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Rules vs. Guidelines in Fantasy

May 15, 2021May 10, 2021torforge10 Comments

The Witness for the Dead is hitting shelves on 06/22 and to celebrate, we’re doing a throwback to this amazing Rules vs. Guidelines in Fantasy guest post from author Katherine Addison! Check it out below.

By Katherine Addison

I have loved fantasy since I was a very little girl. My father read to me: L. Frank Baum, J. R. R. Tolkien, Susan Cooper, C. S. Lewis, David Eddings, Robert Jordan. As I grew older, I scoured both school and public libraries, read fantasy and science fiction and horror: Stephen King and Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany and Lois McMaster Bujold and Angela Carter. I never stopped loving fantasy, never “grew up” into a preference for realism. And I have always, always loved what Tolkien calls secondary world fantasy, stories that take place in entirely made up worlds.

I love writing those stories as much as I love reading them. I love the freedom they offer for the exercise of sheer invention. And thus one of the things that frustrates me terribly about secondary world fantasy as a genre is how hidebound it has become. The combined impact of The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons (both excellent entities on their own merits) has created a set of genre conventions that have almost become rules, rather than merely guidelines. One of these rules is that all fantasies shall be quests; another is that no fantasy world shall ever approach the Industrial Revolution.

Obviously, these rules get broken all the time, which is a good thing. But they remain in the background, like the ceiling in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” that could lower and squash you at any time. And it can be very hard to think around them.

The Goblin Emperor was an attempt to contravene both rules. There is no quest, and this is a world with both magic and a lively technological and scientific community. (I never have understood why magic would negate technology, even though many stories I love take that as a guiding principle.) And the technology turned out to be decidedly steampunk.

I blame this on airships. Zeppelins and dirigibles and blimps and hot-air balloons. I love them, just as steampunk loves them, and insofar as I can tell you the idea that sparked The Goblin Emperor, it was the desire to put elves and airships in the same story. Once I’d made that world-building decision, the rest of it became inevitable, and I loved figuring out the details of how the airships fit into elvish society and thinking of names for the goblin steamships. When I realized the vast central palace could have a pneumatic tube system, I was excited for days.

The hardest part was the bridge that runs as a motif through the entire book. I’m not an engineer; I don’t have the first idea how you’d actually go about building a steam-powered retractable bridge. I was stuck on that problem for an incredibly long time. But Steven Brust said something that saved me. He said that when you’re describing made-up technology, he doesn’t want to know how it works, he wants to know how it runs. And that gave me the idea of a working model instead of a long expositional presentation, and that turned into one of my favorite set pieces in the book—which is also a scene in which magic and technology are used together.

Because as far as I’m concerned, the openness of invention in secondary world fantasy means that writers can build worlds where technology and magic are intertwined or where they are at odds or anything in between. If you can imagine it, fantasy will let you write about it, and that is the most powerful and enduring reason that it is my best-beloved among the genres.

Fantasy means never having to say, “It can’t be done.”

Katherine Addison is the author of the award-winning novel, The Goblin Emperor. Her next book, The Witness for the Dead, comes out from Tor Books 06/22/2021.

Pre-order The Witness for the Dead Here

Author Features / Behind the Scenes / Extras / What's New

Samurai, Octopuses, and Time-Traveling Lesbians: An Interview with Annalee Newitz and Ali Wilgus

October 11, 2019April 2, 2020torforge1 Comment

2019 has been a wild year so far, and it’s made a lot of us crave well…a different timeline. Thankfully, Tor authors Annalee Newitz and Alison Wilgus have wrote this year about one of our all-time favorite SFF subjects: TIME TRAVEL.

So…Why time travel?

Annalee Newitz (The Future of Another Timeline):

Honestly, I never wanted to write about time travel—it’s so difficult to plug up all the plotholes. But then I conceived of this alternate timeline, where my characters live, and realized that the only way it could have happened was because of time travel. So I kind of tricked myself into it.

Alison Wilgus (Chronin, Volumes 1 and 2):
It’s a mechanism that keeps sneaking up on me honestly—I’ll start out building a story about some other thing entirely, and then whoops, turns out that time travel is once again necessary to make the machinery of the story work. Different systems, different genres, radically different plots, but I just can’t seem to resist hurtling my characters around through time. That said, I do think there are some core themes that knit all these stories together, themes which I’m clearly interested in — most time travel stories are about exploration, or regret, or control. Chronin has a little bit of all three — the mechanism is a time travel program used by academics, and the antagonists are either picking at the scabs of the past or desperately trying to reshape the future.

What were some of the challenges of writing time travel?

