Transcript
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Hello, and welcome to myth makers.
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Myth makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives
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brought to you by the Oxford center for fantasy. My name is Julia Golding.
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I'm an author, but I'm also director of the center.
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And today I am joined by Victoria Godard,
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who actually was invited on the podcast by special request of one of our
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listeners. So don't say we don't deliver.
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So if you've got any more ideas for guests, please do send them in.
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Because for me it's been an enormous pleasure over this week,
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actually getting to understand and read Victoria's fantasy works.
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So first of all, hello to Victoria.
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Hello. Thanks for having me.
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So, Victoria, where are we talking to you? Where's your home base?
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I live in prince Edward island,
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which is the smallest of the Canadian provinces it's in Eastern Canada and the
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Maritimes.
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Fantastic.
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So should we have a little overview of the kind of things you write? Um,
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so people understand where you sit in the fantasy Panion as it
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were. What are the,
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what kind of series do you write and how would you describe them?
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Well, I tend to, uh,
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tell people I write in the general kind of mythic tradition from the inklings
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onwards. So this was a nice fit with your podcast. Um,
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I'm kind of one of those English derived medievalists by background. Uh,
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my family's British and, um,
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first my dad was a immigrant actually. And, um, always been very,
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very fond of them. I tend to,
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I like writing kind of a vast sprawling interconnected narrative universe,
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exploring different, different elements of it. And I tend to like writing,
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I suppose,
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the stories that happen around the epics what's going on after you've had the
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grand speech,
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how do you get from there to the actual work of the work of living
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and how you, how do you do it? That's something I find really interesting.
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So you recommended to me as did the listener who wrote in, um,
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one of your books called the hands of the emperor,
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which I'd be absolutely thrilled to talk to you about in a moment,
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but you also, as you say, connected to this,
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you sort of dip into the history before and later, and, um,
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you use your world building to go where you want,
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but you also have a series which is more like a, a duo, uh, two,
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two connected characters. And that starts with the Starz book. Is that correct?
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Yes, that's right. Um, I like, I,
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I enjoy writing a whole bunch of different kinds of books and that's something
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I've always really liked, um, to connect to, to your kind of thing. Like,
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I've always liked that about say Toki where you have such different books in the
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same universe as the Hobbit and the Lord of the rings. And, and, um, so I've,
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I've enjoyed that or somebody like Dorothy Sayers in her mysteries where she
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writes different kinds of mysteries with the same characters.
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And so that kind of a, that's always appealed to me.
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That's sort of stretching yourself as craft and just being able to tell
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different sorts of stories and focus on different elements of them.
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And so the green wing and dart series is sort of a bit of a more, yeah,
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it's a duo kind of friendly, a little, a little bit of a cozy mystery,
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sort of underlying it there and a bit of an adventure. And, um,
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whereas the hands of the emperor is, you know, it's a bit a, among many things.
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It's about a bureau cut on the edge of retirement kind of thing. And, um, so,
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so I suppose in terms of genre, I just kind of say, well,
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I'm right in the middle of fantasy,
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but I tend to write these sort of slightly off,
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off kilter towards genre conventions.
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Yeah. And I think that's what is so wonderful about your writing Victoria,
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is that you feel really original. Um, that's,
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there's nothing wrong with reading something which F fits in a genre.
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So if you read a romance or a detective story,
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you know how it's gonna turn out or a Western, you, you know, before you start,
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what's gonna happen more or less, but you dunno what the journey is. Whereas,
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when I started reading hands of the emperor,
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I had no idea what the journey was gonna be. And it was a pure delight.
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It's a longer book. It's not a sort of thing you can knock out in a a day. Um,
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but I have a thoroughly enjoyed my week spent with your main character
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Clefa. So, but before we come to him, um,
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I'm just thinking about the influence and place, uh,
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on your stories because the wining and dart series feels quite
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like a sort of 18th century feel.
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I mean, people are the sort of small, small villagey town type society.
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There feels like that. Whereas the,
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the world of the hands of the emperor is very much a much bigger
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scale. It's got, um,
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a sense of almost mixture of the sort of Chinese bureaucracy
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and the exams that used to have to do to be part of the Chinese bureaucracy,
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but also island culture that could be from, um, I dunno,
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Maori or Pacific islands. I mean that you are, you're creating your own world,
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but I felt that there was a sample of different elements that you were going
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for. So as a writer,
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have you traveled first and gone around squirreling away all these
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ideas? Or is it something that you think, oh,
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I want to do this and then go and have a look at it.
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It's a little bit of both. Um, as I said, my family's, uh,
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British and I've spent a number of visits and some quite some time visiting
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family members in various parts of England and Wales, particularly,
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and I did a year abroad in Scotland, um, when I was in undergrad. And,
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um, and so for me, I've always really enjoyed that kind of,
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yes, the 19th century, sort of the Jane Austin or early, late 18th,
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early 19th century, that kind of period of the early novels. Um, and then,
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and the sort of early Regency stuff.
