Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (43 page)

In
The Shadow Road,
the fourth book of my Warlocks of Talverdin series about the Nightwalkers, a lot of the action takes place in a world suffering a supervolcano-induced ice age, not unlike that nuclear winter that we all thought might be coming when I was a teenager once WWIII came along. The supervolcano was triggered by misuse of a particular and not fully understood magic as much as by natural processes. The population of the planet has been pretty much wiped out, many in the initial disaster but most of the rest in a slow decline as the climate changes; it’s reached the point when the story happens that glaciers cover much of the world and civilization, in the true meaning of the word, has ended. One of the heroes is living in what she thinks is probably the last settlement of people alive in the entire world.

Kay Kenyon:
My world has had short geologic ages during which it was formed and then populated by degree, in a process of copying life forms from “our” universe, the Rose. But this creation period is in back story, not brought on stage. Aside from that, the story contains a cataclysmic event in one of the “minorals” or offshoots of a “primacy.” It’s an event that demonstrates the ruling class ruthlessness and contributes to an uprising.

What goes into the development of a magic system?

K.V. Johansen:
Some research and lots of (desperate) inspiration! In world of Blackdog, each region has its own forms and rituals of magic. Coming up with these and having them evolve as the story moves from region to region is challenging, sometimes. They all have to have some common ground, too, as the magic underneath is all the same. Sometimes it’s just something that leaps out as a neat idea while I’m writing, like the Grasslander cat’s-cradles, and sometimes it involves a lot of thinking about similar cultures in the primary world and what they believed had power.

Tim Akers:
Again, a lot of my experience with this comes from my time in RPGs. Personally, I need to figure out power sources, the strict rules of the powers, the costs and benefits and dangers of them. But on top of that you have to figure out how these things fit into the culture. Especially when religion gets involved, you can really end up with some complicated societal effects to magic. What roles do belief and faith play in world where there’s manifest arcane and divine power all around? In what ways have dogma impacted the culture’s understanding of magic and its application? Those kinds of questions really drive my construction of the magical systems in my worlds. What fun is making up dogma if you can’t make up heresy?

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe:
Like all writing, the development of magic comes from what you already know and a desire to do something new—and in my case an irritation with the tropes of traditional horror and fantasy.

Reviewers have commented that they haven’t seen a magic system like mine in fantasy before. I found this surprising, because it’s the magic that people practice in the real world. My magic is based on starvation, pain, denial of sleep, drowning, and freezing. It’s a magic of ordeal, and you can see it used in everything from Inca death rituals to Yoga, the desert retreats of Christian mystics, the sweat lodges of the Native Americans, the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the dances of the Dervishes. I have a good grounding in myth and real world magic—although I don’t believe in its literal truth—because I’ve been interested in magic and witchcraft since I was a child. I’ve done a lot of reading, so I have a lot to draw on.

I came to the specifics of my magic system through two ideas. The first is an extract from the Edda, in which Odin gives his eye for knowledge of the runes. The second was when I read that Norse mystics would seat themselves on a high chair to perform their prophecies. It occurred to me that this might be to deny themselves sleep. From there I needed an idea of the runes and I just envisaged them as living things that root in the mind of the sorcerer, sustained by her rituals and starvation. I took that, I think, from a misreading of the Poetic Edda. There’s this beautiful verse which describes Odin’s sufferings for magic:

I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
then I fell back from there

This verse is the key to everything that happens in the Wolfsangel books. The misreading was of the “shrieking” (screaming in some translations). I originally read it that the runes were shrieking, not Odin. This gave me the idea that they were living things. Magic is solely a female preserve in my world. Men regard it as effeminate and beneath them, something you’d only resort to if you were too weak to fight. Again, this comes directly out of the Norse myth. The gods practice magic, but Norse gods are quite a gender-bending bunch.

My werewolf came from the idea of getting rid of the normal werewolf tropes that Hollywood invented. There’s no changing with the full moon, no silver bullets, no separation of the wolf and human identities. It always annoyed me that a 150-pound man could turn into a two-ton wolf within an hour. I know we’re dealing with magic, so anything is possible. But that always struck me as contrary to the laws of physics. Matter is coming from nowhere. My werewolf changes slowly, over a period of about a year. He puts on weight by eating people. My werewolf’s transformation is one-way—no changing back—and the wolf is consuming his personality from the inside. The idea of linking it to the myth of the Fenris wolf arrived about half way into the writing of the book. Again, I didn’t plan on or let it worry me that I hadn’t got every last detail worked out. The feel of the story was right and that was all that mattered.

If I were designing a magic system for a pure fantasy novel I’d avoid fireballs or “six-gun magic”—that is, magical effects that could just be a replacement for a gun or a laser pistol. It’s important in any writing to avoid cliché. The only thing you need to do is come up with something new, that is, if you want to write something really memorable. If you just want to churn out another genre standard, then you can embrace its clichés. That said, you should always strive to do something new in some way. Otherwise why not just read the stuff that’s already out there, and save yourself the bother of writing? You might write a bestseller by adhering to the genre’s clichés, but that’s not what writing’s about. If you’re in it to make money, become a banker. Writing—and fantasy writing in particular—is about striving for something unique and resonant.

Justina Robson:
Far-future technologies in my case. Or, as it is also known, “pseudoscientific jargon.” Magic is either incomprehensibly useful technology that allows you to write a story in a certain way or it is a straight metaphor for creativity and charisma. In either case it has to hold water convincingly and logically. Someone has to pay somehow. Nothing is free.

