Song Styles

I'll be posting more from my Scylla and Charybdis playlist once I have a release date for the novel, but in the meantime, here's a "general purpose" song on it that I really like simply because it's imaginative and joyous:

In The Arms Of The Milky Way - Laura Powers

Laura Powers is what I would describe as New Age Pop, stuffed with every Celtic cliche you can imagine.  As a professional Celtic musician, sometimes I'm kind of embarrassed by my fondness for her stuff, but it is surprisingly catchy and fun.

As a sidebar, the television show Salvation recently mentioned the mythological Scylla and Charybdis.  (I keep meaning to write a blog post about Salvation, which is to impending-apocalypse science fiction what Laura Powers is to Celtic mythology:  a heartfelt but not particularly original love letter.)  

Anyhow, the characters on Salvation discussed the part of the story most people don't address, which is Odysseus' solution to sailing between them.  With the whirlpool Charybdis, the danger was all or nothing; they might be able to evade it, but it might suck the ship and all its passengers down to doom.  Scylla, on the other hand, was a monster, a woman from the waist up, and vicious dogs from the waist down (given Greek misogyny, there's gotta be a metaphor there).  She would certainly kill some of the crew ... but not everyone.  

So the mythological choice between Scylla and Charybdis is ... do you choose the certain sacrifice of some over a chance that everyone might make it ... or everyone might die?  It's a no-win situation.

How this metaphor applies to *my* Scylla and Charybdis is another question.  I didn't have this story specifically in mind when I structured the plot, though there are mythological influences sprinkled throughout.  (In the original short story, when Gwydion was the *only* male you see, I very deliberately chose a name from another mythos - Welsh.  And I can't recall specifically, but I don't think that the name of his sister-in-law, Sophie - wisdom - was chosen randomly, either ...)