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Stargazy Pies And Imperial Stories - Part 1 · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and
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  fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding.
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  I'm an author but I'm also director of the Centre.
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  And today I am joined by Victoria Goddard who actually was invited on the podcast
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  by special request of one of our 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 actually getting to
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  understand and read Victoria's fantasy works. 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 which is the smallest of the Canadian provinces.
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  It's in Eastern Canada and the Meritimes. Fantastic. So should we have a little overview
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  of the kind of things you write so people understand where you sit in the fantasy
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  pantheon as it were? What kind of series do you write and how would you describe them?
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  Well I tend to tell people I write in the general kind of mythopiac tradition from the
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  Inklings onwards. So this was a nice fit with your podcast.
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  I'm kind of one of those English derived medievalists by background.
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  My family's British and first my dad was a immigrant actually.
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  And always been very very fond of them. I tend to I like writing kind of a vast
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  sprawling interconnected narrative universe exploring different different elements of it.
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  And I tend to like writing I suppose the stories that happen around the epics.
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  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?
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  And how do you how do you do it? That's something I find really interesting.
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  You recommended to me as did the listener who wrote in one of your books called The Hands of the Emperor,
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  which I've been absolutely thrilled to talk to you about in a moment.
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  But you also as you say connected to this you sort of dip into the history before and later.
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  And 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 duo to connected characters.
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  And that starts with the stargaze pie. But is that correct? Yes, that's right.
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  I like I enjoy writing a whole bunch of different kinds of books.
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  And that's something I've always really liked to connect to your kind of thing.
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  Like I've always liked that about say Tolkien where you have such different books in the same universe as the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings.
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  And so I've enjoyed that or somebody like Dorothy Sayers and her mysteries where she writes different kinds of mysteries with the same characters.
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  And so that kind of that's always appealed to me that sort of stretching yourself as craft.
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  And just being able to tell 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, it's a duo kind of friendly,
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  a little bit of a cozy mystery sort of underlying it there and a bit of an adventure.
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  And whereas The Hands of the Emperor is, you know, it's a bit of, among many things,
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  it's about a bureaucrat on the edge of retirement kind of thing.
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  And so so I suppose in terms of genre, I just kind of say, well, I'm I'm right in the middle of fantasy,
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  but I tend to rate these sort of slightly off of culture towards genre conventions.
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  Yeah, and I think that's what is so wonderful about your writing, Victoria, is that you feel really original.
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  And that's there's something wrong with reading something which fits in a genre.
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  So if you read a romance or a detective story, you know how it's going to turn out or a Western.
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  Yeah, you know before you start what's going to happen more or less, but you don't know what the journey is.
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  Whereas when I started reading Hands of the Emperor, I had no idea what the journey was going to be.
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  And it was a pure delight. It's a longer book. It's not a sort of thing you can knock out in a,
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  but I have thoroughly enjoyed my week spent with your main character, Cleafer.
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  So but before we come to him, I'm just thinking about the influence and place on your stories,
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  because the Green Wing and Darts series feels quite like a sort of 18th century feel.
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  I mean, people are sort of small, small villagey town type society there feels like that.
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  Whereas the world of the hands of the Emperor is very much a much bigger scale.
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  It's got a sense of or mixture of the sort of Chinese bureaucracy 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, I don't know, Maori or Pacific islands.
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  I mean, you're creating your own world, but I felt that there was a sample of different elements that you were going for.
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  So as a writer, have you traveled first and gone around squirreling away or these ideas?
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  Or is it something that you think, oh, 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.
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  As I said, my family's 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.
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  And I did the year abroad in Scotland when I was in undergrad.
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  And so for me, I've always really enjoyed that kind of, yes, the 19th century sort of the Jane Austen or early, late 18th, early 19th century, that kind of period of the early novels.
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  And then and the sort of early Regency stuff.
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  And then also just sort of the kind of idealized vision that people have Oxford and Cambridge and things like that.
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  And I enjoyed playing with that and thinking about, I have an academic background.
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  And so I enjoyed thinking about, you know, what the good parts of that and also the bad parts of that in some ways.
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  We haven't seen that much of the university experience, but I enjoy thinking about it.
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  And so for me kind of travel, I once spent about six months walking down the length of England and staying with various relatives and friends along the way.
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  And so that kind of sense of the landscape was a great resource for me.
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  And otherwise, I've moved quite a lot around Canada growing up, lived in 14 places across the country.
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  And my parents spent 10 years in Papua New Guinea, north of Australia.
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  And so I had a lot of stories about Papua New Guinea and Australia growing up.
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  I mean, that really comes out strongly in the hands of the emperor with the White Seas Islander culture, which is quite strongly based on sort of Polynesian historic Polynesian culture.
