Stargazy Pies And Imperial Stories - Part 1

0:06 Hello, and welcome to myth makers. Myth makers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford center for fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but I'm also director of the center. And today I am joined by Victoria Godard, who actually was invited on the podcast by special request of one of our listeners. So don't say we don't deliver. So if you've got any more ideas for guests, please do send them in. Because for me it's been an enormous pleasure over this week, actually getting to understand and read Victoria's fantasy works. So first of all, hello to Victoria.

0:48 Hello. Thanks for having me. So, Victoria, where are we talking to you? Where's your home base? I live in prince Edward island, which is the smallest of the Canadian provinces it's in Eastern Canada and the Maritimes. Fantastic. So should we have a little overview of the kind of things you write? Um, so people understand where you sit in the fantasy Panion as it were. What are the, what kind of series do you write and how would you describe them? Well, I tend to, uh, tell people I write in the general kind of mythic tradition from the inklings onwards. So this was a nice fit with your podcast. Um, I'm kind of one of those English derived medievalists by background. Uh, my family's British and, um, first my dad was a immigrant actually. And, um, always been very, very fond of them. I tend to, I like writing kind of a vast sprawling interconnected narrative universe, exploring different, different elements of it. And I tend to like writing, I suppose, the stories that happen around the epics what's going on after you've had the grand speech, how do you get from there to the actual work of the work of living and how you, how do you do it? That's something I find really interesting.

2:06 So you recommended to me as did the listener who wrote in, um, one of your books called the hands of the emperor, which I'd be absolutely thrilled to talk to you about in a moment, but you also, as you say, connected to this, you sort of dip into the history before and later, and, um, you use your world building to go where you want, but you also have a series which is more like a, a duo, uh, two, two connected characters. And that starts with the Starz book. Is that correct? Yes, that's right. Um, I like, I, I enjoy writing a whole bunch of different kinds of books and that's something I've always really liked, um, to connect to, to your kind of thing. Like, I've always liked that about say Toki where you have such different books in the same universe as the Hobbit and the Lord of the rings. And, and, um, so I've, I've enjoyed that or somebody like Dorothy Sayers in her mysteries where she writes different kinds of mysteries with the same characters.

3:00 And so that kind of a, that's always appealed to me. That's sort of stretching yourself as craft and just being able to tell different sorts of stories and focus on different elements of them. And so the green wing and dart series is sort of a bit of a more, yeah, it's a duo kind of friendly, a little, a little bit of a cozy mystery, sort of underlying it there and a bit of an adventure. And, um, whereas the hands of the emperor is, you know, it's a bit a, among many things. It's about a bureau cut on the edge of retirement kind of thing. And, um, so, so I suppose in terms of genre, I just kind of say, well, I'm right in the middle of fantasy, but I tend to write these sort of slightly off, off kilter towards genre conventions.

3:40 Yeah. And I think that's what is so wonderful about your writing Victoria, is that you feel really original. Um, that's, there's nothing wrong with reading something which F fits in a genre. So if you read a romance or a detective story, you know how it's gonna turn out or a Western, you, you know, before you start, what's gonna happen more or less, but you dunno what the journey is. Whereas, when I started reading hands of the emperor, I had no idea what the journey was gonna be. And it was a pure delight. It's a longer book. It's not a sort of thing you can knock out in a a day. Um, but I have a thoroughly enjoyed my week spent with your main character Clefa. So, but before we come to him, um, I'm just thinking about the influence and place, uh, on your stories because the wining and dart series feels quite like a sort of 18th century feel.

4:33 I mean, people are the sort of small, small villagey town type society. There feels like that. Whereas the, the world of the hands of the emperor is very much a much bigger scale. It's got, um, a sense of almost mixture of the sort of Chinese bureaucracy and the exams that used to have to do to be part of the Chinese bureaucracy, but also island culture that could be from, um, I dunno, Maori or Pacific islands. I mean that you are, you're creating your own world, but I felt that there was a sample of different elements that you were going for. So as a writer, have you traveled first and gone around squirreling away all these ideas? Or is it something that you think, oh, I want to do this and then go and have a look at it.

