Far Fetched Fables No. 81 Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette and Angela Slatter

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Novel excerpt: An Apprentice to Elves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

Even as a grown woman of fifteen, Alfgyfa never stopped thinking about the wolves she had encountered as a child. Sometimes she tried to speak to them, stretching out into the pack-sense as far as she could. Once she thought she caught a whisper of mice-under-snow; sometimes she was sure she caught the trailing edge of the wild konigenwolf’s thoughts. But if they heard her, they never answered. And even as a grown woman of fifteen, Alfgyfa did not give over her visits to the trellwarrens. At first, Tin’s warnings and the almost-fate of the dog wolf had cowed her for a while. But Alfgyfa was not much-cowable by nature. And once discovered, the lure of those tunnels and their slick, shaped, twisted stone like the boles of ancient trees was beyond her power to resist. She’d seen stone worked like this before, though it hadn’t had this twisting sense of otherness, of being a little dislocated in space between what her eyes told her and what her hands — or feet — felt.

Elizabeth Bear was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction, a Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. You can visit her online at elizabethbear.com.

Sarah Monette is the acclaimed author of Mélusine and The Virtue as well as award-nominated short fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel – written under the pseudonym Katherine Addison – The Goblin Emperor, won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. You can visit her online at sarahmonette.com.

Together, they are the authors of A Companion to Wolves, The Tempering of Men, and An Apprentice to Elves, the third book in their Iskryne series, currently available on Amazon.com.

Second Story: “The Jacaranda Wife” by Angela Slatter

Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes when the winds blow right, the summer heat is kind, and the rain trickles down just-so, a woman is born of a jacaranda tree.The indigenous inhabitants leave these women well alone. They know them to be foreign to the land for all that they spring from the great tree deeply embedded in the soil. White-skinned as the moon, violet-eyed, they bring only grief.

Angela Slatter has won five Aurealis Awards, one British Fantasy Award, been a finalist for the Norma K. Hemming Award, and a finalist the World Fantasy Award twice (for Sourdough and Bitterwood). Her short stories have appeared in numerous Australian, UK, and US Best Of anthologies.

Angela has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006, and in 2013 she was awarded one of the inaugural Queensland Writers Fellowships. Her novellas, Of Sorrow and Such (from Tor.com), and Ripper (in the Stephen Jones anthology Horrorology, from Jo Fletcher Books) were released in October 2015, and her urban fantasy novel, Vigil, will be released by Jo Fletcher Books in 2016, and the sequel, Corpselight, in 2017.

You can find her online at angelaslatter.com.

About the Narrators:

Nicola Seaton-Clark lives in the wilds of (almost) Eastern Europe with her long-suffering husband, phenomenal children and a grumpy cat. Trained as an actress and singer, she has worked in entertainment for over 20 years and currently splits her time between writing speculative fiction, helping her husband run their voice-over company, Offstimme, and voicing everything from commercials and documentaries to public transport announcements. She also hosts this podcast…

Graeme Dunlop is a software solution architect and voice actor living in Melbourne Australia. He is the co-editor of the fantasy podcast Podcastle, and used to host the YA podcast Cast of Wonders. You can find him on Google Plus and he occasionally tweets as @kibitzer on Twitter.

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