If you want to tell a story in a modern setting, you often have to look at the past to figure out how you got here and now — even if, in the here and now, you want to write a fantasy story. Mike Shevdon learned this in the course of writing Sixty-One Nails, in which a desire to tell a story set today meant he had to follow paths that lead to the past, in the process discovering, as Faulkner once memorably put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Here’s Shevdon to explain why.

MIKE SHEVDON

When I started writing Sixty-One Nails, I wanted to write fantasy set in the real world – the world of shopping malls, CCTV cameras and mobile phones. I wanted to create a feeling that if you were quick and observant enough, you might see something quite extraordinary. I wanted magic in the now.

This is easy to say, but it immediately spawns a host of questions. Where is the magic? Who’s doing it and what are they using it for? Most of all, why don’t we know about it? After all, if people were able to do magic, it would be obvious, right? We’d be able to go into stores and buy it.

As I began researching the novel I realised how little people actually see. So much of modern life is about attracting your attention to adverts or warnings, that we routinely block out anything that isn’t shouting for our attention. It occurred to me, therefore, that it wouldn’t take very much to be completely unnoticed – not invisible, just not seen. I began to postulate that there could be another race of beings living alongside humanity, unseen by most people; the creatures of folk-tales and faerie stories. What if they existed and were part of our world, but we just didn’t notice them?

That spawned a whole new set of questions. If they exist, why aren’t there any records of them? Where are the fossil remains? Why has no-one photographed them? Why don’t they show up on CCTV or trigger burglar alarms? Where do they live? What do they eat?

I started reading and researching English folk-lore and discovered layers of stories like sedimentary rock, with the oldest stories often revealing more ominous themes. The Victorians gentrified fairies and gave them flower petal hats and mushroom houses to live in – Barbie for the nineteenth century – but before that there were other stories with a darker tone.

A number of themes emerged. The appearance and disappearance of creatures and people, often accompanied by a loss of time. Abduction and replacement of children with something older and not necessarily human is also frequent. Sex crops up, often as a single night of passion which seems like a dream once daylight returns. Deals and bargains occur, often to the benefit of the human party, only to fall apart when the human gets greedy or tries to take the source of the power for themselves. These themes fed into the imaginary world hidden beneath the surface of everyday life.

The questions became opportunities. Why are they so interested in sex, fertility and children? Don’t they have any children of their own? What if they live a very long time and therefore breed very slowly? What if they breed so slowly that a catastrophic failure in fertility goes unnoticed until it’s too late? What if they’re dying out? What if they’re the last of their kind? What happens when they discover that a union with humanity is fertile? What happens to the children of that union? Would the half-breeds be a welcome boon, the saving of a dying race? Or would they be gene pollution for an ancient and noble race?

What if it’s both?

As part of the research I started looking into the relationship between faerie-folk and iron. Its use as a talisman against magic is still present in today’s society, which is why horse-shoes hang over doorways and are used as symbols at weddings. It’s why you find iron nails embedded in the roof-beams of old houses and why blacksmiths are considered lucky.

While researching horse-shoes, I came across something unique. In London each year, in the Royal Courts of Justice, which is home to the Supreme Court, a ceremony is conducted as it has been since the year 1211. It’s the oldest legal ceremony in England barring the Coronation, and it involves the payment of two quit rents, a medieval mechanism allowing a person to ‘go quit’ and avoid an obligation to their baronial lord by making a payment or delivering a service in its stead.

The first of these quit rents is for wasteland called ‘The Moors’ in Shropshire, an area well-known for its ancient iron-workings, and it consists of two knives, one blunt and one sharp. The knives are made by a smith and presented to the Queen’s Remembrancer, an official who is also a senior master of the Royal Courts of Justice. The knives are tested in court to verify that the blunt knife will dent, but not cut, a hazel stick of one year’s new growth, and the sharp knife will cut clean through it.

The second Quit Rent is for a forge in Tweezers Alley, just off the Strand and not far from where the ceremony takes place. The forge is no longer there, but the rent is still paid. It consists of six iron horse-shoes and sixty-one nails, all of which are counted out each year in court. The horse shoes are massive, sized for a Flemmish war-horse, and are the oldest known to exist in England.