AN: Definitely plotting was the hardest part for me. In the world I built, time travel is mundane and has been going on for thousands of years. So everybody knows that history is constantly being edited, though there is some debate over how much and how difficult it is. Plus, it takes years to become a time traveler so it’s not like anybody can just jump into a Machine and muck things up. I kept finding myself having to explain how time travel works, including paradoxes and limitations and the Machines themselves—and that’s hard to do without boring infodumps. I still think there are some plotholes in the book. The fun part was researching the different periods my characters visit, like Chicago in 1893 and Petra in 13 BCE. I love research. It’s my favorite way to procrastinate on writing.

AW: So I’ll confess that I’ve been reading your book, and one of the things that’s really impressed me about it so far is that you aren’t shying away from the consequences of your conceit—you’ve clearly put a lot of thought into how this technology would have shaped the world and the perspectives of your characters. It’s a great illustration of what I see as the real key of building a good time travel story: coming up with a system that compliments the story you want to tell, that is interesting to learn about in the text instead of a chore, and that only breaks in ways that your readers don’t care about. Because the thing is, unless you’re writing a very specific kind of closed-loop-zero-free-will plot, basically all time travel stories are kind of bullshit if you think about them too hard; your time travel magic systems will break if you pull at them the right way. They key is to kind of narratively wave your arms around and yell such that your reader isn’t looking for that loose thread—ideally, they’re too caught up in your cool book to notice. (And to be fair, a version of this is true for nearly all works of fiction, it’s only that travel stories are especially vulnerable—so many moving parts, so much complicated causality!)

What are some of your favorite (or least favorite!) time travel stories?

AN: I’m a huge fan of the feminist time travel tradition, so I love all the classics like Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Plus, modern masterpieces like Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls and Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

And there are so many more! I’m a huge fan of the bureaucratic time travel system that Kelly Robson invented for Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose the Time War was fascinating and I’m still mulling it over. And obviously, I freakin love Doctor Who. I even put a futuristic tool that’s basically a sonic screwdriver in my novel.

AW: See, this is great, because now I have a few new titles to put on my to-read list. As for me…well, on the books front, the classic go-to is Connie Willis for a reason, her Oxford stories are all so interesting. I was told to read them by my friend Gina Gagliano back when I first started working on Chronin in my mid-twenties—she was like, “People are going to assume that you were influenced by these books, so you should probably read them anyway.”

I’ll admit that, as a former film-student, movies are also a huge influence for me. The Back to the Future movies are classics for a reason, they hit all the major sub-genres of time travel stories and were definitely a huge influence on me as a kid. I absolutely adore The Edge of Tomorrow, which I think was bizarrely retitled “Live. Die. Repeat” at some point. It had all of the time-loop-story-competency-porn of Groundhog Day with bonus aliens and the terrifying badassery of Emily Blunt’s character, Rita. I also have a lot of respect for the film Primer as a tightly-written closed-loop story, but I wouldn’t say that I enjoy it exactly—it’s like the vegetables of time travel movies for me.

I also really love some of the time travel Star Trek episodes. They’re just so much FUN. Star Trek is already so hand-wavey about its own science fiction to begin with, it’s a perfect tonal fit for “Don’t Worry About It” time travel nonsense. “Yesterday’s Enterprise” from TNG and “Children of Time” from DS9 are a couple of my favorites, they’re so deliciously melodramatic but also, have some genuinely wonderful character moments and compelling moral dilemmas.

If you could time travel to any period when would you go to?

AN: I want to visit Cahokia, an indigenous city near today’s East St. Louis, which was the biggest city in North America in the 1000s. Its people built massive city grids, huge earthen pyramids, and had a very cosmopolitan social life. But we don’t know very much about them, and they left no writing behind. I just want to visit the city on an ordinary day and say hi to everybody (assuming my time machine helps me speak a proto-Siouan language). And also ask them ALL THE QUESTIONS ABOUT EVERYTHING.

AW: Oh, that sounds fantastic. I mean, the past is always unknowable, but some things have been more thoroughly lost to us than others. My first thought when I saw this question was that I’d love to visit a Neanderthal community, and see what their lives were like. My second thought was embarrassingly Basic but…listen, I wanna see some dinosaurs, okay? I never really left that phase behind me. And if the future is an option? I’d be desperate to travel forward to when we discover some evidence of life on a planet other than Earth. In my heart, I’m kin with Eleanor Arroway.

Both of your books also feature LGBTQ+ characters—was that a conscious decision, or always a part of how you approached the stories?

AN: I think we all know that time travel is very gay. I mean, that’s just a fact. As evidence, I will cite David Gerrold’s classic early 1970s novel The Man Who Folded Himself, about a guy who time travels so much that he meets dozens of versions of himself and they buy a giant mansion together and have gay orgies.

I think we all know that time travel is very gay

Also, the whole Doctor Who/Captain Jack situation is another piece of evidence. And various subplots on Legends of Tomorrow. Plus, as Amal El-Mohtar pointed out in a recent article, this year alone there were like four new novels with time-traveling lesbians. It’s gays all the way down.

