Jump to content

Mistress Chloe

New Member
  • Posts

    2
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Mistress Chloe's Achievements

Newbie

Newbie (1/14)

  • First Post
  • Week One Done
  • One Month Later
  • One Year In

Recent Badges

  1. I don't know if you want "hard" or "soft" alt-fiction, as in, whether you want real-world what-ifs, or fantasy that happens to take place in an alternate historical version of our world. If it's the latter you're after, I recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It's set in England, before, during and after the Napoleonic wars, and deals with an England that used to have magic and magicians and fairy-servants and a magician-king, but one day magic disappeared and is now merely studied in a historical context. Then Mr Norrell is brought to the attention of The Learned Society of York Magicians (historians, who can't use magic). They discover he is able to use magic and encourage him to bring it to the public, and the story then deals with how he and magic fit in to the period's upper-class social lifestyle, the politics of the era, and its military applications. Once the man takes on an apprentice (for the good of the nation) the story becomes more about their different outlooks - Mr Norrell sees magic as dangerous, to be hoarded only for the trustworthy and wise to use (by which he means him), and Jonathan Strange has a wilder streak, seeks out ancient magic that Mr Norrell has suppressed, and so on. Between the story of the magicians, there's an interwoven story of Stephen Black, a negro valet to Sir Walter Pole, who is discovered by a powerful fairy-king; a fairy of the "fair folk" sort, not the Tinkerbell sort. The carpicious, whimsical, decadent, mad and extremely powerful kind. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the fairy takes a liking to Stephen Black, doing him all sorts of favours and kindnesses, including "inviting" (summoning) him to the fairy realm of Lost-Hope, a dismal mansion full of gory trophies and horrifying history, each and every night, to participate in endless balls, processions and rituals. For most of the book Stephen's role appears to be to act as a viewpoint character for us to be aware of the fairy-king and his role in the protagonists' struggles, but becomes important later, though not in the way the book very, very cleverly sets you up to believe. The book is written extremely cleverly, in the style of Dickens or Austen, which really draws one into the mentality of a novel set in the period. It's full of extremely in-depth footnotes that may not have any relevance to the story, but build up an extremely rich history of Britain and the world in which magic played a part, with history, anecdotes, fairy tales, excerpts from in-universe scholarly works, correspondence between or about characters in the book and even excerpts from the characters' own books, written while the story takes place. It's an absolutely unique fantasy, and the historical side of it is extremely cleverly done, well researched, and amusing in its style. The fantasy side is so unobtrusive and fits so well into the era that the synergy of the two makes it read like a genuinely classical book.
  2. I read 1984 as a pre-teen, and it set the course of my life for the next 7-8 years. I tried to use doublethink to condition myself away from what I didn't want to be. We Need to Talk About Kevin also sprang to mind, in fact it was mentioned in the second post too. Terrifying book, not just in the horrific events that take place in it, but in its depiction of a cold, loveless relationship between a boy and his mother from the minute he's born, and the ambiguity as to whose fault it was. Is he just a sociopath, or could her post-natal depression and irrational insecurities and distrust of him, even as a baby, have caused him to grow up incapable of love?
×
×
  • Create New...