The ceremony takes place each autumn (I have been to several now) and next year will be the eight-hundredth anniversary. The question that occurred to me was why, after 800 years, though numerous different governments and changes of political system, an industrial revolution, a civil war and two world wars, was a ceremony involving horse-shoes and iron knives still being performed at the heart of the realm?

The answer to that question forms the core of Sixty-One Nails and inspired the title of the book. It is a tale of magic hidden in plain sight, of danger and darkness threading back through human history. It is the story of a man who has a heart attack on the London Underground and is revived by an old lady who tells him that the reason he is alive is that he is not entirely human. It is about his fight for survival, and his discovery of the magic hidden in the real world.

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Sixty-One Nails: Amazon|Barnes&Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel in .epub format. Here is the PDF.Visit Mike Shevdon’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

I’ve been a follower of Matthew Hughes’ work since Old Man’s War and one of his novels had the same “birthday,” and that following has been rewarded with a series of works that think deeply on a number of issues, along with enough plot twists and turns to keep things interesting along the way. Template, his latest novel, is more of the same, with a panoramic view not only a series of worlds, but with a series of people and cultures, and the things that make each culture unique… or perhaps more accurately, uniquely corrupted. Here’s Hughes to tell you more.

MATTHEW HUGHES:

Not so long ago, if you called a man a liar, it was coats off and outside, pal. Go back a few generations farther, it was sabers or pistols at dawn.

Reputation was everything. “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” meant that when good standing was lost, all was lost with it. Better to die, or at least take a beating, than be branded a weasel.

Then something changed. Now people go on “reality” TV to lie and cheat their way to fame and fortune. And their blatant weaselhood doesn’t earn them public contempt. Instead, they become celebrities.

These aren’t secret agents who lie to defend their country. They’re doing it for the money and a chance to appear on Good Morning America. And every time there’s an audition, tens of thousands more rush forward and beg for a chance to connive and backstab their way to the top.

The thing that has changed, it seems to me, is that the role that honor used to play in our society has been supplanted by greed. I see it as a side-effect of the social transformation wrought by marketing in my lifetime: today we no longer think of ourselves primarily as citizens of a society, with rights and responsibilities; instead, we have become consumers in an economy whose only purpose is getting and spending. You know: “This means war! Everybody go shopping!”

In the old days, honor was an extension of pride, especially the esteem of our fellows. People might do something unworthy, but they sure didn’t want anyone to know about it. Our grandparents’ world was built around vanity. Our times are driven by avarice. We want it all, and we want everyone to know about it. And how we got it doesn’t much matter.

Being classically educated (well, I’ve read some really old books), I am aware that greed and pride are two of the seven deadly sins. I once got to wondering if there were societies based on any of the other five. For those of you who don’t read really old books, the rest of the seven big bads are: anger, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

Anger was easy: Sparta, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Envy? What about all those Asian societies where it is crucial not to lose face? And mini-cultures within our own sphere where keeping up with the Joneses is a driving force?

That’s about as far as I followed the train of thought, when I first had this insight eight or nine years ago. I was only looking for an idea that would underpin an 800-word guest column for the Vancouver Sun. Writing satirical op-eds was one way I kept my name in front of my client base back when I was a freelance speechwriter in British Columbia.

So I wrote a column on the vanity-avarice switch. Then, about a year later, I was working on a novel called Template. It would have been my second book for Tor if the first, Black Brillion, had sold more copies. Template is a Jack Vance-influenced, multi-planet space opera, about an Oliver Twistish orphan whose origins are shrouded in mystery and who has to go from world to world trying to find out who is trying to kill him and why.

I thought it would be cool to work in the idea that all societies are based on one of the seven sins, and take my wandering hero through exemplars. That turned out to be easier said than done. Pride, greed, anger and envy were no problem. The hero came from a world where every human interaction was an economic transaction; that took care of greed. He visited a society on Old Earth where money was considered disgusting but people knew their social worth precisely and he met a fellow from another world where people endured excruciating agony rather than say uncle.

To look at a society based on envy, I had him make a brief stop on a planet where everybody constantly sought to score one-upmanship points against each other without admitting it–passive-aggression as a way of life. A world built around anger was part of the dark secret behind the hero’s origins.

I didn’t want to do a world populated by overeaters (too easy). So I extended the meaning of gluttony beyond mere chomping and swilling to account for a society whose members tended to go overboard on whatever their interest were–imagine a world full of completist collectors.