AW: Yep yes enthusiastically seconded, this here is a thoroughly queer genre. If anything, Chronin is a testament to this fact — I started working on it over a decade ago, when I was still telling myself how very straight I was (spoiler: I was incorrect). There’s a secondary pairing in the book which I always intended to be gay, but at the time I had no self-awareness whatsoever that I was writing a deeply queer story that was full of queer characters. That realization came more than halfway through the process of drawing it, and involved a pretty major revision of the second book in order to be more deliberate and effective with what I was doing. It all was much more closely tied to my own experience than I’d realized, and my own experience turned out to be a deeply gay one.

Did you see any particular challenges or benefits to adding LGBTQ+ characters to stories that deal with different historical periods?

AN: My main goal in this novel was to center groups who are traditionally ignored in time travel stories. So for example, the pivotal historical events that change the timeline in my novel involve women’s reproductive rights and universal suffrage. When women get the vote at the same time as freed slaves in 1870, Harriet Tubman becomes a senator and changes the course of history. But as a result, there’s a stronger anti-feminist backlash in the 20th century, which results in abortion never being legalized. There’s a trope in time travel stories now about how people of color and queer people have a hard time going back into history, but my point is that there have always been pockets of resistance and tolerance, and we do have a place in history if you just look.

AW: It’s easy to forget how aggressively curated the history that’s taught to us in schools and by pop culture tends to be — as a white American from the Boston area, I had a very specific version of the world presented to me that centered a white, straight, colonial perspective and often erased or mischaracterized everyone else. There have always been queer people, and the homophobia that’s caused so much damage for, say, the people in my own circle, is a relatively recent invention that was then forced onto other cultures and communities. The cast of my book is a mix of time travelers from the future and natives to the past, and I didn’t want to present queerness as a modern invention — my book is set in Japan, during a period when romantic attachments between men were very common.

What are some of your favorite science fiction approaches to LGBTQ+ identities and issues?

AN: I’m not too picky. I like it when a story with an ensemble cast assumes that there will be queer characters and romances. Basically, give me some gay love stories and hot smooches and I’m happy. Throw in some human-alien romance, or human-monster romance and I’m even happier.

AW: Same Gay Hat. Also, while I both understand and accept and support other people’s desire to explore queer trauma through fiction, I personally prefer to write and read stories where my characters’ problems are unrelated to their queerness. Which doesn’t mean that I want only sanitized, frictionless narratives, just that I want the friction to be coming from someplace else. I deeply, deeply love Anne Leckie’s novels, in which everyone is gay and awful things are constantly happening. Those awful things are just, you know… “My best friend’s dad was murdered and he isn’t taking it well” or “I used to be a space ship and now I’m not and it feels really weird.”

What is your dream project – what would you like to tackle but haven’t had the time or opportunity?

AN: I really want to write a non-fiction book about social behavior and communication in non-human animals, maybe ants or crows or cats. Or all three! Octopuses and whales are interesting to me too. I’m a science journalist and I try to keep up with the latest research on animal communication. At some point, I’d like to spend a field season with scientists who are spending time among the animals they study, listening to them and observing. I’m so sick of hearing humans talk about themselves; it would be nice to spend a few weeks listening to what other species have to say.

AW: I’ve had some short fiction published over the years, but for the most part my professional work has been All Comics All The Time. This is the most cliche possible sentiment, but I’m trying hard to make space in my life for writing a prose novel—I have a story about lesbian wizard podcasters that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for a while, and I think it’ll be a lot of fun to write once I have the momentum going. I adore comics, don’t get me wrong—I edit them as well as writing and drawing them, I made a podcast about the graphic novel industry, like I have leaned all the way in—but the medium is better suited to certain kinds of stories and ways of telling them. I’ve been saying “This is the year I will Do A Novel” for basically a decade, but….okay THIS TIME I mean it.

Author Features

Never Out of Date: The Past as Fantasy, and Our Fantasies of the Past

April 2, 2019May 2, 2024torforge1 Comment

In honor of the upcoming release of Amnesty, the third book in the Amberlough Dossier series by Lara Elena Donnelly, we’re revisiting her guest blog post about how the past influenced the writing of Amberlough. Amnesty is on sale April 16.

Written by Lara Elena Donnelly

Victorians, Edwardians, the Great War, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the Greatest Generation… The past is always a time when Men were Men, a time when Good fought Evil and triumphed, a time when glamor was more glamorous. Just look at all those Greats: things were real back then, were bigger, better, nobler, more.

The reality, of course, is much more ambiguous. Masculinity takes many forms. Good and Evil are two ends of a spectrum with a lot of gray in between. It’s sometimes hard to tell, from where you stand, where on the spectrum you’ve planted your feet. Nostalgia can lend glamor to banality and even ugliness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tropes and trappings of vintage-inspired media lately, thanks to the impending release of my debut novel Amberlough: a vintage-glam spy thriller that draws heavily on the culture and climate of Berlin in the early thirties, with some interbellum England and a little bit of Fitzgerald’s Paris and New York City thrown in.

