Works
Whitbourn is an archaeology graduate and published author since 1987. His first book, A Dangerous Energy, won the BBC/Victor Gollancz Fantasy Novel Prize (judged by, amongst others, Terry Pratchett) in 1991. In 1562, Elizabeth I suffered from a near-fatal bout of smallpox. In reality she recovered, but that did not occur in the world of A Dangerous Energy and its sequels. Instead, Elizabeth I died from that infection, and her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, succeeded to the English throne, leading to a second and permanent Catholic Counter Reformation in England and Scotland.
Popes and Phantoms and To Build Jerusalem are other novels located in his own preferred - and wildly skewed - version of history, and followed that success. A Dangerous Energy was reviewed as "the first Counter-Reformation science fiction novel" and To Build Jerusalem furthers the story of that particular alternate history. A third volume in this trilogy, The Two Confessions, is now complete. Popes and Phantoms was also published in Russia by Mir Fantastiki.
At the same time Whitbourn has published a steady stream of short stories, including the extensive Binscombe Tales series of supernatural stories set in his ancestral homeland. They were published in two volume collected form as Binscombe Tales - Sinister Saxon Stories and More Binscombe Tales - Sinister Sutangli Stories by Ash-Tree Press in 1998 and 1999, and reissued in ebook and print editions by Spark Furnace Books in 2011.
His fifth book, The Royal Changeling, (described as the first work of Jacobite propaganda for several centuries) was published in 1998 by Simon & Schuster's Earthlight imprint. The book recounts the Monmouth Rebellion accurately and in great detail, while adding a layer of fantasy that brings figures from English mythology to life as both combatants and political forces. The fantasy layer builds momentum and becomes increasingly vivid as the story of the protagonist, Theophilus Oglethorpe, unfolds. Toward the end, as Theophilus engages in battle with Monmouth and his mythical allies, his wife, Eleanor, battles supernatural forces at their manor on the River Wey. Whitbourn does remarkable justice to Eleanor with his historically-accurate portrayal of her formidable character.
Subsequent years have seen the release by the same company of his trio of books which he insists on calling The Downs-Lord triptych (not "trilogy"), including Downs-Lord Dawn (1999), Downs-Lord Day (2000) and Downs-Lord Doomsday (2002).
This depicts the adventures of a 17th Century down-at-luck curate who crosses into an alternate Earth where - though all physical features are similar to ours - the hapless local humans are little more than food animals of the monstrous life-form known as Null.
He appoints himself their liberator, goes back for 17th century weapons, and manages to defeat the Null (at least in that world's version of the British Isles) and in the process makes himself a God-Emperor. But further complications arise from the interference of a power-hungry 19th Century American professor, extraterrestrial creatures known as "Angels" - which is rather a misnomer - and the exploits of the Emperor's Corps of diplomats who refine Machiavellism to unprecedented subtlety.
A rare interview with Whitbourn in 2000 was revealingly entitled 'Confessions of a Counter-Reformation Green Anarcho-Jacobite'.
Read more about this topic: John Whitbourn
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“Evil is something you recognise immediately you see it: it works through charm.”
—Brian Masters (b. 1939)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the “drisk,” with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)