Lust was a little trickier. Of course I toyed with the idea of a Hollywoodesque planet where sex appeal was the only determinant of status, but it kept coming out as buffoonish. In the end I opted for a sinister cult of decadent Old Earth aristocrats–a secret society called the Immersion–whose members vied “to encompass the full depth and breadth of amatory experience and thus enable themselves to break through to a new realm of consciousness they call Prismatic Abundance.”

With sloth, I confess I gave myself a pass. I will argue that any society based on doing as little as possible would soon die out or be supplanted by some invading culture that was powered by a more energetic iniquity.

All taken in all, I think I made the idea work well enough to support Template’s overarching theme: that there are all different ways to be a human being among other human beings, and that the most important thing in life is to discover where (and perhaps to whom) you belong, then go there and make the best life you can.

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Template: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s|Paizo

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Matthew Hughes’ news page.

Suffering: Sure, it’s a pain in the ass, but does it make for good art? And more to the point, if you make your characters suffer (which is objectively at least more comfortable than having yourself suffer), will their struggles help to perfect their stories? Perhaps it’s not the only way to tell a tale, but it’s an interesting way to tell it, no?

These are some of the questions Anthony Huso’s been rolling around in his head on the occasion of the release of his debut fantasy novel The Last Page. And after considerable thought on the nature of suffering, angst and depression, he’s come to some conclusions. And as luck would have it, here he is to report on what he’s discovered.

ANTHONY HUSO:

So here’s what happens.

One day you wake up and realize, crap.  I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.  Somehow, my world just exploded, and I’m watching the remnants float down like burning pages.

It’s bad form to wallow in misery but most of us have been there, on that day when we didn’t know if we were going make it.  And –- surprise — tomorrow wasn’t a big improvement.  Nor was the tomorrow after that.  It’s not that we want to wallow.  But it takes time to adjust after calamity.

Coincidentally, it takes time to write a book.

John [not Scalzi] first showed me Vonnegut’s words: “You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed.”

Exclusionary assertions aside there’s truth enough there that you can excavate it with a spoon.  Angst is a reliable minter of art.

Angst also sells because we relate to it.

In the past couple of decades we’ve witnessed a brand of anxiety that only the internet could unearth.  The sort that stuffs the whole of humanity into a runaway train and sends it down the track at breakneck.  This is the thrill ride of 2012, meteor, super volcano, mega tsunami, disaster-porn that carries an acknowledged titillation value.  Look at this.  It would make a great B-movie. 

Maybe we’re making movies like this because as our knowledge of the universe expands, so does our ability to catalog erenow inscrutable catastrophic threats to our existence.  Quite naturally, the notion of extinction gets reactions from creatures easily smashed or burned by rocks falling out the sky.  So we make and watch disaster movies and think, wow. 

Now, we probably don’t go to bed worried that the end is just around the corner.  I hope not.  But there is — I think — a heuristic dread lining our collective psyche.  In other words, we do actually think about it from time to time.

In The Last Page I wanted to bring some of that fringe hysteria into the plot while keeping it analogously anchored.  Understand that my goal was for the characters to not be fretting constantly about some esoteric doomsday scenario.  Rather it’s background noise, which I think makes it far more uncertain and believable.  Think of it as a subconscious horror, a fly sucking fluid from the corner of your sleeping eye.

You’re probably getting the sense that the world where The Last Page takes place is fairly dark.  Indeed, I would call it brutal.  It is a place that exacts its toll indiscriminately from every character within its bounds.

Let’s begin with Caliph Howl, the first character to appear in the book.  When he assumes control of his backwater country, the political landscape does not pause for him to get his footing.  He sees his own values compromised by degrees.  He feels the sting of being lampooned by the press and the pain of repeated betrayal.

But to make this fantasy, and to make it fantastic, I needed to pile considerably more and far weirder pressures on top of him, so that he could really struggle.

This role is filled by Sena Iilool (though she would say she never intended for things to go the way they did).  Being Caliph’s college obsession, she is for him the harbinger of things fantastic.  While Caliph is embroiled in pragmatic affairs: paperwork, meetings and espionage — Sena is up to her earlobes in hexes, fables and the occult.  Their relationship might be summarized as the empirical vs. the theoretical.  This results in a slow-moving fracture across both of their realities.  Eventually all preconceptions shatter and the accompanying bottoms fall out.