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And then also just sort of the,
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the kind of idealized vision that people have of Oxford and Cambridge and things
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like that. And I enjoyed playing with that and thinking about,
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I have an academic background. And so I enjoyed thinking about, you know,
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what the, the good parts of that, and also the bad parts of that in some ways.
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So we haven't seen that much of the university experience, but I,
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I enjoy thinking about it. And, um, so for me kind of travel,
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I, I once spent about six months walking down the length of England and staying
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with various relatives and friends along the way.
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And so that kind of sense of the landscape, um, was a great
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resource for me. Um, otherwise I've lived around quite,
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I've moved quite a lot around Canada, growing up,
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lived in 14 places across the country.
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And my parents spent 10 years in pap, new Guinea north of Australia.
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And so I had a lot of stories about Papua New Guinea in Australia growing up.
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And I think that really comes out strongly in the hands of the emperor with the
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white seas Islander culture, which is, um,
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quite strongly based on sort of Polynesian historic Polynesian culture.
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But there's quite a lot of P Guian elements in there too from the TRO brandand
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islands and the Highlands, which is where my parents lived.
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And so I had lots of stories in like the material culture of that,
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that white parents had various elements of it and friends of theirs, um,
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who come to visit us, or we visited them. I've only been there once, but, uh,
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that I remember I was there when I was very, as a baby, but as an adult,
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I've only been there once. And so it was a very, um, rich experience,
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even being a quite short trip. So I enjoy, uh, that combination. I,
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I feel like it's important to be very respectful of other cultures and I try
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really hard to, uh, not to appropriate, um, cultural elements,
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um, especially for ones that have been, you know, historically colonized.
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But at the same time,
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I also think it's very important to try and broaden the base that you're
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building off of.
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So the grooming and Dick dart series is quite largely based off of kind of the
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English country tradition and country like country, house, um,
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stories too, right? Like that kind of the mysteries that you get out of, or,
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and that, that tradition there,
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but the hands of the emperor and the world that that's set in, which is Zuni,
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I deliberately wanted it to be a non-Western European, uh, based society. I was,
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I really wanted to, to get away from that. So I, I,
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the different parts of Zuni are drawn from different, um,
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non-Western cultures as a conscious choice there.
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And what the person who wrote in said, is I something along the lines of,
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I defy you not to fall in love with Clefa now Clefa is the main character,
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um, of the hands of the emperor. He is the hands of the emperor.
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You could describe him very boringly as bureaucrat,
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but actually he is just the most wonderful,
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wonderful character. Um,
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I was saying to you just before we started recording that he reminds me very
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much of the, um,
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count Rosoff who is the lead figure in the fantastic, um,
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novel gentleman in Moscow by Amor towels, which is a historical novel,
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I think being filmed at the moment. Um, but the,
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how that story works is that you just love spending time with that character.
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And I felt absolutely the same about Clefa. And as you were just saying,
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what you're thinking about in this book are things which don't make it into
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fantasy. It's the stuff that's not around the battle. It's um,
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how do you hand on power?
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How do you retire?
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And there's also a really strong theme about what do the people back home think
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of those who have gone into another walk of life and got success elsewhere,
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which doesn't translate into the local context at all.
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They completely misunderstand him in sad ways.
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So when you started this book,
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did you start with the character and just see where it went,
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or did you already have those themes in mind and then, you know,
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built him to fit the plot?
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No, <laugh>, it was a very character driven, um, different book.
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So my, my kind of general project, as I said, I tend to,
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I write these sort of, it's a sprawling interconnected stories in my,
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in my narrative universe here. And they, they there's sort of two parallel core,
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um, to that, that project.
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One of them there's this empire called the empire of a stand laws,
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which has this catastrophic cataclysmic,
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magical collapse that happens. And so I, it's sort of,
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one of my projects is the lead up to, to that collapse.
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And then what happens afterwards, I'm not really a dystopian kind of writer.
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I'm really much more interested in how do you rebuild, um,
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what happens afterwards, but that,
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that kind of shadow that falls across the entire, um,
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entire cultures and individuals is something that I find a very interesting to
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think about.
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And I think this connects back to something like Toki and the shadow of world
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war, I, that's always behind, um,
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all those authors of the first half of the 20th century.
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And I've always found that interwar period quite interesting for that with,
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with people, not always talking directly about it, but it's always there.
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And so in my novels that kind of the fall of a stand laws is, is that,
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that culture wide devastation that people don't always talk about,
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but is always there. So that's one part of the project.
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And then the second part of the project is this figure of, um,
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of one character, um, and who is, um,
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called Fitzer cell.
