Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Mythmakers.
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Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creators brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
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My name is Julia Golding and I'm about to introduce you to our season wrap up for number six.
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Yes, we've got quite a back catalogue of podcasts now, so do have a look back because you may have missed some of the earlier interviews we have done over the years.
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But in this season we had a busy programme, meeting with Tolkien, experts and debut writers and those with more, shall we say, track record in the fantasy field, and we have picked the top five podcasts to share a little excerpt with you now.
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This will give you a fair idea of what we have been up to since the season began in the summer.
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First, at number five, we have an interview with Kate Dillon and we talk about her brilliant novel Until we Shatter, and Kate is particularly good at summarising exactly what is going on in her plot.
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Right?
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So, thinking about the actual story, do you want to give us a little tiny hint of what the plot is like, the characters and what they're getting up to?
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of course.
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Uh, so until we shatter is a heist novel.
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It is a fantasy heist with color magic across two worlds, one of which wants to shatter the main characters to pieces.
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Yeah, okay thank you.
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So I I found a couple of strong themes sprung out to me as I was reading it, and they're connected, which is nice, but one was the impact of betrayal, how that impacts on individuals but also on a group, and the other was what it's like to exist in a sort of liminal space between things, and this is both as an image of the idea of shattering when under too much strain, but also the social position of those with the wrong kind of magic, in a way, if that's, if that's a correct sort of description.
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Is there something about those scenes which you felt resonated with this?
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Well, we're not going to call it ya, are we going to call it new adult.
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Let's just borrow that, that new adult reader in particular um, I think for this kind of reader, the betrayal specifically is when we sort of come into adulthood or we're coming out of childhood.
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It's when we first start to experience real big betrayals.
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They might not be quite on the scale of what happens in the books.
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You know, most of the time the stakes in our normal lives aren't life or death.
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The world isn't ending.
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We're probably not accidentally killing our friends or I should hope not but we are going to face some sort of betrayal.
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You know you're not going to get a job you want to, or something is going to go wrong at university, or perhaps you know, like your parents have decided that you can no longer live in the house rent free.
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We're starting to get those moments of oh, life is actually quite hard and it can be quite unforgiving.
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And people can be quite unforgiving and quite cruel in some respects.
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And I think as we sort of come into that age we experience that more.
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We experience it more without the safety net that we have when we live at home and when we live with our families, and so everything feels big.
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Everything feels bigger when you don't have that net to fall back on.
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And I think that's what the main, that's what the character is in, until we shatter.
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Really going through their lives are hard, because this is a fantasy world and actually they are wanted dead by pretty much everybody on both worlds in the novel.
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But but, um, they don't have a safety net.
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Uh, the main character, Kemi, her mom is very, very sick.
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She is the provider.
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Um, her entire group of friends, including herself, they're all illegal.
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So you know, if anyone found out that they were half shades which is kind of like the witches in the novel are basically called shades and there are full-blooded shades and there are half shades and half shades are illegal.
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So if they are found out, they will essentially get hunted down and killed.
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So they are very much operating without a net and they are making mistakes.
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And they're making mistakes because, well, they're not that old, they don't have that much life experience.
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So you know, young people make mistakes.
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The problem is their mistakes are exacerbated by a world which is making it very, very difficult for them to make good choices.
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In fact, it's making good choices almost impossible, and so every bad choice kind of compounds and it culminates in a lot of betrayal, in a lot of heartache.
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And, yeah, it's really enjoyable as an author to sort of explore those kinds of big moments in your characters' lives.
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Yeah, I think all is.
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A particularly strong theme is when I do a course where we teach novel in the year.
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One of the sessions halfway through we start adding in sort of powerful storylines and one of them is betrayal, because I think all of us instinctively have that deep sort of gut feeling of it's not fair or how could they and we all really invest in that.
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The idea of someone you trust who turns on you, um, is very much a way of involving us in the novel and sort of rooting for the characters.
