© Aphelion Webzine
I’m pleased to report that a story of mine, the quaintly named Pockets of the Janostovore, has been published in the long-fiction section of the December 2020-January 2021 edition of the webzine Aphelion. As its title suggests, Pockets of the Janostovore belongs to the fantasy genre and so it’s attributed to Rab Foster, the pseudonym I put on my fantasy writings.
When it comes to fantasy literature, perhaps the writer I admire most is the author, poet and artist Mervyn Peake, who penned the trilogy of Gormenghast novels in 1946, 1950 and 1959. The influence of Peake and Gormenghast seeps through into Pockets of the Janostovore, though there’s one important difference. The characters in the massive, labyrinthine edifice in Gormenghast are prisoners of centuries of feudal and ritualistic existence. They’ve been conditioned to follow the same daily ceremonies appropriate to whatever level of the hierarchical society they inhabit. This includes the aristocrats living at the top of the pile. However, the inhabitants of the massive, labyrinthine city in Pockets are governed by a different sort of feudalism and hierarchy – one powered by relentless trade and commerce. Yes, there are aristocrats at the highest tier of this world too but, as the story mentions at one point, they’re mostly nouveau riche who’ve been able to buy their titles.
One writer who might appear to have influenced the story, but didn’t, was the American Gene Wolfe, who passed away just last year. While I worked on the story, I found myself inserting more and more references to those mainstays of the economies of medieval cities, the merchant and craft guilds. Hence, in Pockets, you get mentions of such obscure groupings as the cutlers (knife-makers), the bowyers (bow-makers) and the girdlers (belt-makers). After I’d submitted the story to Aphelion at the start of the summer, I then read Wolfe’s excellent 1980 fantasy / sci-fi novel, The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), which turned out to be choc-a-bloc with references to guilds. It even features a torturers’ guild, to which the title character belongs. So now somebody will probably accuse me of ripping off Gene Wolfe. But no, I wrote Pockets before I knew of his novel. Honest!
One thing I definitely did rip off for Pockets was the corny old British sitcom about life in the Roman-era environs of Mount Vesuvius, Up Pompeii (1969-70), which starred the incomparable comedian and comic actor Frankie Howerd. Specifically, I stole from Up Pompeii one of Howerd’s most memorably groan-inducing jokes. I wonder if any readers of Pockets will spot it?
For the next two months, Pockets of the Janostovore can be read here, while the main page of the December 2020-January 2021 edition of Aphelion can be accessed here. And incidentally, the long-fiction editor of Aphelion has named Pockets as one of his picks of 2020, which makes its publication extra-pleasing for me.
© Arrow Books