5:24 It's a little bit of both. Um, as I said, my family's, uh, British and I've spent a number of visits and some quite some time visiting family members in various parts of England and Wales, particularly, and I did a year abroad in Scotland, um, when I was in undergrad. And, um, and so for me, I've always really enjoyed that kind of, yes, the 19th century, sort of the Jane Austin or early, late 18th, early 19th century, that kind of period of the early novels. Um, and then, and the sort of early Regency stuff. And then also just sort of the, the kind of idealized vision that people have of Oxford and Cambridge and things like that. And I enjoyed playing with that and thinking about, I have an academic background. And so I enjoyed thinking about, you know, what the, the good parts of that, and also the bad parts of that in some ways.

6:14 So we haven't seen that much of the university experience, but I, I enjoy thinking about it. And, um, so for me kind of travel, I, I once spent about six months walking down the length of England and staying with various relatives and friends along the way. And so that kind of sense of the landscape, um, was a great resource for me. Um, otherwise I've lived around quite, I've moved quite a lot around Canada, growing up, lived in 14 places across the country. And my parents spent 10 years in pap, new Guinea north of Australia. And so I had a lot of stories about Papua New Guinea in Australia growing up. And I think that really comes out strongly in the hands of the emperor with the white seas Islander culture, which is, um, quite strongly based on sort of Polynesian historic Polynesian culture.

7:03 But there's quite a lot of P Guian elements in there too from the TRO brandand islands and the Highlands, which is where my parents lived. And so I had lots of stories in like the material culture of that, that white parents had various elements of it and friends of theirs, um, who come to visit us, or we visited them. I've only been there once, but, uh, that I remember I was there when I was very, as a baby, but as an adult, I've only been there once. And so it was a very, um, rich experience, even being a quite short trip. So I enjoy, uh, that combination. I, I feel like it's important to be very respectful of other cultures and I try really hard to, uh, not to appropriate, um, cultural elements, um, especially for ones that have been, you know, historically colonized.

7:45 But at the same time, I also think it's very important to try and broaden the base that you're building off of. So the grooming and Dick dart series is quite largely based off of kind of the English country tradition and country like country, house, um, stories too, right? Like that kind of the mysteries that you get out of, or, and that, that tradition there, but the hands of the emperor and the world that that's set in, which is Zuni, I deliberately wanted it to be a non-Western European, uh, based society. I was, I really wanted to, to get away from that. So I, I, the different parts of Zuni are drawn from different, um, non-Western cultures as a conscious choice there.

8:26 And what the person who wrote in said, is I something along the lines of, I defy you not to fall in love with Clefa now Clefa is the main character, um, of the hands of the emperor. He is the hands of the emperor. You could describe him very boringly as bureaucrat, but actually he is just the most wonderful, wonderful character. Um, I was saying to you just before we started recording that he reminds me very much of the, um, count Rosoff who is the lead figure in the fantastic, um, novel gentleman in Moscow by Amor towels, which is a historical novel, I think being filmed at the moment. Um, but the, how that story works is that you just love spending time with that character.

9:14 And I felt absolutely the same about Clefa. And as you were just saying, what you're thinking about in this book are things which don't make it into fantasy. It's the stuff that's not around the battle. It's um, how do you hand on power? How do you retire? And there's also a really strong theme about what do the people back home think of those who have gone into another walk of life and got success elsewhere, which doesn't translate into the local context at all. They completely misunderstand him in sad ways. So when you started this book, did you start with the character and just see where it went, or did you already have those themes in mind and then, you know, built him to fit the plot?

10:02 No, <laugh>, it was a very character driven, um, different book. So my, my kind of general project, as I said, I tend to, I write these sort of, it's a sprawling interconnected stories in my, in my narrative universe here. And they, they there's sort of two parallel core, um, to that, that project. One of them there's this empire called the empire of a stand laws, which has this catastrophic cataclysmic, magical collapse that happens. And so I, it's sort of, one of my projects is the lead up to, to that collapse. And then what happens afterwards, I'm not really a dystopian kind of writer. I'm really much more interested in how do you rebuild, um, what happens afterwards, but that, that kind of shadow that falls across the entire, um, entire cultures and individuals is something that I find a very interesting to think about.

10:54 And I think this connects back to something like Toki and the shadow of world war, I, that's always behind, um, all those authors of the first half of the 20th century. And I've always found that interwar period quite interesting for that with, with people, not always talking directly about it, but it's always there. And so in my novels that kind of the fall of a stand laws is, is that, that culture wide devastation that people don't always talk about, but is always there. So that's one part of the project. And then the second part of the project is this figure of, um, of one character, um, and who is, um, called Fitzer cell. And he's a mean character in various books and referred to in other ones, he's this poet. And so as part of that, one thing I was interested in with the fall of a Standal as, and the effects of it was the character of the last emperor of a Standal as who survives the, this destruction and ends up having to kind of rebuild on a personal level.

