Vampire Book Club

Ed. note: Karen Mahoney was kind enough to offer a copy of her debut The Iron Witch up for one Vampire Book Club reader. The contest is now closed. Winner will be announced on Dec. 30.

Before we turn things over to Karen Mahoney, a quick heads up that Flux has pushed the U.S. release date up to Jan. 25, 2011. We’re super excited for this one. You can pre-order The Iron Witch from the Book Depository or Amazon.

Karen Mahoney, author of The Iron Witch

Alchemy in The Iron Witch
By Karen Mahoney

First of all, I just want to say a big “Thank You!” to Chelsea for inviting me over here to talk about something I could quite happily bore you all with for several hours. When she suggested that I write something about the use of alchemy in The Iron Witch, I thought: Cool! What a great idea! I’ll get to discuss something I love, while also giving people a glimpse behind the curtain of the inspiration for my book.

I soon realized that, to be quite honest, there is just waaaay too much material and I’ll never do it justice in a single blog post. Still, I can scratch the surface, and maybe a few of you will be interested enough to take a closer look one day.

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of alchemists for many years and started seriously researching it about six years ago. I used to work in an occult bookstore in London and had ready access to some wonderful resources including antiquarian texts not readily available elsewhere. I’ve always loved that the historical alchemists seem to have taken themselves ridiculously seriously, while some of the things they were actually doing were simply… well… ridiculous. And it’s not as though the practitioners themselves weren’t aware of the stigma attached to their experiments, because many of them operated in secret. Sir Isaac Newton, a world-famous English scientist and astronomer of the seventeenth century, is often considered one of the most important mathematicians and physicists in history—and yet he himself worked on alchemical experiments in secret. Clearly, many alchemists were afraid of the ridicule that might befall them if it was known how they liked to dabble in one of the more mystical branches of esoteric study.

An Alchemist in his Laboratory by Thomas Wijck

Alchemy is an ancient art—centuries old—and there have been branches of it studied and practiced all over the world. There are some pretty far out theories as to how the alchemists came upon their information, encompassing everything from demons to Egyptian gods to channeled angels and even to alien technology. It’s hard to believe that alchemy was actually a precursor to today’s study of chemistry, but there was a lot of method, ritual and painstaking note-taking involved in their pseudo-scientific experiments, even back in the sixteenth century. I tried to get a flavor of that into The Iron Witch, but I had to be careful not to overdo it. There’s just way too much source material and I didn’t want to go all info-dumpy.

Also, I really wanted to make the subject my own in the book, and something that today’s YA readers might be interested in—I created my four alchemical Orders from scratch, and had a great deal of fun doing that: The Order of the Dragon, Order of the Crow, Order of the Lion and the Order of the Rose. In The Iron Witch, we only see the Order of the Dragon, which is the secret group of alchemists that Donna Underwood—my main character—is born into. I wanted to explore the idea of what it would be like for a modern teenage girl to grow up knowing that her life was mapped out for her as an alchemist-in-training, especially considering that the ancient study was traditionally more of a masculine pursuit.

Well, it looks that way on the surface, but when I dug a little deeper there is certainly evidence that female alchemists existed. Sometimes they were considered more like ‘assistants’ to the alchemist himself (picture me rolling my eyes here!), and they were given the vaguely patronizing title of ‘Moon Sister’ by some groups. The most famous female alchemist was a British woman: Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, who had her own laboratory and worked with cool stuff like invisible ink and secret codes. Click to continue reading Karen Mahoney Guest Post: Alchemy in The Iron Witch