To clarify Caliph and Sena’s dynamic within the story: whenever you have a boy-meets-girl-thing it’s natural to ask, as Fred Savage once did, whether this is a kissing book.

I admit the story to have torture, revenge, chases, escapes, true [dysfunctional] love, miracles…

But The Last Page isn’t a light-hearted romp.  Caliph and Sena are cautious rivals, best friends and bitter enemies depending on the chapter.  Their relationship is not easy to define because, if it was, the book (and its companion Black Bottle out 2011) would be a much diminished tale.  And the grim struggles and fine lines between obsession and love, fidelity and cowardice, of rationalizing the accomplishment of good things through dark means, I think, would be significantly undermined.

Sometimes plots evolve out of big ideas like: what if this crazy dude parked his spacecraft at the edge of a singularity and murdered his crew; then turned them into zombies and fitted chrome pantyhose eggs over their faces?  That would be cool!

And other times, plots evolve from the characters themselves.  Plot = struggle.

Sure I’m offering zeppelins, sex, gun fights, Lovecraftian god-things and a haunted building outside of town.  That’s scratching the surface.  And I hope it is entertaining.  Under the hood, however, I have to confess a secret hope that I’ve also delivered a story that resonates with what happens under real pressure, real heartache, when everything goes suddenly very wrong.

Calamity!  What do you do now?  That’s the big idea.  Rather than slaying the personification with a weapon and taking its treasure home, I think real people are just hoping to survive, even before they try to start making sense of what happened.

And that’s the true part.

One day my world blew up.  I was shell shocked.  But I was lucky.  I found my keyboard.  I wrote this story.

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The Last Page: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Anthony Huso’s Blog. Follow him on Twitter.

It’s well known that one of the best ways to get someone to do something is to tell them that they shouldn’t do it. In the case of author Zoe Ferraris, the thing she was told she shouldn’t do is write about a particular character — one whose origins are outside the usual experience of her audience. Two books on, this character is alive and well, so there. Here’s Ferraris to tell you about the character, the world he lives in, and why she keeps on with him in her newest novel, City of Veils.

ZOE FERRARIS:

City of Veils comes from a big idea and a small one.

In Jeddah, my ex-husband once brought me to a jacket bazaar. Yes, there was a whole market devoted to outwear in the hottest country in the world. Furs, pea coats, leather, you name it. He wanted to buy a “Columbo coat” – a Peter Falk trench coat – and set off to solve mysteries. He was bored. But I was electrified. It occurred to me that there were no Muslim investigators in crime fiction, and I thought that it might be fun to write one.

That was the small idea.

City of Veils started out as a serial killer novel back in the early 00s. (I go with the Brits and call them the naughties.) I set an American serial killer loose in Saudi Arabia. He was happily killing people but mostly chasing down one American woman whose husband had conveniently abandoned her in the one country on earth where she couldn’t fend for herself, being a woman and an American and someone not very good at wearing a veil. I sent the novel to an agent who said that the story of the American woman was great, but that my little subplot about “that Arab investigator” needed to be ejected into space.

I was so aggrieved at being told what to eject that I went out and wrote a whole book about my Arab investigator, Nayir Sharqi, which turned into my first novel, Finding Nouf.

I guess I’m still aggrieved, because City of Veils is basically that original story, minus the serial killer. We have an American woman abandoned by her husband. We have a brutal murder in which her husband may have been involved. We have a chase through the desert. And most importantly, we have a sandstorm. But still, that Arab investigator persists in taking up most of the book!

I arrived in Saudi Arabia with the notion that women were deeply, darkly oppressed by a conspiracy of ignorant, cruel, patronizing men. Then I started meeting my ex-husband’s friends, basically a bunch of twenty-something guys who wanted nothing more extravagant than to find a decent Friday-night date in a country where they weren’t allowed to talk to women outside their family. What’s a man to do? Turns out that in courtship, gender segregation is just as difficult for men as it is for women.

Nayir’s problem is even bigger than that. He has no experience with women. So when he finally gets to talk to one (putting his religious convictions aside), he tries his damndest not to mess it up, because he’s fairly certain that it would take no effort at all to mess everything up. I really want him to have love, I really do. But the problem is big enough that it’s going to take more than two books to solve it.

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City of Veils: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Zoe Ferraris’ Blog. Follow her on Twitter.