OK, it’s been a while since we had one of those, but here’s Colin Harvey on his novel Winter Song and his use of Icelandic culture.
(I’m still MIA and will remain so for another week or so. Very very busy)

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I have two novels which came out nearly simultaneously –at least by geological time scales—in the US last year. Because Winter Song was actually published in the UK in 2009, I’ve tended to focus guest blogs on Damage Time, which was published worldwide for the first time in 2010.

But knowing Aliette’s fascination for cultures, particularly of the non-traditional/Western European variety, I thought it might prove interesting if I stepped back a year and talked about Winter Song instead.

Winter Song actually grew out of a visit to Borganes in western Iceland in late 2007. It’s a fairly small, everyday-looking town through which one can imagine the tumbleweed blowing on a Saturday night – or afternoon, for that matter.

But as we learned on a visit to the municipal museum, the first settlement in Iceland took place only a few kilometres away. The museum exhibits included films and still photographs of vast numbers of birds and animals, all shown in a dark, enclosed room simulatinga bird-watcher’s hide.
Outside were racks of books about Egil’s Saga, and other medieval stories; these are the literature of the Norsemen whose longships struck terror into Irish monks, and Saxon men and women from Scotland to Normandy. Illustrations and models in another display showed Egil’s Saga in model form, and brought it vividly to life. Here was a man who as a child had smashed the skull of a competitor during a race because he couldn’t bear to lose, who regularly murdered his enemies under truce, who was ugly, yet fascinated women with both his poetry and his vitality, who lived into his eighties, and even when he was a frail old man, still delighted in making mischief.

The actual settlement of Iceland didn’t take place until the mid 9th century, when the the countryside was covered with dense woodland inhabited by what seemed to be almost unlimited numbers of birds and animals, particularly game and wild fowl. It’s hard to envision today, when there is barely a hundred square miles of forest across a land four-fifths the size of England, and nine-tenths of that is replanted (most Iceland trees are still so young that there’s an Icelandic joke that says if you’re ever lost in an Icelandic forest…just stand up) — forest nowadays accounts for just one third of one per cent of Iceland’s total landmass.

But the climate cooled, deforestation stripped the landscape of cover, and life grew increasingly difficult. Growing cereal crops became all but impossible — Instead settlers baked bread from moss, seeds or whatever constituents they could obtain. For the next three centuries life became ever more difficult, but even though deprivation and isolation made life ever harder, Icelandic chieftains founded the first parliament; disputes could be settled peaceably (although many chieftains succumbed to the urge to settle arguments by force) and laws were passed establishing when men and women could travel without becoming outlaws. In the end Iceland passed into Norway’s sphere of influence and the world’s first parliamentary democracy ended for seven centuries.

Many or the reviews focused on how bleak and harsh the novel was, whereas i actually softened the reality; I thought it best to omit the incest that too often happened on isolated farmsteads deprived of outside visitors, and I felt that dwelling too long on having to eat moss, bark or even mud would be too much for modern sensibilities – we aren’t as tough as our forebears. Indeed, the harsh but beautiful Icelandic landscape kills one or two visitors every year, often the more experienced tourists lulled into complacency. Even now it is a harsh landscape, and before GPS, cellphones and aircraft, it must have been almost unbearable. Almost…. but humans are tougher than one might think. They would need to be to survive Isheimur.

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Colin Harvey was born in Cornwall in 1960, and now lives between Bristol and Bath. He worked on a kibbutz and in a night shelter in the Midlands before joining Unilever. Colin worked for Unilever for over 20 years, including launching Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in Iceland, and as part of the project teams rolling out Sunsilk Colour Active Shampoo in Australia, and Vaseline Body Butter in North America.

Colin has been a freelance writer since 2007. He reviewed for Strange Horizons for six years, and served on the Management Committe of the Speculative Literature Foundation for five, during which time he co-judged the Travel Research Grant and the Older Writers Grant.

His short stories have appeared in Albedo One, Gothic.net, Song of the Siren and Speculations, as well as several original anthologies. His novels are all available on Amazon.

Colin’s anthology Killers was nominated for the Black Quill Award and the British Fantasy Award.

Diana Wynne Jones is dead. Ugh.

