Mike Shevdon

As some of you will have noticed it has been quiet here on the website for a while – all for very good reasons, I assure you. I have been working hard on Strangeness and Charm: Book 3 in The Courts of the Feyre series, and I am finally at a stage where I can take a short break from it and catch up with other things.

One of those things was facilitated by Sandy Auden, writer, reviewer, and photographer. Sandy was at BristolCon this year and had the foresight to bring her camera with her. One of my reasons for being there was to give a talk on Archery in Fantasy, a whirlwind tour of the use of the bow and arrow in genre fiction, and Sandy was on hand to take some shots.

Mike with a Magyar Horse Bow (photo courtesy of Sandy Auden)

Pictured left is is a Magyar Horse Bow, or rather a replica example of one, made by the Hungarian Bowyer Csaba Grózer. This is the design used by the nomadic tribes of the open grassland of the Eastern Plains of Europe.

You can see that the bow is quite short, but it will draw easily out to thirty inches (which is about my limit) and is fast and sweet to shoot. It doesn’t jar against the hand but has a very ‘live’ feel.

The ends of the limbs, as you can probably see in the picture, are solid wood, and are called Siyahs. They act as levers on the end of the limbs so that the geometry of the bow evens out the draw weight over the length of the draw, making it smooth and fast.

Magyar bows of this nature were typical of a period about 4,000 years ago, so this is more ancient that an English Longbow, which would have been more common about 500 – 600 years ago.

Drawing a Compound Bow (photo courtesy of Sandy Auden)

In contrast,  the bow on the right is a very modern example. This is a compound bow, typified by the eccentric cams on the ends of the limbs which act to change the apparent weight as draw it. This bow is set at 55 lbs peak weight, but at full draw I am holding only around 20 lbs, allowing me more time to aim and settle before releasing. Obviously I didn’t actually release, as there’s no arrow on the bow, and dry shooting a bow is very bad for it since all the energy stored in the bow has nowhere to go but back into the bow.

Compound bows were invented in the 1960s and have been developing ever since. This is an American design, manufactured by Bowtech Archery or Oregon, and is my competition bow. It’s a Bowtech Guardian – very fast and very quiet.  A superb feat of engineering and design.

So I had a great time explaining how even the masters of Fantasy can get archery very wrong – and how some get it so right. I explained paradoxes, demonstrated stringing, showed off bows ancient and modern, with a really friendly audience who asked lots of interesting questions.

The only problem was we ran out of time. If I do it again, I’ll try and get a longer slot. Many thanks to Sandy for some excellent photos in tricky lighting conditions.

Brighton in October

There has been considerable discussion over the past week about the British Fantasy Awards, who won them and why.

I was at FantasyCon in Brighton this year, and had a great time. The organisation was excellent, the venue worked well and it was great to see everyone there – the weather gave the whole weekend a summer holiday feel. I didn’t stay for the Sunday afternoon as I had a five-hour journey including a replacement bus service and London rail closures to negotiate and so I missed the awards ceremony, but it would be a shame if controversy over the awards overshadowed an excellent event.

Many thanks and congratulations to Marie, Paul and the whole team for all their effort in making FantasyCon 2011 a success.

The awards, though, were not a success and have culminated in the unfortunate situation that Sam Stone has handed back the August Derleth Award for Best Novel after there was criticism of the selection procedure and the method by which the books were shortlisted. It speaks volumes for Sam’s integrity that she gave back the award.

According to the rules of the society, the British fantasy Awards are presented on the basis of the votes from the membership of both the society and the members of FantasyCon, but while readers of genre fiction number in their hundreds of thousands, members of the BFS and FantasyCon number only in their hundreds.

It has been remarked upon before that the BFS has a strong bias towards Horror, a part of genre fiction which has been in decline in recent years. The fact that FantasyCon and the BFS Awards therefore have a strong bias towards Horror, and that the awards tend to go to authors known by the membership of FantasyCon who have worked hard to build a following in that group, should come as no surprise. It is a natural consequence of the process as it stands.

The 2011 shortlist for Best Novel, known as the August Derleth Award, is shown below:

• Apartment 16 ‘ Adam Nevill ‘ Pan McMillan
• Demon Dance ‘ Sam Stone ‘ The House Of Murky Depths
• Leaping, The ‘ Tom Fletcher ‘ Quercus
• Pretty Little Dead Things ‘ Gary McMahon ‘ Angry Robot
• Silent Land, The ‘ Graham Joyce ‘ Gollancz

There are no works of Fantasy on this list. Some of them might be described as Dark Fantasy, but the emphasis is on the dark element, rather than the fantastic.

August Derleth was the person who first published H P Lovecraft. He was a writer himself and coined the term “Cthulu Mythos”. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the August Derleth Award for Best Novel is rarely won by a work of Fantasy and is usually awarded to a Horror writer. Some years there are no works of Fantasy on the shortlist at all – as was the case this year. This is not because no works of Fantasy were published, or that none of them were worthy of recognition.

After the events of this year’s awards, the BFS is at a crossroads. For its awards to mean something, it needs to reestablish the credibility of those awards and the process that selects the winners. A first step to that, perhaps, would be to openly promote the August Derleth Award as an award for Horror writers, making the de facto situation a reality.

Then people might stop wondering why so few Fantasy works end up on the shortlist, and the winners of the award would get recognition from the people who appreciate the best in Horror fiction.

FantasyCon is a little later in the year than usual and in Brighton instead of Nottingham, giving those in the south of the country and opportunity to come along and meet your favourite genre fiction authors. This year has special guest, Christopher Paolini, famous not only for the Inheritance series but also for his somewhat unconventional rise to fame.

There will also be Guests of Honour: Gwyneth Jones, Sarah Pinborough, Peter Atkins, John Ajvide Lindqvist, plus Brian Aldiss, author of over 80 novels including the superb Helliconia trilogy, two of which won BSFA Awards with the other nominated, and Joe Abercrombie, author of The First Law trilogy, one of my personal favourite fantasy series. Details of the Guests of Honour can be found here.

I shall be reading on Saturday at 4:30 in Reading Room 134, but come early and hear Anne Lyle read from her Elizabethan historical fantasy, The Alchemy of Souls, at 2:30, the incomparable Mike Carey at 3:30, and M D Lachlan‘s norse Wolfsangel series at 4pm, then stay for Jaine Fenn after my reading at 5pm. It’s looking like a superb afternoon, and that’s without leaving the Readings Room.

Hope to see you there.