castiron: cartoony sketch of owl (Default)
castiron ([personal profile] castiron) wrote2012-01-01 11:05 am

Yuletide recap

Thanks again to Qikiqtarjuaq for the enormously fun Without a Clue fic, The Bloody Revenge of Jefferson Hope.

The fic I wrote, for Velvetmouse, was His Master's Voice, a Lord Darcy fic.

If you've never read Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, they're worth a look. (Baen still has them in print in pbook and ebook format.) In a universe where magic exists and the Anglo-French Empire rules a large chunk of the world, Lord Darcy, the Chief Investigator for the Duke of Normandy, solves crimes with the help of his colleague Master Sean O Lochlainn, Chief Forensic Sorceror. The prose is nothing special, and the characters aren't particularly deep; what makes these stories worth reading is the world, where magic is a science and is treated as a science, and of course the mysteries themselves.

I went with a prequel to (most of) the stories, in which Lord Darcy meets a person who appears again later in Garrett's Too Many Magicians. It was great fun to write, though it turned into Zeno's fic for a while there (I have half the fic left to write! Oh no, I still have half the fic left to write! Oh no, I still....).

Someday I might try another Darcy fic; there's aspects of that universe that I'd like to dissect a bit more (gender being a big one -- we know female magicians exist, but we see very little of them in canon. Agent 055 is the only one we see actually working, and there's a reference to a female Healer who does midwifery; Mary, Duchess of Cumberland *has* the Talent, but it's never really made clear what she can *do* with it).

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