Vale Sir Terry

Sir Terry Pratchett - 28 April, 1948 - 12 March, 2015

The literary world lost one of it's true giants and gentlemen this week when Terry Pratchett passed away at the age of 66.

It's taken me a couple of days to recover sufficiently from the news of Terry Pratchett's death to get my head together enough to put down some thoughts.

Generally when someone famous that I was never connected with, or never met, passes, I have a moment of sadness for them and their families, but it doesn't really hit me. It was different with Sir Terry.

I never met him (my wife did, though, and that's why we have a couple of signed Discworlds, in fact he even did a little drawing of a scythe in one of them), but I kind of felt familiar with him. It may have been because from the time I first saw a Discworld book in the shops (The Colour of Magic) readers could rely on another novel by the same author at fairly regular intervals. At his height Terry Pratchett was releasing 3 books a year. Generally they were Discworld (he wrote more than 70 novels and more than 40 were related to Discworld), but he wrote and co-wrote across genres and didn't confine himself just to his most famous creation of the flat, disc shaped world that stood on the backs of 4 giant elephants, who in turn stood on the back of the great space turtle A'Tuin, as it swam endlessly through space.

What first attracted me to The Colour of Magic was Josh Kirby's chaotic art work.

The artist became synonymous with the series, and also provided artwork for other Terry Pratchett books. Unfortunately he passed away in 2001 and was replaced by Paul Kidby with the release of

The Night Watch.

Paul Kidby is still doing the covers now. The two artists are very different. Kirby's covers were cartoony chaos, and Kidby's are Discworld reproductions of other famous images. They both suit the books, but in entirely different ways.

What it said about The Colour of Magic on the back also intrigued me. A flat world that if you sailed too far you fell off the edge. Invisible dragons, an inept wizard, a clueless tourist. Funny fantasy was just becoming in vogue at the time. While I found The Colour of Magic a little uneven at times I was hooked, because Pratchett stood head and shoulders above the others, he wrote satire, the others did farce. Then there were these great ideas. Like The Luggage, a trunk made of sapient pear wood, a rare magically impregnated wood. Just that in itself made The Luggage priceless, it also meant that it wandered about the place on hundreds of little legs and had a mind of it's own, it could also defend itself. One of the author's most famous and loved characters also appeared, a scythe carrying skeleton, who spoke in capitals, the personification of Death. Although the inept Rincewind was the hero of that and other Discworld books, I always felt he played second fiddle to the other cast of characters.

It was with the third book, Equal Rites, that I knew Discworld, and it's creator, were something different from the other funny fantasies on the market at the time.

Most of the others got a character or an idea and then drove it right into the ground, to the point that it was a mercy killing when they finally moved onto something else. The first two Discworld books had Rincewind as their hero, and most of the action took place in the city of Ankh Morpork (sort of like what Charles Dickens and Robert E. Howard may have created if they'd ever worked together). Equal Rites was different, it was the first of the Witches books, and it introduced readers to characters like Granny Weatherwax and her earthy friend and fellow witch Nanny Ogg. It also took place out of Ankh Morpork.

Mort, the 4th Discworld novel, dealt with Death, who by this stage had achieved rock star status amongst fans.

Mort is actually my favourite, although I think I may be in the minority there.

From then on Terry Pratchett and Discworld went from strength to strength. He established a number of series within the one. There were the Rincewind books, and those featuring his colleagues from the Unseen University, the Witches books, the City Watch books, the Moist Lipwig books, the Death books, as well as standalones like Moving Pictures and Pyramids. He also did Maurice and His Educated Rodents for younger readers, and the Tiffany Aching books were aimed at younger readers, but are read and enjoyed by older ones just as much. I think the Nac Mac Feegle have a bit to do with it all.

Terry Pratchett's first book The Carpet People was written when he was 17 years old and it sold a few copies and then disappeared without a trace. It turned up at a few libraries and people were on enormous waiting lists to read it. The author cleaned it up and had it rereleased so that everyone could enjoy it. His publishers also republished two earlier science fiction novels very much in the Douglas Adams mould (The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata). The second of those was written in 1981 (two years before The Colour of Magic) and contains the first mention of a flat disc shaped world.

The Bromeliad trilogy, written for young readers (Diggers, Truckers and Wings), was a delightful little thing about a race of short lived Gnomes stranded on this planet.

He also wrote the Johnny books for teenagers and co-wrote Good Omens (a parody of The Omen films) with Neil Gaiman.

There's a final Tiffany Aching book due to come out later this year, but from 2016 it will be rather sad to look at the section containing Terry Pratchett in the book stores and know that there will be no more.

Terry will be missed, but he has left a legacy that will live on forever in the hearts and minds of his millions of readers.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (D)

And now we come to the D's. I was able to find 3, although one is a collaborative effort.

I will admit I did cheat a bit here and used two authors. The distinguished looking bearded chap at the top is Lyon Sprague de Camp (generally known as L. Sprague de Camp) November 27, 1907 - November 6, 2000. Below him is a picture of a very young Fletcher Pratt 1897 - 1956.

L. Sprague de Camp is one of the giants of the science fiction and fantasy genre in it's heydays of the 40's and 50's, and was one of the founding members of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild of America. Over a 60 year career he authored over 100 books, including novels, non fiction and biographies of fellow authors. During WW II he served as a researcher at the Philadelphia Naval Yard along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He moved between genres, and is known as much for his continuation of Robert E. Howard's Conan novels as anything else he wrote over his 6 decade career. Along with his friend Fletcher Pratt, he was also one of the first writers to explore fantasy for it's comic potential with the Harold Shea or Incomplete Enchanter stories. He also wrote novels with his wife Catharine Crook de Camp in the 1960's.

