themes

Recurring Themes

Of varying degrees of subtlety.

Certain motifs appear in several storylines. Two of them are particularly notable.

Amad�s de Gaula

Don Quijote's favorite knight-errant. The books about him were among the first bestsellers.

Poor Amad�s has been largely forgotten these days. But he's referenced in more than one of my books, sometimes blatantly, sometimes less so. (It started out with just the blatant ones, but I decided to make it a theme.) References include:

Most obviously, a character in Downworld is named Amadie de Gallo. His brother, Galen, is named for Don Galaor, playboy brother of Amad�s (and for Claudius Galenus). However, Galen is the one who resembles Amad�s most in both temperment and appearance, while Amadie is reminiscent of Galaor.
For obvious reasons, Quixotic Picaresque has several: Donald Hoady, when choosing his superhero persona, likes Peter's Green Knight and briefly considers "something like that, but with lions"; both Amad�s and Don Quijote were called the "Lion Knight". Peter adopts the mantle of the Green Knight, which is a reference not just to Amad�s (the Knight of the Green Sword), but also to Sir Gawain's eponymous foe, and to the Verde Gab�n of the Quijote. And when Pansy Sanchez is choosing her identity, she considers "Black Belle" before deciding it's "not supervillainey enough"; Amad�s is sometimes called "Beltenebros" or (in French) "le beau t�n�breaux", both meaning roughly "the beautiful dark one".
Amadie de Gallo (Downworld), Jermaine Freeman (Little Trouble Girl), and Art Copdrake (Terminorum) all carry knives with green handles; Amad�s was, as mentioned earlier, the Knight of the Green Sword. Peter Caro, as the Green Knight in Quixotic Picaresque, also has a jade-handled knife—which he intends only for "cutting ropes, that sort of thing."
There are even more obscure connections: for example, the town of Walsh Park (featured in Downworld) is indirectly named after Wales by way of Latin Volc�: the "Gaula" in "Amad�s de Gaula" actually refers not to France but to Wales. (Volc�, incidentally, also shows up in "Cornwall", "Walachia", and in fact "walnut". Why yes, the Online Etymology Dictionary is a major resource, why do you ask?)

The Gates of Horn and Ivory

Homer claimed that true dreams pass through the Gate of Horn, false ones through the Gate of Ivory.

Neil Gaiman wrote seventy-five comic books about one of the Oneiroi, and he barely mentions the Gates they pass through! Me, I can't seem to write anything without the Gates slipping in. Perhaps it's because so many of my ideas originally came through one of them.

For obvious reasons, And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth talks about them.
The character of Catherine Ivory in COSMIC is named after one of them.
In Walsh Park, a town that appears in Downworld, there is a faux-English pub called "The Bull and Gate". This is intended to suggest not just the Gates, but also the idea of travel in general; many things in Walsh Park have names associated with travel, most notably St Christopher's College itself.
A scene in Terminorum is based on a line from T. S. Eliot's "Sweeney Amongst the Nightingales": "Death and the Raven drift above / And Sweeney guards the horn�d gate." However, I've taken a rather loose interpretation of what "horn�d gate" means in this case, so this one might not count.