The Sea Hag
THE SEA HAG was one of my attempts to write a commercially successful book that was different from anything I’d done before. The closest analog to my plan was The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance: a world in which magic works but the vestiges of ancient super-science remain also. (I hadn’t read it at the time, but Vance’s novelet The Miracle Workers is even closer to what I was trying to do than his Dying Earth stories.)
Though Vance gave me a model, I fashioned the action of The Sea Hag from fairy tales. Among the first books I read by myself were the Color Fairy Books edited by Alexander Lang. I reread several of them while I was plotting my novel as well as reading Alan Garner’s recent (and brilliant) collections, but most of the tales I used were from the Pantheon collection Russian Fairy Tales. continue reading…