Though there is no magic, though there are no dragons or witches or spells, Amberlough is a fantasy novel; it takes place in an invented world. A world I invented because, like many people, I am in love with elements of the past. But I’m also troubled by the way we talk about it and portray it in media. So I made my novel a playground where I could put characters in impeccable evening dress without rules for who wears a gown and who wears tails. Where the color of a character’s skin doesn’t imply the conclusions we might jump to, because this history is not ours.

Which isn’t to say Amberlough City doesn’t have problems. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have rules. But because those rules are different, when someone breaks them, the transgression doesn’t carry the baggage of our real-world expectations. Because the rules are different, they require detail and elaboration in the text.

Often, period fiction fails when creators replace this complexity with nostalgia and stereotypes. Robert Zemeckis’ recent film Allied is an example: the characters are largely empty shells acting per the dictates of a “World War II Romantic Thriller”: earnest good ol’ boy fights Nazis, gets girl, loses girl, defeats Nazis. No surprises, no suspense, no moral ambiguity. Nothing to inspire emotional investment. Contrast this with the reality of Lily Sergeyev, who almost changed the course of World War II because the SOE lost her beloved dog at the border. I first read about her in Ben MacIntyre’s Doublecross, and spent most of the book as desperate as Lily herself to know: what had happened to Babs? Would she betray the D-Day plans to Germany to avenge the loss of her dog? This woman was willing to sacrifice the free world for a tiny terrier mix. If you’ve ever loved a dog, the story strikes an uncomfortable chord. What might you do, in her situation?

Some fans had negative reactions to Agent Carter’s portrayal of Peggy’s struggle against sexism in the SSR, because in Captain America: The First Avenger we had already seen that her male colleagues respected and admired her. Falling back on simple sexism as a conflict—get the coffee, Agent Carter, stand back and let men do the real work—felt lazy and insulting. Yes, there was sexism during the Cold War, but there were also women doing vitally important, difficult work, and men who trusted them to do it. John Glenn wanted a black female mathematician—Katherine Johnson—to double check the calculations for his orbital trajectory, because he believed that if the computer had made an error, she would catch it. “Get the girl to check it,” he said. Though racism and sexism are inherent in his choice of words, Glenn followed it up with “If she says the numbers are good, I am ready to go.” If prejudice and trust can coexist in life, they can in fiction too.

Downton Abbey, soaked in nostalgia for the peerage, is full of examples of this kind of stereotype-driven storytelling, but perhaps the most egregious is Thomas Barrow. He is presented as conniving, greedy, and cruel, with the implication that he became these things to survive as a gay man in Edwardian England. A conniving, greedy, cruel, gay footman could be a fascinating character if the story gave compelling reasons for his cruelty other than “it’s hard to be gay in 1914.” But here Downton lets us down.

In these properties, we are meant to understand the characters’ motivations and challenges solely through popular assumptions about their era. The past was a “time of absolutes.” The past was a time that valued a very specific type of masculinity. The past was sexist, racist, homophobic. Press too hard on the why of any narrative decision, and the glittering façade cracks: there is no reason beyond “that’s just how it was, right?”

Some modern narratives rely on tropes rather than constructing complex characters from whole cloth, but I think we forgive it more in period pieces, because we’re told that’s how it used to be, back when. We let an aesthetic stand in for an ethos. This substitution isn’t just lazy; it can be dangerous. When we simplify the past, we erase individual experiences, contradictions, and complexity. People have always been people, no matter the decade or the social construct in which they move. We have always been apt to color outside the lines. No constructed paragon of any era will ever be as fascinating as a flawed, enthusiastic, infuriating human being.

I hope Amberlough avoids the pitfalls of readers’ preconceived notions about how we structure period narratives. The vintage glamour sets the mood, and alludes to very real time of sex, strife, and cynicism, but I hope the characters carry the plot and the emotional arcs, rather than relying on hackneyed anachronistic shorthand. I hope it tells a twisted, tangled, human story, dressed up in lipstick and evening clothes and free from expectation.

Follow Lara Elena Donnelly on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her website.

Author Features

The Best or Worst-Timed Title Ever?

October 1, 2018May 6, 2024torforge

The Consuming Fire is close at hand! So we’re revisiting John Scalzi’s 2017 post “The Best or Worst-Timed Title Ever?” on Book 1, The Collapsing Empire.

Written by John Scalzi

So here in 2017, when you have a book coming out called The Collapsing Empire, you get a lot of rueful smiles and knowing nods and statements like “so, writing non-fiction now, are we?” and “a little on the nose, isn’t it?” and you just have to sort of grin and nod, because, well, yeah, actually the title does seem a bit on the nose. It’s either the best-timed title in the history of science fiction or the worst-timed. I suppose I’ll find out when it goes out into the stores.

