Guest Post: Fantasy for the First Time by Lou Aronica
Originally published at Grasping for the Wind. Please leave any comments there.
My first book was published in 2003. Since then, I’ve published ten others. Yet, my twelfth book, Blue
, is the first to incorporate any elements of the fantastic. For anyone who knows my background, this might seem odd. After all, during my days at Bantam, Berkley, and Avon, I worked with Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. I published two-thirds of the “Killer Bs” (I never had the pleasure of publishing Greg Bear). I published the great Nei(a)ls (Gaiman and Stephenson). I talked the Lucasfilm people into letting me launch a line of Star Wars books. I lived and breathed sf and fantasy for years. If I were ever going to write anything, of course it would be in this genre, right?
Here’s the thing, though: when you’ve worked with Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Benford, Brin, Gaiman, Stephenson, and Lucasfilm (not to mention LeGuin, Simmons, Willis, and the many others who will be offended that I didn’t mention them if they ever read this), the idea of trying to do what they do can be a bit intimidating. One of the bloggers I contacted about Blue wrote back that she was in the middle of reading The Healer’s War, Elizabeth Scarborough’s 1989 Nebula winner that I edited. Great, I thought, now she’s going to compare Blue to a Nebula winner. This is what I’ve been avoiding all these years. (And really, how strange was it that this person was reading a book I’d published in 1988 when I contacted her?). My first two novels were decidedly human-scale. The first was a father-son story, and the second was about male friendship. For the third, though, I wanted to write about the power of imagination. I wanted to write about the ability of love to create remarkable things. I wanted to write about transcendence. The only way I could see doing this was to write a fantasy novel.
I therefore stepped very carefully into the world of the writers I’d admired for so long. I’m writing a novel of character, I told myself, it just happens to involve traveling to a fantasy world that two of the protagonists imagined into being. Yes, it has invented creatures and an alternate ecology, but the characters are the big thing, not the fantasy elements. I wasn’t trying to write my Neil Gaiman novel. I wasn’t trying to out-Bradbury Bradbury. I was just trying to talk about things that mattered to me using the only tools that made sense for me to use. This kind of denial got me through the writing of Blue, though it took me six years to do so (by comparison, my first novel, The Forever Year, took nine months, and my second, Flash and Dazzle, took only three months). In the end, I had a novel - a fantasy novel - that meant more to me than anything I’d ever written. I’m far too close to it to know if I’ve done right by the genre I’ve loved since I was a teenager. I only know I’m thankful to that genre for providing me with the metaphors I needed to say what I wanted to say.
I’m already planning my next work of fantasy. There’s really no point in turning back now.
Lou Aronica is head of The Fiction Studio, a full-service creative development company. He is also a novelist and nonfiction writer. His novels, The Forever Year and Flash and Dazzle appeared under the name Ronald Anthony. His nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller The Element (written with Sir Ken Robinson), the national bestseller The Culture Code (written with Dr. Clotaire Rapaille), Conscientious Equity (written with Neal Asbury), Miraculous Health (written with Dr. Rick Levy) and A Million Thanks (written with Shauna Fleming).