Okay, this is fun — take a look at my new map of Mnemosynea by clicking on the image at right. 
Mnemosynea, you may or may not recall, is the world of the Seer and Sword fantasy stories, “Justice is a Two-edged Sword” in Powers of Detection and “A Woman’s Work” in Unusual Suspects (December 2008).
In Mnemosynea, everyone has a Talent that manifests itself at puberty. Sharryn the Seer has a Talent for magic and Crowfoot the Sword has a Talent for war, and together the two make up one of the nine pairs of Seer and Sword teams that travel the nine provinces of Mnemosynea to dispense the King’s Justice. Sharryn bears a Staff of Truth, made from an oak of the Forest of Arthemeus in Yranea, and Crow wields a Sword of Justice forged in the Caves of Lycia in Pthersikore, both imbued with powerful magics by the Magi Guild in Hestia.
King Loukas I has been on the throne for a little over two years, and is determined to introduce a life of peace and prosperity to the people of Mnemosynea, who have been battered and bruised by a thousand years of warfare between nobles, clans and wizards white and dark. Not everyone buys into this notion of one nation, indivisible, with truth and justice for all, and even fewer of them know how to function when the countryside is at peace.
Well, of course not, or there would be nothing to write about.
I blush to disclose how much fun I’m having playing around in this world, especially since we’re only talking about two little short stories here, nothing like the massive fantasy epics I love so well, like Tolkien’s trilogy (natch), or Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series or George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire series. I have even, heaven help me, started an almanac (by kind permission of King Loukas the Good and with the invaluable assistance of the Magi Guild). It’s probably past time to write a novel set in this ‘verse. But first I should get on with Whisper to the Blood, also known as the 16th Kate Shugak novel, don’t you think?
The map was tranlated from my smudged, illegible pencil and paper mess by Mapping Solutions’s resident genius Dr. Cherie Northon in Anchorage. She does good work, doesn’t she?
13 Comments
Hello! (this is peaseblossom from the ‘maniacs site)
Is the new Kate title from a poem?
If you do write your epic fantasy novel, I will definitely read it.
The map is great! They’re nice to have when one cannot visualize directions, land mass, geography in general.
Oh, also! (Off topic, but I hope it’s okay as I know you’re a fan) Astonishing X-Men #24 is out THIS Wednesday. *happy dance* (even if the Giant Sized, whatever that is, has been pushed back *again*. Marvel and its wacky marketing schemes).
Looking forward to Prepared for Rage!
It is indeed, from Theodore Roethke’s “Prognosis.”
Ecstatic to hear the new X-Men is out on Wednesday, Bosco’s will have it in my pull box the next time I’m in Anchorage, joy!
And I’ll get right on that fantasy epic…
You cite two of my favorite newer series . If you haven’t already found Sharon Shinn and Wen Spencer give them a look .
Got Sharon Shinn, I’ll look for Wen Spencer. Thanks, Ed.
I have a mental thing about word pronounciation, even though I’m reading silently. Can you tell me if this is close for Mnemosynea?
Nem-oh-SIN-ee-ah
Thanks!
neh-MOH-seh-KNEE-uh.
That’s how I pronounce it, anyway.
That would make the people who live there
neh-MOH-seh-KNEE-uns.
Your way must be the right way! Thanks for your patient explanation. I had to listen to many of the Kate books on audio to get all the pronounciations in my head so it sounds right when I reread, and reread….
Would this be the right place to ask a question about Red Planet Run?
Any place on the website would be, James, ask away.
When I read Red Planet Run back when, I noticed what appeared at the time to be a homage to Andre Norton’s Sargasso of Space. Was that actually a homage or just independent parallel development [1]?
RPR isn’t much like SoS, which is why I wasn’t sure if what I thought I saw was really there.
1: One example from SF might be why authors from Pournelle to McCullum to Bujold arrived at similar FTL systems for plot reasons but my favourite example is what happened when Charles Sheffield discovered that he and Clarke, writing on opposite sides of the Earth in pre-internet days, had simultaneously and independently written books about engineers with somewhat similar names, whose previous job involved building a bridge across Gibraltar, who were both building orbital towers and who both used something called Shelob in their work.
Man, I wish I could say I was that well read. Nope, whatever it was you saw, unless I credited it in the text to a real person (the balloon inside a balloon is based on a design by French engineer Jacques Chaumont, for example) I somehow thought it up myself. Maybe. Back then I was reading everything I could get my hands on about science, so long as it was written in a language I could understand (I soon gave up Scientific American for Discover, for example). I have no background in the hard sciences, so I’m hesitant to take credit for anything engineering-related that happens in any of my sf.
But it sure is fun to write. There’s a reason we call it speculative fiction.
Man, I wish I could say I was that well read.
I do read freakishly fast, which is handy since my freelancing involves reading stacks of SF, F, mystery and other manuscripts.
Back in the 1970s in Ontario one took what one could get and Norton was both prolific and fairly canny in her choice of publisher (Ace and DAW, which now that I think about it makes perfect sense: Donald A. Wollheim worked for Ace before he founded DAW). Even if you avoid her fantasies, your avid SF reader of that time and place would probably end up reading at least a dozen of her books.
I remember once looking in the back of an Ace MMPK of a Heinlein young adult novel and noticing that while Heinlein had ten or twelve novels listed, Norton had fifty.
She was veeerrrry prolific. I suppose I should read her at some point. What’s her best book?
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[…] How cool is this? Okay, literally as well as figuratively, as that’s the Gerlache Strait next to Wiencke Island off the Danco Coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. In the foreground is mapmaker Cherie Northon on board the Star Princess (she made the map of Mnemosynea for me, and she will be doing a map of Kate Shugak’s Park later as well, with the help of the Danamaniacs), holding a copy of Blindfold Game she found in the ship’s library. […]
[…] place I’m writing about (Ellfive, the asteroid belt, Mars, interior Alaska, southwest Alaska, Mnemosynea). Then I figure out who lives there, and then I figure out what kind of trouble they’re up […]
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