Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (42 page)

Once I had Lenayin, the other lands and peoples evolved at least in part as foils for Lenayin. For example, the main enemies or bad guys of the series turn out to be people who live in the more traditional European feudal system, which Lenays mainly detest because of the serfdom it forces most of the population into. And that clash of values is reflected in the beliefs of my characters, which then becomes the kind of personal, dramatic tension that makes stories work.

Tim Akers:
Because of my particular background, religion and cosmology inform pretty much everything I do. So I always start with the gods, the religions, the hidden powers that work beneath the world. That informs culture, which informs history, which in turn informs plot and character. I tend to start big and work my way down into the specific. Of course, that reveals a lot of my weaknesses as a writer, too. I’m good at the grand patterns, but I’m still learning how to craft the perfect character.

In what manner did you develop the secondary world from the original seed?

Justina Robson:
By reading and thinking and studying a lot of social-science material, anthropology, and daydreaming. This was all very distracting from the real development of the story, but I wanted a credible base layer, even if I never actually write about it directly. It has to make a kind of sense to me in terms I am content with. So I’ve been trying to figure out realistic and necessary conditions for everything that the story has. Unfortunately this has sometimes made me attempt to “answer” the mysteries of human cultures, their evolution and possible biological origins, trying to separate necessary things from chance and memetic accretions. . . a totally impossible Gordian knot. So now I’m down to choosing where I cut the knot and what statements about the present I’m really trying to make. But I’m often distracted and also dismayed that many of my observations are so damning. I’m trying to dig my way out of Western, Christianized, secular, liberal, and capitalist culture and. . . ugh. . . it’s nearly impossibly hard and manic, like some kind of Whack-A-Credo. You get one, and four more pop up from your unconsciou But it’s worth a stab at something a little bit more than just a reactionary OMYGODWUT.

Kay Kenyon:
Once I had the tunnel idea and knew that an advanced civilization created the Entire, I started asking questions like, who would live there? How like or unlike humans will they be? What technologies do they have? If this universe is a tunnel, what mechanism creates day and night, if such exists? Each of these answers constrains and/or influences the answer to the next question, and so forth, until you begin to find a coherent world, suitably strange, but with anchors to human experience. At times this process is exhilarating and sometimes you expect it to collapse like a house of cards. Not the least of the challenges is how to make such an improbable place coherent yet mysterious, strange but somehow recognizable.

Tim Akers:
For my second book,
The Horns of Ruin,
I developed a story about three gods who were brothers, and who ended up betraying each other until only one of them was still alive. Then I imagined the church that would be built on that kind of history, and then what a society based on that church would look like. The tone of that kind of theocracy is going to flavor everything, from your architecture to the way the three churches interact, to why people would choose to serve a god who was dead, or a god who murdered his brother. Again, I built from the large (gods killing each other!) to the small, and then built a plot around that.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe:
I started with research into the Viking age. This meant I read a general historical text on the Vikings, some of the sagas and also the Eddas. The Eddas are the 14th-century poems written by an Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson. He collected oral poems and wrote them down. These form the main plank of our knowledge about Viking myth. At that point I started writing. It’s always better to start writing sooner rather than later. If you find out, or decide, that the deck on your longship isn’t as extensive as you first wrote, you can always change it later. I then research as I go along—reading books on Viking ships or arms and armor, for instance and getting information from the many great web resources. If I were in a completely invented world I wouldn’t have to bother with all this and would just start writing immediately after I had the idea for the story.

K.V. Johansen:
The local gods, which are such a vital part of the
Blackdog
secondary world, grew out of the existence of the Blackdog. There he was; I had to find out
why.
The incarnate goddess who needed a guardian was the why, and the rules of the world grew out of developing a theology in which this limited, lake-bound goddess could exist. As the world developed, with its local gods and goddesses, the demons of the wild places, the Old Great Gods and the banished devils, the Blackdog didn’t seem to be quite any of them. I had that question in the back of my mind for most of the book: What, really, was the Blackdog? Wondering about that led to a lot of ancient history developing as an underpinning for his existence, which now seems such a foundation for the world that it’s a bit disconcerting to remember that none of that was there when I started.

Once I had the idea of local gods who were very limited in their powers, it seemed to make sense that there wouldn’t be very many large kingdoms or empires; the limited gods would lead to limited tribal regions. Geography shapes culture, so there are larger groupings of peoples linked by common culture and language, but a person’s emotional attachment is to a much smaller idea of place, and the political units are also usually centred on individual gods or goddesses. There are certainly kingdoms containing more than one god, but they’re usually not great monolithic nations, which prevent their kings being absolute monarchs. Only a few empires have ever existed.

Setting the story along a caravan route meant that I could explore the different cultures linked by that road. It’s the sort of world where you could get a lot of isolationist, mistrustful cultures, but instead it turned out to be one where this river of trade and travel means there is a constant flow of cultural influence and language. As Holla-Sayan travelled, I had to keep developing new gods and places, which meant looking at new interpretations of the basic idea of a god limited in territory and influence.

Mark Chadbourn:
The danger of creating an ur-world was that it would be too familiar, filled with too many tropes that we’d all seen played out in books, films, and TV over the years. Once I’d identified the elements that spoke to many disparate cultures, I needed to twist them, turning archetypes into elements that were three-dimensional, rich and unique. Part of the process included re-naming some concepts—for instance, dragons—to prevent readers bringing a bagful of preconceptions to the story. By the time the reader had figured out what the things are, I’d had space to imprint my reading upon it.

Do you ever get bogged down in the world-building process?

