© Swords & Sorcery Magazine
A good place for a writer to go to for ideas – writers of all types of fiction, I’d say, though especially historical fiction and also fantasy fiction, which I write under the penname of Rab Foster – is a museum. Last year my partner and I were on holiday in the city of Yogyakarta in Java, Indonesia. There, we visited the Sonobudoyo Museum, which is devoted to Javanese history and culture.
Among its many exhibits, a couple of items in the transport section caught my attention and piqued my curiosity. These were palanquins, the conveyances the wealthy once employed to get around, which consisted of a chair, inside a box, with poles attached to it. The poles rested on the shoulders of servants or porters and their legs provided the palanquin and its rich passenger with locomotion.
What, I thought, if I set a fantasy story almost entirely inside a palanquin? How would that work? So I went off and thought about it, and made notes, and planned, and wrote, and the result a year-and-a-half later was a 7500-word short story entitled The Palanquin. I even managed to incorporate into it a striking detail I’d seen on one of the Sonobudoyo Museum’s biggest palanquins, a carved snake (or naga) that adorned its roof.
I’m happy to say that editor Curtis Ellet has chosen The Palanquin for inclusion in Issue 167 of his monthly webzine Swords & Sorcery Magazine and that issue is now available to read. Being fantasy, the story is attributed to the aforementioned Rab Foster. For the next month, you can access the magazine’s main page here and The Palanquin itself here.
And that’s it from me for 2025. Have a Happy New Year when it comes.