Latest / Mythmakers / The Call: Peadar Ó Guilín, Irish Fantasy and the Nature of Fairy Stories

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The Call: Peadar Ó Guilín, Irish Fantasy and the Nature of Fairy Stories · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creators
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  brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. And today I am delighted that I am joined
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  by Irish fantasy writer Peder O'Gillin. And before we go any further, Peder, we were talking
• 0:26
  about names because one of the things that global listeners will know is that when you look
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  at Irish name, it might take a few runs at the fence before you can get over it.
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  If you get over it's total. Like Shoshia. Shoshia, number of times I've heard people say that
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  name. So you're about to tell me that Irish is an old written language which is one of the reasons
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  why we get this difference. Yeah, well there are lots of reasons. One of the interesting things
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  is that you know in English like why do we spell the word night with a GH? And most people will
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  know it's because once upon a time the GH was pronounced. So it was neat, you know, and a night
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  was a kinecht, right? Because we used to pronounce it. It wasn't for no reason. We didn't just decide,
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  you know what, let's just throw in a few random letters in there. And the thing is then that
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  writing tends to be standardized, you know, and then spoken words just to whatever they want.
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  And so you get these situations where the spelling is left behind by the pronunciation.
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  Now if you can imagine a language that's much older than English, I mean as a written language.
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  You know, then you can imagine that it needs a lot more reforms, you know, for the spelling to
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  catch up with the pronunciation. However, Irish is pretty much pronounced as it's written.
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  There are lots of haches. You'll see lots of haches in Irish words.
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  And this is kind of because, you know, when people were writing in Latin,
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  the Latin alphabet was designed specifically for the Latin language. So you tend to have one sound
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  for each letter. But then lots of other European countries we adopted the Latin alphabet.
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  And suddenly you have a language like Irish, which has way more sounds and there are letters in
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  the alphabet. So the only way you can make one of these new weird sounds is by putting a
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  H after it. So, for example, in English, we have a chair in cheese. There was no chair in Latin.
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  So they had to put a H after the scene to cope with it. So Irish is not as far from the pronunciation
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  as people think. It's just that we pronounce things differently, you know.
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  Yeah, and it's the fear of making yourself horribly embarrassingly wrong. My husband once had,
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  we said we're going back a long time ago, he once had a summer job in a factory in the former
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  West Germany, so he dates it. And one of his jobs was to tell the people there, this is before
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  the internet, if the people applying for the job in the factory were Irish women or Irish men,
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  because it made a difference to the extreme they went into. So he had to sit there and say,
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  oh yeah, that's, you know, leave. That's a girl. Calm, that's a guy, you know. So he was responsible
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  for getting the right job. So if you are an Irish person who was working in West Germany
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  in the late 80s and you've got the wrong job, it could have been his job.
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  Anyways, yeah, well, we're here mainly today to talk about your fantasy writing, of course,
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  but we wanted to also have a chance to broaden it out and look at the presence of Ireland as a
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  powerhouse in fantasy of its own in its own right, because your work reflects the environment,
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  the landscapes of Ireland, the stories of Ireland, the longs of folkloric traditions,
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  and also it powers the actual plots of your books as well. I've started reading The Call
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  as I have in preparation to meeting you. So we're not talking a comfortable,
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  fairytale world like Disney fairytale world, are we? Tell us a little bit about your fantasy
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  novel The Call and what it's how it's set up. Yeah, often when people ask me, you know,
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  what the call is about. I mean, I don't know what to say. I mean, there's a writer, you know,
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  the ceiling, but I usually say something like it's a bit like a Harry Potter where everybody dies.
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  I'm exaggerating a little, but it's not nice. A bad time has had by most people.
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  And part of that is, are people often translate, there's an Irish word, she,
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  which is often translated into English as fairy. And it's a really, really bad translation,
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  because when you think of fairies, you know, you're thinking of a beautiful girl in the
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  de affinist dress sitting on a told stool at the bottom of the garden or someone flying around
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  with a magic wand and hitting the Disney castle, you know, these are the kind of things that come
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  to mind. Are she are fairies? They're not like that. They don't like us. They don't help us out.