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But it's also equally interesting when it's the other way around, where your character you're identifying with ends up betraying somebody.
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Yep, and all the cascade of emotion that then happens when you find yourself on that side of the fence, which again is a going back to your idea of a more mature experience when we let people down.
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Yeah, it's also it's a big, big feeling and it's it all comes to do with.
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Betrayal is at its core, it's a breach of trust.
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As you know, we get hurt, a lot, people hurt us and it's quite.
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It's.
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I mean, it's not easy to get over, but it's easier to get over when you know you understand.
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Okay, maybe that person was having a bad day or is a misunderstanding, but when trust is breached it's much, much harder to get over.
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And yeah, as an author, it's really, really fun because obviously the challenge becomes well, you know, if your character is getting betrayed but they then need to work with those people, uh, how do they get over that?
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And if they're doing the betray, the betraying, how do they get over that?
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And if they're doing the betray, the betraying, how do you then redeem them in the eye of the reader?
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so it presents a really really fun challenge as an author, actually and it's also a great thing to read, uh, as a reader, because you're very much involved.
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So I was interested that the, the dear old publishers blurb all of us authors get this where we're put in some kind of box, yep, and where they've put you is in the tradition of the is it lee bardugo, isn't it six of crows?
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And I think what they mean here is a shorthand for high stories about magical misfits.
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Um, do you find this?
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I thought it was quite a good.
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I wouldn't mind being all right, but do you feel you're part of this sub-genre or were there some other influences or genres that you would like to sort of highlight yourself?
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um, yeah, I mean, it's definitely it's, it's they chose that, and actually, like sometimes when publishing does this choosing, you're like I'm not 100% sure that's right, but we're gonna go with it, whereas this time it's a hundred percent right, like it very much sits in that sub genre.
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That is the main genre, I would say for the book, and you know, when I'm recommending the book, like heist fantasy is what I lead with first, because it pretty much tells the reader everything they need to know.
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If we were going to go dig further down, though, though, like I've never really written a book, that was just one genre.
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It's just that when it comes to selling books, we sort of lead with one, because we don't want to confuse people.
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But I think this is and this is again where, even though I've moved to fantasy now, a lot of my early influences, a lot of the things I love, did originate in sci-fi.
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Now at number four, we have the wonderful interview with Anna Simpson and Chris Riddell.
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This was a joint interview with.
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Anna is the editor who selected the poetry for the anthology of heroes and villains, and Chris Riddell, as many of you already know, is a very famous illustrator and he's also a political cartoonist.
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In this excerpt you will hear him talking about tips for anybody who wants to go into the field of illustration.
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That was the child version of you and your relationship with poetry.
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And Chris, you said that you found that the Jabberwocky kind of helped you become the illustrator that you have since become.
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But for someone listening who is wanting to follow in your footsteps, how did you get there?
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What happened to that little boy to get him to be such a well-known illustrator?
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Oh, my goodness.
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Well, who knows is the unhelpful answer to that.
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Who knows is the unhelpful answer to that?
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I suppose a more helpful answer is that I was an inveterate reader and so I read Tolkien and I read CS Lewis and I read Ursula Le Guin and I read a lot of sort of fantasy that was just perfect for illustration and I attempted to illustrate the books that I read.
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And I attempted to illustrate the books that I read.
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So I remember sort of drawing the Battle of the Five Armies when I was in sort of you know, year six, you know, having read the Hobbit and being inspired by it.
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The other thing I did was I went back to the illustrated books that I loved and would find illustrations that really spoke to me and I would attempt to copy them, the illustrations that really spoke to me, and I would attempt to copy them.
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And sometimes copying gets a bad name, but I think it's a great way to analyze how images are made, and particularly illustrations in books, you know, can tell you a lot by careful sort of perusal and certainly by sort of attempting to recreate the effect that the illustrator has got.