The irony is, to the extent that Earth plays a role at all in the development of the book itself, it’s not the modern-day planet that inspired the book, it was the Earth as it was five hundred or so years ago.

The basic concept of The Collapsing Empire is that there’s a far-flung interstellar mercantile empire, whose systems are connected through a feature of the universe called “The Flow”–a sort of extra-dimensional river the courses over standard-issue space-time and lets spaceships essentially float from one planetary system to another at what looks like faster-than-light speeds (it’s more complicated than that, because it’s always more complicated than that, this is science fiction. But that’s the basic idea).

“The Flow” is a natural feature of the universe, and the mechanics of it aren’t particularly well understood. What is well-known are the practical aspects of it—where to get into it, where to get out of it, how long it takes to go from one planetary system to the next. The people in the novel (mostly) know that it works, but not how it works. Which is fine on a day-to-day basis, but it’s really bad for planning for the future.

When I was first kicking around the concept of “The Flow,” I was looking for a way to describe it to myself (if I want you all to understand it, I have to understand it first), and after a couple of weeks of wrestling with it, the metaphor I came up with was: Ocean currents. The oceans of Earth have these immense engines in them, huge rivers of water within water, which cycle around and around, pulling water and air—and ships!—along with them. It was these ocean currents that helped open the North American continent to European exploration, exploitation, and trade—which, depending who you are, was either a good thing or a bad thing, or some combo thereof (but inasmuch as I literally would not be here if it didn’t exist, I’m mostly grateful for).

So, what would have happened to that exploration, exploitation, and trade in an age of sail power if—for some reason not well understood by the humans at the time—those ocean currents just…went away?

Well, a lot of things would have happened. Most of them, I suspect, not especially good (for Europeans, anyway).

And with that I had an understanding of what my future society—one entirely reliant on a feature of the universe it didn’t really understand—would be up against if “The Flow” also just…went away. A lot of things would happen. Most of them not especially good.

For the characters in the book, I mean. For you, the reader? Well. They’re going to be really interesting.

No nods to modern-day Earth required.

Probably.

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Extras / Fearless Women

Are you a hero or a villain?

April 19, 2018May 10, 2024torforge

Everyone loves a good villain. At least, we definitely do! But what does that say about you, as a person? It might mean nothing, but it might mean everything. Not sure if you’d be the hero or the villain in a sci-fi or fantasy novel? We’ve got you covered. Take our quiz and discover your role!

Want to read more books about heroes and complex villains? Check out V. E. Schwab’s Vicious and the upcoming sequel, Vengeful. And don’t forget to take a look at the other amazing books in our #FearlessWomen program!

Author Features

Hadens, Chris Shane, Gender and Me

April 2, 2018May 23, 2018torforge35 Comments

Written by John Scalzi

About five years ago, when I started writing Lock In, for which my upcoming novel Head On is the sequel, I decided one important thing about the protagonist, Chris Shane: I decided that I would not know, and would not seek to know, Chris’ gender.

I decided this for a couple of reasons. One reason was that in the world of Lock In (and now Head On), there’s a thing called Haden’s Syndrome, in which people are locked into their bodies by a disease. Because of that disease “Hadens” encounter the world through an online community called the Agora, and by remotely piloting android bodies called “threeps.” Chris is a Haden and presents in a threep, and threeps are not (necessarily) gendered. So when people encounter Chris out in the world, they would not know if Chris is male, or female, or non-binary, or other, unless Chris chose to say. My feeling is that Chris wouldn’t say—even to me. Because it’s not necessarily anyone else’s business. So there’s that.

But another reason is that I thought that Hadens, because of various aspects of how they interact with the world and how they interact with each other, would not necessarily always place the same emphasis on gender that other humans might traditionally do. As noted above, Hadens have the option of not presenting any obvious gender at all, but more than that, they might decide, as part of the natural development of their community, that gender simply isn’t as important, or, even if it were, that it could be flexible in various contexts—one might present as male to some people, female to others, or non-binary or non-gendered to still others. When you meet people with your mind first, they are not prejudiced one way or another with your body (they still might be prejudiced in other ways, of course).

That being the case, while I think many Hadens would feel and be strongly gendered, I thought that many would not be, and would feel more at ease being non-binary or on a gender spectrum—and even many of those who felt gendered might not choose to make that gender known publicly. To those they trust, sure. To the public at large, maybe not so much. Because that was an option, and because that could be a growing aspect of an emerging Haden culture. It’s a speculative aspect of a speculative community.

To get back to Chris, knowing that I wouldn’t know Chris’ gender even before I started writing my novel (now novels) meant I spent a non-trivial amount time thinking about presenting my character in the world, and through speech and action. What I didn’t want to do was write a gendered (and given my own defaults, that meant probably male) character and then just erase all mention of gender. It’s not enough to just drop pronouns. I wanted to make an authentic non-gendered presentation, for a person who chose not to have gender a topic for general discussion, and lived life accordingly.