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  They don't grant three wishes, right? Most of our superstitions are all about keeping away from them.
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  A very famous example of keeping people keep bringing up is how I think it was around 2004.
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  They were building a vastly expensive motorway across Ireland. And at a certain point is due to
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  go through this field where there was a hawthorn tree belonging to the fairies. And they ended up
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  spending millions to divert it around the tree. So, you know, it's about keeping away.
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  Not having anything to do with them. But your characters in the cool are unable to keep away
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  because teenagers at a certain point are summoned, are cooled into the other world as objects of a hunt.
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  Yeah, yeah, the fox with the hounds after them, reversing our sort of expectations there. And as
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  you say, it's got a high death rate. Yeah, no, it's a pretty, pretty high death rate.
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  Yeah, I mean, it comes down to, you know, I said they don't like us. Why don't they like us?
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  You know, I mean, who could possibly dislike me? I'm lovely, right? It's hard to explain.
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  But in our, in Ireland, there's a very, very old book,
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  Alves Labaragabala, which means literally the book of the taking of Ireland.
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  And it's a kind of a history of all the people who came to Ireland and what happened to them?
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  You know, the first group arrives and they all die of plague and then another group arrives and
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  they marry with another group where they go to war with another group or whatever. It's just one
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  group after another one wave of conquests, if you like, or one wave of invasions after another
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  coming to Ireland. And the second last group are very unlucky. They're caused the two of
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  Adan and the people of the goddess, Danny. And they loved Ireland. They absolutely adored it.
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  They called it the many colored land. And you know, they loved all the colors of it, the sea,
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  the grass, the sky, absolutely everything. But they were a bronze age people.
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  And the people who came after them were the Malaysians who are kind of said to be the
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  ancestors of Gaelic Ireland, basically of the modern inhabitants of Ireland. And they beat the
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  living daylights out of the two of Adan and in a big battle. And at the end of the battle,
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  the people of the goddess, Danny, were all like, oh my goodness, you're going to slaughter us now.
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  And the Malaysian said, oh, you're going to enslave us then?
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  No. Well, what are you going to do? What we're going to do is we're going to share Ireland with you.
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  Half and half. Oh, that's so generous. So are we getting the north? Are we getting the south?
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  No. Are we getting the east? Or are we getting the west?
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  No, no, no, no, you're not. Well, what part are we getting then?
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  You're getting the half. That's underground. You're never going to see those beautiful
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  colors again. Tough luck. So basically the last line of this book of conquests or book of
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  invasions or the book of the taking of Ireland's got lots of different translations for the
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  realm. But the very last line of it is something like the king of the two of Adan and led his people
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  under the mounds. So he basically led him underground and you've got all these mounds across
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  Ireland, which we call in English fairyforts. And the Irish word for mound is she, which is of course
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  the name of these people. They were the ashi, the people of the mounds after that. And we're
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  basically living in their home. We're basically living in their many colored land. So generally
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  they don't like us. And the call was basically exploring the idea of what would they do to us
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  if they could get their revenge. So the first thing was where were they sent? Now we all know in
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  history, but when one group defeats another group and takes over their land, what do they do?
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  Do they give them the best land? People who are defeated? No, they don't. They usually send them
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  somewhere awful. Like a trail of tears kind of idea or when Cromwell came to Ireland, his big
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  line here was to hell or to conald. In other words, either I'll kill you all or you can go to the
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  worst land. And it's just a very common theme throughout history. So I imagined in the book
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  that where they were sent was the worst place possible. They go to a place called the Grey Land,
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  which I hope kind of makes dentists and furniture look very comfortable. And from there they find
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  a way to get their revenge. And what they do is they each teenager once in their life
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  and be pulled into this Grey Land. And once they're there for an entire day, they're hunted down.