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So I used to almost obsessively draw the white rabbit from the frontispiece of Alice in Wonderland, because there was something magical about the way the artist, john Tenniel, conveyed both the character of the rabbit without losing the essential rabbit nature of the character.
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So there was this, and it was something about the eyes, something about the stance, and I would draw this and then I would discover the foliage in the background, I would discover the way that Tenniel drew the folds in the jacket, and this just entered my visual imagination.
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And the great thing about copying is that once you've copied, you can then put that away, but it lives in your visual imagination.
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So it's a great way to learn.
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And so I would say sort of.
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You know, go along to a gallery, get one of those little stools that you often see sort of by the reception I see far few people sort of doing this but take a little stool, take it to your favourite exhibit, sit down with your sketchbook copy, something beautiful, just for half an hour, and you'll find you'll take that away with you.
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Yeah, that's, and what I find really interesting about that idea of copying is that there is a stage in writing.
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About that too.
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I think Anna will probably agree with me that.
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Certainly young writers at school, but also new writers who, as adults, there's no harm at all in doing your fan fiction or your homage to, I don't know, doctor who, whatever it is, because you are learning how plots are put together.
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You're learning voice.
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You're learning style.
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You're learning characterisation what could happen to this, to this character?
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No, that's outside what they would be like.
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You're learning coloring in, uh, in a sense, but it's such a huge yeah it's going to say and isn't that how a poetry anthology is working?
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in exactly that, that way.
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Yes, I mean the idea is that you have a buffet of poetry and you sample all of those different styles and you can go away, obviously, and explore them more fully if there's something that really strikes a chord with you.
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But I mean, I do think for any kind of writing, I think everything starts with reading.
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I'm always incredibly shocked when you meet someone who says, oh, I've written a book.
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And then you say, oh, and you know what do you like reading?
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And they say, oh, no, I don't really read and you think your book is bad.
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I'm sorry, you know, we know that it's sort of.
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Everything starts with experiencing how other people put words together on the page and you're right, right, the nuts and bolts of plot and character and those kind of things.
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And I think when people I I certainly remember going through little periods of writing like, oh, but dh lawrence and I was doing my a levels somewhere, there are presumably a lot of pages of a terrible kind of rip off dH Lawrence writing somewhere in a drawer at home.
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Yes, that might be quite unintentionally funny if I'm just thinking about this lushness.
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And in number three we have an interview with Professor Simon Horrovin.
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Simon actually holds the chair that CS Lewis held at Magdalen College, oxford, when he was alive, and Simon is, as you might imagine, a medievalist.
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But he has also just published a book called CS Lewis's Oxford.
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Here we discuss how the parts of his book about Magdalen can only have been written by a Magdalen insider.
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So when I was reading this, having lived in Oxford for decades and knowing the places, so I was able to follow it very, very closely.
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But the one thing which was new to me and new to all the biographies I've read of CS Lewis, was the college details of Magdalen.
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Now, I was actually a Magdalen postgrad for a few years when I was doing my doctorate, but I didn't get to know it in the same way as you as a professor do and I felt, reading this section, it could only be written by an insider.
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So do you want to mention some of the odd little things about the maudlin experience?
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And perhaps you might want to go on to talk about whether or not what's the same and what's changed in maudlin since um cs lewis's time.
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Bearing in mind someone listening to this might be thinking to apply in future.
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We don't want to put them off no, I think that's right and and I think that's partly what spurred me to write the book, is that, you know, there there are many excellent biographies of CS Lewis, and so it only makes sense to write something where I feel that there's something I could add to that room, just like his um and you know, sort of teaching in the way that he taught the course, that he taught more or less um, and and going around the various parts of the college did give me a kind of an insider's view of what that was like, um and some of the the weird kinds of traditions that you know that actually still go on today.
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You know there's he talks in surprised by joy, about the moment that he became a fellow here in 1925 and how strange it was he found it.
