A tradition of viewing Paradise as an Otherworld exists in Middle English literature. Why not the artificial paradise of the Assassins described in The Book of John Mandeville?
Tag: Assassins
Behind Guy Fawkes: the History of Catholic Conspiracies
“But as a nation—continued he in his reveries—these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it.” -Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno." “The imaginary is part of history.” -Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun. “[A] good case could be made that the last unchallenged and most …
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Behind Guy Fawkes II: The Gunpowder Plot
"But 'The Gunpowder Plot'--there was a get-penny! I have presented that to an eighteen- or twenty-pence audience nine times in an afternoon. Your home-born projects prover ever the best; they are so easy and familiar. They put too much learning i'their things nowadays, and that, I fear, will be the spoil o' this." -Leatherhead, Bartholomew …
Ancestral Memory Point of View Experiment
Over the summer, I was debating what kind of new short story I should write, when I found myself gravitating towards the technical challenges and experimentalism that the Assassin's Creed franchise might inspire in fiction. What really got me thinking was how to represent the experience of entering an Animus in fiction. The Animus machine …
Machiavelli and the Problem of Memory in Tigana
"Tigana, let my memory of you be like a blade in my soul." -Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana . Alessan's mantra for his beleaguered nation, erased from history by the tyrant sorcerer Brandin of Ygrath, forms a central node in the theme of exile and memory in Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. A novel set in the …
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Bloody Caesar; or The Ides of March
Several years ago, I wrote an experimental short story: the assassination of Julius Caesar told from the perspective of his blood. I'm still quite proud of it, and I thought I'd share it with you here. A nice short story that de-familiarizes the familiar, it was originally published online at the SPACE website, an arts-sciences …
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Though this novel is quite different from the other books I have reviewed, which tend to belong to the fantasy genre, I nonetheless was intrigued to read it, because of three things: the bizarre cover, the awards it has won, and descriptions I had heard about its graphic depiction of violence. Actually, fantasy readers might …
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
A group of editors gets together to write a parody of a conspiracy theory. What if the parody ends up becoming perceived as the source of ultimate truth for an actual underground group that styles itself after the Templars and Rosicrucians? The answer lies in the pages of Umberto Eco's intellectual thriller Foucault's Pendulum. In …
Matthew Rettino 