11:49 And so I started off writing this, what was going to be a short vignette, uh, about the last emperor and what he was like in the period after things had sort of settled down after the fall. And I thought, oh, his, secretary's probably a good window onto what he's like as a person. And so I started writing about his secretary and it was really only intended to be a couple of scenes or maybe one scene, like that was all I was doing. And by the end of the scene, I had fallen in love with CLE, for as a character. He was just so interesting and he just kind of kept going. And, and that was the story was, was an, was an unusual one to write because I usually have more of a sense of what the story is to start with, or at least like, I often know what the emotional tone I wanna end with is, or like the, the very, the Demont, I don't always know what the climax is, but I usually know what the Demont is and where the characters end up.

12:34 And so for that one, I had no sense of what the arc was at first. I just kind of kept, but I kept being drawn to writing scenes, and I just kept imagining them, like, I'd be driving or I'd be, you know, taking the dogs for a walk or something, and the scene would come into mind and I, I just have to go write it. And so for, I don't know, a year, a year and a half, maybe two years, I just kind of kept going back to it and picking away at it. And I was enjoying writing it so much. Like I just love spending time with Clefa and eventually I was like, okay, you know what? I'm not getting any other books done. I'm just gonna focus on this one and see where it takes me. And eventually at that point, I realized that the reason I had had so much problem seeing what the arc was was because it was an incredibly long book. And so I'd written, you know, 80,000 words, which is normally coming towards the end of a, of a novel that I usually write. But that's really, I mean, not even a third of the way through this one. So the, the kind of character arc was just really getting going. And so, yeah, I just loved writing it. So the character really drove that story.

13:30 I had a sense of what was going on with the, with the emperor. Um, and I knew at some point he was gonna be leaving, you know, there there's some elements there, but, um, but Clefa as a character, just sort of shouldered his way into being sort of one of my favorites and a, a really important person in my, in my stories. I think it's a very good, um, illustration of how it is that characters are the things that draw us to books, um, because the, the, the slice of one person's life through these momentous events is a really fascinating one to take cuz he passes through the fall and the rebuilding he's had his own personal journey, but no one which, which lots of people, you could have written the book about his journey home.

14:16 He has his time in his life where he wants to go and find out someone to his family, but nobody's interested. So he only gets to tell it right later on in life. And that itself is, is a really fascinating sort of it's do it's dodging the most obvious, like it's not a quest in that standard sense. It's not a there and back again, uh, in, well, except I suppose it is. Uh, but not in the sort of talking que setting out to find a dragon way. Um, and what I've thought was fabulous about it was the way that you are really expanding a sort of, this is what fantasy can do. Um, and, and, and finding a really original, uh, area to, to explore the stuff between main events. Well, main events are happening, but the focus is on the experience of a, a man passing through those. So I would, can't recommend it enough listeners go and you need a while.

15:19 I think I would say that, stick with it because I was, I couldn't understand it to start with, well, why are we, why are we on holiday with this guy? You know, why have we started there and don't get it until you think, ah, okay. And something really big happens where he takes a decision and that has the consequences then kind of like the, do the first domino that goes down and the rest of the book follows. So, yeah. Fantastic. Well, thank you. I think for me with that book, one of the things I find it like that I just find endlessly fascinating too is, and for me, I feel like that question of you have a family that you love, but you have a desire to go traveling or to go and do other things.

16:01 And they may or may not understand that is, you know, is, is a very true one. We're not all orphans, you know, with Fs and whatnot. Like you can just want to have those adventures. And that's something I, I explore in different parts of my stories, those kind of complicated families that, um, that are there, cuz I feel like I don't know the people who love their families and you can still have a complicated relationship, no matter, you know, if you love them and are loved by them very well, but it doesn't stop you from having those desires, but it makes them much more complicated. And I find that. So like that's a thread through that story too, and kind of found families as well and how that interacts with your, with your biological family friendship is the themes that I find really important too.

16:45 Thank you for listening to part one of this week's podcast. Come back next week to hear part two. Thank you for listening to myth makers. Thanks for listening to mythmakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford center for fantasy visit Oxford center for fantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide.