Sherwood Smith's Blog

March 4, 2021

Lagoonfire

I’ve been an ardent fan of works by Francesca Forrest ever since she published Pen Pal , a standout novel with a brush of magical realism set in contemporary times. That novel is built around letters between a little girl living precariously in a houseboat off the Gulf Coast and a political prisoner suspended above a volcano in a Southeast Asian country. Pen Pal was my favorite book of 2013.

In that novel, and in her other work, Francesca Forrest seems to be drawn to the liminal spaces in our world, whether geographically, culturally, or philosophically.

The first novella in this storyverse, The Inconvenient God, introduced Decommissioner Thirty-Seven, nicknamed Sweeting. She works for the government of the Polity, her task to decommission, through arcane rites, gods no longer worshipped or otherwise relevant.

The story, so deceptively light and gleaming with humor, went unexpected places, accelerating as it dove into questions of divinity, religion, culture, and how humans deal with the big questions.

In this new novella, we learn more about Decommissioner Thirty-Seven’s background, which is anything but conventional. Apparently one of her recent decommissionings went awry. Laloran-morna, former god of warm ocean waves, hasn’t quite been reduced to being merely human in that he spurts saltwater when upset. Sweeting, who visits the gods she has decommissioned and becomes their friend, wants to help him, especially when suspicion falls on him when seawater floods a new development project in Laloran-morna’s old territory.

But in the course of investigating, questions of sabotage arise, putting Sweeting up against the enforcer arm of the Polity, and with these questions come more questions about Sweeting’s past.

Once again, the pacing accelerates as Sweeting tries to do what’s right—and all the other characters also try to do what’s right. One of the strengths of the writing here is that no one is Villain McVillainface, evil for the sake of evil. Everybody is doing what he or she believes is best for the individuals, for the Polity. Which raises questions like, is the good of the Polity the same as the good of the people? What about individual people?

I’ve read this story three times, once in draft. Each time I fell right into it, absorbed and delighted; the story seamlessly blends a vivid setting and divine magic as Sweeting finds herself plunged deeper into big questions . . . and the eye of Order is upon her.

I’m usually wary of fantasies that deal with religion, after far too many decades of Evil Priests in Red, who exist mainly to assure the reader that yes, All Religion Is Bad, or at the other end of the spectrum, fantasies that are really religious allegory, hammeings the reader over the head with the One True Dogma.

Francesca Forrest deals with religion without the narrative telling the reader what to think, evoking the questions I find interesting: that liminal borderline between faith and rationality, the liminal world of miracles (magic) and reality, and the consequences of both. Especially when, as in life, people perceive events differently.

So I approached her for an interview, asking a couple of questions.

ME: After many years of reading fantasy, I have never read one in which deities are decommissioned. How did that idea come to you--and how does it work in that world? Do gods cooperate, and if they do, why?

FF: I got the idea from a 2013 blog post by Sonya Taaffe. She was talking about the Roman term exauguratio, which refers to the removal of a god from its temple or other sacred ground. She described a legend of two ancient gods who refused to be displaced and had to be accommodated—so in that case, no, the gods didn’t cooperate! I built on that notion in a pretty straightforward fashion in The Inconvenient God.

Until recently, the Polity was home to many, many different deities of different types—apotheoses, tutelary deities, and gods and goddesses related to the natural phenomena or human activity. People—and communities—had relationships with lots of different deities. But sometimes the relationships faded—like partners in a marriage drifting apart. In that case, a decommissioning is just a formal recognition of what’s already happened: A person who was a spouse becomes, when divorced, just another person. When a god is decommissioned, he’s no longer a god—at least not as far as the Polity is concerned. In Lagoonfire, we meet decommissioned gods who have become human beings, but that’s not the only thing a decommissioned god can become (a fact that’s relevant in the story).

Decommissionings are more dicey and more ominous when they involve the Polity trying to exert its political will in a way that doesn’t match the reality—say, by trying to decommission a deity that still has a strong following. We don’t see that explicitly in Lagoonfire, but it’s referred to. Then it comes down to a power struggle. Who is more powerful, the Polity as a whole, or the deity and its followers? In our own world, we’ve seen plenty of polities attempt to decommission various deities, with differing degrees of success.

A more effective way of gaining more control is to direct people’s attention away from instantiated deities—ones with personalities, awareness, etc.—and toward Abstractions, and that’s been the Polity’s focus more recently.

ME: Talk more about Abstractions! Are the Polity bureaucrats trying to control these, politicize these, direct these in some way?


FF: I don’t want to say too much, because I’m working on their implications for the next story, but basically, by switching people’s devotional focus to Abstractions, the Polity can remove personal relationship from the equation. You can be very devoted to the principle of justice or the notion of love, but you can’t be intimate with them. You can’t appeal to them in your need or desperation the way you can a deity with a unique personality. That in itself gives the Polity more control over people, because by moving from deities to Abstractions, the Polity is removing people's recourse to aid outside the state. As for directing them, yes: an abstraction can’t really argue with you over how it’s defined (or can it? food for thought for the next story), whereas a deity can. So from the Polity’s perspective, Abstractions both help with controlling the populace and are themselves more controllable.

