Article: Like many children I grew...
Like many children I grew up reading fantasy. Not just The Hobbit: before I discovered JRRT my favourite books for a time were the (sadly now hard to find and largely forgotten) Uncle books by J.P. Martin — exotic tales of an autocratic elephant who ruled the vast, bizarre castle of Homeward — and later the wonderful British fantasies of Susan Cooper and Alan Garner. In many ways, I think the fantastic is a natural mode of both story-hearing and story-telling for children. When we're young we have an instinctive, unquestioning ability to surrender ourselves to stories and immerse ourselves wholly in imagined worlds.
Something happens to a lot of us as we get older; the real world gets its claws into us and completely losing yourself in a book becomes progressively harder. That's what most writers of adult fiction, in whatever genre, are still trying for though: they're hoping to so thoroughly engage the reader, through plot or characters or setting or literary elegance, that he or she forgets for a little while everything outside the pages of the book. For me, science fiction and fantasy novels — along with historical non-fiction, for some reason — can still cast that immersive spell over me as a reader, in a way that few other forms of writing reliably do, so when I started writing myself it felt entirely natural to wander off down the fantasy path and see what I could find.
The Godless World trilogy was what I found, and it turned out to be fantasy with a hint of realism to it, and a bit of a hard edge. But it's definitely fantasy, and in it I am unashamedly trying to immerse the reader in an imaginary world and an imaginary story. All the effort of plotting and character development and worldbuilding really just boils down to that simple ambition. It won't work for every reader, of course — no book ever written does — but if there's a few out there who stay up late reading Winterbirth because they've lost track of time, or because they just really, really want to know what happens next, I'll be delighted. Losing yourself in a book is, after all, still one of life's greatest pleasures even for those of us who stopped being children a long time ago.
Copyright © 2007 by Brian Ruckley