Fantasy Firsts Guest Post - Tor/Forge Blog

A Spectrum of Worlds

January 4, 2017May 8, 2024torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from V.E. Schwab about setting and opens in a new windowA Darker Shade of Magic. The final book in the Shades of Magic series, opens in a new windowA Conjuring of Light, will be available on February 21st.

A Spectrum of Worlds

Written by opens in a new windowV. E. Schwab

Setting.

To most writers, it’s a backdrop, to some even an afterthought, but to me, it’s always been a character. Setting is one of the very first—if not THE first—thing that comes to me when I’m writing a book. It’s not that I don’t care about the other pieces—the people and the plot and what have you—it’s that for me, as a writer and a reader, setting IS one of the most important aspects, and it’s always integral to the plot.

Sometimes, its importance is obvious, as in Neil Gaiman’s opens in a new windowNeverwhere, in which a second London lurks under the surface of the first, or Andy Weir’s opens in a new windowThe Martian, set entirely on the surface of Mars. It might be a time as well as a place, as in Kate Atkinson’s opens in a new windowLife After Life, in which Ursula is continuously reliving the years leading up to World War II. Other times, it’s built into the fabric of the story in other ways, like Emily St. John Mandel’s opens in a new windowStation Eleven, set across a Canadian expanse after an apocalyptic disease. Or perhaps it creates a framework for the plot, as with Paula Hawkins’s opens in a new windowThe Girl on the Train. Whatever the form it takes, and whatever the framework is fantasy, thriller, dystopian, historical, the fact remains that a good setting is a living, breathing element, a character all its own.

My book, opens in a new windowA Darker Shade of Magic, houses not one but FOUR versions of London (Grey, Red, White, and Black), and each one takes a different shape: Grey the mundane world, Red the magical empire, White the wasteland, and Black the source of all power.

In essence, A Darker Shade of Magic—or ADSoM for short—gave me a chance to turn my setting into not only a character, but an entire supporting cast. Through the four iterations of London, bound together by only a name, I was able to explore not only time, but also space, and the ways that different actions shape the world in which they happen. The color terms and relative absence/presence of magic are not the only things that set the Londons apart. Though each ones occupies the same geographical footprint, with the Thames (or the Isle, or the Siljt) at its heart, each city was inspired by a different part of the world, a different aesthetic, a different breed of empire. The worlds sit, layered like pages of paper in a book.

Grey London, which you could call the template, is based on the world as we know it, modeled on early 19th century England, with its smoke-clogged streets and its ailing mad king. If there was magic once, it has been forgotten.

The crown jewel of the worlds, Red London, features a plush, eastern motif, full of spires and night markets, spices and luxury. Here magic thrives, woven into every part of life, respected by some, worshiped by others, and used by all.

Its neighbor, White London, a world once more powerful than Red, is now slowing dying, starved out by the magic it tries to control. It has the arctic air of the far north, ruled a pair of wolf-like twins, Astrid and Athos.

And Black London, well, no one knows. The site of a magical catastrophe, and sealed off from the other worlds, it’s the city known only through bedtime stories and nursery rhymes. Until now.

The characters are as much a product of their setting as anything else. The main characters, Kell and Lila, come from different Londons. Kell, a magician with the rare ability to move between worlds, belongs to the elite and fantastical Red London, while Lila has grown up as a street rat-turned thief in the magic-less Grey world. To them we add the Danes, the rulers of White London, desperate to hold on to power, and their servant, Holland, bound not by will, but by magic.

I’m a firm believer that when crafting a story, the world—or worlds—in which it’s set must come before the characters. It must shape them. For what are people, if not the product of their environments? A setting is wasted when it simply exists to fill the space behind the action. Similarly, when the characters and the world in which they live are bound by nothing more than convenience.

The characters of ADSoM are diverse, and so are the settings they occupy. When you step into the book, you step into several worlds, each one different, but all connected, as tangled with each other as the kings and queens, magicians, smugglers, and thieves who roam them. They are a strange cast, my Londons, but I can’t wait for you to meet them all.