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  And of course, to have some charge of them aren't going to get out of that situation.
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  So that was the kind of basis of it. So when you're talking about this sort of history based on
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  the book of conquest, was that the yeah, or book of invasions? Yeah, there's a different yeah.
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  Is it when you are sort of using that as a background? Obviously there are strong themes here of
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  like history and colonisation and class war and wealth war because I'm thinking of there is
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  you know, the enclosure movement in Scotland that England had a similar thing where the poor,
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  basically the poor people always get shafted in all these situations. So in a way, there's a kind of
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  very obvious mapping on to real history, but also you've got the beautiful
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  imagination of this idea of the the magic that goes along with the the fay folk, which gives them
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  power. So it gives them the power they didn't have before. So when you're using it, how much are
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  you thinking if at all that you're writing a sort of modern morality tale and how much you just
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  really sort of enjoying the fantasy and seeing where it takes you? Because always this balance between
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  the theme and author might be exploring, which can end up being messaging what you don't want to do.
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  No, no. So how did you get about it? Well, well, I didn't I didn't deliberately in for a
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  soon. Yeah. But but we all have themes in us. They merge, don't they? They emerge. I mean, it's
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  basically like if you have an apple and you drop it, you expect it to fall. You don't expect it
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  to float there. You expect it to fall. It's it's just you've grown up in this world. This is your
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  instinct. This is something that you just know to be true. Right? Now you may be wrong about that.
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  You may just not have seen the apples that float, but as far as you are concerned for your entire
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  life, if you drop an apple, it falls. And in the same way, you were saying with the enclosures
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  and so on and so was the poor people who get shafted, right? Maybe you're wrong about that. But more
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  than likely, you believe that to be completely true. So if you're writing a book and you wanted to
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  have some various militant, you're not going to have the poor people not getting shafted.
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  Most of the time, you know, unless that's that's your story, like the poor people trying for,
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  you know, have a great adventure and finally save themselves from a good shafting or whatever.
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  But you know what I mean? Like if it's just the background to the world that you're writing,
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  to your mind, the poor people get shafted. So that's not you making a political theme. That's
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  just something you believe is true of the world. And therefore, when you're writing the world,
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  that's that's what's going to come out. It's it's the same for me. I grew up on the the the border
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  with Northern Ireland. I was in living next door to me at one point was arrested
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  for being in a terrorist organization. We used to do all our shopping on the other side of the
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  border. We would come in on a Saturday morning and the whole road would be covered in bottles and
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  breaks from a riot of the night before. Everywhere I lived was was covered in graffiti. People had
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  very, very strong opinions. My father was a surgeon who operated on people who, you know, were
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  sometimes whisked in under great stress, having been attacked or whatever. So this is this is
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  going to have an influence. You know, it's it's it's going to have an influence. Not not necessarily
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  here's me making a political point, but that's just what I grew up with. It's just what I saw.
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  You know, and if I grew up somewhere else, I'd have seen something different and come out with
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  with something different. You know, so so so that was definitely in the background.
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  Also in the background where all of these myths and legends, I mean, they were
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  they were they were told in every school. Everyone knew these stories in the same way as
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  a lot of people in Britain grew up with these kind of ladybird books. You know, Rumpel still skin
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  and so on and shaping beauty and and all of these. You can probably still picture in your head
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  the illustrations from some of them from from from when you were a kid, I bet, you know. Yeah,
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  yeah, we had those too, but we also had we also had this this other set, you know, of stories.
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  And again, they they affect you, you know, that they're a very different way of looking at the world
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  from from those those ladybird books, like, you know, that they're a very different mentality,
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  but it influences you. I mean, how local were your stories? Because I'm just thinking I'm an
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  Essex girl, which is doesn't have a great reputation for the global history, but I do remember that
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  the very local stories aside from the things in the library were to do with Epping Forest.