Justina Robson:
Endlessly. I use it as an excuse not to write the story or to stop writing when I feel very anxious and. . . well. . . as an excuse for everything really. I keep coming up against my inner demon which tells me I have to be right or I can’t go on. I have to solve it. I have to solve
everything,
or I’m unjustified in making whatever flaky claim my story is trying to make in the face of a relentlessly nitpicky universe. I escape by reading romances and novels by people who are smart enough never to care about this stuff. I realize it’s starting to sound like I think world-building is pointless. I don’t. But for me, story is first. If the world is going to get in the way because of some notion that I am writing SF and therefore it has to make a literal sense, it doesn’t want to make because it is really all metaphors then
metaphors must win.
Every time. All the time. I never give two hoots for anyone else’s cruddy world-building if their story blows my mind. I might potshot at it later, and god help them if the story blows. But if it’s good, I don’t care at all. I am in it for the trip, not the brochure.

K.V. Johansen:
Possibly—if by bogged down you mean distracted, so that the world-building takes over and the adventure gets sidetracked. “This is getting interested, let’s keep going and see what that’s like. Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with this particular story.” There’s a southern continent across an ocean channel which has trade with the Five Cities. The Five Cities aren’t in
Blackdog
either, but they’re there, Nabbani colonies east and south of Marakand. And the early history of Marakand, the city where the eastern and western caravan roads meet, is really fascinating and can distract me from the more immediate history that is the story in hand. But name a place Marakand, which is fairly obviously derived from Asmarakand, which became Samarkand, and it’s crying out for a mysterious, romantic past, isn’t it? And I can start hunting for books from which to develop some small detail and end up with a stack of six histories, reading for background on something that’s going to be a tiny presence in the story itself. I guess I like things to have roots. (Also, it’s an excuse to add to my library, of course.) It’s really important for the world not to end at the edges of the map and for there to be a past before the story begins, a foundation for everything, but sometimes I can end up knowing more about the past of something than its present, and have to step out of it a bit and refocus on the story’s here and now. I don’t work out things like that in advance, though. They unfold, or I go chasing after them, as I get to them, and then I can end up with pages I have to cut out and stash in another file because it’s not part of the story; it’s just stuff that I have to know so the story can go on.

Tim Akers:
I can spend too much time on world-building, because it’s the part that makes me tick. I started as a designer of roleplaying games, and I still have a great deal of affection for the tabletop dice. In fact, if it were possible to just make a living creating and deploying hyper-deep worlds for people to explore, that’s probably what I would be doing. I suppose I could make a go of it in the computer game industry, but I’m focused on honing my craft as a writer. Plus I love words, I love language, and I love story. I’m not sure you can practice all of that in that industry.

Joel Shepherd:
[I don't get bogged down] really, but there are times when I feel the story becomes bogged down if I haven’t sufficiently developed the world. The characters, and therefore the story, must interact with their environment in a way that enriches the story. If the world isn’t sufficiently developed, sometimes I’ve felt there just isn’t any energy happening between the characters and their world, much the same as a relationship between characters that lacks energy or excitement. So I have to go away and think for a bit about what’s missing from the world, and what would liven up the experience.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe:
If I were writing a traditional fantasy, I wouldn’t bother about very detailed world-building at all before I started writing. I’d just have a character in an interesting dilemma and start making it up from there. It’s a complete distraction for a writer to take thousands of notes on his or her invented world before sitting down to write. Stories are about people—from
The Lord of the Rings
through Earthsea and Moorcock to modern day fantasy. The world is essentially a setting for people to do things in. No one comes to a book to read about the exact appearance of a Black Rider. They come to the book to share Frodo’s terror, to marvel at his bravery and ingenuity in escaping the dark forces. So my advice would be to make it up as you go along. When I wrote the character of Loki in
Wolfsangel
I didn’t map him out beforehand. He appeared in the story and I heard him start to speak. I didn’t realize my witches were using a magic system based on bodily denial and self-inflicted torture before they actually appeared. I started writing the character of the witch queen in a scene where she had had a premonition of disaster. The way she went about her magic just appeared on the page.

Kay Kenyon:
I favor complicated worlds. There are days when I think I’m going too far, but can’t seem to help myself. The distortions of the mundane world may be too much fun; they can threaten, by their very detail, to sink the premise. The only way out of this snarl is to start writing. Plot and character are a great discipline to me; they force me to focus and sometimes simplify.

Have there been any cataclysmic events in your secondary world? If so, how did it change the world?

Justina Robson:
The shapeshifters developed weapons of mass destruction, and now there’s an arms race. But really, that’s a side issue. The cataclysm is a very slow one: the shapeshifters evolving faster, smarter, and encroaching on the “human” ground.

K.V. Johansen:
In the
Blackdog
world, the first war involving the devils happened so long ago that it’s not really remembered well in human stories, and is described as a war of wizards by some characters. The gods of the empire of Tiypur (and the empire itself as a political entity) were destroyed, so the region of Tiypur is now a land without gods. What that means for the world, that lack of any divinity there, is something that will come up later as the story, I hope, goes on. People from that part of the world, like Thekla in
Blackdo
g, worship a memory of gods they know are dead, pray to gods they know can’t hear them. That’s an interesting state of mind. If the gods of your world are real and other people of other folks (or tribes or lands) can interact with their gods, and you and your people can’t, because you know your gods are dead, where do you find your focus, the core of your identity as a folk? What might end up filling that emotional vacuum for people? One battle of that war also had a physical effect further east, in the blighted landscape of the eastern shore of the Kinsai’av in
Blackdog
; there’s a region all along the river that’s still a wasteland because of it.