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Follow V. E. Schwab on Twitter at opens in a new window@veschwab, on opens in a new windowFacebook, or opens in a new windowvisit the magical Londons online.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on March 2, 2015.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

A Conversation Between Steven Brust and Skyler White

December 14, 2016May 10, 2024torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a conversation between the co-authors of opens in a new windowThe Incrementalists. Steven Brust and Skyler White discuss writing, collaboration, and walking through someone else’s house in the dark. The next book in their series, opens in a new windowThe Skill of Our Hands, will become available January 24th.

Skye: At the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention this year, I was part of a panel that picked apart the differences and dividing lines between gut churn, writer’s block, and depression, the consensus being that all writers deal with these things, you and Ray Bradbury being the requisite counter-examples.

Steve: Depression has never been an issue for me, nor, so far, has writer’s block — at least, based on what my understanding of writer’s block is. There are times when I haven’t known what happens next for several days, but I don’t think that’s the same thing. My guess is that it’s something constitutional, something inherent that I can’t take credit for. Wish I could say something useful.

Skye: So what happens in those several days?

Steve: Internally, or externally? Externally, I stomp around the house, glaring at everyone, and threatening to kill the dog, until I finally get it, at which time everything gets better, and I realize how much I was enjoying it, and I apologize to everyone I’ve offended, and I threaten to kill the dog. Internally, I run through all of the advice I give students at Viable Paradise for figuring out the next scene (which even works, sometimes). I constantly remind myself, “You’ve been here before, it’s part of the process, chill out, it’ll come together.” I reread what I have so far. I run through lists of what can happen. I completely ignore the book and try to think about other things. I write imaginary reviews in my head, culminating in the mythical reviewer saying, “The best moment was when…” and try to fill that sentence in to describe the thing I can’t write. Eventually, some combination of those comes together and life is good again. Except for the dog. I still threaten to kill him. He wags his tail.

Skye: You know, I think I’ve internalized that — not the dog, but the voice. I still do more pre-planning for my solo work than we do for ours, but I do a lot less than I used to. Writing has always felt to me like walking through someone else’s house in the dark. You’ve made me a little less cautious, if no less leery of dogs.

Steve: We’ve spoken a lot about how much fun collaboration is; when doing your solo work, where do you find the fun?

Skye: Honestly? I have less fun. Or a different kind of fun, anyway. Working together — sending pages to you the moment I’m done writing, getting immediate feedback, waiting to see what you do next — is a kind of giddy fun I just don’t have writing on my own. The solo fun is more muscular, slower, like the difference between skipping and stretching. I love doing it and I love finally getting to share it. I like that it lets me go deep into places that are my peculiar interests and down my personal rabbit holes — I write more about sex, less about politics.

Steve: So here’s a political question: if the Incrementalists were real, what would you most like them to be working on?

Skye: One of the things that fascinated me in my Yeats research was the debate that surrounded the idea of corporate personhood. It’s one of those pivots where I wonder how things would be different now had things gone differently then. It’s proved a sneaky work-around to our nation’s ideal of being governed by laws rather than leaders. If no person — or corporation — was above the law, I wonder whether we’d be a flatter, fairer nation. In the book, we talk about Celeste raking power up. I’d have the Incrementalists out there working on scraping it back, flattening the distribution of money and influence.

Steve: How has collaborating changed your approach to your solo work?

Skye: The chance to listen in on the, “You’ve been here before, it’s part of the process, chill out, it’ll come together,” voice — and even borrow it sometimes. It’s one of the most valuable things I’ve gotten from you in the process of writing together. Where did you get it?

Steve: That one’s easy: from writing several books where that happened. I don’t know when exactly it started — maybe my fourth or fifth book; but after fighting through it all those times (and, seriously, the first several times I made myself miserable), I just got cocky.