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  Yeah, and there were a couple of things. There were two famous highwaymen who were local heroes,
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  Dick Turpin and 16-string Jack. We proud of Dick Turpin. Yeah, the 16-string Jack was a bit more
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  local. There was a pub named Doctin, but also Boedersia or Budica, but she had a camp in Epping Forest,
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  and of course, she was a great figure of resistance. I didn't question this at the time, but since
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  the old now, I look back and think, isn't it interesting how the local legends that were the ones
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  which were highlighted were these, all of them in some way, resistance figures. Yeah. Because Essex
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  itself, because it's not Chelsea, had that feeling of being with it on the edge, with a bit
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  bit chippy. We got that sort of position, and so it was very local. We're talking
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  10, 20-mile radius of stories that were the ones told locally. So when you're thinking about your
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  own upbringing, were there some very specific to your outside your front door, as well as the
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  folklore of Ireland that have gone into the imagination? Yeah, no, that there are so many different
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  layers, so many different layers. For example, in Irish legends, people who studied them,
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  divide them into kind of distinct cycles. You have your stories of Finn McCool. This guy used to
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  go back to place with his band of trusty warriors, a bit like Robin Hood, and his marry man,
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  a very similar kind of vibe to that. Even though he was a king as such, these stories were
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  basically the stories of ordinary people. They would tell stories among themselves, and each member
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  of the band would have stories about him or her. Do you know what I mean? There were all kind of stories
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  of local people, but then you have the famous epit of the Tonbokun about Bukkullin.
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  And these were aristocratic stories, and told by professional bards to kings and the like.
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  So a very, very different set of stories. But then of course, you have your little local
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  folk tales, you know, a bit like when you go and see a place in Essex and say, so that's a
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  bodicus camp. Yeah. I mean, it's really, really normal in Ireland, but there isn't a rock
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  or a piece of grass out there that someone says, oh, yes, that's the place where such is a,
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  for example, a Dalman in Ireland, the Irish word for Dalman is lava, which means bed.
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  And so one of the one of the famous stories is a story of German didn't grow any of the runaway
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  lovers. So this guy fin McCool when he's older, when he's an old man, he decides to marry this
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  pretty young girl. She isn't having any of it. So she basically tricks one of his warriors into
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  running away with her. And now they're kind of on the run and they've got like, you know, the army
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  after them and to catch them. And everywhere you see one of these Dalmans, they say, oh, yes,
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  that's where they spent the night. You know, that's that's one of their beds. That's that's where
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  they spent the night when they were running away. You know, so this is very common. And then you
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  some very, I mean, how high crude am I allowed get? Am I allowed to crude? And probably don't get us
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  an E rating? Not at not an E rating. Okay. Well, well, there is a there is a place
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  called there's a queen. There was a queen called Queen Mave. And there was a place called Maves
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  a pit where where she had a week. Am I allowed to say that? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's it's it's
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  called something a bit worse than that slightly worse than that, but a place where she had a
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  week. And and basically she's watching this battle. And her, her, her troops are engaged and she's
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  in top of the hill. And she says, right, I can't watch anymore. I desperately need a week.
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  And and her, her general is saying, no, no, my lady, you can't, you can't, it's very close. We
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  need your inspiration. We, we need you here. But I, but but I desperately desperately need a week.
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  No, no, my lady, you've got to stay with her. Finally, the battle ends. She runs and we's so hard
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  that this massive pace is carved into the earth. Right, earthy, earthy story. It's named for this,
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  it's named for this. Yeah. So, so that's really common. So this sort of the cliché,
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  and forgive me for repeating it to you, but the cliché of an Irish writer does lean into this
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  sense of the, the sort of mystery and the legends and the poetry and all of these kind of things.
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  Do you think that's a fantasy of itself? And, and do you resent it? Or do you think it's
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  helpful and and something true about a sort of general tendency amongst Irish writers?
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  I think there is every kind of, of, of writing. Of course there is. I just meant that there's a sort of
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  under, I don't know, expecting you're going to be a good storyteller and perhaps start
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  breaking, breaking the song every five seconds. You know, is that sort of cliché?
