yuletide | 2021 Yuletide Promo Post

Welcome to the Fandom Promo post, everyone!

Here's where you get those eyes on your fandoms for sign ups!

Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them. A big part of Yuletide is how small our fandoms can be, and this is a good way to make sure other people know what gems there are out there!

Suggested form to use:

FANDOM NAME:
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT:
WHERE CAN I FIND IT (optional):

(Bonus optional: What are you thinking of requesting for this?)

EDIT:

Useful tips (Not required, but helps people if they want to engage with your fandom!):

- Mention what form of media the canon is. Is it a comic miniseries? Is it a twenty season tv show? Is it a book? Is it a twitter feed?
- Is it standalone or part of a series?
- It's best to make each fandom its own entry with its own title in the subject line! That makes it easier for people to find/see what you're promoting! Don't worry about 'spam', that is the entire point of this entry and you're using it exactly as intended.

For reference, last year's promo post!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Windrose Chronicles is a trilogy of 1980s SFF novels (The Silent Tower, The Silicon Mage, Dog Wizard), with a fourth novel in the same setting but featuring different characters (Stranger at the Wedding) and some recent online-only novellas set after the main trilogy. I've only read the main trilogy so far, so anything I request will relate to those books.

You pretty much do need to read the trilogy as a whole. The first book, The Silent Tower, ends on a heart-shattering cliffhanger that leads immediately into The Silicon Mage. Dog Wizard is a little more independent but resolves many longer-term plot threads from the previous two books. But they're none of them doorstoppers.

You may recognize Barbara Hambly's name from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, from the Darwath trilogy (which I'm told is similar in concept to Windrose but much bleaker in tone), or from her Star Trek and Star Wars novels. Hambly is very much One Of Us; she knows what the fannish brain and heart want, and she gives you plenty of it.

In brief, The Windrose Chronicles are about a young female computer programmer from the 1980s, Joanna Sheraton, who’s pulled into another world where magic exists, but is heavily regulated and controversial. There she meets Stonn Caris, a young member of an order of warriors who are trained to see themselves as nothing but living weapons. Stonn is escorting as his prisoner a renegade wizard, Antryg Windrose, widely believed to be insane and accused of creating portals into other worlds--including Joanna's. But as Joanna travels with Caris and Antryg, hoping to return to her own world, she finds it harder and harder to believe he's the real culprit. The relationships between these three characters (various permutations of romance, friendship, enmity, trust and distrust--despite which there's no love triangle whatsoever!) are the heart of the story, in my opinion.

The worldbuilding is vaguely based on Regency England (But With Magic, and also evil female bishops), and Antryg is explicitly based on Tom Baker in Doctor Who, whom the author clearly has a little bit of a voice-crush on (I told you she was One Of Us!). It's good stuff. There’s adventure and intrigue and angst and humor and really good character relationships, both romantic and platonic.

It's marketed as fantasy, but I'm really more comfortable calling it SFF or spec-fic without narrowing it down, because it very much operates off of 'sufficiently advanced technology cannot be distinguished from magic'--and vice versa! Sorcerers draw on the power of computers, eldritch abominations run science experiments, etc. Joanna's mainframe-based programming expertise is somewhat endearingly dated now, but that gives it the feel of a delightful period piece.

I'll likely be requesting stories with the same characters pre- or post-canon, or canon scenes from a different character's perspective. A little worldbuilding/magic-system stuff never went amiss either, but I'm mainly interested in Antryg and Joanna and their friends. It's been a Yuletide fandom before, and I've liked several of the resulting fics.

I really love the complex and nuanced ways in which the characters claim and exercise agency in their lives, especially the female characters. The romance makes me absolutely melt in puddles (although it's at least as much adventure as romance), the setting is really vivid and well-drawn, and I've just remembered one of the characters deals with chronic pain and a disability in his hands, which is some pretty cool low-key representation, I think.

The main content warnings I can think of are for depictions of emotionally abusive relationships (one of the major themes of the trilogy is the complex process of recovering from such a relationship) and, especially in the third book, discussion of a major character's abusive childhood. There is some aftermath of torture stuff (characters with permanent scars and so on). Another thing that might put some readers off is that there's a gay antagonist side character who is depicted... pretty much how you'd expect for a gay antagonist side character in the 1980s, but that's only in part of one book. (And he does have some unexpected redeeming qualities! There's a reason I've said 'antagonist' and not 'villain.') There might be something I'm not remembering right now, but it's not a bleak or grim story either.

Some libraries have copies, and there's generally a few copies for sale at reasonable prices on your favorite book-buying website. Also apparently Kindle and audiobook editions, as I've just discovered!

-lurking_latinist (no Dreamwidth acct)

2021 Yuletide Promo Post

The Windrose Chronicles - Barbara Hambly