Fantasy

I dove into this 1983 literary fantasy due purely to the setting—the sunken lands of lost Lyonesse, west of Cornwall, for which I’ve developed a deep fascination.  Many of you know I’m in the middle of writing my own first historical paranorm

Set in Tudor England during Elizabeth Tudor’s sunset years and in the parallel world of Faerie, INK AND STEEL is a highly unusual, poetic and sensual cross between alternate history and mythic fantasy, written in the opulent style of J.R.R.

Set on a primitive, post-apocalyptic Earth, this is the story of an exiled smith’s apprentice and a renegade female shaman who journey together across a hostile land to retrieve knowledge from an ancient repository (actually a primitive computer system that survived the apocalpyse). As it turns out, the system is not unguarded, and this knowledge can either save or destroy them.

This book is written in the “high fantasy” style, which (so I gather) can be described as epic in scope, exploring the universal themes of light vs. darkness, order vs. chaos, and is serious and rather romantic in tone (in the melancholy, brooding, pre-Raphaelite sense of the word).

I'm delighted to report that I spent an entire weekend happily buried in this book! I do like so much this marvelously imagined series, an alternate history with fantasy elements which takes a look at what the Napoleonic wars might have been like—-with dragons.