Skye: You made yourself miserable, but you didn’t give up. Why? What kept you writing when you didn’t have the experience to know it was just part of the process?

Steve: If I didn’t keep going, I wouldn’t know how the story came out.

Skye: You have to keep writing because you’re curious?

Steve: I’ve heard it said that there are “writers” and “storytellers.” I think those distinctions are real, but also not hard-and-fast — they interpenetrate and mess with each other. You, I think, are a wordsmith who takes joy in story; I am a storyteller who takes joy in how words fit together and bounce off each other. So, yes: I have to keep writing, because I want to tell a story, and the reason for that is, at heart, because I need to know how the story ends.

Skye: How’s this for how our interview ends?

Steve: I think it’s okay, and if it it’s not, we’ll fix it in edits.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on September 23, 2013.)

Buy The Incrementalists here:

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Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Thoraiya Dyer Talks about Worldbuilding, Giant Rainforests, & Crossroads of Canopy

December 7, 2016May 16, 2024torforge

opens in a new windowWelcome back to Fantasy Firsts. Today we are sharing an interview with Aurealis and Ditmar Award-winning author Thoraiya Dyer about her debut novel opens in a new windowCrossroads of Canopy. This highly-anticipated novel is set in a mythical rainforest controlled by living gods and will become available on January 31st. You can sneak a peek of it here!

Crossroads of Canopy is set in a giant, rainforest world, and you drew upon a lot of scientific research to imagine this realm. What was some cool facts about this environment you were excited to include in the book? Or, was there something you really wanted to mention but couldn’t find the right spot for?

I was excited to include monsoonal weather patterns, aka the “big wet” in northern Australia.

In the temperate south of the continent, we have cold, rainy winters and hot, dry summers. However, in the tropical top end you get something like 75% of the annual rainfall dumped all at once in the summer (although they wouldn’t necessarily call it summer; the locals observe something closer to a six-season cycle.) Between October and February, Darwin gets an average of 1267mm rain. Which is a pretty cool fact!

On a trip to Nepal, I remember using elephants to get across a river because the monsoon had just finished and jeeps were useless.

Yeah. Monsoons. Exciting!

What else. Gap-axe wood really is too hard to cut into without ruining your axe. Fish really can climb up waterfalls. Sandpaper fig leaves, while not to my knowledge recorded as being used for depilation, are pretty good for smoothing spears. Sun bears don’t hibernate in the real world, but their appetite for honey and co-evolution with the tualang tree has produced in the latter a glassy, slippery trunk which prevents bears from climbing the trees and keeps the hosted giant honey bees, Apis dorsata, happy and safe.

As for things that didn’t fit, when I first tried to convince my agent, Evan, that a rainforest setting would be a good idea for a fantasy novel, I’d just seen a brilliant exhibition at the Australian Museum on the Aztecs. The words “jaguars and sloth gods” may have flown excitedly from the keyboard.

I found a place in Canopy for jaguars and their souped-up versions, the chimera. Possibly sloths got a mention once or twice, but the sloth god itself got canned.

Sorry, sloth god.

Greek mythology has a subtle influence in this worldbuilding along, including Canopy possessing its own pantheon of gods and goddess. How did you decide on these thirteen deities and their specific ruling “specialties”?

In the Greek stories of Odysseus and Atalanta, which inspired many of my characters and their arcs, you find prominent mention of the following immortals: Artemis (wild animals), Aphrodite (love), Zeus (thunder, ruled the other gods), Rhea (mother of gods), Hermes (emissary, travel, trade), Helios (sun), Thetis (sea) and Poseidon (also the sea).

Because I wanted things to be cyclical with reincarnation, not linear with mother and father gods, Rhea was left out, and Zeus became a tamer, lightning-only type of god. Canopians didn’t travel much outside the forest, so Hermes got cut. Canopians consider the sea to be practically mythical, so Poseidon didn’t survive, either. That left wild animals, the sun, and a freshwater goddess of the monsoon.