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  I have no Irish writers like that. So there are, no, no, there definitely are. They're definitely,
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  definitely are. People like Brendan Beacon, you know, and we're plenty, plenty, he used to break
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  into song and we're very good at this. And, and plenty who, who love to tell stories and,
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  and plenty who are singing drunkards and, and, and I mean, they absolutely, absolutely exist.
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  What, what I will say is when I'm trying to sell a book like The Call, yeah, it's an,
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  it's an incredibly helpful stereotype. You know, that's, that's, you, you, you, you will definitely
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  sell more if you're from Ireland than, than if you're from, I don't know, hungry, even
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  hungry, as, as amazing folk legends, but it's not the point. It's just, we've got this cliché
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  working for us, you know, when I, when I try and sell my science fiction, not so much, you know.
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  Yeah, it's, it's interesting that one isn't it because I think there is a,
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  some countries have really strong global identities. And, and others kind of
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  fly beneath the radar and have to explain themselves more. And I think particularly because of
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  the strong Irish contingent in America, I think, as you say, there is like a appetite,
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  so a reconnect to something maybe authentic or something from someone else's past
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  that might help you there. But I was just wondering if you felt it was
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  fair or actually a shoe that no longer fits because we're living in a modern world where
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  everything is less local, more global. Things, things have an effect. And, and the effects last
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  a long time. Like, I mean, everybody knows, for example, how America started with, you know,
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  I mean, the American state with people throwing tea into Boston Harbor because they didn't want to
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  pay tax on it. And, and, and how now it's, it's a notoriously like tax unfriendly country. You
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  know what I mean? Like, I mean, it has an effect. These, these, these things last. In, in Ireland,
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  one of the reasons we were so lucky and so blessed to, to have all these legends. I mean,
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  they have them in every country. It's ever, it's absolutely natural that it gets dark and you're
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  sitting around the fire and you start spinning your tail. And, and also that it's dark and did
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  something move in the shadow. I'm a bit scared now. I'll, I'll make up an explanation for it. I mean,
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  that, that, that probably happened absolutely everywhere around the world at the same time.
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  We were kind of lucky in that, we, we had monks at one point. In, in, when a lot of places were
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  going through what was unfairly called the dark ages, we had monks, we had so many months that
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  if a monk scrapped himself two other monks fell out, you know what I mean? Like, yeah. We, we
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  tons them and they wrote everything down. Absolutely everything. Recipes her, her beer,
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  medicines, spells, curses. We know almost more about medieval Ireland than, than almost
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  any other society at the time. They just wrote absolutely everything down. And one of the things they
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  wrote were the, were the legends of the day. And, and, and like there's an example where there's
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  someone writing, I was told to write these down. I don't believe in them. They're all just,
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  it's all just pagan nonsense, full of sex and adventure and, and fighting and, and, and fun
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  and romance. And, and I'm not enjoying it at all. Not even one tiny little bit. I'm just writing
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  it down. Is it a pretty good flair, though? Yeah, but, but that's not exactly what they clearly did
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  like it, you know, they clearly did enjoy it. And, and they wrote them down with Gusto, you know,
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  and, and so we have them now. And then back in the 1930s, like a very short time after Ireland
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  became independent. One of the first things the state did was it paid money, like it was a,
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  it was like the poorest country in Europe, more or less at the time, but it paid money for,
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  for people to go around with very primitive recording devices to all the old people and collect
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  their stories and record them. You know, so these things have an effect, you know, they, they,
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  they stick around a bit, they, they do affect people. And then, you, you know, that up until,
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  about 15 years ago, professional artists, which includes writers and storytellers and things
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  like that, did not pay tops in Ireland on their art earnings, right? So the country looked after
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  them. And, and even more recently, like in the last two or three years, we have this, you know,
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  universal basic income for, for artists, including writers.
