Guest Post: To France and Beyond

What fun! I really didn’t know what to expect when I accepted the Author of the Year recognition from the Baltimore Faerie Faire, but there was belly dancing, big bands, folk music, a hoard of really cool/fun people”¦

AND I was given a key to the Faerie Kingdom!

It all started when I received a random Facebook friendship invite. I checked out their stream before accepting (My sister taught me to do this.) Happily, the person passed the spam test so I clicked “approve.” Almost immediately I received an IM.

My newest friend started off by thanking me, and launched into how much she loved A Halo of Mushrooms. She’d picked up a copy at Mars Con in January, devoured it, read passages to her husband, and brought it to the attention of her reading group. I felt flattered and thanked her. Then, she added that she was one of the organizers of the Baltimore Faerie Faire and not only wanted me to come, but to be their author of the year.

Swim, small fish, swim!

I got the details, checked out the website, and said, “Yes.”

It turns out the Baltimore Faerie Faire is not only a warm community, but enough of a big deal to be included in the official state of Maryland’s tourism website. It took place over two days. On April 13th, they held the Masquerade Ball and on 14th was the Faire itself. My major duty was to step before the faerie court to ease the transition between the seasons and aid in the passing of the baton from the Winter Queen to the Spring. I also had a table for signings and some other authorly roles. Both Seelie and Unseelie.

The Ball was great. Spritely music played as professional burlesque dancers, belly dancers, and folk dancers twirled on the floor. In between, the attendees boogied”¦ or is that bogied.

When I was introduced during the Ball as the man of the hills and 2019 Author of the Year, they gave me a key to the Faerie City! Everything went as smooth as faerie dust. On the second day”¦ well, you know something always happens during live performance!

The second court began with the faerie queen of winter, the magpie, resisting her dethroning. This was planned and scripted. The crowd played along and tried to bribe her with shinies. After being mollified, I was introduced and began my speech. I glorified the magpie as someone who does not hoard, but protects and keeps safe our treasures from winter’s bite.Then, I pivoted to extol spring, that transition from gray and white, to green, red, purple, and new life. A time of blossom and seed. As I read, I spy the the organizer hurrying up to me. She stabs at my speech and whispers, “Don’t read that!” I look at her.

I’m not to introduce the Spring Queen?

It turns out that they couldn’t find their Queen. She got hung up in traffic or between dimensions or something. I finish, receive my applause, and recede back into the crowd, but after about ten minutes of music and funny schtick mainly about Winter not wanting to give up her crown, I return to my table.

Fifteen minutes later, they re-summon me to court. I sprint back and see the Queen of Spring waiting in the wings. I start thinking furiously. I’m not going to reread my speech. I don’t want to put the audience through that no matter how poetic and pretty it is. What can I say that I didn’t say the first time?

I decide that it would be fun to wink at the audience and talk about how sometimes Winter refuses to release its grip and Spring comes late.

It works. The crowd laughs. Spring smiles good-naturedly. I take a step back. Receive a gift from the Queen of Spring. Chapstick! Then, the organizer asks me to tell the Queen of Spring how wonderful she is.

What?

More?

Two things pop in my mind. I covered this already and the audience has already been asked to sit for far longer than anyone expected. What can I possibly say? And then it hits me”¦

Gershwin!

I belt out, “You’re wonderful!”

The crowd roars and the organizer says, “Yes! Like that! Tell her more!” So, I sing,

“You’re marvelous!”

Of the things I never expected to do as Author of the year, crooning old standards was probably high on the list, but as with all writing”¦ you go where the story takes you and do what the story demands!

Thank you to the organizers of the Baltimore Faerie Faire! I had such a great time. I am both humbled and honored that you embraced my work. I will remember this weekend for a long time.

Oh”¦ and for the record, I did eat faerie fare at the faire. Surprisingly, it tasted like chicken, Masala chicken to be specific.

Author Bio:

Andrew Hiller is the author of A Halo of Mushrooms, A Climbing Stock and the editor of Thursday Stories. Follow him on Twitter as @AndrewHiller.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines

In my romantic-noir urban fantasy novella The Demons of Wall Street, magic and the existence of demons are secrets kept hidden from most people. Only a relatively small number of sorcerers, bankers, and their agents are in on the conspiracy, on the order of thousands of people worldwide.

The premise of magic-done-only-in-secret is not exactly an original conceit, and indeed it has become so familiar over not just years but generations of fantasy literature that it is hardly something to be questioned when it appears. It’s a convenient explanation for how magic can possibly exist in our familiar and ostensibly non-magical world.

