Origin Stories -- Beneath the Lanterns Part One

The Reed Bank

First, a bit of background. I spent over two year writing The Lost Star’s Sea, and it got to be somewhat of a grind finishing it. I vowed never again to write something that long. And I vowed never again to write a sequel to a book that sold less then several tens of thousands of copies. (I have since broken that vow, but it was a case of “any port in a storm,” I needed to write something...) Sequels appeal only to readers of the previous volumes, and not all of them, while with a new, standalone book, you start fresh, so anything can happen, including lightning striking.

So after The Lost Star’s Sea, I wanted to do something new, to appeal to a different, and wider readership. I felt that a fantasy that might attract new readers. Plus, fantasy had a significantly larger readership than that of SF. However, this plan, faced one significant issue – I don’t like fantasy, much. I do have fantasy books on my shelves that I’ve read and enjoyed, but these days, fantasies have pretty much fallen out of favor with me.

I don’t like many of fantasy’s most common tropes. I don’t like magic, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps because with magic, anything goes. A writer can do anything in a story, it’s “magic” after all. Cause and effect need not apply. And then, there’s Evil, with a capital “E.” That unstoppable force of darkness that threatens the world because that’s what Evil always does. No motive necessary. And it is never defeated, for at least for as long as the publisher buys the stories. Nor am I fond of the other capital “E” fantasy trope, Epics. I like more personal stories. And I don’t like war stories – its a cheap, redi-built conflict, and especially those that glory in gore. And then we have the rivals to the throne trope, which is oh, so very common. And yet, I still wanted to write a fantasy.

But if I left out all the tropes that I didn’t like, did I have anything left to write a fantasy with?

The answer is probably no, but I did it anyway. Sort of.

What I did was write a speculative fiction book instead of a fantasy – in my mind. To make it a fantasy, I set the story in a post-SF world with the remnants of this SF world shrouded in mystery and legends. There is no magic in the story, though some unexplained SF elements pass a magic. There is no over arching Evil, only powerful people who are ruthlessly working to achieve a peaceful future for their kingdoms, despite the objections of their pawns in the game. It is not an epic, but rather one of my typical story about people caught up in the gears of statecraft, whose main concern is personal survival. It doesn’t involve a war. Indeed, indeed, I took delight in writing an adventure story featuring a swashbuckling character who drew her sword only once in the story, and none of the characters die in it. In essence I wrote an anti-fantasy fantasy, and had fun doing it.

Birdsong Square

For the speculative fiction elements, I could’ve started anywhere, but I chose to set it in the same “universe” of the Nine Star Nebula – tens of thousands of years in the future where humankind is sending out slower than light colony fleets to populate planets identified by robotic explores a suitable for human life. I set it on a world that has been terraformed for human life in this universe. If humans exist tens of thousands of years in our future, I doubt that they are much like us, but I didn’t care to explore their differences, nor try to make them relatable, so that we have today’s humans as our heroes. In itself that’s a fantasy. By setting the story in this common universe, I could use all the ideas I developed in the Lost Star Stories, at least for the legends of the Elder Civilization. But since that advanced civilization had mysteriously collapsed, I could set the story in a much more fantasy like setting.

I didn’t want to write a Tolkien-est type of fantasy, so I pictured China at the turn of the last century as my model. This would allow for a mix of the old and new ways with the introduction of industrial inventions like railroad and such to give it a distinct flavor. I then littered this landscape and history with the remnants of the Elders – some of them obvious, others not so much.

Caravans on the Steppes

Making it part of my existing universe had pluses and minuses, which I’ll explore in part two of the origins of Beneath the Lanterns. What I want to close with, is a sort of a cautionary tale. As I said at the beginning of this post, I knew that fantasy outsold SF, which was one of the reasons I decided to write a fantasy. (Other than just for the hell of it.) But only after I had written the story did I find out that I had completely misunderstood the fantasy market. (Not that it really matters.)

