Tor/Forge November 2010 Newsletter

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In This Issue

Turn on the Wayback Machine!

“Magic calls to magic”

The Genesis of The Flock

The Rope Roads

Turn on the Wayback Machine!

By Mercedes Lackey

It’s been an awfully long time since I last did any of the urban fantasy for Tor. I won’t elaborate too much on what is now ancient history, except to say that when I was writing the Diana Tregarde books (Diana first appeared in Burning Water), there were some folks whose reality checks bounced, and we had good reason to think they were potentially dangerous. So…we put things on hold.

“Magic calls to magic”

By Alyx Dellamonica

The above line, from my story “Nevada,” formed one of the first rules I set out for the universe where Indigo Springs takes place. I had decided I was going to write about my grandparents’ home in Yerington, Nevada, an ordinary ranch house centered in a fenced-in patch of desert just outside town. The place has always been special to me. We moved a lot when I was young, but Yerington was always there. Going to Nevada meant being spoiled by my grandmother, of course, but their home also had a lot of physical objects that I was fond ofa cookie tin full of sun-melted crayons, my mother’s old stuffed bunny, Grandma’s polished rocks, and the possibility of finding a painstakingly hand-chipped arrowhead under every tumbleweed. I made all these childhood treasures explicitly magical when I turned them into the chantments that do so much good and harm in Indigo Springs and its sequel, Blue Magic.

The Genesis of The Flock

By James Robert Smith

The spark for The Flock was born in the early 1990s when I read about the discovery of a bone in a Florida spring. A paleontologist had found a piece of the fossil puzzle for the animals commonly referred to as “Terror birds”. These were enormous flightless predator birds that lived during the Pleistocene along the Gulf Coast of North America. No one had ever found their wing bones, and it was assumed that such bones would indicate a vestigial limb, such as those on their ratite relatives, the ostrich or emu.

The Rope Roads

By Karl Schroeder

I’ve just introduced my daughter to The Odyssey; she loves it. When it came time to describe the wonderfully illustrated edition we’d just bought for her, there was no way I could capture her imagination better than by telling her the simple truth: The Odyssey is the story of a man trying to get home to his wife.

There’s no magic ring here; no Mount Doom. The fate of the world does not hang in the balance. No nation will fall if Odysseus fails in his particular quest. And yet, my daughter understood instantly that, for Odysseus, this was the most important journey he could possibly undertake, and she wanted to take that journey with him. It’s the simple humanity of Odysseus’s quest that makes all the other trappings of motivation and dire consequence unnecessary—and this also explains how the story could remain popular for nearly three thousand years.