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  But there's quite a lot of Papua New Guinea and elements in there too from the Trobrand Islands and the Highlands, which is where my parents lived.
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  And so I had lots of stories and like the material culture of that that white parents had various elements of it and friends of theirs who come to visit us or we visited them.
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  I've only been there once, but that I remember I was there when I was very as a baby.
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  But as an adult, I've only been there once. And so it was a very rich experience, even being a quite short trip.
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  So I enjoy that combination. I feel like it's important to be very respectful of other cultures. And I try really hard to not to appropriate cultural elements, especially for ones that have been historically colonized.
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  But at the same time, I also think it's very important to try and broaden the base that you're building off of.
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  So the grooming and dark series is quite largely based off of kind of the English country tradition and country like country house stories to write like that kind of the mysteries that you get out over and that tradition there.
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  But the hands of the emperor in the world that that said in which is zoonie.
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  I deliberately wanted it to be a non Western European based society. I was I really wanted to get away from that.
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  So I the different parts of zoonie that are drawn from different 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 identify you not to fall in love with clear for clear for is the main character 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, but actually he is just the most wonderful wonderful character.
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  I was saying to you just before we started recording that he reminds me very much of the count Rostov who is the lead figure in the fantastic novel gentleman in Moscow by Amortals, which is a historical novel.
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  I think being filmed at the moment. But the how that story works is that you just love spending time with that character. And I felt absolutely the same about clear for.
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  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.
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  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.
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  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?
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  No, it was a very character driven.
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  So 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're sort of two parallel core.
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  It's to that that project one of them there's this empire called the empire of a standalone as which has this catastrophic cataclysmic magical collapse that happens.
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  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?
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  What happens afterwards, but that that kind of shadow that falls across the entire entire cultures and individuals is something that I find.
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  Very interesting to think about and I think this connects back to something like Tolkien and the shadow of World War one that's always behind 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.
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  And so in my novel is that kind of the fall of a standalone is is that that culture wide devastation that people don't always talk about, but is always there.
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  So that's one part of the project and then the second part of the project is this figure of one character and who is called Fitzrangerson he's a mean character in various books and referred to in other ones he's this poet.
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  And so as part of that one thing I was interested in with the fall of a standalone as in the effects of it was the character of the last emperor of a standalone who survives the cut 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 about the last emperor and what he was like in the period after things that sort of settle down after the fall and I thought oh his secretary is probably a good window on to 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 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 clear for as a character he was just so interesting and he just kind of kept going 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.
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  Like I often know what the emotional tone I want to end with is or like the very the denouement I don't always know what the climax is but I usually know what the denouement 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 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 to 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 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 clear for.
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  And eventually I was like okay you know what I'm not getting any other books done I'm just going to 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 trouble 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 novel that I usually write but that's really.
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  I mean not even a third of the way through this one so 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 I had a sense of what was going on with the with the emperor and I knew at some point he was going to be leaving you know there's some elements there but but clear for as a character just sort of.
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  Shouldered his way into being sort of one of my favorites and a really important person in my in my stories.
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  I think it's a very good illustration of how it is that characters are the things that draw us to books because.
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  There's slice of one person's life through these momentous events is a really fascinating one to take because he passes through the fall and rebuild.
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  He's had his own personal journey but no which which lots of people you could have written the book about his journey home he has his time in his life where he wants to go and find out what's on to his family but nobody's interested.
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  So he only gets to tell it right later on in life and that itself is is a really fascinating sort of it's dodging the most obvious like it's not a quest in that standard sense it's not a there and back again in well except I suppose it is but not in the sort of talking ask setting out to find a dragonway and what I've thought was fabulous about it was the way that you're really.
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  Expanding a sort of this is what fantasy can do.
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  And finding a really original area to explore the stuff between main events well main events are happening but the focus is on the experience of a man passing through those.
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  So I would can't recommend it enough listeners go and you need a while I think I would say that stick with it because I was I couldn't understand it to start with 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 oh okay.
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  And something really big happens when he takes a decision and that has the consequences then kind of like the dot the first dominoe 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 to is.
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  And for me I think 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 and they may or may not understand that is you know is a very true one we're not all orphans you know with feats and whatnot like you can just want to have those adventures and that's something I explore in different parts of my stories is kind of complicated families that.
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  That are there because I feel like I don't know the people who love their families and you can still have a complicated relationship no matter if 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 that's a third through that story too and kind of found families as well and how that interacts with your with your biological family friendship was a themes that I find really important too.
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  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 Mythmakers.
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  Thanks for listening to Mythmakers.
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  It's worldwide.
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