StephSwainston.co.uk

The official site of author Steph Swainston

Discussion Area

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What people are saying

Swainston's scintillating prose, well-developed characters and talent for brilliant absurdities mark this as one of the more innovative fantasies of recent years.

Publishers Weekly

The World

I have been writing stories set in the Fourlands since 1982. I have also always drawn the characters. As you might imagine, the Castle mythos has changed a lot and has been through many phases over the years but there has always been a Castle and there has always been Jant.

Research

Here is a selective bibliography of the non-fiction books and manuscripts I read while I was researching the specialisations of the immortal characters. I have only included books that I found to be useful. The links are either to the books’ amazon.co.uk entries, or in the case of manuscripts, to the manuscript itself.

Drugs and addiction

I seem to have amassed an astonishing library on this subject. However, I won’t bore you with technical articles: all the books I've listed below are accessible as well as accurate. They are ordered from best to least useful, depending on how well-written and entertaining they are.

They are reliable too; they engage with the politics and the economic and human cost of drug use. Then I have listed what I think are the best novels on the subject. If anyone has any recommendations for me, do get in touch.

Non-fiction

  1. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A social history of drugs by Richard Davenport-Hines
  2. Heroin Century by Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith
  3. Legal Highs by Adam Gottlieb

    4. A good notebook for anybody interested in active constituents of herbs. I wouldn’t trust it 100% though.

Web

I don’t recommend doing serious research on the web without checking published sources. However, these are the sites I have found most useful:

Some of the personal accounts on erowid are really interesting.

Autobiography

Authors who have had first hand experience of drug-taking usually don’t glorify it. Nor do they feel the need to shock the reader by overblown description. Trocchi wanted to shock the reader for other reasons: he wanted to set himself apart as an 'author' - but was so successful that he could no longer function as a writer. Only the first five deal with addiction, the other three are about non-opiates.

  1. Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi

    2. After reading this you can scarcely believe that heroin diminishes the capacity for abstract thought.

  2. Junky by W.S. Burroughs

    3. The plainess and directness of the style is a marked contrast to his fiction.

  3. Confessions of an Opium Eater by De Quincy
  4. The Underworld of the East by James S. Lee
  5. Opium: Diary of a Cure by Jean Cocteau
  6. The Poem of Hashish by Charles Baudelaire
  7. The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

    8. Seems very innocent these days...

  8. The Diary of Anais Nin. 1947-1955 Vol. 5

    9. In a few pages at the end of the diary, Nin describes an LSD experience. She isn't impressed because she realises it only heightens what is already in her mind.

Fiction

Here are some of my favourite novels dealing with drug use:

  1. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

    2. Full of inaccuracies but great fun.

  2. The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren
  3. Naked Lunch by W.S. Burroughs
  4. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Swords and Swordplay

Historical Sources

  1. His True Art of Defence by Di Grassi, Giacomo, 1594
  2. The Book of Five Rings, by Miamoto Musashi
  3. Paradoxes of Defence by George Silver, 1598
  4. Brief Instructions on my Paradoxes of Defence by George Silver, 1599
  5. Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence by Joseph Swetnam, 1617

Modern Sources

  1. The Secret History of the Sword by J. Christoph Amberger
  2. The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe by Sydney Anglo
  3. The Duel: A History of Duelling by Robert Baldick
  4. Renaissance Swordsmanship: The Illustrated Use of Rapiers and Cut-and-Thrust Swords by John Clements
  5. Fencing: the Skills of the Game by Henry de Silva
  6. A Collector's Guide to Swords, Daggers and Cutlasses by Gerald Weland
  7. The Swordsman's Companion: A Modern Training Manual for the Medieval Longsword by Guy Windsor

Lots of my research wasn't book-related, however. Watching Mike Loades' video 'The Blow by Blow Guide to Swordfighting in the Renaissance Style', visiting The Wallace Collection in London, and other museum collections, and looking again at the swords I have in my own collection were far more useful than book learning. The best resource, though, was my partner who shared lots of tips from his fencing lessons at the Reading Fencing Club.