Love was an interesting one. If you look at the religion of the Indus Valley civilization, which preceded Hinduism in Nepal, you find a mother goddess, a father god, deified animals and plants, indications of water worship, and giant stone genitalia.

No mention of love.

I combined love with the sun and kept it, because I was doing the compromise thing. If you look at the geographical half-way point between Nepal and Greece, you find Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of fertility, love and war.

If you visit the Temple of Eshmun near Sidon, Lebanon, you find hundreds of marble statues of babies. Eshmun was a Phoenician god of healing. His origin story goes like this: He was born an eighth son in Beirut. As he grew into a young man, Ishtar/Astarte romantically pursued him, to the point where he fatally castrated himself with an axe. She then resurrected him and turned him into a god.

He was the patron deity of Sidon from about 500BC. If your child was sick, you’d have a stone replica carved and sent to the Temple in the hope that Eshmun would heal them. No matter where they are in space or time, no matter what they believe, people want to keep their children safe.

In Canopy, the god Odel, Protector of Children, holds a special place in my heart.

Many characters seem to leap from great heights in a death-defying way! How much climbing research (or hands-on experiences!) went into this book?

Here’s where I confess that I suck at rock-climbing. Once, I abseiled with my uncle into this amazing cave system in Canada. We dropped down seventy metres into pitch blackness. Waited for pumps to evacuate water from “the birth canal” before squeezing through it. Endured waterfalls in the face and having to balance in foot-width, ice-cold watercourses to avoid touching and ruining the crystal-covered walls. All that was fine…but climbing back up? Ahahahaha! Talk to my stepson. He’s good at that stuff. I’m an armchair Ninja Warrior.

My stepdaughter advised me to google the extreme climber known as the Monkey Man. So I’m confident in humankind’s ability to do the things I described. Just not me personally. Although I have stripped off a bit of bark and inadvertently grabbed a spider before. So there’s that.

The idea of one having a great destiny is what motivated Unar to start her adventure. Do you, too, believe we all have some sort of fate awaiting us?

I’m a scientist. I believe in statistical likelihoods. Which, I admit, can sometimes seem like destiny.

Crossroads of Canopy is your novel debut, but readers mostly know your award-winning short fiction. What are the challenges between writing short versus writing longform?

I think many years of writing short fantasy fiction made me not only succinct, but enamoured of the mysteriousness of my succinctness. One real challenge for me was to flesh things out in this manuscript. How did Unar and Aoun meet one another? In a short story that’s not my problem! What are they wearing? They have insects and bark, you work it out! Except, no, here it’s my job to make sure you smell the patchwork of pressed leaves, see Aoun sitting by the closed Gate of the Garden, and feel the silk as you stroll through the market.

If you could be a goddess from any mythology, who would you choose and why?

Artemis, for sure. I like deer and dogs and I wish I was better at archery.

Buy Crossroads of Canopy here:

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Don’t forget to follow Thoraiya Dyer on opens in a new windowTwitter (@ThoraiyaDyer) or visit her opens in a new windowwebsite.

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Got a Job in Magicland?

November 2, 2016May 16, 2024torforge

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Welcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from opens in a new windowThe Magic of Recluce author L. E. Modesitt, Jr. about taking an “economic” approach to writing fantasy.

Got a Job in Magicland?

Written by opens in a new windowL. E. Modesitt, Jr.

While I always wanted to be a writer, I didn’t start out writing either science fiction or fantasy. In fact, my first published works were poems, and my primary collegiate fields of study were politics and economics. For the record, writing was third. But when I left the Navy, after a tour as a pilot and after the realization that the life expectancy of wartime search and rescue pilots was less than optimal for a man with a wife and children, I returned to the boringly practical and became an industrial economist, followed by other fields required by economic necessity, until I ended up in Washington, D.C., still dealing in economics and politics. By then I was writing science fiction on the side, and my first published story was about, naturally enough, a junior economist in Washington, D.C., followed by more stories and then novels, all with characters who had what I’d call “real jobs” and no desire to be heroes.

