Mark Chadbourn: In my interlinked sequences that began with Age of Misrule, the secondary world is the mystical Otherworld of Celtic mythology, the home of gods, Fabulous Beasts, magic and mayhem. Every time a character crosses over from our own world, he or she sees different aspects of it, or it appears subtly altered. What is never stated is that it’s a thought-form world, completely fluid in nature, which is created and shaped by the mind and preconceptions of the people who visit it.
M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: I write historical fantasy, so it’s our world but with the mythology taken literally. So, as I’m writing at the beginning of the Viking age, the gods do interfere in human destinies. Witches exist. Magic is taken directly from that described in ancient Norse poetry. The coolest thing is how strange history is—how differently people think and act to modern people. For instance, the size of the settlements. In Wolfsangel, Vali looks on the town of Haithabu as unimaginably large. It contains one hundred houses.
K.V. Johansen: Some of the history of the Old Great Gods and the devils is quite cool, I think. I know a lot more about the cold hells and the “heavens beyond the stars” in which the human storytellers place the Great Gods and devils than appears in the published stories. But I’m not going to talk about that yet! (Although people can probably figure a part of it out. In “The Storyteller” there’s a bit more about that than in Blackdog.) In general, though, because of the way I work, the world grows as I write. I don’t usually see much of what lies over the horizon until not too long before the story gets there. That’s true of both the physical landscape and the social/historical/cosmological landscape, the cultures and the systems of magic.
Kay Kenyon: My secondary world, called the Entire, is both a world and a universe. It is a landlocked universe that is shaped like a starfish, in that it has five geographic arms, or “primacies,” radiating outward from a central sea of impossible, vaguely oceanic matter. Things are so cosmically far apart that the only efficient way to travel is on the Nigh, a five-armed river fed from the central sea over which is suspended the Ascendancy where advanced beings dwell when they’re not up to no good.
Justina Robson: I guess you mean this secondary world I’m making right now. Animal-people, I’d have to say. I haven’t done those before. They’re biomorphs: life-liquid-engines. Haven’t entirely finished working on their true nature. It’s been very hard going. My imagination wants them to be one way and my scientific brain is telling me it’s all never going to work so. . . obviously imagination has to win eventually and I’m struggling towards that.
Where did you start building your secondary world?
Mark Chadbourn: I looked first at the old stories of Celtic mythology, and then at other mythologies—Norse, Greek, Native American, Chinese, African and more—searching for commonalities. The conceit is that this world is the source of all our stories, our myths, legends and folklore, our dreams, so it needed to be very much an ur-world that could speak to all cultures.
K.V. Johansen: I started with the landscape of the Turkmenistan desert and the idea of small, local gods. In Blackdog, the mountains, a combination of the Himalayas and the mountains of central Asia, came into it almost right away, with the Siberian taiga lurking in the northeast. In a way, the seed of the world is a book and a TV series, Realms of the Russian Bear, on the natural history of the former Soviet Union; both the BBC producer and the Russian host were biologists, so it’s a cut above the usual sort of nature documentary and the book is very detailed. I had a fascination with the landscape and natural history described in that for some time, and when the story began, with the idea of the character who became Holla-Sayan being possessed by the Blackdog, it just always seemed to have existed in that landscape.
Kay Kenyon: I started with the odd thought, what if you didn’t need space travel to get across the universe, but could instead sort of hoof it? What if you could walk to Alpha Centauri or the equivalent? And if you can walk, obviously there are no stars or space. So what is this place? It’s a tunnel. It burrows through our own universe. At this point you have to write the story to find out what the hell is going on.
Joel Shepherd: For me it always starts with the cultures, politics, belief systems, and languages of various parts of the world. And that is always driven by the dramatic requirements of the story. In A Trial of Blood and Steel, I wanted to tell a story largely driven by the conflicts between the different values that arise from different kinds of civilizations. My main character was a young woman, a former princess who renounced her heritage to become a warrior in the somewhat exotic style of distant Saalshen. I loved the dramatic conflicts that sprung from a main character, one who chooses to give up that status and privilege for something that suits her better as a person. But I needed to have a land where that would be possible, because in a lot of lands it wouldn’t be. And so I came up with Lenayin, a land of individualist warriors where the royal family has only very precarious power, and inherited title means little, because everyone worships achievements and skill more than family. Much of that creation of Lenayin was driven by my need to make my main character’s situation believable.
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 Blackdog, 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.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 29