Fletcher Pratt is best known for works on naval history and the Harold Shea stories with L. Sprague de Camp. I'm not sure if this is true, but his obituary listed 'raising marmosets' as one of his hobbies. That just seems like such a fantasy writer thing to do. Wargamers recognise Pratt as one of the first people to set down rules for gaming, especially naval games. He established a literary dining club called The Trapdoor Spiders, as Isaac Asimov later fictionalised the club, its reasonable to assume that he was a member. He is best remembered among readers for the Harold Shea stories, although he did unfortunately pass away before the series reached any great heights in terms of popularity.

The Harold Shea novels and stories, or as they are also known the Incomplete Enchanter, originally appeared as serialisations, and then later as separate novels. It wasn't until 1988's The Complete Compleat Enchanter that they were all collected together. The basic premise is that the brilliant, but eccentric scientist Harold Shea finds a way of transporting himself into the pages of myths and legends, like the Norse Kalevala, Spenser's Faerie Queene and  Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. The first of the books (The Incomplete Enchanter) came out in 1941 and the last of the original stories written by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (The Wall of Serpents) was published in 1960, 4 years after Pratt's death. This means that they predate one of the best known and most talented exponents of comic fantasy, Terry Pratchett by more than 40 years. To accompany him on his excursions into parallel worlds of magic and fantasy Harold Shea often has his colleagues Reed Chalmers, Walter Bayard and Vaclav 'Votsy' Polacek either help of hinder him. In later stories they add Belphebe and Florimel of faerie (who later marry Harold and Walter) and Pete Brodsky, a hapless police officer who gets caught up in the lunacy. Most of the humour is derived from 20th century technology and ideas clashing with magic and thinking set centuries earlier. They're quite a wonderful example of how things were done in the days before this had become a subgenre of it's own, although the years that have passed have dated the works quite badly on a number of levels.

Further and related reading: both de Camp and Pratt have extensive back catalogues, although most of it seems to be very different from the light hearted feel and focus of the Harold Shea stories. Following the death of Fletcher Pratt, and the reinvigoration of interest in the stories with the publication of the collection in 1988, de Camp collaborated with Christopher Stasheff (Gramarye) and a number of other authors to produce the anthologies The Enchanter Reborn and The Exotic Enchanter. The idea of people entering fiction is not new and has been explored a number of times over the years, one of the best examples can be found in the works of Jasper Fforde, especially his Thursday Next series. Jim Hines also uses this conceit as part of his Libriomancer series, in which the main character has the ability to draw things out of works of fiction to fill a need he may have at the time.

Michael de Larrabeiti's life prior to writing his children's fantasy series The Borribles reads rather like adventure fiction in itself as some of it included a time travelling with a group of Provencal shepherds on the transhumance herding some 3,000 sheep from their winter to summer pastures. He taught English in Casablanca, and was the photographer on Oxford University's Marco Polo Expedition, which entailed tracing the great explorer's steps on a 4 month trek mounted on a pair of BSA motorcycles.  He also worked as a documentary cameraman and travel guide in Morocco and France. He abandoned his DPhil at Keble College at Oxford to take up full time writing. This culminated in 1976 with the publication of The Borribles, he later wrote two sequels The Borribles Go For Broke and The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis. He's written a number of other novels since that, but nothing that could be categorised as fantasy and two of them are memoirs. The last published work was Spots of Time: A Memoir in 2007.

The Borribles used the medium of children's literature (although I feel they are better categorised as YA novels) to highlight the British class war. Given that the first book came out in 1976, I feel that they use the pointy eared Borribles, who live on the fringes of society as a sort of punk urban updating of Peter Pan's Lost Boys. The Borribles are runaway children who never get caught by the authorities and live outside of society, they live a hand to mouth existence, and if they stay on the run for long enough their ears become pointed and they never age, going through life as eternal pre teens. They're locked in a battle with human sized rat creatures the Rumbles, themselves a satire on the popular children's favourites The Wombles. This is also combined with a healthy distrust of authority, the worst fate for a Borrible is to be caught, have their ears clipped and go on to live a humdrum existence. The violence and anti establishment message in the books did bother censors and the fact that they were aimed at children and young adults didn't help. I found them a great deal of fun, but they also contained food for thought, and they updated and added some much needed realism into the genre itself. They've been cited as an inspiration for the New Weird movement, but I can't really see that in them personally. I guess it would help if people could actually decide what the New Weird movement really is. The Borribles (and you really should read all 3 books) are one of those cross generational works where both children and adults can read them and find things to appreciate.

Further and related reading: Michael de Larrabeiti's other works are very different from The Borribles, although some of his writings, especially his memoirs, may give the reader an idea of what formed the concepts behind the creation of the Borribles. The closest idea I can find to the Borribles themselves is in J. M Barrie's Peter and Wendy (the novelisation of the stage play Peter Pan, Or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up), with the Lost Boys. a group of runaway children who never grow up. I can't remember any of the Lost Boys as having pointed ears, but their leader Peter does, which makes one wonder if Peter Pan was in fact the first ever Borrible. American comics author Jeff Smith includes armies of large human sized ratlike beings in his graphic novel Bone, and they're generally called Rat Creatures, I doubt Smith ever read The Borribles, but they are very reminiscent of the Rumbles. I'd also suggest reading Bone, because it just awesome fun. Think of Lord of the Rings and cross it with some of the Disney cartoons featuring Mickey, Donald and Goofy and you'll get some idea of what Bone is like.

