Skip to content

← Home

Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde (born 1961) is a Welsh English-language science fiction and fantasy writer, author of a series of alternate-history detective novels featuring the literary detective Thursday Next (Ukrainian: Четвер Наступний). In the novel The Eyre Affair (2001), he presents Crimea as the arena of an endless Crimean War and, through this storyline, shows the cost of the peninsula and the brutality of war.

Overview

Jasper Fforde is a British (Welsh) science fiction and fantasy writer, best known for a cycle of nine novels featuring the literary detective Thursday Next (Ukrainian: Четвер Наступний). His world is a mixture of alternate history, detective fiction, and fairy-tale burlesque, where characters from books are able to move from one work to another, and historical events have taken a different course.

The work central to the Ukrainian-Crimean theme is the novel The Eyre Affair (2001), the first book in the Thursday Next cycle. In its alternate reality, the Crimean War, which began in 1854, is still ongoing in 1985; England is at war with the russian empire, and Wales has seceded as the People's Republic. Crimea appears as the front line of the war, where British brigade soldiers die near Balaklava, and the Goliath corporation promotes plasma weapons under the slogan "Crimea is a boon for England." The heroine, Thursday Next, a former combat vehicle driver, comes to understand the cost of the peninsula through the prism of war, loss, and homecoming.

Key Details / Subtopics

  • Biography: a Welshman, an English-language science fiction and fantasy writer; author of nine novels about Thursday Next (Четвер Наступний).
  • The Eyre Affair (2001): the first novel of the cycle; it combines alternate history, detective fiction, and literary burlesque. Literary detectives (littectives) investigate crimes related to literature and ensure that parallel worlds do not influence one another.
  • Alternate Crimean War: in the novel the 1854 war is still ongoing in 1985; in the 1970s near Balaklava, a light tank brigade came under crossfire from russian artillery — of 534 soldiers, only 34 survived. Thursday recalls her service as an IFV driver in the 3rd Wessex Brigade, the death of her brother, and a war that "comes back" home.
  • The Goliath Corporation and plasma weapons: the all-powerful military-industrial complex of the British Empire; the promised "plasma rifle" turns out to be a bluff that does not fire. Upon learning this, Thursday puts an end to the Crimean War.
  • The antagonist Acheron Hades: a physically elusive and bulletproof villain who can only be killed by a silver bullet; the embodiment of the threat of chaos between worlds.
  • Political prophecy: the novel shows the power of words over reality and the cost of war, contrasting a light ironic tone with the tragic storyline of the Crimean front. The author plays on a pun: "Crimea" → "a crime".
  • Crimea in works of foreign literature: The price of the peninsula — an article by Valerii Verkhovsky in the newspaper "Krymska svitlytsia" (2018, No. 49), the main primary source about Fforde and the novel The Eyre Affair.
  • Jules Verne and Crimea — another article from the same column "Crimea in works of foreign literature" about the depiction of Crimea in foreign literature.
  • Beryl Bainbridge — an article from the same column about the British writer and her novel Master Georgie (Crimean War).
  • Brian Garfield — an article from the same column about the American writer and the novel Kolchak's Gold with a Crimean plot.
  • George Fraser — an article from the same column about the Scottish writer and the cycle about Harry Flashman (Crimean War, escape from captivity).
  • Harold Lamb — an article from the same column about the American writer and the "Cossack cycle" about the Cossack Klit (Crimean Khanate, influence on Robert E. Howard).
  • Crimean (Eastern) War of 1853–1856 in the Kherson region — the historical period whose alternate version (ongoing until 1985) forms the basis of Fforde's novel.
  • Andrii Shchekun — the editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Krymska svitlytsia," which published the article about Fforde.
  • Heinrich Böll — an article from the same column about the German Nobel Prize-winning writer and his Crimean frontline experience (1943).
  • Colleen McCullough — an article from the same column about the Australian writer and the depiction of Mithridates/Bosporus/Panticapaeum in The Masters of Rome.
  • Louis Boussenard — an article from the same column about the French novelist and the novel The Zouaves of the Malakhov Mound about the Crimean War.
  • Mark Twain — an article from the same column about the American writer who visited Crimea in 1867 and described his impressions in the book The Innocents Abroad (bestseller of 1869).
  • Michael Moorcock — an article from the same column about the British science fiction writer and the cycle The History of the Runestaff (techno-fantasy) with a Crimean plot (Simferopol, Kerch, "Ukrania").