Whether I did this convincingly is up to the individual reader. I can say that after two books writing Chris, I’m happy that readers tend to gender Chris—or not!—depending on their own inclinations. My wife is convinced Chris is a woman and uses the corresponding pronouns when she discusses the character. Other people are convinced Chris is a “he” and proceed accordingly. Still others picture Chris’ gender as fluid. Some, like me, choose not gender Chris one way or another—or at least choose to follow Chris’ lead in keeping gender out of the general discussion.

As the author, I don’t have any particular problem with readers gendering Chris to their own satisfaction, whether male, female, non-binary or none of the above, and I think it’s interesting watching how people choose to answer that question for themselves, and how that influences and changes the experience of reading Lock In and Head On.

I should be clear that my choices in presenting Chris as a character are my own, and that I don’t see myself as a spokesperson on gender issues in general. Like many “cishet” folks, I’m still learning and trying to stay open to the experience of life that people outside gender norms live and choose to share with me and others. I’ve especially been grateful to the non-binary people I know who have talked to me about the world of Lock In, and their own thoughts about Chris, whatever those thoughts may be. They help inform my thinking, and the development of the world of the Hadens. And that’s a good thing, I think.

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Author Features

The Stars of The Queens of Innis Lear

March 21, 2018May 23, 2018torforge

Written by Tessa Gratton

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion.” —Edmund the Bastard, King Lear

When I set about creating a secondary world for my fantasy novel, The Queens of Innis Lear, I knew I wanted to use the metaphors of the natural world traditionally found in Elizabethan literature and which Shakespeare used to explore the deterioration of the eponymous lead in King Lear, the play that inspired my novel.

Innis Lear is an island where nature is magical, practically sentient itself. The trees speak, the rootwaters of the island have a basic will to thrive, and the distant stars hold power over people and the progress of modern civilization. There are two main philosophies: the religion of star prophecy, where priests worship through studying the stars and interpret their signs as behavioral guides, and the practice of wormwork, where wizards commune with the roots and waters of the earth to derive power and influence progress. While the philosophies can, in a healthy kingdom, weave together into a layered, complicated system of magic and belief, Innis Lear is no longer a healthy kingdom, having fallen into decay by only upholding the side of fanatical belief in the stars.

Because the world of Innis Lear is not our own, their stars are not ours either, and yet astrology is deeply important to each character—so I had the freedom to use our familiarity with the basic principles of astronomy and the modern enthusiasm for various astrological systems, while creating my own star-lore. Nightly, star priests on the island of Lear draw precise charts of the sky, including stars, planets, and the moon, as well as the angle of the wind and how or if clouds brush or block out certain stars. If a cloud smears darkness across the tail of one constellation, in the prophecy those stars might be read half-obscured, or become a different constellation entirely, depending on the priest and their understanding of how wind and light can affect how stars communicate destiny.

Part of creating the system of star prophecy for Innis Lear was not only creating several charts filled with stars and their various meanings, but being certain I knew how the characters understood their own stars, and how those relationships interacted. I read a lot about the history of astronomy alongside the development of Western astrology and horoscopes, as well as drawing on what I know about archetypes and prophetic magic from reading Tarot over the past decade. I wrote out star charts for the birth of the main characters, so that their “destinies” would live in my imagination as I put their personalities and relationships on the page.

One thing I never did was map out my main characters’ Western zodiac signs, because I didn’t want to overwhelm the Innis Lear system with existing ideas. But now that the book is finished, it’s a delightful activity.

There are five main point of view characters: the sisters Elia, Regan, and Gaela; Ban the Fox, the bastard individualist; and Morimaros, king of Aremoria. Beyond that, Aefa Thornhill, Elia’s closest companion, and Kayo of Taria Queen, the princesses’ foreign-born, Lear-adopted uncle, are probably the two most influential secondary POV characters. So those are the characters whose Zodiac I’m exploring for fun!

Since Ban and Elia were born on the same day, I’m going to put them in the same sign: Aries, a fire sign, and the first and youngest of the Zodiac. This would allow them pull on the Aries traits of being impulsive and proud, with tempers, but also be devoted and caring. The different influences of their moon and planets and rising signs could account for how Elia sublimates her pride into a soft selfish desire to be left alone (her influencing planets are probably all in water signs), while Ban devotes himself absolutely to those who first devote themselves to him (Cancer rising, for sure).

Regan is definitely a Scorpio, probably with all her planets in Scorpio and her moon and rising, too. She embodies both the positive (magnetic, passionate, brave) and negative (possessive, jealous, manipulative) aspects of the sign. Sorry/not sorry, Regan.

And her older sister Gaela is most likely a Capricorn, because she is a master planner—though occasionally a myopic one—and her faith in herself is impeccable. What she wants is to rule, and she never second-guesses her ambitions. Her greatest strengths, however, are also her downfall.