Even when I give the name of the man above a lot of people won't recognise it. This is Dave Duncan. He's a Scottish born author, who has made his home in Canada since 1955. Duncan came to writing rather late. He spent 31 years as a geologist in the petroleum industry and published his first fantasy novel (A Rose Red City) in 1986 when he was 53 years old. Since that he's written quite steadily and often switches his focus. The Seventh Sword was a classic tale of someone from our world finding themselves inhabiting the body of a swordsman in a typical fantasy setting. The A Man of his Word series and it's sequel A Handful of Men were both epic fantasies set on the secondary world of Pandemia. The Omar stories are two books which contain a number of tales told by the rascally itinerant story teller Omar, that are rather Arabian Nights in flavour. The Great Game was a trilogy where the action shifted between our world just after the First World War and a secondary world that the hero made his way through. and we're never quite sure which is real and what is the product of the main character's imagination. He did a number of books in the Kings Blades series, which are rather Three Musketeers in both setting and style, this included a trilogy specifically aimed at young adults. These tend to be what most people think of when the name Dave Duncan as a fantasy author is mentioned. He's also dabbled in historical fantasy and written quite a few standalones, as well as science fiction. He has two standalone novels scheduled for release later in 2015.  He's not particularly active on the net, although he is at pains to point out that he is not the baseball player of the same name.

There's plenty to choose from and I have read a fair bit of it, but I always come back to A Man of His Word. I include the picture above to represent it. That's the cover of the series' first book The Magic Casement, and it's by noted cover artist Don Maitz. For some reason it's since been reissued with different covers, I don't know why, because that is one of the best pieces of cover art I've ever seen. I know it's not possible to fall in love with a picture, but the girl on that cover almost does it. I rarely buy books just on the cover, but that is what made me pick up A Man of His Word and consider it. It regularly appears on my recommended list and it's been in my top 10 from the time I first read it. The story is pretty standard fantasy, although it's more of a love story than anything else. It tells the story of the love between Princess Inosolan of Krasnegar and her childhood friend and loyal stableboy Rap, as the two strive to be together and rescue their kingdom from all sorts of forces across Pandemia. Duncan did some really interesting things with this. Pandemia is inhabited by all sorts of mythical races, and he had them correspond in a large part to the cultures the myths come from. The jotuns for instance are large, fair seafaring types who like a drink and a fight, not necessarily in that order. The imps are small, dark and prolific and tend to rule the entire continent of Pandemia in a rather Roman style. The goblins are short, squat green tinged, forest dwelling savages. The djinn are big, bluff loud people, who like beards, have red tinged skin and live in the desert areas of Pandemia, you get the idea. Then there was his wonderful idea of magic being passed on by means of words of power. One word amplifies an existing talent or skill to a high level, two makes the bearer and adept, three a mage and four a sorcerer, five is believed to be impossible. The more people know a word, the less power it has. It's startlingly original and the naming convention of both the books and the chapters was also something different. The names of the books (there are four in the series) all come from the one verse of a Keats poem, and the name of each chapter is also a verse in a poem, which is reproduced at the end of every chapter. An absolute joy to read and deserves to be rated much higher than it actually is.

Further and related reading: Dave Duncan followed A Man of His Word with the A Handful of Men quartet, which was also set in Pandemia and largely followed the next generation from the A Man of His Word quartet. It was entertaining, but to as good as the original in my opinion. There's also the many other books that he's authored. I have read many of them, but haven't been able to find anything that did to me what A Man of His Word did. His magic system is quite original, but simple and I can't really think of anything else quite like it. Possibly Blake Charlton's Spellwright series, which involves the magic contained in writing something down, but A Man of His Word deals with the spoken rather than the written word. There's something of the clearly defined races with various powers and looks as well as geographical locations on the world, which is present in most of David and Leigh Eddings' books, especially The Belgariad and it's various sequels.

And that's the D's. I'm still looking at the E's, but I fear it may be rather slim pickings there.

Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 18

Season 5 of Burn Notice ended with more of a whimper than a bang, but it did bait the hook nicely for Season 6.

As they often do, all stops were pulled out with the casting. Both Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) and Dean Cain (Clark Kent aka Superman from TV's Lois and Clark) with appeared. As well as Eric Roberts, the King of the B movie, although I felt he was rather wasted as a second level villain.

Michael gets to run his own team and have his own op as a reinstated CIA agent, oddly enough Pearce always said it was Michael's op and Michael's team, but she still oversaw it most of the time, even to the point of getting exasperated when Michael just took off halfway through to deal with what he termed was a family emergency involving his mother, but was actually to do with Fiona trying to get Anson's hold on Michael broken.

The episode and the season concluded with Fiona bravely giving herself up to the authorities. Once she's in jail she reasons that Anson can't hold anything over Michael and therefore breaks Michael free. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anton will then tell Michael that unless he does as told he'll arrange to have her killed in prison, or extradited out of the States to somewhere else, or get her released as long as Michael behaves. There was even different ending music, it was a soft slow musical piece that is probably named Michael and Fiona's Theme.