Several years later, after attending my first SF convention ever, I came to the realization that very few SF writers dealt with economic structure in their stories and that, at that time, almost no fantasy writers did. So when I began to write The Magic of Recluce, I made a deliberate decision to continue the approach I’d used in my science fiction, and I centered all of Lerris’s problems on his need to fit into his society economically. That is, Lerris needed a job! Yes, he’s exiled from Recluce, but he still needs to make his way, to pay for what he eats and where he lodges, and even to pay for that mountain pony he needs. And, as is the case with most successful people, the key to his eventual understanding of life and success in it comes from his mastery not just of magic but of the skills and understanding required in learning how to do a meaningful job well and professionally.

More than twenty years ago, when I wrote The Magic of Recluce, my “economic” approach to fantasy was anything but common, but readers liked it well enough that the book has been continuously in print, and they’ve bought fifteen other Recluce books over the years. I’d like to think it’s at least partly because I required Lerris, and all the characters who followed, to have a real job in magicland.

Buy The Magic of Recluce here:

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Don’t forget to visit L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s opens in a new windowwebsite.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on July 11, 2011.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

Enough With Zombies! Bring on the Pirate Apocalypse!

October 26, 2016May 16, 2024torforge

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Welcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from opens in a new windowChild of a Hidden Sea author A. M. Dellamonica, who advocates for pirates over zombies.

Enough With Zombies! Bring on the Pirate Apocalypse!

Written by opens in a new windowA. M. Dellamonica

The first time I saw the opens in a new windowGlobal Warming Coffee Mug, it was at the opens in a new windowAmerican Museum of Natural History. The mug is a commonly-found gift store item in science-y tourist attractions: aquariums, Biodiversity Centers, science museums. The idea is that you pour hot fluids into the mug, and its heat-reactive plastic artwork changes color, transforming alarming chunks of the planet’s land mass into ocean.

It’s dramatic. South America gets to looking especially moth eaten. Were you fond of Buenos Aires? Too bad! Want to visit the Amazon basin? Don’t wait until you retire.

My primary feeling, though, the first time I saw the mug, was relief. I could still recognize everything. Sure, habitats of millions of animals, plants and people vanished. But I could take comfort in the shape of the continents, in what remained.

Yes, I am appallingly Bad at Maps. Also, like many writers, I tend to imagine disasters in the starkest terms possible. Don’t get me wrong—that coffee-heated map is dire. But I could still find Saskatchewan on the mug. So… win?

In Child of a Hidden Sea, a marine videographer named Sophie winds up on a world, possibly Earth, where the continents aren’t recognizable. Almost all the land is gone; only the moon is familiar. Is Stormwrack a parallel world? A future one? If the latter, is the catastrophic whatever that rearranged the world’s geography going to happen to us? And how soon?

Though Stormwrack is an imaginary worst-case scenario for a opens in a new windowreal world problem, it isn’t scientifically realistic. According to Echopraxia author Peter Watts, the only way to transform the map of present day earth to the tiny Galapagos-like archipelagos of Stormwrack would be to flood the planet with the water ice from multiple comet strikes.

Or, alternately, a magical cataclysm. Luckily I’m better able to imagine those than I am at looking at Google Earth and envisioning a six meter ocean rise.

The good news, for Sophie and for Stormwrack anyway, is that whatever it was that made this world what it is, it took place millennia ago. Human beings survived. We’re flourishing on those little islands in the Nine Seas—there are 250 separate island nations, in fact, each with its own culture, form of government, and ecosystem. Each practices a form of magic, called inscription, which depends on the wildlife within their microclimate. Tiny variations between plant and animal species can yield great differences in the kind of magic practiced: the feathers of a blue penguin from Ylle, for example, might create a spell that’ll save a person from eighty-below weather. An almost identical penguin that nests on Murdocco, meanwhile, might be good for inscribing weather seers, people who predict those same cold snaps.