The first book I read of hers was “Charmed Life (aka Ma soeur est une sorcière), in its lovely first French translation with cute line drawings. I later turned back to her while living in London as a teenager (and feeling a teensy bit bluesy)–discovering and loving all her books. Lately, I’d started reading the Chrestomancy books again, and finding them just as awesome as they’d been years ago.

As Chaz says “Books are magic, but apparently not magic enough”. I alternate between saddened and wanting to kick something.

So, day after tomorrow is the deadline for nominating for the Hugos–for which, like the Nebulas, I’m sadly behind, especially on the novels. But, as for the Nebulas, I read some awesome short fiction this year, so here are my suggestions again:

-”Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Short Story): a great story of immigration, alienation and man vs. machine. Available on the SFWA forums, or in the e-edition of Interzone 229 (available at Fictionwise).
-”Flying in the Face of God” by Nina Allan (Novelette): about space explorations, its cost and its impact on those who are left behind. Available here as a PDF from the TTA press website.
-”The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers from Beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Novella): a tale of a woman summoned again and again from beyond death to practise magic–dealing with loss, prejudice and the evolution of cultures and countries, and a great reversal on the “summoning demons” trope. Available here from Subterranean.
ETA: may I also recommend Rochita Loenen-Ruiz for the Campbell Award? In addition to the Interzone story, check out this awesome one at Fantasy Magazine.

(my own stuff is here if you feel like trying it out: “The Jaguar House in Shadow”, an Aztec alt-hist novelette on friendship, betrayal and honour, is on the Nebula Awards shortlist; and of course I’d be pretty darn honoured if you deemed it worthy)

So…
I have two weeks, one (English) manuscript to rewrite, and one (French) manuscript to read through. And er, large amount of stupid administrative stuff to do.
So I’m going into submarine mode: this blog may be updated occasionally, but it certainly won’t be my priority. Same for twitter, LJ, FB, and also for emails. Do poke me again if it’s urgent and I don’t answer you.

Current mood:

determined

-Reviews of Harbinger of the Storm by Antony at SFbook.com and by Josh Vogt at Examiner.com. And one of Servant of the Underworld by Hannah Mariska at Fantasy Faction
-Also, if you feel like voting for Servant of the Underworld in the BSC Book Tournament, by all means go ahead (it’s set against Ian McDonald’s superlative The Dervish House, though…)

Aka lazy (wo)man’s recipe. This is a mainstay of Chinese/Vietnamese takeaways in France–there are many, many variants depending on whether you marinade the beef (and what there is in the marinade, which can range from soy sauce to nước mắm), and what you then serve it with. Amusingly, the Vietnamese name of this is thịt bò xào hành tây, literally “beef meat sautéed with Western onions”!

(yes, the pic is slightly scary due to poor lighting. I swear this tastes better than it looks).

As it happened, I had leftover yellow onions from last week’s phở, and extra limes from buying a whole bag. So I marinated in nước chấm This would actually be better served with rice vermicelli, but I had leftover egg noodles which needed consuming. See? Frankenstein cooking.

 

Et voilà!

NOTE: If you do decide to go for rice vermicelli rather than egg noodles, the procedure is the same, except you’ll probably want to skip the sesame oil (it doesn’t go well with rice vermicelli, in my limited experience).

It occurred to me I did this kind of post for Ancient China, but never got around to it for the Aztecs…

-The jungle. Ok, if I had a cookie every time the romantic and torrid jungle atmosphere was mentioned in connection with the Aztecs, my kitchen would be overflowing. The Aztecs were a people of Central Mexico, with NO jungles whatsoever in a radius of several dozen kilometers. Their country was wet marshes; and after the wet marshes, high mountains with dry and cold weather. To get the jungle, you had to go down to the south–a week’s march or more, beyond the boundaries of the empire for most of its existence–, and enter the bits that are now the South of Mexico and Guatemala. Those are Maya lands (see below for Aztecs, Mayas and Incas). There is a lot of jungle-based imagery in Aztec mythology (jaguars and quetzals, for instace), precisely because those jungles were far-off lands the Aztecs didn’t see every day and thus acquired an aura of magic and preciousness, a bit like the Orient in the 19th Century became this glamorous place where everything was larger than life.
And Apocalypto is a terrible movie about Mesoamerican people, incidentally (it depicts life among the Maya, but does a terrible job of it).

-Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, it’s all the same, isn’t it? Er, yeah, sure. Just as the Finns, the Spanish and the Ancient Greek are secretly all one people. The Aztecs, as said above, occupied the centre of Mexico from the 14th to the 16th Century; the Mayas held the South of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc., for a longer time than this (the last Maya city fell in the 17th or 18th Century, and the Mayas had been around for a while, even though their culture had changed a lot by then). The Incas were in Peru, which is more than three thousand kilometers from any of the aforementioned countries.

-The Empire: or lack thereof. You often find references to the “Aztec Empire”, which immediately evokes a political structure akin to the Roman Empire, ie a unified territory under the rule of a centralised administration. Truth is, the Aztecs were nowhere as organised. The word “hegemony” would be a better description of how they ruled: strictly speaking, they had under political control only a very small bit (the centre around their capital Tenochtitlan). When they conquered a new city-state, they didn’t integrate it by modifying the power structure: they tended to keep the ruling family in place, and force them to pay tribute to Tenochtitlan. And that was pretty much it. There was no attempt at political, territorial or even cultural homogenisation: the Aztecs spread by extending their tribute area, and you didn’t have an empire so much as a collection of loose city states owing a very loose form of allegiance to Tenochtitlan. (the Incas, on the other hand, were very good at the Empire business, sometimes relocating entire populations in order to make sure the political cohesion was preserved). It’s part of the reason the Aztecs fell so quickly: their hold was so tenuous (but still grudgingly felt, considering their demands for exorbitant tribute), that the Spanish had no trouble convincing the rulers of the neighbouring city-states to support them instead of the Aztecs.

-All bloodthirsty savages, I tell you: not going to linger on that one because I’ve harped on it enough, but of course not true. Human sacrifice is a bit of an arresting custom, which means that any other achievements tend to get lost under the weight of disapproval. The Aztecs were awesome astronomers, pretty good physicians for a medieval time period, and they also had a pretty equalitarian society (again, for the time period), with possibilities for commoners to reach pretty high on the social ladder, and a fair amount of women’s rights (right to divorce and inherit, for instance) that most medieval societies tended to forget altogether.

-We’re very well informed about what the Aztecs were like: ha. Mostly, not that much. The conquistadores did a terrific job of destroying the Aztec culture as they found it: there are Aztec descendants, and a handful of codices, but the evidence of how the Aztecs lived is terribly thin. As far as monuments go, again, there are very few Aztec monuments left: the shiny pyramids everyone thinks of when the Aztecs are mentioned tend to be those of Teotihuacan (which predates the Aztecs by 5 centuries or more), and of course Mexico City was built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, which means very few remains of the Aztec capital.

Look at what I have!

Yes, it’s the French version of Servant of the Underworld, which I have two weeks to reread and annotate. So far, it reads wonderfully if a little weirdly (in the “did I write this?” vein). Had a lovely chat with the editorly folks yesterday; and the artist is apparently starting work on a series of three new covers for the French version–which will be Aztec portraits. Shiny!

There’s been another earthquake in Japan (magnitude 6.4 in eastern Shizuoka prefecture), apparently unrelated to the big one which broke last Friday. That’s in addition to all the aftershocks of the big one, naturally…
And the nuclear situation in Fukushima doesn’t really look to be getting better, since they’re running out of coolant.
Great.
As starlady38 says, it never rains but it pours. If you want to donate specifically to Japan [1], see the Japanese Red Cross, or Medecins Sans Frontières, among others. Any other suggestions for donations welcome in the comments.

In other news (which tend to get obscured by Japan), Bahrain has apparently called in Saudi troops to maintain order as things get out of control there.

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[1]Of course, don’t let that dissuade you from donating to other charities, all year long. It’s money which often comes in handy; charities tend to be deluged by donations at times like this, which of course is a good thing–but they can have a bit more trouble getting through the less high-profile disasters, or the daily grind of small things, for which few donations come in.

BSC is holding their annual tournament, in which books face off against each other. It sounds like a fun premise–and lookie lookie, Servant of the Underworld is there, under the Forgotten Realms bracket.

Wow. I’m honoured to be in such great company.