Frustratingly they set Anson up so that Fiona could shoot him earlier in the episode. She foolishly allowed Michael to give the nod rather than take the shot herself and she had ample opportunity to put a bullet through his head. That's the one weakness in the whole thing, just kill him and the problem is solved forever.

As final episodes for this show goes it was relatively disappointing. Anson and Pearce aside this entire season was a little disappointing and it needs a significant lift in quality and less repetition of storyline to redeem itself. Fortunately the final 2 seasons do deliver that. I was at least happy to see that Pearce made it out of the season alive. Hopefully she gets transferred out of Miami, so she can stay healthy. Barry and Nate were both under utilised. I do like the show, but it's lucky that this season came after it was already well established. Jere Burns saved it for mine.

Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 17

After thinking he'd been dropped into a deep, dark hole and left there for the rest of his natural born days, Agent Vaughn returns. It's always good to see Vaughn, manly because Robert Wisdom does such a good job in playing him.

Armed with the information that she got from transferring Anson's money out of his Cayman's account and getting Barry to work his magic on tracking it, Fiona traces some of his dealings to a DC based law firm. It's childs play for Michael to steal someone's id, have Fiona impersonate the someone and stroll in there to check out Anson's dealings. They lead to Vaughn, and even though he's currently 'enjoying' his 'tropical island retirement' at Guantamo Bay the file was recently updated and active.

Michael uses his new clearance and every bit of influence Pearce has to get Vaughn transferred temporarily to a CIA supermax facility in Miami. The problem is that he doesn't have a lot of leverage to use with Vaughn. He can't get him out, so why should Vaughn volunteer any information about Anson, he doesn't like that he's contacted Michael, though.

Adding to Michael's woes is that despite Frank Westen being an abusive husband and father, Maddie isn't happy that Anson killed him and she does worry that he could cause the same sort of pain to others. She never outright says it, but I think Nate and Charlie loom large in her mind. She tells Michael to stop him before he ruins anyone else's life and when Michael intimates that he may have to crack a few eggs to make the Ansonless omelette, she says whatever it takes. She would have made a good CIA boss.

The main mission of this episode is largely Jesse centric. Jesse meets with an old friend who works in the customs area of the government. For a long time part of Ian Covey (Gregg Henry) has been doing things he doesn't much like and one of them is helping an Indian diplomat smuggle conflict or blood diamonds into and out of the country. He's coming up for retirement and he wants to do something good with his career and figures out taking this guy down will do it.

Jesse agrees to help and of course involves Michael and Sam. Fi was only involved peripherally when they needed to do some driving and scare off the diplomat's original buyer in order to replace him with the blinged up Jesse. Coby Bell is like Jeffrey Donovan in that he can transition from Jesse to a range of stock characters during jobs. Sam is always Sam, and that's probably because no matter who he plays Bruce Campbell is always playing Bruce Campbell.

I did wonder about Jesse's Porsche and doubted it would survive the season, it didn't. They've flirted with damaging it, but never gone the whole way. Michael blows it up to help sell Jesse's story and his reaction is not faked. He leased it too, which answered another question posed when he first rolled up in it.

Eventually when everything looks about to go tits up Ian comes clean. He's got terminal cancer, he won't live more than a few months. Taking down the diamond smuggling Yash was his legacy. He's prepared to die to do that. Michael and Jesse go along with the change of plan reluctantly, although Michael never agrees with simply rolling over and giving up, its why he fought to clear his name and it's why he keeps butting heads with Anson and others ho believe that they can break him. They do hope that they can get Ian out of it alive, but it wasn't to be and Yah shot him dead, but was then soon arrested for it and not even his diplomatic immunity can get him out of shooting an active government agent in cold blood, Ian was not armed at the time.

Michael gets Pearce to do him a favour. She agrees, because she's a decent person and she knows Vaughn is seriously bad. Michael wants to tell her why, but says that the last person he came clean with on all this was Max and he wound up dead soon after. Pearce accepts it, but I just have this awful feeling she's going to wind up as collateral damage in the final episode of the season. Once Michael tells Vaughn he's pulled strings to get him transferred from Gitmo to the mainland Vaughn says it's not enough to open his mouth, then Michael shows him that he's also had a few of Vaughn's favourite people, including Simon, transferred to the same facility. The canary starts to sing. Anton didn't want the money transferred to retire on, he wanted access to it, so he could start Management up again.

Interestingly for the penultimate episode to the season it wasn't a multi part one as they often are. Be interesting to see where they go with the final or if they're going to use it to connect onto Season 6.

Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 16

Now shit gets real as Michael is forced to actually team up with Anson, and this is after his mother told him to never darken her door again when he reveals that he knew Anson had knowledge of Maddie for some time before he told her.

Anson (his other name is Fullerton in case anyone was wondering) claims he only wants Michael for another month (yeah, like that's gonna happen) and he wants the $200 million that is held in a flagged account in the Caymans. Michael quite rightly points out that he can't touch the money either and he can't really fly off to the Caymans to pressure the banker who can move it without tipping off his employers. So Fi and Jesse have a job. It's one of the easier ones they've had, sipping drinks in the sun and blackmailing a fairly sleazy banker, he does try to pull a gun on them at one point, but Jesse disarms him without breaking a sweat. I do wonder if putting the two of them in a romantic location together on a fairly cruisy job is another way of reminding people that Fiona and Jesse could very well become a thing.

