I’ve just done a moderate update of my list of sf and fantasy set in Ireland.
Added the following – in many cases I don’t know much about them, so if you think they don’t belong on the list – and also if you know of other books that should be on it – please let me know in comments or by email.
(Anonymous) The Dawn of the Twentieth Century: A Novel, Social and Political, 1882
Mary Arrigan, Searching for the Green (thanks,
Paul Brandon, The Wild Reel, 2002
Lisa Carey, The Mermaids Singing (2002)
George Green, Hound (2003)
Patricia MacDowell, Daughter of the Boyne (1992); Sorrows of Tara (1995) (thanks,
Marsha Mehran, Pomegranate Soup (2005)
Caiseal Mór, the Wellspring trilogy: The Well Of Yearning (2004), The Well of the Goddess (2005), The Well of Many Blessings (2005)
T.P. O’Mahoney, The Lynch Years: A Political Fantasy (1986)
Selina Rosen, Adventures of the Irish Ninja (1998)
Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Oracles: A Novel (2004)
Novels featuring Ireland in the background
David Graham, Down to a Sunless Sea
Howard Waldrop, The Texas-Israeli War, 1999 (1974)
Short stories
- Richard Cowper, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” (F&SF March 1976)
- Gil Fitzgerald, “The Vengeance of Nora O’Donnell” (F&SF, April 1983)
- Robert E. Howard, “The Dark Man” (Weird Tales, December 1931)
- Peadar Ó Guilín, “The Mourning Trees” (Black Gate, issue 5, Spring 2003); “The Bag” (Reckless Abandon, ed. David Sparks and Bob Strauss, 2002); “Fairy Fort” (Walk On the Darkside, ed. John Pelan, 2004); “Hair”; all horror short stories.
- Joel Richards (Joel Richard Fruchtman), “In the Prison of His Days” (Alternate Generals II, ed. Harry Turtledove & Martin H. Greenberg, 2002)
- Gene Wolfe, “How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen” (Asimov’s Dec 1989)
As always, grateful for more material, including also anyone who can identify these stories that people have asked me about:
1) a brilliant short story possibly called “Ringsend”: it was set in Dublin after a cataclysm in which everyone died. It becomes a very funny and absurd account of the protagonist’s discomfiture when one day he meets the only other survivor – a girl he had fancied and was rebuffed years before.
2) A story by Lucius Shepard set in Ireland
3) A novel set in an Ireland rapidly modernised by aliens, and isolated from the world by stringent security?
4) A novel where Ireland developed the technology to produce a birth control pill, and was the only country in the world with this knowledge (written in the 50s or so 😉 The pill was made from turf and was made in one factory in the midlands. The protagonist of the book was a British secret agent, sent to infiltrate the factory.
I saw it as neo-Nazi too. More specifically, it’s hard not to see a Siegheil to the SS symbol, there.