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  Aren't you talking about that? Yeah, well, it's only, it's only a certain number every year
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  I get it. Okay. But it's, but it's, it was an experiment that, that we're doing. Like it shows that,
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  that this is a country that cares about the arts, about writers that values it as an export,
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  if you like, but not just as an expert, but just, just values it. And, and that has an effect.
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  It means that when you're growing up, you, you, it's in the water already that this is a country
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  that respects what you do, you're like making up funny stories to refer to it because,
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  you know, you have a chance, you know, that, that's really unexpected actually to me because what
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  you've just described there is a part, I mean, I was aware of the long Irish tradition,
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  but I hadn't really factored in just the careful curation and that's gone on since medieval times
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  onwards, which has enabled that to happen. These things don't just survive by chance, do they?
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  It's been a, it's been a decision by a society to protect and to remember. I spent some years
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  living in Poland shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And one of the things that was
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  sort of present in Poland was sort of rediscovery of, of their own sort of national
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  story and their, their own literature and traditions, which have kind of got flattened by
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  communism and the propaganda of the earlier era. So these things can survive either under adverse
• 29:23
  circumstances, but you have to dig them up and say, look, this is, this matters.
• 29:29
  Pan-tade or shit matters. Yeah, no, that's, that's really interesting. We, just before we started
• 29:36
  recording, I was talking to you about how one of Tolkien's most famous essays is called on
• 29:42
  fairy stories. And he was writing to reestablish fairy stories as a serious subject for academic
• 29:53
  respect, because they had been, you know, all there for children. And there's nothing really in
• 30:00
  Irish fairy stories that is particularly for children, is there? Oh, no, there are. Of course,
• 30:05
  there are. It's, it's, um, oh, should I say only for children? Yeah, I mean, that there's,
• 30:12
  there's a, there's a, there's a huge variety. There's a huge variety of, of stories in the
• 30:19
  Irish tradition. I told you, they wrote everything down like, I mean, there's a, there's a massive
• 30:23
  amount. So it's hard, it's hard to, hard to get your brain around it. Some of it, I didn't
• 30:28
  say exactly. Absolutely filthy. And some is funny. A lot of it is tragic, but it's not all like,
• 30:33
  you know, there's, there's everything. I didn't phrase that very well. What I meant was
• 30:39
  fairy stories had been relegated to the nursery. As if that was, that's what I meant. It's the only
• 30:44
  place that you read fairy stories was as a young child in the nursery, whereas when actually the
• 30:50
  tradition of fairy stories, which Tolkien is talking about, is actually more in, it's better really
• 30:57
  calling it folklore, really, because it's for society. And obviously there are some tales you would
• 31:02
  tell to younger children and not want to scare them too much. You don't, you want them to go
• 31:06
  to sleep at night, but there's also the element that they grow with you in there for all ages.
• 31:12
  And it seems as though what you're describing in Ireland is that full, full spectrum story
• 31:18
  telling tradition. Yeah, yeah, no, the, the, some, just some amazing stuff. It's some of it is,
• 31:26
  absolutely hilarious. And some of it is, like, very science fiction, you know, like some,
• 31:32
  some real kind of, like, there's, there's an amazing concept, which I'm sure lots of traditions have,
• 31:37
  but, but it's, it's very clear in the Irish tradition where, where you have two worlds
• 31:42
  overlapping at the same time. And I absolutely love it. Like, there's one, one famous story of,
• 31:49
  you know, these people who are working in the, the, the, the feels of a random monastery.
• 31:56
  And, and they look up and they see a ship just closing through the wire. And at a certain point,
• 32:05
  the ship gets caught, the anchor of the ship was caught on a tree, like down down on the farm.
• 32:12
  And someone jumps off the ship and they swim down through the wire and they're trying to
• 32:16
  free the anchor from the tree, but then they start to drown. So one of the persons climbs up
• 32:23
  and cuts the anchor free. And, and then, then the, the, the pressing can go back up to the ship.
• 32:29
  And everyone in the ship wades down at the people in the farm and, and off the ship goes again.
