Tac Talks with bestselling author Gail Carriger about Patricia A. McKillip’s legendary THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD
We welcome the bestselling creator of several series including the Parasol Protectorate, Finishing School, and Tinkered Stars, Gail Carriger for this special Tac Talk, an occasional series of essays by Tachyon creatives. In this piece, a reprint of her foreword from the first Tachyon paperback edition of THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD and included in the recent SPECIAL 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, Carriger reveals the magic of McKillip’s masterpiece.
Foreword
(to THE FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD)
by
Gail Carriger
When I was much younger, my friends and I would challenge ourselves with the hardest question ever asked of any avid reader:
Which book would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island?
There were a lot of books I loved back then, and a lot of new books have been added to that list-of-adored over the years. But after the first time I read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, it became the answer to this question, always and forever. Thirty years later, it’s still the answer.
So now I am left with a very difficult task. How do I explain my love for this perfect desert-island book?
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is like no fantasy novel you have ever read before, and yet it is a touchstone for all of them. It’s not just that the story is magic—it’s that the prose itself is magical and heart-wrenching. Not only will you become immersed in plot and character but also sentence structure. McKillip forms a stunning union of what is told and what is portrayed, and how a writer can transcribe both. It’s like fractal mathematics: beautiful, impossible for an ordinary human to quite understand, and yet hypnotic. Just the opening paragraph is chilling, and thrilling, and all sort of other trilling llls in a row. I can’t describe this book, because it is better than that. It’s better than my capacity for description. It’s not funny, or cute, or silly—it is a work of pure lyrical genius.
This book is the Arthurian legend for an alternate human timeline. It is a riddle teasing you to understand power—in sorcery, in arms, in passion, in knowledge. It is a philosophical treatise on the petty wars of man and how they spin and weave their own magic over intellect and desire. It is about the price of forgiveness, the cost of revenge, and gentle, tentative, nurturing love in all its varied forms.
McKillip explores what it means to be a woman with power beyond the world of men, and then within it. In doing so, she illuminates how we turn ourselves into weapons—not so much how the act of being a weapon is flawed but how in choosing to become one, we risk losing our true selves.
And she does all this while still entertaining.
If you are about to read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld for the first time, I envy you. If this is a reread for you, as it is for me, I know without a shadow of a doubt you will find something new in its pages. I always do.
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is not just a book about magic—it is magic.
Gail Carriger has multiple NYT bestsellers and millions of books in print in dozens of different languages. She writes book hugs – comedies of manners mixed with steampunk, urban fantasy, or sci-fi (and cozy queer joy as GL Carriger). She is best known for the Parasol Protectorate and Finishing School series. She was once an archaeologist and is fond of shoes, octopuses, and tea.