Ian Watson - Queenmagic, Kingmagic

In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britains oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English languages finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were and remain landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of todays leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.

Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

Welcome to the SF Gateway.

What you see on the board is only the outcrop of a much larger world, like mountain peaks above mist.

- Bishop Lovats the Perceptive

Do you spy the palace of Queen Isgalt?

Magnificent, eh? Yet what a medley! Part fortress, part fantasia.

Hewn into the curtain walls were mullioned windows of stained glass; invaders could practically leapfrog their way in. Isgalts predecessor, Queen Alyitsa, had those windows sawed through the stone to let in light, so she said, for light is the foe of dark and night. Alabaster statues of soldiers (from Queen Damas reign, before) stood on the palace parapets: a perch for pigeons. The white onion domes were so pierced by quatrefoils that they resembled peasants lacework, or curious colanders for draining salads. Rain poured through those to spout out by way of demon gargoyles. The impression was of roofs which moths had feasted on.

As for the cupolas topping the towers, on festival nights bright blaziers were lit in those. Often updrafts swirled sparks aloft so that the royal flags caught alight, burning high in the night and skidding down the spires to the roofs below like bloody, tattered shirts.

But of course no common-or-garden siege would decide the outcome of the war

Our lovely, wistful Queen Isgalt only possessed half the magic force of Queen Alyitsa; quarter of the power of Queen Dama. King Karol spent much of his time high in the central tower devoting himself to bubble-art. Prince Ruk, who guarded the King, could race along two lines of magic. But the prince had long since used up his ability to shift instantaneously to another place through the body of a pawn-squire. (He used this to rescue King Karol from the suicidal attack of the Knight of Night, Oscaro.) Bishop Veck, who practised crosswise magic, continued to minister to the queen and to brace her courage. As did chevalier Sir Brant, who jumped askew through magics. Our city of Bellogard had survived longer than some of us imagined it might.

And me?

My name is Pedino. I was a pawn-squire.

At times how I envied the ordinary lives of burghers and menials of Bellogard, of farmers and peasants throughout the Dolina valley and the rest of the kingdom; even though those people had no full souls which might migrate to another life when our kingdom finally fell, when all houses and barns tumbled into chaos, and the palace burned like white paper.

How proud I was, as a lad, to have my soul divined as a full soul by the late Bishop Slon. How can I forget that day?

Queen Alyitsa was still with us. Isgalt was only one of a quartet of princesses. Despite the loss of Queen Dama, the struggle against the ebon city of Chorny seemed remote, inconsequential to our lives; not so much a total war to the death, by magic, as a mischievous dispute, a cantankerous scrimmage. There had been sorrow at the death of the long-reigning queen; she was killed when I was only an infant, and my mother told me about the pang people felt. There had been a whole fortnight of mourning; though no sense of doom. (Ah, but Prince Ruk and Bishop Veck knew the truth. They realized how vulnerable, in the long run, Damas loss had made us.)

My father was a pipe-maker in Chalk Street near the Spomenik Monument, and my mother ran the tobacconists shop which occupied the front of our premises. My sister Drina, a year older than me, was blonde and slim and tall, though with blobby features which gave her an air of whimsical babyishness; whereas my own hair was dark as walnut, my features were open, and I was broader of build but always somewhat shorter than Drina. She was a long clay pipe with a little bowl of a head; I was a burlier, briefer briar.

My childhood was interesting and happy. Both parents were at home all of the time and there were constant visitors to the shop, sometimes quite exalted ones. Shop and workshop provided fascinating hideouts.

In the workshop were tool-strewn benches for cutting, whittling, drilling, and polishing wood, for crafting silver lids to cap expensive long pipes; clay moulds and an oven; a deep cupboard where chunks of wood matured for up to two years. As kids, we sometimes took clays which had been rejected because of some trivial bobble or air-pit, and dipped them in soapy water to try to blow magical bubbles. Naturally we always failed, producing streams of quivering airy spheres which quickly popped.

Dad was purveyor of pipes by appointment to the palace; perhaps we werent such total commoners. His royal warrant looked grand, carved on the sign which hung outside, but this by no means implied constant consultations with the king. Dad had crafted his most recent bubble pipe masterpiece for His Majesty in the year of my birth. Equerries occasionally purchased ordinary smoking pipes, and flunkies frequently called to buy Mums special royal cut mixture; but that was a more mundane matter. Mums shop!with its heady, nostril-teasing jars of shag and rum-shag, mellowleaf and ambershred; the plugs and pigtails laid out like knots of rope; the boxes of cheroots; the snuff of all scents from mint to strawberry. Dads pipes on display: racks and trays of clays and chibouks, briars and lulus. Boxes of lucifers illustrated with views of Bellogard, blooms from the botanic garden, fish of Lake Riboo.

Every year during our childhood we holidayed in the countryside at the village of Duvana, where the tobacco plantations were. Mum did not personally buy tobacco wholesale, but she liked to keep an eye on the quality of the crop and the standard of curing in the sheds. Duvana was close to the Shooma Forest and uplands; Dad would make excursions with the woodcutters to choose his branches for maturing in the cupboard back home and subsequent carving into pipe bowls and stems. The area around Duvana was a well-known beauty spot dominated by snow-tipped Mount Planina. The Vodopad Waterfall was half a days journey by horse and trap. Ruined Zamak Castle offered a stiff climb up from the base of the falls. We enjoyed our holidays.