Gregory Frost’s fantasy novel Rhymer places a recent spin on Thomas the Rhymer, a personality from Scottish folklore whose poems have been reputed to foretell the long run.

“It’s the origin story of Thomas the Rhymer as a kind of Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion battling against aliens—effectively, these elves which are passing into our world from another world,” Frost says in Episode 544 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “He’s just one person fighting this war that nobody even knows is going on right under their noses.”

Rhymer contains a wild mixture of Lovecraftian horror and fantasy, and presents a marked departure from earlier variations of the Thomas the Rhymer story. Frost felt it was essential to do one thing large to set his story aside. “Ellen Kushner a number of years ago wrote, to my mind, the definitive retelling of Thomas the Rhymer from the ballad,” he says, “and I didn’t want to go there at all, because I would have felt like, ‘Oh, it’s already been done to perfection. There’s no reason for me to touch that.’”

Frost come across his unique approach, the thought of a time-skipping Thomas the Rhymer, when he observed putting similarities between Thomas and the later character Tam Lin, who lived in the identical space and who additionally had dealings with the Queen of Elfland. “You’ve got Thomas the Rhymer, whose full name in some cases is Thomas Lindsay Rimor de Ercildoun—which is the town he was from, which is now Earlston,” Frost says. “And then you’ve got Tam Lin. So you’ve got Thomas Lindsay and you’ve got Tam Lin, and I’m going, ‘This is the same person.’”

Frost is at work on a sequel to Rhymer, which is able to see Thomas the Rhymer skip ahead in time to turn into the legendary outlaw Robin Hood. “All of the versions of Robin Hood anybody’s ever seen have basically been the Sir Walter Scott riffs on Robin Hood, and that’s not really who Robin Hood was,” Frost says. “So I’m kind of having a field day a century after Thomas the Rhymer would have existed and trying to map a journey through the world of Robin Hood that nobody’s ever played with before.”

Listen to the entire interview with Gregory Frost in Episode 544 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And take a look at some highlights from the dialogue beneath.

Gregory Frost on the Clarion Writers Workshop:

There was a working gag that yearly Damon Knight would, in some unspecified time in the future throughout the week, pull out a squirt gun and go looking college students, so all people got here with squirt weapons … He was chasing us via the dormitory, and Damon in some unspecified time in the future smacked right into a door and just about retreated for the evening. We couldn’t discover him, so all of us went to his room—there have been separate quarters for Damon and Kate—and knocked on the door, and it was like being 5 years previous once more, as a result of Kate Wilhelm opens the door and we stated, “Can Damon come out and play?” and she or he stated, “No, Damon has to stay in the rest of the night,” and closed the door on us, and that was the top of that.

Gregory Frost on the Liars Club writers group:

For a few years we went round to largely impartial bookstores within the Philadelphia space and did group signings, group occasions, which have been an terrible lot of enjoyable to do. There’s nothing extra suicidal-driving than sitting at a bookstore by your self making an attempt to make eye contact with folks coming via the door, as a result of, a minimum of in my expertise, the very first thing they do is see that there’s a author sitting there with their ebook they usually instantly look in every single place else however on the author with their ebook, they usually go proper previous you such as you don’t exist, so if there’s a gaggle it’s loads more durable to get round you.

Gregory Frost on Bill Johnson:

We began riffing on a narrative thought primarily based on the coldest spot within the universe, which is the Boomerang Nebula, and went forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards on it, and got here up with nearly a point-by-point construction of the story that we have been going to write down collectively. Bill had suffered his complete life with Marfan syndrome. It’s a extremely dangerous situation in your blood vessels the place they principally begin to come aside, and he’d dodged that for a really very long time. Right after we had structured the story out, he went into the hospital for a easy checkup or one thing and just about didn’t come out. So I had all the notes for that story, and I believed, “I’ve got to write this story. I can’t just set this aside because Bill’s gone.”

Get More From WIRED

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.