An old friend of Sam's; a cute Venezuelan journalist by the name of Beatriz shows up in Miami needing protection from a Russian gunman after writing some whistle blowing articles on a corrupt Russian/Colombian oil deal. Beatriz was another character introduced in The Fall of Sam Axe. Kiele Sanchez may have been working on The Glades at the time, but I would have preferred to see her in this episode if we had to have a pretty love interest from The Fall of Sam Axe in there.

Sam and Michael can only do so much and that's when Sam suggests that Michael ask Anson to help. Anson agrees on the condition that he gets to accompany Michael everywhere and that he gets full disclosure and answers to any and every question he asks Michael about how and why he does what he does.

Anson is a pretty smooth operator. He charms a pretty receptionist at the Russian building the two of them need access to, Michael probably could have also gotten past her, but he would have done it differently.

What makes Anson dangerous is how much he knows and how he uses it and the insights that his background allows him to have. He's hinted that he knows about Frank before and exactly what he knows has remained secret, he did fill in as Maddie's therapist for one session, but he lies like most people breathe, so the Frank Westen stuff could be all talk.

However once they've saved Beatriz and his money is on the way he opens up a little. He believes Michael is a white knight, not because he's trying to make up for what he did when he was working for the service and running with Larry, but because he doesn't want to become his father. He said he knew Frank and he got a lot out of him during drunken conversations with the man, and that Frank wanted to apologise to Maddie and the boys for his behaviour. The real bombshell is that the heart attack that killed Frank Westen wasn't accidental at all. 

Burn Notice, Season 5, Episode 15

This episode was titled Necessary Evil, but I think a better name would have been Why Madeline Westen Can't Have Nice Things.

After Fiona and Michael find an extremely novel way to break into the government security building across the road from Anson's apartment with the satellite dish that he piggy backs off of (it involved posing as window washers and Fiona's lack of height was once again joked about, and wrecking a window washing platform to make it look like they accidentally fell into the office they needed to be in), they get some information off the computer in the room before building security arrive.

The information leads them to one of Anson's agents and it turns out to be Maddie's new boyfriend Benny. Even if I hadn't seen this season before I would have known as soon as Benny turned up that he was doomed one way or another, that's just how her life works. The only romantic entanglement aside from Benny that I think she's had was with Sam's ex-SEAL buddy and that never worked out because he's a bullet and danger magnet.

Initially Maddie refuses to be believe it and is convinced Michael has made a mistake, but a search of his house turns up evidence that he is connected to Anson in some way.

While that's being dealt with Michael is tasked by Pearce to try and stop a Liberian warlord from creating a missile on American soil. The brass gave the gig to Michael because of his experience in that part of the world, however that's a double edged sword. They can't risk sending Michael in for that very reason, someone may have crossed paths with him before and will recognise him. Interestingly Pearce said that he's authorised to run the op using Sam and Jesse as his operatives. It is curious how quickly the CIA have altered their stance on Michael using his 'people' on missions that they sanction.

Once Sam and Jesse get in there and meet the scientist working on the missile they realise that he isn't betraying his country, at least not willingly. The Liberians have effectively abducted him and to make him work for them they're holding his daughter hostage. Once Fiona gets that bit of information she's all for finding out where the girl is, kicking down the door and getting her out. Of course they can't do that because that would tip the Liberians off and get the scientist and probably Jesse, who is being held for good behaviour and to ensure that Sam returns, killed. The warlord is unstable and quite violent. I felt they kind of missed out with the casting of the daughter. For the entire time she's referred to as a 'little girl', so I was thinking she'd be a pre teen, but when we see her she looks at least 14 and possibly older, and her father didn't really look old enough to be her Dad, either. It's still not at all cool to kidnap her and threaten her father with her life, though.

Michael, Sam and Pearce come up with one of Michael's crazy schemes to arm Sam and Jesse and end the whole thing without any unnecessary loss of life. They do something that Sam and Michael occasionally do in that they reference an earlier job they pulled. This one was apparently in the Ukraine in 1997. Burn Notice is like James Bond with it's timelines, they sound okay in theory, but don't make any actual sense without the use of a TARDIS when you try and think about them in practical terms.

Once they've ended this one off happily and managed to blow up the missile in the process, thus pissing off the people at the CIA who already don't like Sam Axe, because they wanted the specs (although they've got the guy who built it in the first place, I don't see why he wouldn't simply tell them how he did it, he does owe his life and his daughters to them after all). Michael goes back to his surveillance of Benny with Maddie in tow. It becomes apparent that Benny regrets his deal with Anson and wants out, that's when Michael gets tipped off that something is very wrong. He's out of the car and running towards the house when the whole thing goes kaboom. RIP Benny.

Aside from killing Benny it's worrying that Anson did this, because now Michael doesn't know if he did it because he no longer had a use for him, if he was upset that his agent wanted out, or if he was sending a message to Michael and knows that they've found his information gathering device, and is that the only one? No Jere Burns in this episode, but his spectre looms large over it all.

Favourite Fantasy Authors and Books A - Z (C)

C, yes we're at C already, where does the time go? I did the B's last week, so the C's follow them, because that's kind of how I roll and it makes everything much neater.