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When he was lining up in the president's lodgings he had the kind of the Latin admission ceremony and then went round and shook the hands of all of the fellows at the time who all said I wish you joy, to which he made no reply and of course that was very significant for him because the word joy already had an importance for him, which it then took on even greater significance and, for a number of reasons, surprised by joy is obviously one importance for him, which it then took on even greater significance and, um, you know, for, for a number of reasons, surprised by joy, uh, as being, is obviously one uh, joy, davidman and other.
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But you know that strangeness of that ceremony.
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Well, that's exactly the ceremony that I went through when I came here as a fellow 18 years ago.
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So there are all these connections and um, and there are some nice kind of objects that are still around in the archives which, um which, which I talk about in the book.
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So, for instance, um, we still use the college weighing scales, um on special dinners where guests who come to dinner um are given the option and not so many people take it up these days but being weighed.
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I don't know if that was active in in your day, julia, but I was um having a child at the time having my daughter lucy.
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So I I was having enough weighing.
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At the right, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, because it is something that happens at graduate dinners.
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But yeah, so he appears in the college weights book.
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Somewhat unfortunately for Lewis, he appears sort of early on in his time here at Magdalene and then just before he left for Cambridge in 1954.
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So you can exactly work out how much weight he put on during the period he was here, out how much weight he put on during the period he was here.
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So there's that kind of thing.
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There's also the college betting book, which again is still active in the SCR, where fellows might fall out over some sort of abstruse fact and decide that, because they can't decide who's right, they're going to stake a bottle of port on the outcome of it.
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And there's an entry by Lewis in the college betting book where he's had a wager with CE Stevens, the ancient history tutor, about whether the word eros appears in Homer's Odyssey and they stake a bottle of port on the outcome and of course Lewis turns out to be the correct and wins the bottle.
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But these kind of quaint traditions that are still active today.
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But you know, we can sort of trace them back to lewis's day and see him um taking part in them I think the thing to emphasis really uh, emphasizes how masculine the environment was, yeah, in his day, compared to now.
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Um, I mean, obviously I was there years ago.
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It would change.
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I don't know when it went mixed in the 80s, maybe when did in the 70s.
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But yeah, exactly what I was going to say is that the big change between lewis's day and today is, I think, the admission of women and this was a very exclusively male world.
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Um, in lewis's time, although one of the things that I found which had surprised me really was how many female students he taught, and that's partly because, going through the archives of a number of the women's colleges, I found references to him being paid for tuition or writing reports on students, and that was particularly during the Second World War, where lots of the male students, of course, were not here, but also before that as well.
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So, although it was particularly a male-dominated world, there were women students in the ladies' colleges, and they did come in pairs rather than singly, because of course, they needed to be chaperoned, but he did actually teach women as well.
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And at number two.
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I'm delighted to report that my sidecast's journey through Lord of the Rings is getting quite a faithful listenership.
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I've reached the chapter just before we reach Rivendell and I'm going to pick it up again for the new season.
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But here you can hear an extract from a much earlier chapter in the Fellowship of the Ring and the little details about Buckland that you might have missed when you were reading the novel.
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So there's some little details in this which I really appreciate.
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When we're talking about Buckland, there's a note about sometimes people keeping their doors locked.
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Now, unless you've had the experience of living in an English village, you might think that's a bit of a strange detail.
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But actually, even now in some villages the doors will be open.
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They won't be locked.
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In fact, where I live, which is in the middle of a village these days, some friends came round for supper and gave up because our door was locked.
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They thought it would be open.
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I've been in cities, you see, so I don't keep my doors open, but it's quite common for doors to be unlocked with this idea that you can just call round.
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So we know that Buckland is more dangerous because people live on the other side of the river.
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So they feel there may be strangers wandering around.
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So we're edging out into a wilder, more dangerous landscape.
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There is another difference here which is worth sort of drawing out, which is an authorial decision versus what you might do as a screenwriter.
