Theresa Crater

I had the privilege and honor of taking an advanced writing class with Joanna Russ at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was studying literature mostly, but took a few writing classes. Russ stood out as brave in that time of worship of “high literature” over popular or (God forbid) genre fiction. In addition to her excellent critiques, she gave sound advice about how to keep writing in a world in which we’d have to work full time for a while, if not for our adult lives. I remember her suggesting that we might want to take a job that didn’t consume our writing energy so we’d have that left to write during off hours. She suggested not writing junk fiction to make a living, as our “real” work would start to resemble it.

 My two favorites of hers are in fiction, The Female Man, with four women who come from the worlds that embody the variety of gender roles often discussed in the 1970’s. Meet especially Jael, warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. But then there’s the librarian waiting to get married.

 Her nonfiction is equally revolutionary. I loved How to Suppress Women’s Writing, published at a time when a male student said to me in all seriousness after class once that no woman had ever written a classic nor ever would. Yes, this was in the 20^th century. I told him he was a moron and not to talk to me anymore.

Thank you Joanna Russ for all you have done for us—entertaining, teaching and clearing the way!

My novels explore the possibilities of human consciousness–how much can we know and how, is enlightenment a real possibility? Some of my favorite science fiction involves exploring the possibility of machines becoming conscious. Odyssey Five was one of my favorites, but I’m sure you can name many. Zvi Zaks, another Eternal Press author, explores artificial intelligence. The Turing test was designed to see if computers can ever approach consciousness. Here’s what he says about his novels:

With A VIRTUAL AFFAIR, the novel published by Eternal Press, the question of the Turing test (if an observer can’t tell whether questions are being answered by a machine or a person, is the machine ‘intelligent’?) is discussed.  The main character, a computer program named Barbara, can pass this test with flying colors if she wants, and people keep seeing her as human.  But, as she keeps reminding everyone, she isn’t.  Her existence is dedicated to making people happy – but can a computer program know what’s best for humanity?

The second book, IMPLAC (published by e-star) takes place decades after a war against genocidal robots.  The hero, Tommy McPherson, finds a lone surviving robot hidden in a tunnel on the moon.  He manages to immobilize it, and interrogates it.  It says that with the decades spent in hibernation, it’s circuits have mutated so that it no longer hates humans.  Furthermore, it can tell Tommy where to find other hidden robots that presumably still do hate humans.  The dilemma is obvious: if Tommy believes it, sets it free, and is wrong, it will multiply and resume the war.  If Tommy disbelieves it and is wrong, the other hidden robots will eventually awaken and resume the war.  An additional factor is that lying is more complicated than telling the truth, and the robots, vicious though they were, had never before shown any ability to lie.

Beneath the Hallowed Hill is set in Britain’s most mythic place, Avalon. In contemporary times, it’s Glastonbury. In Hill, we see my vision of Morgen le Fey and the community of priestesses who served the two sacred springs. Christina St. Clair has a new novel out that features Vivienne, the sorceress who imprisoned Merlin. Here’s how she describes her book: 

Emily’s Shadow–a novel by Christina St. Clair

Happy days are not here again. That’s how Emily might have thought at the beginning of the family holiday in pretty Cornwall with her father, two brothers, and his new bride, a woman who could have been an older sister. Except she wasn’t. Nor was she a mother to Emily’s brothers. Emily had fulfilled that role after her mother was killed during the London Blitz.
Emily can scarcely allow herself to remember what happened. It had all been so fast. She’d not meant to let go of Byron’s hand during that awful fire bomb attack when the Elephant and Castle pub down the road went up in flames. Byron had darted out of their Andersen bomb shelter right into the midst of the battle. Mum chased him. The rest was history. Why dredge it up?
Yet, somehow, someway, such experiences must be released. Emily’s opportunity to release repressed anger came during that time in Cornwall. It came out of the dark past of antiquity in the form of the sorceress, Vivienne. This witch was the one who’d tricked Merlin, slipping a magic ring upon his finger, and then burying him under a sacred rock. Alas for her, Merlin had laid a spell upon her and sent her whirling through time and space to be trapped in a muddy hole beneath a hut that over the centuries had been rebuilt and rebuilt, with not a soul capable to help her.
Vivienne was not the best sorceress in the world, but she was clever, and as Emily and her family arrived to stay in the fishing cottage where Vivienne remained, she suddenly understood the flaw in Merlin’s spell upon her, and so she began conjuring magic to free herself.
With Vivienne’s freedom, Emily’s troubles began: disturbing thoughts, her brother acting more strange than ever, chaotic family times. Her father, or course, typical of him, didn’t notice a thing wrong. Why would he? He was the great hero who went off to war leaving the family to cope. Sure, he was doing what men all did, and sure he would have been called up anyway, but it hurt that he’d gone off leaving her in charge. She’d only been fourteen at the time. Now, though, she was older and wiser and had her own plans on how to live. They did not include an encounter with a medieval sorceress.

To read an excerpt go here.
To read her blog, go here.

Available from Amazon, Nook, and Sony

Thea Hutcheson is joining us after all! Saturday, April 23, 3:00 p.m. at the Broadway Book Mall, 200 S. Broadway, Denver; phone 303-744-BOOK (2665) – A trio of local urban fantasy writers: Theresa Crater (Beneath the Hallowed Hill), Robin D. Owens (Enchanted No More) and Thea Hutcheson (The Bee Lady’s Amulet) will all discuss and sign their latest books.

Today my new novel Beneath the Hallowed Hill is released. Anne Le Clair travels to Glastonbury with her fiancée, Egyptologist and mystic Michael Levy, to investigate a house she has inherited from a mysterious aunt…only to find trouble waiting. One of Avalon’s sacred twin springs is failing. Together, Anne and Michael try to restore the water flow, but discover there is much more at stake: the Illuminati master Alexander Cagliostro has activated an ancient crystal tower, tearing a hole in time that threatens so much more than one sacred spring. Meanwhile, in ancient Atlantis, Megan, priestess of the Crystal Matrix Chamber, flees the destruction of her world carrying with herself a vital artifact. Order here.