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Lantern Avenue in Lantera
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In my last post I
talked about how I decided to write a fantasy, even though I don’t
like fantasies. And how I worked around that issue by writing a
speculative fiction story set in my Nine Star Nebula “universe”
(Though not in the Nine Star Nebula) after the collapse of the
advanced human civilization that was sending colonist to the stars.
Going this route had its pluses and minuses. Let’s start out with
the use of language.
One of the ways
fantasy often sets itself apart from SF and builds its fantasy world
is in its use of language. Fantasies may use antique words or speech
patterns, may use ornate, ethereal, or evocative language to create a
sense of otherworldness. Consider the two examples below;
Sir George,
Prince Daring’s squire, dressed in embroidered silks, gleaming
chain mail, with an elegant dueling sword at his side, reined his
tall stallion to a hault at Lady May’s bower gate. Leaning down to her, he
solemnly offered her the single white rose he had carried like a
pendant in his calf-gloved hand.
DeArcg Gyorga,
the armsman of the Faror of Dartha, garbed in a flowing Sarafeld
fabric tunic and cape, a vest of hammered Majah-steel chain mail,and wore the
ancient sword of Taroon, bounding at his thigh, drew the reins of
this magnificent silver-maned Darth as he came abreast of the manse
gate wherein stood the Faroratha Mathia. He bowed to her from his
high saddle, and wordlessly offered her a
single Flower of Ashia that he had borne as his
standard.
With the first
example, you don’t need a glossary at the back of the book to
picture the scene. But the use of everyday words may make the
“fantasy” seem more mundane. A fantasy should carry one to new,
strange, and wonderful world. Using the ordinary language of this
world may make it harder to carry a reader away.
In the second
example, with many made up names, titles, places, and perhaps new
creatures, one gets a clear sense that you’re not in Kansas any
more. A door has been opened to a new world. However, each new term
must be described to, and remembered by the reader, all of which makes
it harder for the reader to be carried away, especially if they are
constantly tripping over unfamiliar words.
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A Lanterna canal scene from the story
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I tried for a middle
course by using commonplace words, for the most part, but perhaps not used the same way in Kansas. Fro example, I used "poured stone" instead of "concrete." I
was originally going to use different names for what I knew to be
Earth animals, to suggest how far we were away from today. However, I
realized that this would be cheating. The world I had set the story
on was a human settled, terraformed world, inhabited by humans
descended from our Earth along with Earth flora and fauna. The
characters ride horses, and to call them anything but a horse, would
be deceptive. And I needed to use Earth plants as well, though
genetically modified so that exact names might not apply. Give this
mundane backdrop, I felt that I needed to keep things as concrete as
possible and create my
new world by imagining a world strange enough that would transcend
the mundane language I would use to describe it.
To do that, I chose
a world with low gravity so that my characters could do things that
could not be done on our world. I chose a world where the
dawn to the next dawn “day” was a month long, divided into 16
ordinary “days.” I gave it an opaque sky that hid all the stars
and obscured the two major lights in the sky – the Yellow Lantern
that lit the day, and moved across the sky over the course of 16
days, and the dimmer, Blue Lantern that remained fixed in the sky and
came to its own, after the Yellow Lantern had set. And I tried to
make the cities and landscape as exotic,yet as logical, and as their location and historic background would
allow.
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Another Lanterna scene
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Logic is a keyword
in this case, for it tied my hands in some respect. For example, I
had to keep close track on whether it was a bright day, or a dark day
for any given scene, which meant plotting the story time wise much
more closely that I usually do. I usually just keep the story plot in
my head, committing to paper only the sequence of scenes where I need to
consider time and distance traveled. In this story I needed to do
that for every scene since I needed to know the exact day of the month to determine whether it was a bright, dark, or twilit day. And if I
wanted a scene to occur on a specific type of day, I had to account for the time
between scenes to get there. Plus, I had to take into account that travel
would alter that timetable. The Yellow Lantern would rise several
days earlier in Lanterna in the east than it would in Azera in the
west. I had to determine distances and travel times to reflect that fact.
In addition, by
making it a terraformed world, I had to assume that it would have a
very carefully curated environment, that used a limited collection of
plants and animals to create a self-sustaining, balanced, and
benign environment. Lions and tigers, cobras, and mosquitoes and a
million other plants and animals would not be introduced. This was a
very artificial world, which meant that I was rather short of
dangers, other than humans, that my heroes would have to face. I had
to settle for feral dog packs as their greatest danger on the road,
after rogue raiders.
I chose to make the
setting is a sort of faux China, because of all the fantasies I like
“oriental” ones the best. I threw in the Russian steppes, plus
some tea gardens, and the various remnants of the Elder Civilization
that they are the descendants of. I modeled the military units after
those of the British in mid-19th century India. For the story itself,
I have no idea where the inspiration came.
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Caravan to Mirra
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With those
limitations and inspirations, I set out writing The Fourth
Daughter, the working title of
the story, since it is the story of a fourth daughter of a
Queen, borne to please her husband who wanted a son. There were,
however, other stories with that title, so I had to find another one.
Anyway, I had this
daughter, who was unwanted by her mother, and so she was raised as
the son by father in his regiment in the field. For the narrator and
male lead, I wanted a mild mannered scholar who gets dragged across the
world by the strange, devil may care fourth daughter. As usual, it
has an episodic structure, with an anti-epic vibe, anti-quest. Though
their fate has important consequences, the story focuses on their
concerns. And instead of going on a quest, they’re simply fleeing
for their freedom, if not their lives.
One of the things
that made this story fun for me to write, was that I set it on a very
specific “world” whose characteristics I had to respect to the
extent of my understanding. There are hints throughout the story, if
a reader had read The Bright Black Sea – but I purposely
made no effort to highlight them. The narrator is unaware of their
significance when he notes them. I didn’t want them to distract
from the story, nor did I want to make the story into a puzzle. I
just did it as a personal challenge, for fun of it. Another writer
might have made the discovery of those clues central to the story,
but I choose to keep my narrator in the dark about the Elder (SF)
Civilization, at least in this story. Like all my stories, I left it
open ended enough that I can always return to it, after I sell tens
of thousands of copies. Don’t hold your breath.
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The Reed Bank, second version
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Because I like old
fashioned stories, and use SF motifs mostly for color and exotic
locations, I used a similar motif for my next story, Sailing to
Redoubt. Though in that story society and the characters were
much more knowledgeable about their origins, even if their technology
wasn’t all that much more advanced. But I’ll get to that in the
next installment of Origin Stories.
