Amberlight was a matriarchy, in the strictest sense. Just as a patriarchy by definition deforms gender equity in favour of men, a strict matriarchy deforms it in favur of women, but both do the deforming in class specific ways. In Victorian England, patriarchy decreed that ideal women were secluded in the home. Which meant all women were excluded from the professions and the public world as well as Universities, but it also meant upper and middleclass women were left idle, while lower, working class and poor women were inferiour because they HAD to work, lowerclass men were inferior because they cdn’t keep their women home. So in Amberlight, upperclass men were kept in luxury and relative idleness, while the lower classes were scorned because the women couldn’t support their men.
So the first and most basic change Tellurith dreams of is achieving gender equity. Riversend is about realizing that dream. The struggles, compromises, political maneuvers, defeats and triumphs and disasters, on the way to founding a community not only equitable, but sustainable in the new world. Because that world contains not only old tradition and prejudice and simple physical threats, but also all of Amberlight’s old political enemies.
The blurb says: A dream. A mystery. A quest. So that’s the dream. The mystery is exactly what it was in Amberlight. The presence and/or nature of the qherrique, the proto-sentient all-purpose McGuffin whose functions upheld Amberlight. For most of Riversend, Tellurith’s House-people are learning to do without the qherrique. At the end, there’s a new mystery. A great deal of trial, some terrible grief. And then, out of all that, a new, mysterious hope. That hope is centred in the final element of the blurb. A quest.
Did you intend to have a sequel when you first began?
(grinning) I didn’t intend to have anything when I first began. When I finished paragraph one of Amberlight I was in much the same situation as Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings when he reached Weathertop in book one: he had no idea where Gandalf was, and he was starting to despair of living to find out. I wasn’t despairing, but I had no idea where I was, what qherrique was, even who Tellurith was. If you’d told me then that this was the start of a series of 4 books -- two in print or about to be, one flapping at the moment, and one in the process of writing -- I’d have been beyond belief.
Does it start up where the other left off? I don't know if you've ever delved into the Paris Balzac created for his Comedie Humaine. Do the same characters always appear as main characters or do characters who were major characters in one book take on a minor role in ensuing books?
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