Welcome Back to Riverside! (WisCon 31)

189 Welcome Back to Riverside!

Solo Presentations•607• Sunday, 4:00-5:15 p.m.

When my first novel, Swordspoint, came out in 1987, I never imagined it would become the touchstone of the "Fantasy of Manners" or "MannerPunk" movement—let alone that I would go on to write two more connected novels, set 60 years (The Fall of the Kings, 2002, written with Delia Sherman) & 20 years (The Privilege of the Sword, 2006) after it! It's been a long, strange trip, and I'd love to describe, discuss and answer readers' questions about the process, the characters and the world—and what's next!

Ellen Kushner

Transcripts and Notes

Partial presentation notes by Janice Dawley.

Ellen says that her whole life has changed since last WisCon. Last year The Privilege of the Sword had not yet been published.

She delights in the multiplicity of reader reactions.

Chomp, chomp -- she loves the WisCon hotdogs.

Joan Vinge & Jim Frenkel at Dell were really supportive of her forging her short stories into a novel. The only short story she sold before Swordspoint was “Red Cloak”.

Swordspoint was published by Unwin in the UK before the US.

At first she thought she wouldn’t write a sequel -- trashy people wrote sequels! For a long time, when people asked, “What happens next?” she would say, “A diphtheria epidemic swept through the city and they all died.”

But she missed the characters. She wrote “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” as an exploration of the main characters’ misogyny. She felt somewhat bad about her male characters who cared only about themselves, and this at a time when “Ursula Le Guin was ritually flogging herself with a diaphragm and rewriting her Earthsea books.”

She says writing The Fall of the Kings saved her and Delia’s marriage, because it gave them something to do together while Ellen was “going psycho” with the radio show (Sound & Spirit).

“The Death of the Duke” is not really canonical, it’s “a fantasia”.

She became a fan of outlines after writing tPotS.

“I’ll be honest with you. I write really complicated books, and you’re supposed to read them twice.” [laughter] “I mean it!”

On the Campion family: “They’re all crazy as coots!” (except for Katherine)

The Ugly Girl was written in response to a panel Debbie Notkin ran at another convention. Audience members are split about whether they like her or not.

Regarding more fictional visits with Richard and Alec: “I’m a huge Dunnett fan, a huge Georgette Heyer fan, a huge Elizabeth Knox fan. I want the biscuit!” But she doesn’t want to repeat herself.

She is aware of fanfiction set in her world, and thinks a lot of it is really good (though officially and publicly SHE HASN’T SAID THAT). It actually inspires her to write more, because if she doesn’t, someone else will!

She recounts the story of her encounter with a real blind swordsman (after writing tPotS) and her sense of vindication.

People discuss what the best reading order is for the Riverside books. Ellen advises chronological order, and most audience members agree.