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So if you remember this part, as in the film, in fact what they do is they jump over the next couple of chapters, but just this bit where they're coming from Farm and Maggot is driving them to the ferry and they meet Mary at the ferry.
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It's slow, they aren't under immediate threat.
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There's a conversation.
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The threat is in fact from Mary.
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They see this rider coming towards them and they wonder who it is and there's a moment of tension.
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His voice is muffled, they think it might be an enemy, and then it's revealed as Mary.
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So it's a moment of tension.
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His voice is muffled, they think it might be an enemy and then it's revealed as mary.
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So it's a very low level, not a jump scare, it's a low level moment of tension.
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In the film version, peter jackson and philip aboyans and fran walsh gave this the chase through the woods and being chased by the horsemen jumping onto the ferry, frodo almost not managing it and having to do that leap.
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So it's obviously much more um an action sequence.
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And then they cut.
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They forget all about Crick Hollow decisions, old Forest on Bombadil and they go straight from there to Bree.
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But one of the absolute joys of having a good film series and an excellent book is that the reading the book is still a very different experience and there's loads more to come.
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In this chapter and the next and the one after that, which are some of the best bits in Fellowship of the Ring, I think there is one when I was reading it closely for this podcast.
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There was one element which I found I wondered about, which is when they see the rider sniffing at the bank on the opposite side of the river and they're relatively safe because they've taken the ferry with them.
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It's like a you do your own polling across the river.
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Uh, frodo asks mary if the horse you know, can they reach us?
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And mary says oh, they've got to go up to the bridge and I've never known which, which is, you know, miles up the river or maybe horses could swim, but I've never heard of it.
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The problem about this is Frodo spent a lot of time in Buckland and he would know this.
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It's you try not to get characters telling each other something they both know.
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I personally think it'd be better if Sam had asked that question, because Sam is the one who's ignorant of anything outside.
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You know Hobbiton and its environs, so I just noticed that as being I'm not sure about that.
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I think that that's the wrong person to ask that question.
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Anyway, tiny, tiny, tiny detail, it doesn't matter, and it's the first time I've noticed it.
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Tiny, tiny, tiny detail, it doesn't matter, and it's the first time I've noticed it.
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There is another thing I've noticed as an author reading this passage or this whole chapter, is the Access All Areas narrator.
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So we've had the narrator dipping back into the past telling us about how the Buckland was founded.
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There's actually quite a funny series of colonies being set up here, because in the prologue material, bree, the people of Bree regard the hobbits of the Shire as people who've been sent out to the colonies, like they've colonized the Shire thinking they're the original community, and now the people of the Shire think the Bucklanders are the colonizers.
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So being the historian of the piece, that voice giving the history is that sort of omniscient idea.
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But the conceit that Tolkien had in his mind when he was writing is, of course this is an account of the story compiled.
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Firstly starts off with bilbo compiling it, then frodo compiling it, then, uh, sam finishing off.
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So one way of looking at this ability to know all of what's going on all around is a bit like I don't know the way a gospel is put together from the accounts of all the people who saw it.
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So it's like a patchwork of people's experiences, which explains why in this chapter you get to see Frodo's anxiety that he is going to have to tell his friends that he's about to leave the Shire.
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But you also get the other side of that conspiracy.
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You've got Pippin saying to Merry oh, he's about to tell us.
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So you see both sides.
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And finally, in the first place perhaps not unsurprisingly as our most popular episode was our verdict on season two of Rings of Power.
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You can hear me in conversation with friend and podcast partner Jacob Renica and we discussed what we thought succeeded and where the series is perhaps still not quite got its act together.
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So I hope you enjoy got its act together.
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So I hope you enjoy.
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Okay, to the meat of it.
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Season one was all over the place and my general feeling is the way they handled the story structure in season two was hugely, a huge improvement.
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It was much more coherent.
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However, hang on, I have broken down, when I was preparing for this, the number of storylines, so keep count, jacob, and see if I've missed one.