Intriguing!

You can find the new story, Lagoonfire, here: and its predecessor,
The Inconvenient God, here:
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Published on March 04, 2021 08:28

February 24, 2021

BRIDGERTON and Regency romance

A quick overview of a popular genre that might be older than you think.
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Published on February 24, 2021 06:54

March 20, 2020

AMA come talk to me . . .

Today I'm doing an AMA at r/fantasy. If you have time, come talk books, reccos . . .
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Published on March 20, 2020 08:08

December 3, 2019

TIME OF DAUGHTERS is now complete

My favorite white fire projects are the ones that completely write themselves. But other times a project can turn into a white fire. TIME OF DAUGHTERS did.

It takes place a century after INDA, and deals with the aftermath of "the time of heroes," when people think there are no more heroes . . .

Book One on sale deeply discounted, especially at Book View Cafe. 2.99 Everywhere Else

Book Two, out today: Book View Cafe | Amazon | B&N
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Published on December 03, 2019 05:35

August 10, 2019

Desires and Dreams and Powers, an Interview with Rosamund Hodge

On the YA fantasy front, author Rosamund Hodge has been making quite a splash with her moody, dark, intensely atmospheric reworkings of myths and fairy tales. So when I had the chance to review this collection, Desires and Dreams and Powers, I pounced.

Though many of the works in this collection spark off a wide range of original sources, there are enough recurring themes to inspire me to raise some questions with the author, who generously gave of her time in the following exchange.

 SS : It appears to me you are using mythology and fairy tales as springboards for these tales, all of which feature swords and fairly bloody interactions. How you are engaging with the myths and old tales?

RH:I must admit that I feel a little ambivalent when I hear people talk about “engaging with” old tales. When I was coming of age as a writer, it felt like I kept finding stories that retold myths and fairy tales with the sole theme of “actually, all the happy endings are really not, because life sucks and men are pigs.” That’s not just depressing; it’s boring. What’s the point of “engaging with” old tales only to dismiss and disenchant them? So I fumed, and set those stories aside.

But perhaps I was unfair. I don’t think any authors write from the sincere conviction that their subject is banal and meaningless. *Something* drew those authors to the old tales, even when they wanted to fight them. And that’s why *I* keep going back to myths and fairy tales: because I can’t stop. Because I want to know why I can’t stop.

What are they, these stories that we turn to even when we hate them? That we rewrite, even when we’re trying to be completely original? Because these ancient, half-buried stories seem to have a strange life of their own, an independent, subterranean existence that slowly moves and shifts beneath the landscape of our culture, so that a retelling is as much discovery as it is creation.

Maybe if I write enough of them, I’ll know.

 SS: 'Engaging with' is one of those handy umbrella terms that can be a little too wide an umbrella. So too can 'in conversation with' though I have come to believe that literature is constantly in conversation with itself, mirroring (and distorting) that produces it. It's interesting, I find, to tease out which story forms keep showing up over centuries--and across cultures. Like you, I want to discover why, and I'm still not sure of the answer. 

RH: I’m not sure there is a single ultimate answer, beyond the fact that we’re all human. We love, we hate, we need, we fear. We live, and then we die. Since we all have the same circuitry in our brains, of course the same story can speak to us, of course the ghost of the same story can haunt us, even across wildly different cultures.

The story that most haunts this collection is not a myth or fairy tale, though. It’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin. I read it as a teenager, not too long before (or maybe after?) I watched the movie JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBURG, which reduced me to a sobbing mess because even at age seventeen, I was quite aware of how many skeletons my world was built upon.

It’s a question that’s haunted me ever since: how do you live, when the whole fabric of your life is fueled by someone else’s suffering? LeGuin offers the answer of walking away, but she’s writing an extremely abstract fable; it’s a lot less easy to figure out what walking away would mean in concrete terms, in this world or any other.

In DESIRES AND DREAMS AND POWERS, the stories “Apotheosis,” “Of the Death of Kings,” and “Perfect World” are all different attempts to wrestle with this issue.

SS: Though many fairy tales and myths begin with some version of 'long ago' there are as many that do not—that were contemporary. So . . . why swords instead of guns?

RH:Because swords are cool!  But as much as some part of me wants to believe that swords are Just Better, truthfully I have to acknowledge that the reason swords are cool—to me, anyway—is that I am modern.

If you look at Medieval art, you’ll notice that they paint everyone—from Cain and Abel to Hector and Achilles to the current king and bishop—in what was, for them, “modern” clothing. The idea that a tale from long ago should be painted or told in “long ago” terms was just . . . not there.