Contemporary fantasy author Jonathan Carroll gets us off to a start this week. The author has made his home in Austria since the 1970's, although most of his work seems to predominantly set in his homeland of USA. He made his debut in 1980 with The Land of Laughs, which seems to be his best known work and quite possibly the most commercially successful, although he is quite highly regarded, especially in Europe, and is regularly nominated for various literary awards. His work is rather hard to classify, although it seems to fit best into the contemporary fantasy (not to be confused with urban fantasy) category and this occasionally sees it shelved in the 'literature' section of the bookstores. He's written 17 novels as well as a number of short stories and has had those also published in collections. He was quite active and prolific during the 1980's and 90's, but has slowed down since that. His last published work was Bathing the Lion in 2014.

I'd picked up and put down The Land of Laughs a number of times before 100 Must-Read Fantasy Novels prompted me to give it a go. The covers did tend to attract me (although not the ones with the pit bull on them. I find that one of the most unattractive dog breeds there is), however what I read about it seemed to suggest that it had literary pretensions. 'Literature' and I get along about as well as science fiction and I do. I think I may be a philistine. The Land of Laughs surprised me. Initially it reads rather like Dead Poets Society crossed with some of John Irving's work, and then the dog speaks and everything else you read just goes out the window. The story largely follows the protagonist Thomas Abbey and his self proclaimed girlfriend Saxony Gardner as they research the famous children's author Marshall France for a biography they plan to write. The further they look into the reclusive author's life and origins, the more they realise that his books weren't just flights of fancy. Carroll wrote about France and his work so well, that I was almost prompted to find out if he was a real person and I was rather disappointed to realise that neither the author or his books had never existed in the real world. Reading about the author's life for this post actually made me wonder how much of the book was autobiographical in tone. There do seem to be some similarities between Thomas' upbringing and background and that of Jonathan Carroll himself.

Further and related reading: Jonathan Carroll has written a number of novels and short stories and from what I know about them they do explore a lot of the same themes and have similar tones to The Land of Laughs. As I said in the bit about the book itself the early part of it does remind me of John Irving, especially if John Irving wrote fantasy. A key part of The Land of Laughs is fictional concepts becoming real. That particular idea is quite evident in other works. I actually found that The Land of Laughs had a lot in common with Lev Grossman's The Magicians. The magical college of Brakebills reminded me a lot of the upper class preparatory school that Thomas taught at, although others have referred to Brakebills as Hogwarts university, and in The Magicians the main characters also visit the and of Fillory which was part of a children's series that they read, although Fillory is a fairly thinly disguised version of C.S Lewis' Narnia. William Goldman's The Princess Bride (the book as well as the film) also looks at a fictional work being presented as one that actually did exist, the conceit of the book being that it's an abridged version of an actual fairy tale written by the non existent author S. Morgenstern.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - 27 January, 1832 - 14 January, 1898, or as the world better knows him Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll was one of those rare multi talented people. While best remembered for his writing he was also an extremely accomplished mathematician (in fact he spent most of his life teaching mathematics at Christ Church College in Oxford), he was also a logician (that's quite evident in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), a keen photographer and an Anglican deacon.

He wrote a number of short works and poetry (it is in fact poetry that was first published under his now famous pen name) before Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865, although he had been writing it for a number of years in various forms. The book started as stories that he used to tell the youngest daughter of a family friend; Alice Pleasance Liddell, and she is in fact the Alice at the heart of it (although Dodgson always denied that she was the only model for Alice). In 1871 he published a sequel Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, it was somewhat darker, which reflected Carroll's view of life at the time, his father died in 1868, which plunged him into a depression that plagued him for years. In 1876 he published an epic nonsense poem called The Hunting of the Snark. He didn't publish for years after, but did attempt a comeback of sorts in 1895 with the two volume Sylvie and Bruno, the story of fairy siblings. It remained in print for many years, but is considered a lesser work.

Charles Dodgson or Lewis Carroll died in 1898 of pneumonia, which followed a bout of influenza. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery.

When discussing Lewis Carroll in a list like this there can really only be one work and that is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is probably one of the finest, if not THE finest, examples of nonsense literature ever produced, and it's lived on throughout the years. In both it and it's sequel it contains many logic and mathematical puzzles as well as social commentary, but aside from that it can be enjoyed by both children and adults alike as an enchanting story about the silliest, but strangely charming, world one could ever imagine. I read it first as a child and then again as an adult and every time I find something new and different to look at and it works on a different level for me. It's completely timeless and I don't think it will ever go out of fashion or lose it's popularity as it relates so well to nearly everyone that reads it, no matter their age.

Further and related reading: if you read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland than you must also read Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, if for no other reason than it contains the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. There is of course also The Hunting of the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno. If you do intend to read the Alice stories then you absolutely have to get ones that are illustrated by John Tenniel, other illustrators have done it, but no one else quite captures the spirit of the stories and the characters in the way Tenniel did. It's been filmed on a number of occasions, the Disney animated version is best known, and while the artwork is quite stunning and a feast for the eyes, and they knew better than to mess around with the dialog it's really a bit of a mish mash of the two Alice books and doesn't make a lot of sense as one narrative. A lot of people did like Tim Burton's 2010 live action film version starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, I wasn't one of them. The less said about it, the better. Wonderland seems to be public domain, and any number of authors and advertisers have appropriated the idea and the characters. Alice and her many Wonderlandian friends can be found wandering about the various Disney theme parks on any given day. There's a chain of pancake restaurants here in Australia called The Pancake Parlour that use Alice and Wonderland to advertise. Some of the Wonderlandians, or rather their offspring, have found their way into the Mattel doll line of Ever After High, and novelist Shannon Hale made liberal use of the setting for her final book in the Ever After High trilogy (Wonderlandiful World). The real life model for Alice, was a key character in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, and Melanie Benjamin's fictional biography of the real Alice Pleasance Liddell, Alice, I Have Been. There's a never written 3rd Alice adventure featured on a bookshelf in one of the background scenes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel, that may have been the artist's inspiration, but it is a very Gaiman type of thing to do. Tad Williams also had a Wonderland reality in his Otherland series. American writer and film producer Frank Beddor wrote a series called The Looking Glass Wars which is clearly inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice books, even lifting it's title from the second of them. I could go on listing books and authors that have been influenced by it all day, that's how important and influential a work it is.