Morimaros of Aremoria was born on the autumnal equinox, making him either a Virgo or Libra, right there on the cusp. But I feel strongly that he’s more a Virgo. His inner wish and his outer wish are the same: to be a strong, heroic leader to his people. He’s always looking at various choices he can make and weighing their best outcomes, as well as considering the consequences. At his best he loves everyone and works harder than anybody to make his people safe, at his worse he’s self-pitying and uptight.

Aefa is an Aquarius, but I’m biased because she’s great, and many of my favorite people are Aquariuses.

Kayo, the Oak Earl, would not want to be categorized like this, as he’s not from Innis Lear, nor Aremoria, and his people don’t believe in the power of stars to affect destiny. But when he must, he adapts to his circumstances without bending his integrity. He’s an adventurer and manages to love whenever he can, no matter how dire the circumstances. AKA, a Sagittarius.

And bonus! King Lear is a Pisces. Once he had the potential to be a thoughtful, wise ruler, but he fell to a flaw that many Pisces are subject to: he lost his head to the stars.

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Follow Tessa Gratton on Twitter, Instagram, and on her website.

Author Features

Shades of Hamilton

March 6, 2018May 10, 2024torforge

Written by V. E. Schwab

What story features a collection of young, scrappy, and hungry leads, an out-of-touch king, an unlikely ensemble of friends and adversaries, and a wealth of fabulous military coats?

In the midst of a revolution (and a revelation), the answer seems obvious: Hamilton!

But with iconic lines about taking risks, dreaming big, changing your stars and taking life into your hands, it’s impossible not to notice how well lines of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s marvelous play pair with characters from the Shades of Magic series.

And so, with A Conjuring of Light out soon, here you have it, Shades of Hamilton:

“There’s a million things I haven’t done, but just you wait.”
Lila Bard, aspiring pirate and trouble-maker in not one but three Londons

“I am the one thing in life I can control.”
Kell, Red London Antari and adopted Maresh prince, no chill whatsoever

“Dying is easy, living is harder.”
Rhy Maresh, crown prince, energetic dreamer, spiced cinnamon roll

“I’d rather be divisive than indecisive.”
Alucard Emery, ex-royal, current rogue, and captain of the Night Spire

“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”
Holland, the White London Antari enslaved to the Dane Twins

“History has its eyes on you.”
Maxim Maresh, sovereign of the Empire and beloved of Arnes, a hardass father to Rhy and Kell

“No one has more resilience or matches my practical tactical brilliance.”
Kisimyr Vasrin, former victor of the Essen Tasch, badass b*tch

“The fact that you’re alive is a miracle, just stay alive, that would be enough.”
Emira Maresh, literal ice-queen, over-protective mother, and gardening enthusiast

“I never had a group of friends before, I promise that I’ll make y’all proud.”
Ned, the non-magical patron of Stone’s Throw tavern who would really, really, really like to be Kell’s protégé

“Love doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints.”
Calla, night market merchant who wants Kell and Lila to bone

“How lucky we are to be alive right now!”
Hastra, the young guard assigned to Kell, gifted with ability to make things grow

“I put myself back in the narrative…”
Black London

Follow V. E. Schwab on Twitter, on Facebook, and on her blog.

Author Features

OPORDS and SOPMOD Kits: Launching into the Great Unknown

March 5, 2018May 22, 2018torforge

Written by Nancy Kress

Why would any writer choose to write a novel about a subject he or she is completely unfamiliar with?

There are subjects I know quite a bit about, at least for a layman: genetic engineering, the history of chess, Tudor England, classical ballet. I have written about these things. However, in If Tomorrow Comes, the sequel to the 2017 Tomorrow’s Kin, a large part of the plot is military. I have never served in the military; no one in my family has served since WWII with the exception of my niece, who is a Navy JAG. She battles with legal briefs, not M4s. But a major viewpoint character in my novel, Corporal Leo Brodie, is a young Army sniper who washed out of Ranger School with the elite 75th Regiment.

Why write this character?

And how?

The “how” involved a lot of research—really a lot. I read memoirs by Rangers who served in Iraq. I did online research for updates. I read the Ranger Handbook: Ranger Training Brigade, United States Army Infantry School (and I can now construct a field antenna, should the need ever arise). I read parts of the Manual for Courts Martial, especially Articles 90-94, which deal with disobeying orders from commanding officers. And then, just to make sure I did not make a fool of myself, I hired an ex-Ranger to read and correct the manuscript. He was incredibly helpful.

One of the oldest saws in writing is “Write what you know.” Yes, good, do that if you like. But you don’t have to. Tom Clancy, author of such books as Th Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games, never served in the military (he flunked the eye exam for ROTC). In The Dispossessed the late Ursula LeGuin, not a physicist, created the wonderful character Shevek, who was one. William Gibson has said that when he wrote Neuromancer, he’d barely seen a computer. And no writer has ever been to Mars, scene of many SF novels.