Still, the idea of a very widely-kept secret to which thousands of people are privy may seem rather implausible. Surely someone would let the information slip? But as it happens, there are quite a few historical examples of widely-held secrets that were kept so well we aren’t sure what the truth of them was anymore.

I refer you first to the mystery cults of the classical world. In ancient Greece, and subsequently throughout the Hellenized and then the Romanized world, a great many people subscribed to the mystery cults of Eleusis, Samothrace, and (in Roman times) Mithras, among others. These cults required terrible binding oaths from their aspirants, and in many classical-period cities, substantial percentages of the middle and upper classes were members. But we don’t know, apart from a few scattered hints, what the cults believed, what their rituals were, or how members were expected to recognize and support one another outside of the ritual centers. It might be that the masonic phrase “I have seen the sun at midnight” was originally part of the Eleusinian mystery, which we know had something to do with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. But then again, that might be just wishful thinking on the part of the masons based on some modern invention. The names of the deities worshipped by cultists at Samothrace were forbidden to be uttered aloud, and while it’s believed they were mostly chthonic female members of the Greek pantheon, we really don’t know for sure. And even the cult of Mithras, to which millions of Roman legionaries and a great many other citizens belonged (including the emperor Julian the Apostate) is almost opaque to us now. There was probably the sacrifice of a bull involved at some point, but we know very little more than that of their beliefs and practices.

In any event, during this period of around 2,000 years (1600 BCE to 400 CE), everyone was well aware of the existence of the mystery cults, but the members kept their secrets quite effectively, as hardly a scrap of period writing survives that reveals any of their hidden knowledge; indeed, even elliptical references and allusions are rare.

And so, through folk culture, literary memory, and possibly even through the survival of cult remnants outlawed by the Catholic Church, the idea of secret organizations, hidden rituals, and underground magical practice was passed into medieval and then modern times. Early Christianity often assumed the form of a secret cult during the time in which it was forbidden, and splinter groups such as the various gnostic sects became hard-to-extirpate heresies that survived well into the 1400s. These heretic cults changed form from time to time as individual groups were scattered or forced underground, but eventually many of their beliefs were incorporated into the nonconformist branches of Protestantism, and thus into some present-day sects.

There’s no era of recent European history in which secret organizations didn’t thrive, and in many cases, we have only vague knowledge of their dissemination and indeed of their actual beliefs and purposes. Consider for example the 18th century Illuminati, made famous by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s gonzo novels starting with The Illuminatus! Trilogy published in 1975, and revived yet again on a more literary basis by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum in 1988. It seems Adam Weisshaupt organized some quasi-masonic lodges in Bavaria and elsewhere that might have been political, might have been magical, or might just have been the Enlightenment equivalent of an old boys’ social club with a few secret forms and rituals thrown in for fun. Who knows, really? No one living. But even today we have quasi-secret organizations with wide membership like the various masonic groups, whose rituals are admittedly only officially secret. But there are also a great many more serious, smaller groups, including the various descendants of the Golden Dawn and the organizations founded by Aleister Crowley and his disciples, who include, at just one remove, L. Ron Hubbard. The bizarre pulp-science-fictional beliefs ascribed to Scientology’s elite, while no longer secret, are certainly consistent in style with their many predecessors.

Which brings us back to urban fantasy and its pervasive notion of magic performed in secret behind closed doors by organizations of oath-sworn initiates that any of us might trip over or better yet be invited to join.

Is this mere wish fulfillment? Escapism? Fantasies of power and transfiguration? Certainly. But these are fantasies with the most distinguished of heritages, wending their way back to ancient times, and given the imprimatur of the greatest writers and thinkers of antiquity one must concede there is a certain solemn majesty to the idea.

So if you read The Demons of Wall Street (first in a series, the sequel The Demons of the Square Mile will be out at the end of the year or early in 2021!), I do hope you’ll enjoy it; the novella’s purpose is entirely to entertain. But should the notion of a secret organization of sorcerers and financiers hiding in plain sight in the boardrooms of the great firms of Wall Street give you pause, consider this little essay as a preemptive justification of a grand conceit passed on from earliest antiquity all the way to the present day.

Buy the book here.

BIO: Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and technologist. He has worked in R&D at such firms as Bell Communications Research and Google, and he has five patents along with numerous industry publications. His areas of expertise include Internet and cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence, telecom applications, and online games.

He has published many science fiction and fantasy stories and is a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Find out more about Laurence Raphael Brothers on his website.

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