It is for us. And, frankly, I don’t have the cultural/aesthetic theory to explain why; the Medievals, with their ceaseless hearkening back to Troy and Rome and Arthur, certainly understood the concept of a vanished age. But however much I love the Medieval Ages, I am a child of modernity in this: I want my heroes to carry swords.

SS: Good point about the emerging sense of a long ago time. Like you, I prefer swords in the hands of my heroes. It takes skill to learn to use a sword, and it also can allow for time to reflect. Guns can be shot by anyone, any time, devastation after a moment of careless irritation.

It happens, but I don't want to write about it—or read about it for  entertainment. I guess I'm drawn to that tension between life as it is and life as I wish it was. Throw in the attraction of competence, and an undiminished-over-the-decades enjoyment of the swash of silk and the drift of long hair, and there's the hero with the sword, rather than the cameo-clad, buzz-cut brute with the gun.

There are a lot of stories here about sisters. I realize that many fairy tales are about sisters (and brothers) but I wondered what draws you toward using sisters?

RH:Sibling relationships fascinate me. Actually, all family relationships fascinate me, because they’re the people you love but don’t *choose* to love—and people coping with the loves and the bonds they don’t choose will always be one of my favorite things to explore.

But siblings are special. They’re the first “us” you experience against the first “them”: your fellow children against your parents. They’re the first mirrors you recognize yourself in, and the first people you need to protect.

And they’re the first people you have to betray, if you want to become somebody new.

But why sisters? Especially when I have only brothers?

Partly it’s just that I like writing about girls more than boys. But also, I write about sisters because it’s a shortcut to writing about the love between women. My own life has been utterly transformed by female friendship. I know what that passionate sweetness feels like and how powerful it can be.

But I know that to a lot of people, the only “true love” is romantic. Even those people, however, will usually accept that sisters do love each other quite a lot. If I write about sisters, I can write those feelings I know without having to spend two hundred pages justifying it.

 SS: Talk some more about those two hundred pages justifying female friendship. Some will read that as an argument for f/f (female-female romance), which is a subgenre following in the shadow of the far more popular BL (boy love)—but then you did say that for a lot of people the only “true love” is romantic. Stories showing the full range of love—storge, as Lewis says, the empathy-love, or philia, the friend-love, and also agape, the ultimate selfless love, I think it interesting. Even vital. Rather than limiting oneself to eros. Though eros sells books!

RH: Well, I have written those two hundred pages (and more!) in my BRIGHT SMOKE, COLD FIRE duology. That was, I suppose, my most “subversive” engagement with an old story, because in those books I rewrote the story of Romeo and Juliet to have friendships that were just as important as the romance (and narratively, perhaps more important—because the relationship suspense came from the friendships, not the romance).

In this book, as you noticed, there are a lot more sisters than friends. But I did sometimes write pure friendship. Often that was for thematic reasons: “The Lamps Thereof Are Fire and Flames,” despite its title drawn from the highly-erotic Song of Songs, is an explicitly anti-romantic story—or at least anti the idea that romance is the only (to quote the story) “love without which all the world was dust.”

I used a friendship, not sisterhood, as the central relationship in that story because it made a better foil. Like romance, friendship is love for a stranger, freely chosen for no reason but that stranger’s beauty in the friend’s eyes. (And yes, I realize that last sentence made friendship sound romantic. That’s my whole point. We don’t really have words to express what it’s like to adore and treasure the beauty in a person you don’t want to have sex with.)

Of course, I’m not a 100% intentional writer. In “Three Girls Who Met a Forestborn,” one of the three central relationships is a friendship. I could get all cute and English-major-y and pretend there was a planned contrast in how each of the sections focused on a different type of relationship: siblings, then romance, then friends.

But really, the first section centers on siblings because it’s a foil to the story of Tyr and Zisa in CRIMSON BOUND. The second centers on romance because I went “Medieval France = courtly love!!” and also I wanted to write a story vaguely referencing “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight.” And the third part is centered on friendship because . . . that’s what I felt like writing.
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Published on August 10, 2019 21:12

October 25, 2018

Liminal Stories

An interview with the author of The Inconvenient God.
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Published on October 25, 2018 02:18

September 22, 2018

Memorable Masquerades

A dash of the history behind my newly-published anthology It Happened at the Ball.
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Published on September 22, 2018 06:03

July 4, 2018

1776: The World Turned Upside Down

Serial Box is launching a new series today that takes an entertaining narrative overview of the American Revolution.
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Published on July 04, 2018 07:21

December 4, 2017

Fascinating Memoirs--Napoleonic era

Today at Book View Cafe, a post about Laure Junot's memoir, which was full of details about how life changed during the Revolution and after, then during Napoleon's era.
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Published on December 04, 2017 09:14

November 18, 2017

Not Now Not Ever

New YA author on the scene Lily Anderson is back with a second book that I enjoyed as much as the first. Both books are about the pluses and perils of smart kids, using classics as a substrate.

So I did a short interview.
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Published on November 18, 2017 06:19