Stormwrack is a pretty fun place. When Sophie arrives, it’s enjoying an unprecedented period of peace, the Cessation of Hostilities, that dates back to an international effort to stamp out piracy in the Nine Seas. The unified front against bandits was so successful that the five pirate nations were forced to go legit, and join the United Nations-type organization created with their destruction in mind. But you can’t keep a pirate down forever, and the Isle of Gold is looking for revenge. Soon Sophie has cutthroats at her door, and problems far more pressing than some little matter of ocean rise here on Earth.

Which, you know, don’t we all?

Buy Child of a Hidden Sea here:

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Don’t forget to follow A. M. Dellamonica on opens in a new windowTwitter (@AlyxDellamonica ) or visit her opens in a new windowwebsite.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on June 16, 2014.)

Author Features / Fantasy Firsts

The Pirate Who Just Won’t Leave

October 20, 2016May 14, 2024torforge5 Comments

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Welcome back to opens in a new windowFantasy Firsts. Our program continues with a guest post from opens in a new windowRoyal Street author Suzanne Johnson, who explains what to do when one of your own characters hijacks your story.

The Pirate Who Just Won’t Leave

Written by opens in a new windowSuzanne Johnson

Every author has one in the closet: the throwaway character who just won’t go away, the one-scene wonder who tries to hijack the story and refuses to be relegated to a walk-on role. When the stubborn minor character is a historical figure and one is writing fantasy set in the modern world, things can get interesting fast.

New Orleans and some of her legendary citizens played a starring role in opens in a new windowRoyal Street from rough draft onward—the book title comes not only from NOLA’s famous Rue Royale, but also pays homage to the city’s royalty. Louis Armstrong, Huey Long, Marie Laveau, and Tennessee Williams are all larger-than-life Louisianans who epitomize the enduring spirit and character of the state’s larger-than-life city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Each made his or her appearance in the book, served a purpose, and moved offstage with grace and good humor.

Then there’s arguably New Orleans’ most famous citizen, the early 19th-century French pirate Jean Lafitte, who double-crossed the British Royal Navy and threw in his lot with Andrew Jackson to win the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 in exchange for presidential pardons for past crimes.

Jean Lafitte appeared in one scene of the first draft, in the book’s opening, playing the role of a Jack Sparrowish piratical parody. And then he demanded more.

In self-defense, I read a biography to learn about this stubborn man, thinking to expand his one scene a little and pacify him. Then I made an author’s biggest mistake—or the most fortuitous mystery of authorhood, depending on how you look at it: I fell in love with a character. He seduced me as surely as he tries to seduce my lead character. Who is a wizard. In modern New Orleans.

You see the problem here.

Jean Lafitte, I was to quickly learn, is the type of historical figure who needs no augmentation. His past was shrouded in mystery before he appeared on the scene as a young man of 24 in New Orleans, his final demise left to speculation sometime around his fortieth birthday. He was smart, handsome by all accounts, held as many as a thousand pirates, gypsies, and ruffians under an iron rule, and was quite morally ambiguous. Jean Lafitte liked to win.

Now, six biographies later, I have given in, and Le Capitaine has won another victory. Jean Lafitte has shaped the direction of the Sentinels of New Orleans series, carving a “technically undead” niche for himself and his fellow celebrity New Orleanians of the past in an urban fantasy that might otherwise have taken a different path.

So, what do you do when a minor character has delusions of stardom?

My recommendation: give in, and run with it. And in case you really go overboard: eBay has some great Jean Lafitte action figures for sale.

Buy Royal Street here:

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Don’t forget to follow Suzanne Johnson on opens in a new windowTwitter (@Suzanne_Johnson), on opens in a new windowFacebook, or visit her opens in a new windowwebsite.

(This is a rerun of a post that originally ran on April 2, 2012.)

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