Angela Carter - 7 May 1940 - 16 February 1992. Carter is best recognised as a magical realist. She was ranked 10th in The Times 2008 list of 50 greatest British writers since 1945.  Her first novel, Shadow Dance came out in 1966. I know her for a collection of reworked fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, which appeared in 1979. Two of her fictional works were adapted for the screen, The Company of Wolves (1984) by Neil Jordan, which was based on two of the reworked stories in The Bloody Chamber and The Magic Toyshop (1987) based on her novel of the same name. The author was extensively involved in the film making process in both cases. Angela Carter died in 1992 at the age of 51 after developing lung cancer. At the time of her death she was working on a sequel to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short fiction. All the stories in it are reworkings of well known fairy tales. If anyone ever thought that fairy tales were only for children The Bloody Chamber should dispel that illusion. In most cases the clue to what story she's doing is in the title or clearly evident by the contents, but not all, as she quite often adds elements that many readers are unaware is even contained in the original story. For the record the stories are: The Bloody Chamber (Bluebeard),  The Courtship of Mr Lyon (Beauty and the Beast) the clue to that one is in the title. The idea of the Beast being rather leonine is far from new or unique, even Disney's version looked like a lion, The Tiger's Bride (another look at Beauty and the Beast),  Puss-in-Boots (Puss in Boots), Carter's intention here was to just have fun and write a genuinely comedic story, it's rather needed as the rest of the collection is rather bleak without a lot of what you could term happily ever after endings, The Erl King (the Erl King legends), the Erl King is a rather demonic sort of elf, he's not heard about much these days, but I was aware of him from a poem my mother knew, he was also in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  The Snow Child (there were a few influences, but it's most likely a rather obscure variant on the Snow White legend), nothing like Disney at all here, and you definitely don't want to tell this one to children, The Lady of the House of Love (I'd never actually heard of this, but it was apparently based on a radio play that Carter herself wrote called Vampirella), given it's origins it is unsurprisingly a vampire story,  The Werewolf (Little Red Riding Hood), a different look at the legend, which casts Little Red Riding Hood as the villain, The Company of Wolves (Little Red Riding Hood) Carter clearly had her favourites and Little Red Riding Hood is one of them, this is a closer adaptation of the original and it was later made as the film of the same name, the final story was Wolf-Alice (another variation of Little Red Riding Hood with references to Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There), it looks at a view of the world through the eyes of a feral child.

It's not easy reading for the most part, but it is well worth doing and it helps one to remember that most fairy tales have far deeper meaning and were not really intended as bedtime stories for children. In some ways The Bloody Chamber kick started the current fascination with variants on fairytales and is responsible for an ever growing sub genre.

Further and related reading: most of Carter's fiction (10 novels, 6 collections of short fiction of which The Bloody Chamber is one, and 5 children's books as well as screen plays, dramatic work and radio plays, Vampirella was one of those, as well as the articles she wrote in her capacity as a journalist) tends to concern itself with her feminist views and continually challenge the reader to see beneath the surface of the words on the page. Angela Carter isn't responsible for fairy tale retellings, but she did give it a healthy kick along. It's a virtual sub genre of it's own these days. Urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire had a good look at it in Indexing. Jim Hines gave the old fairy tales a new fun spin with his comedy series featuring 3 butt kicking fairytale princesses in his Princess quartet. The prolific Mercedes Lackey dabbles in it with her Elemental Masters and Fairy Tale series. The idea behind the graphic novel Fables by Bill Willingham is that fairy tales live among us, the TV shows Once Upon a Time, and Grimm to a lesser extent, work off the same basic premise. The Ever After High books based on the line of dolls concern themselves with the offspring of various fairytale characters. One of the most Carterish entries is Sarah Pinborough's Fairy Tale series comprising Poison (Snow White) Charm (Cinderella) and Beauty (Sleeping Beauty), and all that really only scratches the surface on a sub genre that seems to continually growing. Of course you could also track down and read a collection of Grimm's and Perrault's originals.

Susanna Clarke was an overnight sensation that took about 10 years to happen. She first started work on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 1993, but it was not published until 2004. The book became a huge sensation. It crossed boundaries and it seemed everyone bought it. It really kicked off when Clarke's now husband, but then writing teacher, Colin Greenland sent one of her short stories called The Ladies of Grace Adieu to his friend Neil Gaiman. Gaiman loved it and from there it found it's way to editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Clarke herself was unaware of this until Hayden called her and offered to publish the story in his anthology Starlight 1. The anthology won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology in 1997. Clarke continued to publish short fiction in various anthologies (Starlight 2 and 3) over the next few years and one of them Mr Simonelli, or the Fairy Widower was shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award in 2001. The massive Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell came out in 2004 and was an almost instant bestseller. In 2006 Clarke published a collection of stories set in a similar alternate world as her huge hit, called The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories. It was well received overall, but people did want something more substantial like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. That was the last novel length work from Clarke. She says that she is working on a sort of sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but with 9 years since The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, and over 10 since Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I wouldn't hold my breath.