Ships, Sailing and Exploration

Historical Sources

  1. The 'Bounty' Mutiny by Edward Christian and William Bligh
  2. The Journals of Captain Cook, Penguin Classics
  3. Columbus on Himself edited by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto for Folio Books
  4. The First Colonists: Hakluyt's Voyages to North America by Hakluyt, introduction by A.L.Rowse for Folio Books
  5. A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia by Thomas Hariot 1588

Modern Sources

  1. Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O'Malley 1530-1603 by Anne Chambers
  2. The Campaign of the Spanish Armada by Peter Kemp
  3. Privateers and Pirates: 1730-1830 by Angus Konstam
  4. Pirates: 1660-1730 by Angus Konstam
  5. Buccaneers: 1620-1700 by Angus Konstam
  6. Spanish Galleon 1530-1690 by Angus Konstam
  7. The Pirate Ship 1660-1730 by Angus Konstam
  8. Great Harry's Navy: How Henry VIII gave England Seapower by Geoffrey Moorhouse
  9. The Loss of the Ship 'Essex' Sunk by a Whale by Thomas Nickerson
  10. Sir Walter Raleigh by Raleigh Trevelyan
  11. The World Encompassed: Drake's Great Voyage 1577-1580 by Derek Wilson

Again, books are only a supplement to going out and doing the thing yourself. I went on a wildlife cruise around the Hebrides for a week on MV Chalice, which was by far the best holiday of my life. We saw porpoise and minke whales, sea eagles and an orca. One of the minke whales swam alongside and under the boat.

Catching SpurdogCatching SpurdogI also went to see the Mary Rose and Victory in Portsmouth, the Golden Hinde replica in St. Mary Overy's dock in London, Buckland Abbey (which was once Drake's house), and Buckler's Hard shipbuilding village in Hampshire. Later on I saw the incredible Vasa in Stockholm, so with all this material I am keen to do another Castle book involving ships.

My love of the sea comes from childhood when my dad would take me boating in a tiny dinghy in which we had all kinds of stupidly dangerous adventures. The boat in the photo is the next generation, a small Humber RIB and it's great fun.

Archery

Historical Sources

  1. Toxophilus by Roger Ascham

Modern Sources

  1. Tournaments by Richard Barber and Juliet Barker
  2. English Longbowman 1330-1515 by Clive Bartlett
  3. Agincourt 1415: Triumph Against the Odds by Matthew Bennett
  4. The Medieval Archer by Jim Bradbury
  5. Longbow by Robert Hardy
  6. Medieval Military Technology by Kelly deVries
  7. The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy

I first tried archery when I was very young at Bronte Archers in Yorkshire. It's a beautiful, timeless sport. Drawing a bow makes a strong and sexy pose of a man's body, don't you think?

Architecture

Frost is the Architect in the Circle. She comes from Brandoch, which resembles medieval Ely or Holland. Brandoch manor is marshy, low-lying land and they have a tradition of reclaiming it from the sea, so her engineering speciality isn’t surprising. She can design beautiful buildings but she prefers practical projects. She thinks big and loves the challenge of dealing with awe-inspiring forces.

  1. The Hydraulics of Stepped Chutes and Spillways by H. Chanson
  2. Site Engineer’s Manual by David Doran
  3. Dams and Dikes in Development by Hans von Duivendijk
  4. Structures, or Why Things Don’t Fall Down by J. E. Gordon
  5. Understanding Hydraulics by Les Hamill
  6. Architecture of the Middle Ages by Ulricke Laule et al.
  7. Conservation of Bridges by Graham Tilly

As Frost is a scientist, there is lots of well-presented information relating to her speciality online:

Insects

  1. Dragonflies of the World by Jill Silsby
  2. Field Guide to the Dragonflies and Damselflies of Great Britain and Ireland by Steve Brooks and Richard Lewington
  3. Dragonflies (Natural History Museum Life Series) by Steve Brooks
  4. Ant by Charlotte Sleigh
  5. Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon
  6. Field Guide to the Insects of Britain and Northern Europe by Michael Chinery

Site Credits

© Stephanie Swainston