"I am three hundred and sixty years old and I pride myself, not unjustly, on having enjoyed twice as many lovers as I have years. I have loved Men, Minotaurs, Centaurs, and Tritons and no one has ever complained that Zoe, the Dryad of Crete, has failed in the act of love."Here’s one of my favorite speculative fiction authors, and it was hard picking a reasonable book to represent him. I have a stack of his paperbacks, garnered over the years in used book stores and thrift shops, and they are some of the books I’ve held onto through any number of rigorous book purges.
What:The Forest of Forever, by Thomas Burnett Swann, was originally published in 1971. Many of Swann’s slim little volumes appeared during that decade, lovely retellings of Greco-Roman myths and alternate histories full of mythological creatures. Dryads, centaurs, minotaurs, and fauns fill the pages. Swann depicted same-sex relationships as a matter of fact in a way that nowadays seems well ahead of his time.
Who: If you love gentle fantasy, this is a splendid entrance into Swann’s world. Particularly for those who love mythological creatures, you’ll find a full cast, including some magical creatures invented by Swann.
When: Read this when you’re a little down. You may well find that Swann becomes one of your comfort reads. It’s not a thick fantasy by any means, (my copy is 155 pages) but if you finish it too fast, there’s a sequel to Forest of Forever, Day of the Minotaur.
Why: Read Swann for an interesting take on fantasy. I’ve always thought that his world would be a fabulous one in which to set a role-playing game. Also read him to see same-sex relationships worked in seamlessly, without the “OMG look how socially conscious I am” flavor that sometimes intrudes.
Where and how: Curl up in a corner for this one, with a mug of some pleasantly flowery tea. Be aware the time will pass all too quickly. Be aware there’s plenty more Swann out there, though you may have to hunt for some of the rarer titles.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
You Should Read This: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American editor, writer, and lecturer whose short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman’s descent into madness, is often revisited in college literature classes. She was a single mother who supported herself by writing — no small accomplishment today, let alone at the time she was doing so, the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Herland is often treated as though it stands alone, but it’s actually the middle volume of a trilogy, preceded by Moving the Mountain in 1911 and followed by With Her in Ourland in 1916. The work was originally published as a serial in a magazine called The Forerunner that Gilman edited; it did not appear as a complete book until 1979, when Pantheon Books published it.
Herland is a utopian novel, in which three men, Vandyk (the narrator), Terry, and Jeff stumble across a civilization where the women reproduce asexually and there are no men. This turns out to lead not to a perfect civilization, but certainly one that seems more appealing than the one Gilman found herself in. Gilman uses the book as a device with which to explore constructed ideas of gender. It is an appealing society in many others; in others, it’s a bit cold and calculating. Girls who are overly rebellious or mouthy, for example, will not be allowed to reproduce.
One of the things that’s refreshing about the book is that it’s not written as though the lack of males is a deficit that warps society. Instead, it’s simply the way things are, and the Herlanders seem capable of getting along quite well without it.
Gilman was one of the important suffrage speakers of her time and a bit of a polymath. If you want to go further into her writing, I suggest a piece of nonfiction, her work on economics, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, which originally appeared in 1898.
You Should Read This: An Appreciation of Andre Norton
My high school years were steeped in reading from several F&SF authors. Among them, the most influential was quite probably Andre Norton. In arranging my book collection in those early days, Norton was always satisfying, because she wrote a gazillion books and I had most of them. In fact, I know three fantasy landscapes well because I wandered them so often as a young reader: Narnia, Middle Earth, and Norton’s Witch World.
The book I’m working on right now, (working title CIRCUS IN THE BLOODWARM RAIN) tries to get at the feel of some of those books: a protagonist moving across a mysterious landscape laden with both treasures and perils from the past, along the lines of Breed to Come, Forerunner Foray, or Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D.
Norton, the first female SFWA Grand Master, wrote both fantasy and science fiction, both awesome, but I have a particular fondness for her science fiction, like Moon of Three Rings, Judgement on Janus, and Sargasso of Space. Her Free Traders have a gritty feel that predates many other works with a similar feel, like Star Wars or C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur series.
The problem with talking about Norton is that she’s both prolific and consistent, making it hard to find stand-out books to recommend. So here, rather than a single book out of her 314 titles, are several possible entrances into her work.
The Witch World series: Like a lot of Norton’s works, this hovers somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, but ends up sliding pretty firmly into fantasy. There are predecessors, long gone, who have left behind objects of great peril and power, and rival factions with differing degrees of what is either magic or technology that amplifies psychic powers. Technically, the series should start with Witch World, where Simon Tregarth of Earth finds himself transported to that world, but my own suggestion would be to back into the series the way I did, starting with Year of the Unicorn and its sequel, The Jargoon Pard, (the overall series is made up of a number of sub-ones) which will give you the flavor of the world before explanations begin.
The Solar Queen series: The Solar Queen is the name of a Free Trader spaceship. these are early Norton, many originally written as Andrew North. Look to the earliest ones — Sargasso of Space, Plague Ship, Voodoo Planet, and Postmarked the Stars — later cowritten ones lack some of the energy of the early books.
The Beast Master series: Norton often uses animals in her writing, sometimes as protagonists, but also as helpmates, as with the genetically altered animals that companion and assist telepathic ex-soldier Hosteen Storm. Like the Solar Queen series, the earlier ones written by Norton solo are stronger.
In an earlier post, I mentioned Robert A. Heinlein as someone to read not just because so many of his works are classics in the field but because he’s problematic at times. Norton, on the other hand, never is (at least to my memory). Many of her protagonists are strong females, while others are representative of minorities not found elsewhere in YA F&SF of the time, such as The Sioux Spaceman.
So…I salute you, Alice Mary Norton, and deeply regret never meeting you. You’re one of the people that shaped my writing, and you did that to a significant degree. Here’s to your stories, and all the readers who will find them in the centuries (or so I hope) to come.
One Response