Given that Susanna Clarke has only published two books and one of them was a collection of short stories I didn't really have a lot to choose from. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell absolutely took the fantasy world by storm when it was published in 2004. It scooped the pool of fantasy awards in 2005 and it even won The Times Best Novel of the Year award. What made all this more stunning was that it was a  debut. This wasn't really repeated until last year when Anne Leckie's gender bending science fiction novel Ancillary Justice did much the same thing when it came to the genre awards.

I didn't really like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell when I first read it and couldn't see what the fuss was all about. It took a second read for me to appreciate exactly what Susanna Clarke had done. The book still polarises readers between those who love it and those who simply don't get it.

It isn't that easy a book to love really. Mr Norrell is extremely unsympathetic as a central character and I didn't much like Jonathan Strange either to be totally honest, although he's easier to like than Norrell. What I loved about the book was this separate story that she had going on in the footnotes. Terry Pratchett is known and loved for his footnotes, but his are amusing little asides, Susanna Clarke's set out a history that never existed. The world that Strange and Norrell inhabit isn't just a Georgian England in which magic works, it actually makes sense that it does and there's an entire history which explains how it works and why it works and that it's history is very different from the one that we know and learn about. That's the real achievement of the book for me. It was something quite extraordinary that Susanna Clarke did there.

Further and related reading: it may be possible to find copies of the anthologies that Susanna Clarke contributed to when she was working on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I don't think it would be easy. If you liked the debut then The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories may be up your alley. Alternate histories are a sub genre of their own, but there aren't many like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I can think of a couple of examples though. Naomi Novik's Temeraire series is close. It has way more action than Susanna Clarke's alternate history about magic, although it does share an era. Novik's twist on it is that dragons exist and they were instrumental in helping the British defeat Napoleon. It's been described as Patrick O'Brian with dragons. The characters do act and speak using the same faux Georgian that Clarke's characters do, so it's a bit Regency romance with dragons, too. Caroline Stevermer and Patricia C. Wrede wrote a trilogy called Cecelia and Kate, which is about two cousins who navigate their way through a British regency era where magic exists and they know all about it. The first of the books (Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot) was originally written in 1988 and republished in 2003, when it was followed by The Grand Tour or The Purloined Coronation Regalia in 2004 and The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After in 2006. They took it a step further than Susanna Clarke and wrote the first book in an epistolary style. Where I found Susanna Clarke's faux Austenish style complete with misspellings a rather irritating gimmick, it seemed totally natural in the Stevermer Wrede collaboration. There's also Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour series which is set in a Regency where magic works, they tend to be more a Regency romance in style than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

Carlo Collodi - November 24, 1826 - October 26, 1890. Collodi's name isn't instantly recognisable, but his best known creation, a wooden puppet called Pinocchio is. Before turning his talents to children's literature, Carlo Collodi (his actual name was Carlo Lorenzini) had already gained some notoriety in Italy as one of the founders of the satirical newspaper Il Lampione. He published a number of books and sketches which were satirical and political in content, before his first children's work which was a translation of Perrault's French fairytales. The work that gave him enduring fame originally appeared as a serialisation in an Italian magazine for children and the author died in 1890 unaware of the fame that awaited his creation.

Pinocchio is the only one of Collodi's works that has any enduring fame. It's worth noting that the original book is very different to what a lot of people think of when the name is mentioned and that tends to be Walt Disney's 1940 animated version. The Pinocchio in the book is less likeable than Disney's version. The author was a Florentine and even now in Florence they're very proud of the long nosed marionette and various representations of him appear everywhere. Despite the differences from the Disney film I prefer the original. It has a magic and an edge that the cartoon simply didn't. There are no cute cats or goldfish and Jiminy isn't actually named, he's an actual cricket who can talk, but Pinocchio kills him fairly early on and his warnings about disobedience and hedonism help the wooden boy develop a conscience. The idea that there are unscrupulous characters like the Fox and the Cat lurking around every street corner to lead young boys astray is actually rather scary really. In Collodi's original Pinocchio was hanged at the end of the 15th chapter, but his publishers managed to convince him to introduce the blue or turquoise haired fairy to help him out. It's a reminder that even in the 19th century with all that had gone before people could still add to the pantheon of fairy tales.

Further and related reading: Pinocchio is a modern fairytale along with things like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows and deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as those classics. Nothing much else of Collodi's has survived, and it was very different in tone to this fairytale. The character has been used in all sorts of film and other media adaptations from Disney's 1940 film to the rather obnoxious versions in Shrek and Bill Willingham's Fables. I can't readily find anything else that is quite like Pinocchio, but in some ways it does share something with Mary Shelley's science fiction classic Frankenstein in that it's about something inanimate that is given life. Seanan McGuire explores the concept to a certain extent in her Velveteen books in which the titular character is a super hero whose power is animating toys like teddy bears, but they don't have free will in the way that Pinocchio did. The concept also appears in Pixar's Toy Story films as well as a great many stories by children's writers like Enid Blyton where the toys have a life of their own once the owners are asleep or out of the house.

So that's the C's. Next week we explore the D authors.