first of the Moth and Cobweb books, and absolutely love it. It is easily as poetic and vivid as anything of his I've read. If anything, it has the deepest contrasts without pushing to extremes. For all that I love the Metachronopolis or Night Lands stories, they are about finding light in the darkness. Sure, Metachronopolis looks prettier, but it's a thin veneer over ugly. In the Night Lands, it is even more extreme. There is a wide, sparsely populated gulf between the dark, and the point of light we cling to.

In SKS, not only do we see the extremes - and the dark can be very dark, and the love, the warmth, very bright - but a lot of the gamut in between. Every bit of it, from the conversations with animals as a-matter-of-course, to the beauty and darkness of the elf battle and the final fight to protect a kidnapped infant, evokes life, breathes poetry, and a depth of myth and vision behind it weighted with the progress of time. I especially loved the conversations with Ruff, the dog, who like most things in magic, is not all he seems either.

Do yourself a favor. If you haven't read JCW's Castalia works, go pick up Awake in the Night Land, City Beyond Time, The Iron Chamber of Memory, but first, read Swan Knight's Son. 

Oh, and go vote. 

A Parable for the Dragon Awards (and Congratulations)

In his inimitable style, Dave Freer gives us a parable for the inaugural Dragon awards.

A little parable for you: Once upon a time, some Bavarian beer fanciers set up a beer-fest in field outside their small town. Now, because nothing goes quite so well with good beer as good smoked and cured pork, soon there were people providing the same, and happy buxom lasses serving beer, eisbein, various pork sausages and ham. Then there was an oom-pah band. Everyone had a great time, and the festival grew, people came from far and wide, and stall-holders made money.

A carpet seller saw the success and set up a stall in the corner. Now he came from a Muslim country, and didn’t drink alcohol, or eat pork. But people felt a little sorry for him and he did some good business. And some of his carpets were rather nice. It would be intolerant to be nasty and some diversity was good, Ja. The next year there were three carpet sellers. And then the year after twenty…

Oddly, numbers visiting the town for the festival were down, and there was less money to go around.

Read the whole thing. The fun bit here is where he compares the SJW's in the Hugos to a certain group of religious extremists. I'm not sure who it's more insulting to, but they certainly scratch each other's back.

Meanwhile, congratulations to everyone who won. It's good to see the winners list looks very little like the Hugo awards.

Swan Knight's Son: The Green Knight's Squire Book One (Moth & Cobweb 1)

Castalia house has a new book out by the inimitable John C Wright, and the beginning of yet another new series.

We are very pleased and proud to announce the beginning of a brand new YA fantasy series from John C. Wright that we anticipate may one day be worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as classic fantasy series such as The Dark is Rising and The Chronicles of Prydain. The book is the first in a new duodecilogy called Moth & Cobweb, and the first book in the series is THE GREEN KNIGHT'S SQUIRE: SWAN KNIGHT'S SON. 

Gilberic Parzival Moth is a strange and lonely boy who has grown up without a father, raised by a single mother who moves from town to town in fear of something she will not name. His only friends are animals, with whom he has always been able to speak. But when he awakens one night at the Thirteenth Hour, and sees for the first time the dark reality of the secret rule of Elf over Man, he begins to learn about his true heritage, the heritage of Twilight

 The praise of John Wright is not exaggeration. He professes he is not worthy of comparison to Gene Wolfe, but if true, he is not far shy of those heights of literary mastery. The Countdown to the Eschaton series is riproaring fun with too many deep concepts assumed and thrown away as one-liners to count. The stories in City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis are a fresh look at the perils of time travel. And Awake in the Nightland? A masterpiece.