Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

As if the SF Gods didn't think I already felt guilty enough about not being able to attend WorldCon despite its being just a hundred miles away, I see this report on Usenet this morning from an attendee who sat in on Guy Gavriel Kay reading from The Last Light of the Sun, the new novel coming out next spring:

So, here I am in Toronto, and yesterday (or Saturday or something), GGK read from his upcoming book.

By way of introduction, he pointed out that his past several books had all about about "sophisticated cultures". He didn't go into what he meant by "sophisticated", but he gave Arbonne's Court of Love as an example. It's not something that a low-literacy, bare-bones agricultural society could support. Ditto for educated doctors, professional muralists, etc. And Byzantium is the archetype of pre-Renaissance sophisticated civilization.

So with the next book he wants to do something different. It's post-Roman Britain, with Celts and Saxons and so on. The scene he read had kids out on a raid against a nearby fort. There was obviously still *art* -- poetry, music -- but it wasn't troubadors.

We'll see how different it turns out. The part he read gave no sense of who the "Romans" had been, or how the protagonists viewed them. (The only reference to previous civilizations was indirect -- someone mentioned the Wall of Hadrian-or-whoever.)

So there we go: We'll see the equivalent of Dark Ages Britain in the proto-Europe setting that's been the setting of GGK's last three novels. Thus, I expect that the title The Last Light of the Sun refers to the gradual fading of the Rhodian (Roman) Empire as the Imperial forces recede, leaving their outposts and forts behind and the requisite power-void to be filled. What interests me most about this is that it's precisely this setting into which most scholars try to find the actual historical roots of the Arthurian legends. I wonder if GGK is planning a type of re-exploration of the Arthur stories, given that he's already done some work in that milieu in The Fionavar Tapestry. (Of course, he could leave the Arthurian angle out entirely, too. You never know with GGK.) The other interesting angle is that, as I read the quoted post, it sounds as if GGK is creating a more "brutal" civilization for the new book.

And I missed the #$%&^*@!!! reading. AGGGHHHH!!!

(I'll try to post a link to the Usenet post once it shows up on the Google archive. As of this writing, it isn't there yet. I cut-and-pasted the text from my newsreader.)