If you want to launch into areas totally unknown to you, or set a story in a place you’ve never been, or create a character with a job you’ve never done, you can. But you need to (1) read a lot, and not just for facts. I wanted to know what it felt like to, for instance, patrol a perimeter. (2) Use the Internet, but judiciously because there is a lot of wrong information out there. (3) Talk to people who have done that and been there. Learn all you can from them. And then, when the book is done, find someone (maybe the same someone) who will, for love or money, read what you’ve written and correct whatever is wrong.

That’s the how. What about the why? Why would I, a middle-aged (and that’s polite), female, non-military writer create Leo Brodie?

I believe that fiction is better when the author is intensely involved with the characters. Brodie seized my imagination. For months I thought, breathed, dreamed Leo Brodie. Every time I sat down at the keyboard to write Leo’s scenes, I wanted to become him, echo his thought patterns, embrace his values (not all of which are mine), inhabit a twenty-four-year-old male body in superb physical condition who can make kills at incredible distances. I didn’t completely succeed, of course—we never do—but I tried.

I did the same with my other viewpoint characters, but they were easier. Marianne Jenner, the protagonist of Tomorrow’s Kin, is also a major character in If Tomorrow Comes. She and I share gender identification, age, motherhood. Dr. Salah Bourgiba and I share some background, even though I am not a medical doctor. Although here, too, I had an expert, an M.D., read the final manuscript. She made many valuable suggestions.

If Tomorrow Comes takes place on an alien planet, Kindred, in an alien culture, and in the future (although not that far in the future). In Tomorrow’s Kin, the (sort of) alien Kindred came to the aid of Earth. Now Earth is going to the aid of Kindred—although not in the way, or with the outcomes, that they expected. Leo Brodie, Marianne Jenner, and Salah Bourgiba are also launching into the unknown.

As SF, and SF writers, have always done.

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Follow Nancy Kress on Twitter and on her website.

Author Features

No Mother Tongue: Language in the World of Magic

February 22, 2018May 7, 2024torforge

Written by V. E. Schwab

I am not a linguist—I barely speak French, and that’s after studying it for four years—but I knew from the outset that the Shades of Magic series would feature not only multiple Londons, but multiple languages.

As a writer who has to construct a world before she can fathom the people who live within it, it was only natural that, to understand the insiders of my myriad realities, I’d have to understand how they spoke. Were they the kind of people who had a dozen words for love? Or no word for God? How did they say hello? Farewell?

Words are, of course, the building blocks of stories. But they’re also a key facet of setting, of character, and, when it comes to fantasy, of world. Stories are populated with insiders and outsiders, and the existence of a language to which readers aren’t instantly privy emphasizes that they do not belong. It slows our introduction to the world, but does not prevent it. Instead, readers are forced to learn as they go, just as travelers would, when passing through a foreign land.

Languages don’t only serve as gatekeepers to readers; they play the same function within the narrative. They can make characters feel excluded. Lila Bard finds herself in a London where her own language is a mark of royalty and where she cannot grasp the common tongue. Kell is constantly frustrated by the fact people refer to him as aven—blessed—or vares—prince. And then, of course, there’s the language that only Kell speaks: a tongue that marks his gift as Antari, and isolates him further.

There are differences between the fictional languages within the book, each invariably invoking some real-world echo in our minds. The people of Red London speak a tongue that is sibilant and smooth, whereas in the harsh climate of White London, they speak a guttural one, and Grey London, our stand-in for the real world, becomes both familiar in its Englishness, and foreign as, over the course of the series, we spend more time with other tongues.

One of the most exciting things for me, as a writer, has been the eagerness with which readers have sought to learn certain phrases, to memorize the meaning of Kell’s spell words or the common greeting between princes, or even some of Calla’s more obscure expressions. While the majority of oft-quoted phrases are in Lila’s common English, it’s an extraordinary thing to see a fan sign off a letter with As Travars. Used poorly, fictional languages can feel like a wall, preventing all but the well-versed from feeling included in a world. But used well, they can invite the readers to become part of a world they love, transforming from a barricade into an open door.

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Follow V. E. Schwab on Twitter at @veschwab, on Facebook, and on her website.

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So…Why time travel?

What were some of the challenges of writing time travel?

What are some of your favorite (or least favorite!) time travel stories?

If you could time travel to any period when would you go to?

Both of your books also feature LGBTQ+ characters—was that a conscious decision, or always a part of how you approached the stories?

Did you see any particular challenges or benefits to adding LGBTQ+ characters to stories that deal with different historical periods?

What are some of your favorite science fiction approaches to LGBTQ+ identities and issues?

What is your dream project – what would you like to tackle but haven’t had the time or opportunity?

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