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And he's a mean character in various books and referred to in other ones,
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he's this poet. And so as part of that,
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one thing I was interested in with the fall of a Standal as,
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and the effects of it was the character of the last emperor of a Standal as who
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survives the,
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this destruction and ends up having to kind of rebuild on a personal level.
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And so I started off writing this, what was going to be a short vignette, uh,
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about the last emperor and what he was like in the period after things had sort
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of settled down after the fall. And I thought, oh, his,
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secretary's probably a good window onto what he's like as a person.
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And so I started writing about his secretary and it was really only intended to
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be a couple of scenes or maybe one scene, like that was all I was doing.
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And by the end of the scene, I had fallen in love with CLE, for as a character.
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He was just so interesting and he just kind of kept going. And,
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and that was the story was, was an,
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was an unusual one to write because I usually have more of a sense of what the
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story is to start with, or at least like,
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I often know what the emotional tone I wanna end with is, or like the, the very,
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the Demont, I don't always know what the climax is,
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but I usually know what the Demont is and where the characters end up.
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And so for that one, I had no sense of what the arc was at first.
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I just kind of kept, but I kept being drawn to writing scenes,
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and I just kept imagining them, like, I'd be driving or I'd be, you know,
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taking the dogs for a walk or something,
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and the scene would come into mind and I, I just have to go write it.
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And so for, I don't know, a year, a year and a half, maybe two years,
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I just kind of kept going back to it and picking away at it.
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And I was enjoying writing it so much.
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Like I just love spending time with Clefa and eventually I was like, okay,
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you know what? I'm not getting any other books done.
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I'm just gonna focus on this one and see where it takes me.
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And eventually at that point,
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I realized that the reason I had had so much problem seeing what the arc was was
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because it was an incredibly long book. And so I'd written, you know,
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80,000 words, which is normally coming towards the end of a,
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of a novel that I usually write. But that's really, I mean,
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not even a third of the way through this one. So the,
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the kind of character arc was just really getting going. And so, yeah,
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I just loved writing it. So the character really drove that story.
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I had a sense of what was going on with the, with the emperor. Um,
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and I knew at some point he was gonna be leaving, you know,
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there there's some elements there, but, um, but Clefa as a character,
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just sort of shouldered his way into being sort of one of my favorites
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and a, a really important person in my, in my stories.
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I think it's a very good, um,
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illustration of how it is that characters are the things that draw us to books,
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um, because the, the,
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the slice of one person's life through these momentous events is a really
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fascinating one to take cuz he passes through the fall and the rebuilding
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he's had his own personal journey, but no one which, which lots of people,
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you could have written the book about his journey home.
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He has his time in his life where he wants to go and find out someone to his
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family, but nobody's interested.
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So he only gets to tell it right later on in life.
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And that itself is,
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is a really fascinating sort of it's do it's dodging the most obvious,
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like it's not a quest in that standard sense. It's not a there and back again,
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uh, in, well, except I suppose it is. Uh,
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but not in the sort of talking que setting out to find a dragon way. Um,
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and what I've thought was
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fabulous about it was the way that you are really expanding a sort of,
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this is what fantasy can do. Um, and, and,
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and finding a really original, uh, area to,
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to explore the stuff between main events. Well,
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main events are happening, but the focus is on the experience of a,
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a man passing through those. So I would,
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can't recommend it enough listeners go and you need a while.
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I think I would say that, stick with it because I was,
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I couldn't understand it to start with, well, why are we,
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why are we on holiday with this guy? You know,
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why have we started there and don't get it until you think, ah, okay.
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And something really big happens where he takes a decision and that has the
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consequences then kind of like the,
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do the first domino that goes down and the rest of the book follows. So,
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yeah. Fantastic.
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Well, thank you. I think for me with that book,
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one of the things I find it like that I just find endlessly fascinating too is,
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and for me,
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I feel like that question of you have a family that you love,
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but you have a desire to go traveling or to go and do other things.
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And they may or may not understand that is, you know, is, is a very true one.
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We're not all orphans, you know, with Fs and whatnot.
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Like you can just want to have those adventures. And that's something I,
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I explore in different parts of my stories,
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those kind of complicated families that, um,
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that are there,
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cuz I feel like I don't know the people who love their families and you can
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still have a complicated relationship, no matter, you know,
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if you love them and are loved by them very well,
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but it doesn't stop you from having those desires,
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but it makes them much more complicated. And I find that.
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So like that's a thread through that story too,
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and kind of found families as well and how that interacts with your,
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with your biological family friendship is the themes that I find really
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important too.
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Thank you for listening to part one of this week's podcast.
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Come back next week to hear part two.
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Thank you for listening to myth makers.
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Thanks for listening to mythmakers podcast brought to you by the
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Oxford center for fantasy visit Oxford center for fantasy.org
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