• 32:35
  I suggest to, isn't it that one? Yeah. Steerishing counter. Yeah, I think it's amazing. Yeah.
• 32:43
  So, um, how the, where are you going to be going next in your, your writing? Is it, are you
• 32:47
  returning to another form of art? You know, where are you going in your sort of rich subsoil of ideas
• 32:54
  you've got around you? Yeah. So I, I have, I mean, based on that idea, I just said, there are two
• 33:01
  worlds overlapping at the same time. I have a, a science fiction book just about to come out
• 33:06
  called the Sword Garden. The Sword Garden. Sword Garden. Yeah. And it, it looks like a fantasy book
• 33:17
  like when it starts, so I won't say much more than this, but, but when it starts, that you have,
• 33:21
  you have this city, which is the richest city in, in an empire, which is about to rebel.
• 33:29
  And one of the things the city is famous for is ghosts. So everyone in this city is, I would say
• 33:39
  dark skinned, but the ghosts are white skinned and wear furs. And when they breed out, like,
• 33:46
  smoke comes out of their mouths, which is, you know, a rather extraordinary thing that the, that the
• 33:52
  people find. And so, so that's, that's kind of how it starts, you know. So again, you've got
• 33:59
  your two worlds kind of, kind of overlapping there, you know. So that's fascinating. So I look forward
• 34:08
  to seeing that. So I'm always like to broaden the focus at the end of a chat with another author.
• 34:16
  Thank you about all the wonderful fantasy worlds that we've read about us watched on film.
• 34:22
  And I wanted to ask in honor of your story, The Cool, in all the fantasy worlds, they're all
• 34:30
  available to you. Where would you most like to take part in a magical contest or survival contest
• 34:37
  in your sense? But to be the winner of a contest in a magical realm, there is some I wouldn't
• 34:45
  want to be, you know, you can rule out my 100 games, for example, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I
• 34:52
  mean, I guess the world I found most, most, uh, alluring, um, there was a book, uh, by a guy called,
• 35:04
  David Zindal. I think David was his first name Zindal was definitely a second one. Um, and the book
• 35:10
  was called Nevernals. Um, and it's basically this, this city, um, that's, that's basically an
• 35:19
  Arctic wonderland. And everyone sits around in giant ferries drinking hot chocolate. And the streets
• 35:25
  are called glitteries because you just skate is, is all you do from place to place. Um, and, and it
• 35:34
  just absolutely captivated me when, when I sought, um, very magical contest. If I was going to win it,
• 35:42
  um, I would, I would, if I was going to win, if I was going to lose, definitely not. But if I was
• 35:47
  going to win, um, possibly, um, Michael Swanwick's the Iron Dragons daughter, um, it's, it's a horrific
• 35:57
  world. Uh, but, but the, the well off to very well indeed that's, um, but, but the, uh, the
• 36:06
  world's building, it's, it's basically, um, a mix of the modern and fantastical. So one of the
• 36:13
  images in it is, is, is, you see a photograph of grinning elves with, uh, M16s, a top of a, a big
• 36:22
  pile of dead orks in, in one of their foreign wars. Um, so an amazing book. So do you want to
• 36:33
  the question for me? I was thinking, I mean, those, most, most magical contests like your own are
• 36:38
  very much staying in the tail thing. So, you know, the tribus up, you end up being in a graveyard
• 36:43
  with Voldemort, you know, is it's not really. Yeah. They don't have very good reputation. So
• 36:47
  perhaps I'd play safe and I would go for, um, answered Wonderland because everyone gets prizes.
• 36:53
  Oh yeah. That, that seems to be the safest place for a magical contest. I, I, I would be terrified
• 36:59
  to go to Wonderland. Or true. True. Thank you so much, um, for joining us. And we look forward to
• 37:07
  saying the, the title of your book again. Oh, the Sword Garden. The Sword Garden. There we go.
• 37:16
  So that's do, look out for that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed.
• 37:26
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• 37:33
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