John Crowley's Aegypt Quartet asks the question, "What if there was more than one history of the world?"; David Walton's Quintessence, on the other hand, actually explores one of these alternate histories. It is set in a world that follows the rules of known science in the sixteenth century--which means the world is flat and …
Tag: catholicism
Demon Hunter Severian: Lady of the Night Gates by Giovanni Anastasi
Milan during the time of Bishop Ambrose and Emperor Theodosius in 394 AD was the new centre of the Roman Empire, a cosmopolitan city home to Christian and pagan alike--the perfect setting for demon hunt. A young girl and an elderly priest are found dead in their beds under similar circumstances, after a night of …
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5 Reasons Why Christopher Marlowe is an Elizabethan Hipster Poet
Elizabethan England's most celebrated poet and playwright, in underground kind of way, was Christopher Marlowe, although he was soon eclipsed by Mr. Will Shakespeare, whose popular plays would define the mainstream for centuries to come. It was the 90s. The 1590s to be precise. Marlowe was at the height of his powers, writing the politically …
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The Inklings Reunited!
We often see separate photos of the Inklings, that band of Christian fantasists who met at a famous Oxford tavern, but not often in a group picture. I have reunited the Inklings for one last meeting at the Eagle and Child--who knows what they might discuss?
Love & Sleep by John Crowley
The sequel to John Crowley's Aegypt (The Solitudes), Love & Sleep continues the story of Pierce Moffet's quest to write his history of histories, a book that in which he will propose that there is more than one history of the world. He must decide what to do with the posthumous, unfinished manuscript of historical …
Ember Nights in Guy Gavriel Kay and John Crowley
In Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana and John Crowley's Love and Sleep,part of his Aegypt sequence, characters born with cauls are summoned in the middle of the night to walk among the dead. Kay calls these individuals Night Walkers. Their story stretches back to real-world superstitions about children born with a membrane around their heads. This …
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The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
We had magic before the crows came. Joseph Boyden begins The Orenda with an allusion to the lost world of Huronia that is suggestive of a certain insight proposed in John Crowley's Aegypt sequence: the world was not always what it has since become. Huronia, the land of the Wendat nation, has since vanished, along …
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 …
The Battle of Culloden Part. 3: The Bonnie Prince Escapes!
After the disaster of Culloden, the Duke of Cumberland continued to repress the rebellion, to put it lightly. Really, he opened the way up for genocide. Having captured Lord George Murray's orders to the Jacobites, which had been issued the day before the battle, he supposedly found a line that revealed the Jacobites were to …
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Matthew Rettino 