Mark Chadbourn:
My stories are split between our own world and the Otherworld, and I needed a magic system that would not jar too much with our contemporary existence. I went back and researched the occult systems of magicians—from John Dee to Aleister Crowley to modern chaos magicians—and identified what would fit in my cosmology.

When it comes to world-building, what are you good at and not as good at? How have you taken advantage of the strengths and compensated for the weaknesses?

Tim Akers:
I touched on this before, but I think it’s important for writers to not just compensate for their weaknesses. We need to meet them head on. It’s easy to use our strengths as a crutch to cover up our weaknesses, but we’d be better off as artists and craftsman to actively engage our weaknesses and improve them. When I first started writing I was terrible at dialogue. That’s just a matter of craft, so I really studied language, the way people talk, the way they communicate, and now dialogue is one of the things that I’m good at. When it comes to world-building, my strengths lie in religion, in magic, and in backstory. The larger the scale, the better I do. My weakness is character. So I push myself to make characters that make me uncomfortable, that stretch my admittedly simple boundaries. There’s no way for me to get better if I don’t. And while I’m not good enough to produce truly revolutionary character tropes, I resist the urge to fall back on the comfortable, simple character tropes that permeate so much of fantasy.

Kay Kenyon:
I think my strength is sense of wonder and depth. When I take on a particularly bizarre world, one of the things I work hard at is believability—that is, creating verisimilitude despite unlikely claims. Part of the job is not to rely over much on explaining, but using point of view and character to soften/authenticate strangeness. One aspect of world building that I admire in others and don’t accomplish to my satisfaction is alien language—that is, creating an intriguing a lexicon. I minimize the use of foreign words.

Joel Shepherd:
I’m good at cultures and civilizations on the broad scale. I enjoy the complexities—not because I’m addicted to needless complexity, but because complexity exists everywhere in the real world, and I’ve always found it fascinating. I’m also good at politics and political science broadly (I’m currently writing an international relations PhD), and those kinds of struggles form a lot of the motivations of my characters.

Not so good at? Making it simple. Some people like simple. My work’s probably not for them. I like reading stuff myself where I have to work a little bit, because that’s the experience of the real world. If you ever travel to some foreign nation, getting accustomed to the language and customs and so forth always takes some work. That’s the fun of it. If I don’t get that from a story, it doesn’t feel real to me. I can only imagine the readers who don’t like to work are people who don’t like to travel much either. I’ve had to work at keeping my story structure as simple as feasible, to explain the world in ways that are dramatically interesting, so don’t feel at all like reading an encyclopedia. That’s always the danger.

Character or world? If you had to give up one or the other, which would it be?

Tim Akers:
Sadly, character. I’m a world-builder first. Again, it’s a personal weakness, one that I’m trying to overcome. Writers need to learn to clearly identify their weaknesses and go after them, rather than trying to prop them up with their strengths. But I don’t know that I could write a book that was just a character study. I’m not to that point in my development as a craftsman just yet.

Joel Shepherd:
Easy: Character is everything. Worlds are only interesting to the extent that there are interesting characters to populate them. It’s very much like the line about “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to see, did it really fall?” What is a world without characters to experience it, vicariously, on the behalf of the reader?

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe:
Characters exist only in their world. You can’t have one without another. A ninth-century Viking is a very different person than a 21st-century teenager. The world shapes the character, and the world only comes to life through the character’s eyes. The mines of Moria would look very different if you were describing them from the point of view of an Orc. That said, I’m not very interested in traditional fantasy world-building, at least as a writer. It’s very hard, this far into fantasy’s evolution as a genre, to come up with anything new or interesting.

I believe this is why people like George R. R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie have steered clear of worlds packed with monsters and magic and alien races. In fact, I’d argue that the weakest part of Martin’s work is the traditional monsters. I found the Others pretty dull and I love
A Game of Thrones.
Martin’s strength is in his brilliantly realized characters.

To me, another race of elves, another beast man, or another bird woman is much less interesting than the interplay of characters. I’m not interested in how your dwarves smelt their gold. I regard that as a decoration to the story. I’m more interested in how your dwarf thinks, and how that affects his or her interaction with your main characters. This is why I chose historical fantasy. The world-building’s done for you, though, of course, you still have to come up with your interpretation of both the history and the myth. Then uou can get on with telling the story.

Justina Robson:
[Character and world] are inseparable. Actions are meaningless without context. Character creates their world and vice versa in an eternal round.

Mark Chadbourn:
All stories are about characters. [A world without characters] would be like have a theater stage with no actors on it. I know some people get whipped up with enthusiasm in their world-building, but the world should really be devised to underpin the themes the author wants to discuss. The themes come out of the characters.

K.V. Johansen:
The characters are shaped by their world and can’t exist without it. If I put Holla-Sayan and Moth into another world, they wouldn’t be Holla-Sayan and Moth anymore; they’d have to be different people shaped by that world, whatever it was.

Kay Kenyon:
In a forced choice, I would give up world-building. I would be terribly disappointed, but after all, stories are about people. Flat characters can’t (for me) provide enough horsepower for a great read.

Do you have any parting words of advice, encouragement, or mischief for fellow world-builders out there?

Tim Akers:
Think big; write small. You can have the most awesome, mind-breaking idea for a world that anyone has ever seen, but if it isn’t populated by interesting characters that engage the reader—doing things that are interesting in locales that are interesting—you’re going to lose your audience. It doesn’t matter how cool your idea is. You have to execute on every stage of the writing process to pull it off.