Throne Price
The story
THRONE PRICE, by Lynda Williams and myself, is the first published book of a projected series about descendents of Earth colonists for whom Earth is more myth than memory. Humanity consists of native humans and the descendents of human variants bioengineered to withstand the rigors of space travel (Sevolites). Two cultures dominate known space,the native-human governed Rire and the Sevolite-dominated Gelion. First Contact after a thousand years of separation led to a genocidal war and a treaty of exclusion, two hundred years ago. Second Contact, eighteen years ago, featured a thwarted invasion of Rire by Gelion - an invasion which, at the beginning of THRONE PRICE seems merely to have been deferred.
Erien, aged seventeen, is a Gelack of unknown ancestry and a mixed Reetion-Gelack upbringing. He arrives on Gelion homeworld determined to do whatever he must to secure Rire's immunity from Gelack invasion, but ill-equipped to make his way in his heirarchal, violent culture. Amel, aged thirty four, has entirely too much ancestry and too much past. His only wish is to keep the rivals for the Throne of Gelion - his mother and the Ava he serves - from arriving at a bloody final reckoning. He is handicapped by notoriety earned first in his early life as a high class courtesan and then, eighteen years ago, as the captive of Rire. Erien's mission, and even more, the secrets regarding his birth, are liable to undo everything that Amel has worked and suffered for. Surrounding them are people with their own political, sexual and social agendas: Ava-Ameron himself, a monarch determined at all costs not to repeat past mistakes; Ev'rel, Amel's mother, rival to the Throne and a woman with damaging secrets of her own; Horth, Leige Nersal, the Ava's engimatic Champion, on whom everything may depend; Ditatt, a young reformist Prince; Luthan, a cloistered Princess destined for a political marriage; Charous, the Ava's chief spymaster and Amel's enemy; Mira, Amel's foster sister, a brilliant practitioner of forbidden genetic science; and D'Therd and D'Lekker, Amel's two brothers, one who aspires to power and the other who has darker passions.
Note: this novel is intended for mature readers.
Editions
THRONE PRICE was released by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publications in 2003. The first book (chronologically) of the series, COURTESAN PRINCE, has just been released.
Reviews
For reviews, see the THRONE PRICE page of the Edge Website.
Collaborating across continents
(Written while I lived in Calgary, 1998 ) So how do two writers who have spent fourteen of their twenty-one years of friendship/collaboration separated by five hundred to three thousand miles actually produce a saga that details forty plus years of imagined events and sketches in a thousand more?
The Saga got its start early in our second year at University of Victoria when I spotted Lynda, whom I knew slightly from Maths 130, writing something with quotation marks in it and sidled up to ask her whatchadoin'?. She already had the Gelacks and Reetions well established - though in different form- and I was carrying around the Burdanians in embryo, so to speak, and for a time we combined forces. Gradually, however, Lynda's part of the universe proved the more playable (though the Burdanians went on to their own destiny) and she cheerfully made room for a sitting tenant. In student lounges and cafeterias and - I am ashamed to confess - classes, the Saga burgeoned,and has continued to flourish through the getting of five-and-a-half degrees between us, one husband and three children (Lynda's), moves from Victoria to Prince George, B.C. to Hamilton, Ontario, to Prince George (Lynda's) and from Victoria to Hamilton to Boston, U.S.A., to Leeds, England, and to Calgary (mine). We have contributed to the profits of phone companies in three countries and exchanged scenes and parts of scenes by hand, conventional post, the original OPUS/BBS network, E-mail in all its incarnations, and now FAX, the Internet and Web. What computer literacy I possess is owed in part to the compulsion to keep the saga going.
We each have a cast of characters, usually ones we've introduced. Some we are quite possessive about; others, we toss back and forth. Generally, we write from the viewpoint of "our" characters - with THRONE PRICE, we each took one of the principles, more or less, except for those times when one or other of us got the bit between her teeth and ran with it, or, alternatively, got hopelessly bogged down and 'turfed' the fragments to the other. We pass what we have written back and forth for comments which usually run along the lines of 'I really like it ... but ... he/she wouldn't do that/say it that way!' (particularly of the characters we feel possessive about) or 'You're breaking the rules of this society/universe' (Lynda) or 'Isn't there a simpler way to do this?' (Alison). Simple matters we resolve by E-mail. Thorny questions (Chapter 23 of THRONE PRICE was a bear since we both had very different ideas as to what was allowable), complex scenes (those crowd scenes) and wild speculations we hammer out on the phone. My phone bill is something I am always very careful to keep out of sight when my Mum visits, and whenever I phone Lynda, I can hear childish wails of "Is it ALISON??" in the background.
I can't recollect at what stage we decided to try and carve the Saga into novel-sized pieces, but over Christmas/New Year of 1996/1997 I was house sitting for my parents in Victoria and Lynda came down to join me, with the intention of working on THRONE PRICE, which was then in the form of a cluster of draft chapters. The Great Victoria Snowstorm ensued and by the end of a snowbound five days we had a scene by scene outline of THRONE PRICE and portions of the subsequent books, FAR ARENA and AVIM OATH (which we were at that point trying to shoehorn into one immense book). Then we went back to our respective abodes to work on our respective halves. THRONE PRICE was complete and submitted by the end of September, came back for revision in November/December, and was resubmitted with extensive changes to beginning and end in March. In August 1998 it was officially accepted by EDGE.
Note added in November 2001: The five-and-a-half degrees is now six; the number of moves increased by two (mine); the children still stand at three; I forgot to add the rabbit, hamster and two cats (Lynda's); and Lynda wrote a poem to honour the "Alison is on the phone" phenomenon. It's on the Okal Rel website.
Page created July 1998 Last modified July 5, 2005. Alison Sinclair.