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I think there is a kind of elves in Linden slash havens, which means Gil-galad, elr, galadriel, brief appearance from kirdan, and they're the three rings, the three elven rings.
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That's story number one.
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Story number two is the dwarves, the two times durin, plus disa, and then we've got dwarven rings, which brings them in relationship to story number three, which is keller brimbor, um, played by the wonderful charles edwards, um and anatar, played by the equally wonderful charlie vickers, and that's obviously sauron and overall ring plot.
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So three strong storylines.
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But on we also have pelagia, with theo and isildur and arondir until he goes somewhere else, um, hanging around at the well, basically hanging around, uh, and there's a bit of an ent story here and a sort of love with the lady from that part and the mysterious disappearance of Bronwyn.
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Story number five is Numenor, where we have Miriel, our pharazon, and Elendil and Elendil's daughter and the faithful, that storyline.
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Then we have story number six, which is adar and the orcs, and looking at it from the point of view of someone trying to help, rescue, save, make a decent life.
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Perhaps is best way of putting that for the orcs the urk.
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And then we've got story number seven, which is the stranger who is walking eastwards with Nori and Poppy and teasing whether or notadil, played by Rory.
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What's his name?
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Kinnear, rory Kinnear, the wonderful Rory Kinnear.
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So I make seven separate storylines, of which the first three are the ones which relate most faithfully or closely to the theme of the whole series, which is Rings of Power.
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And my problem is with stories four, five, six and seven not really connecting.
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The first three connect, the last three.
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The last four are tendentially connected and right problematic because they might be good stories within themselves and certainly the numinal story is really important, but but they still trying to do too much and that's how I felt about it.
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How about you?
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yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's that's really.
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Yeah, that's good, that, yeah, for a show called rings of power, the, the primary movers, and shakes, like now we actually get, you know, we got that the creation of the three rings at the very the tail end of uh season one and then season two is really about the fuller production of rings, with uh, anatar, uh being involved there and, and so that makes that makes a lot of sense having around there.
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It's clear, yeah, that.
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So those other storylines, the non direct rings of power, those are clearly storylines that are going to be paying off, uh, in further season.
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So this is almost, you know, uh.
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So I I appreciate, appreciate one of the things that I did appreciate, um, about the kind of long view that you're able to have, uh, the amazon can have, when you've already invested and you say, like, we commit to five seasons oh yes, but let me stop you there.
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They haven't.
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They've said they want to do five, but season three has only just been green lit yeah and it reminded me a bit of the fantastic beast franchise which said oh yes, it's five films and there's kind of right, right, right, fizzled at three.
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So, um, I think we're okay at the moment for those who want to see a sort of complete story, um, because this was a better season and just much more, just better to watch than the first one.
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Yeah, well, that's the hazard.
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So that's the that's the hope and the hazard that you have of that.
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If you say like, okay, this is going to five seasons, so the temptation is going to be to like string certain things along and say, okay, we can afford the time to spend on these kind of tangential lines, that if you watch the whole series, so that let's say we're just going to assume that we're getting five seasons so we can just kind of spread things out and looking at the whole five season instead of looking at individual seasons as kind of like self-contained and being valuable in and of themselves.
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So there's two different ways of thinking.
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Right, if you're, if you're just having to prove your value and then you don't know if you're going to be renewed the next season, that's a different mode of storytelling.
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Because you have to have it, you have to be able to wrap it up at the end of the season.
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If you find out that the show is going to be canceled, you have to have somebody pivot to be able to wrap it up in a satisfying or relatively satisfying way, relatively satisfying way.
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But so you see, as one of the things I think that you see the long term, that, like the investment that they're making or the assumption that they're going to get five seasons, is in these inclusions of right, the new menorah, uh, having it just kind of like trailing along the rune, everything with the stranger and norian poppy, that's clearly like has just kind of been a little something that's going to be bringing in, hopefully at at the end.
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So they're assuming that they're going to have that time.