As you can see from the chart below, the fantasy genre is dominated by Paranormal & Urban fantasy, i.e. vampires and werewolves. If you spin that category into its own genre – which is certainly imaginable since it has, I would imagine, a very specific readership – and you’re left with a Fantasy audience that is probably not much bigger than SF. And thus, nullified my initial premise for writing a fantasy. And then, when you consider that epic fantasy came in second, and I wasn’t writing a million word, multi-volume epic, I was probably chasing a smaller market than SF with my book. 

You also have to take into account that Smashwords and Amazon have only so many different sub-genre categories. The only category that I could honestly list Beneath the Lanterns was in “Action and Adventure” and it seems that action and adventure stories are more popular in SF than in fantasy. So instead of chasing a larger market, it seems that I was chasing a smaller one – though in the end, I listed the book in both. Still, the best laid plans…

For some reason Blogger is linking all the captions to the first illustration, and every time I wanted to add a caption, I lost the image. NOTE 18 May 23: This appears to have been fixed. So here are the captions from top to bottom. The First is my  first version of  the Reed Bank Street, Azera in a very impressionistic style that I was playing around with at the time. The second is another version of the scene in the same style. I used part of this one for one of the covers -- I have never much liked my Beneath the Lantern covers. The next one down is Birdsong Square in a similar style. Then there is a scene of the caravan to Treafara that I did as a potential cover. And finally the graph from the Data Guy's 2018 Nebula Award  presentation  http://authorearnings.com/sfwa2018/  And below is another version of a caravan painting

Forever Mars

Image Credit: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia02653

I see that the stars must be aligned for voyages to Mars, since three of them have been launched in the last week or so. Which makes this blog entry all the more timely.

Have you ever wondered why there are so many Martian stories? Mars, it seems, holds a special fascination for writers of speculative fiction. One reason for this fascination, at least a century or more ago, was that it seemed possible, even likely, that Mars was an earth-like world, with life, and possibly intelligent life. However, that dream was crushed 55 years ago, when Mariner 4 flew past Mars and showed it to be a cratered planet, much like the moon. Still, many of the speculative writers of that time had grown up reading those earlier Martian stories, and had likely written their own Martian story as well. And probably the same thing can be said for every generation of reader and writer since then – they read Martian stories growing up, and just have to keep reading and writing Mars stories of their own as they grow old.

There is, however, another reason for the abundance of Martian stories. You see, there is a certain, club or lodge, for writers of speculative fiction, known as the Fraternal Order of the Aether. While I say “known as,” it is not well known. Hardly known at all, in fact. The Order is not fond of publicity. It doesn’t award prizes, run contest, or actively seek members. Writers of speculative fiction must seek it out. And that takes some doing. Plus, one must meet certain requirements even to be nominated and elected to membership into the Fraternal Order of the Aether. One of those requirements is, believe it or not,that one must have written a Marian story. Why this is, is a rather murky question. It likely dates back to the Order’s funding, over hundred and twenty years ago, when its early members, writers like Percy Greg, Camille Flammarion, Gustave W Pope, and Edwin Lester Arnold, were all writing stories set on Mars. Be that as it may, this requirement for membership persists to this day. And so, if a speculative writer desires to become a member of the Fraternal Order of the Aether, he or she must write and summit his or her Martian story to the committee in order to have even a chance of being elected to membership. No exceptions. So, you see, dear reader, it likely that many of those Martian stories you have read, and will read, owe their existence the Fraternal Order of the Aether, and its membership requirements.

Now, I’m not the most social fellow you’ll ever run across. I don’t believe that I belong to any organization at moment. Indeed, I believe that my last one may well have been the Cub Scouts. But still, I can't help but think that it might be rather cool to be a fraternal member of the Fraternal Order of the Aether, even if I don’t ever see myself ever looking into the Order’s lodge, since it is located in… Well, I don’t think they want that publicized so I’ll not rustle any feathers by mentioning it. But I can still imagine myself pushing through the august, but unmarked doors of the Aether Club, to be greeted by the hall porter, who would politely direct me to the library, the lounge, or the dining room, as I wont. But alas, one needs a Martian story even to dream of this.

So I have written my Martian story – Keiree. Or, more precisely, I’ve completed the first draft of it.

Keiree’s first draft is a story of some 30,700 words. A novella. I tend to add more words in the subsequent drafts since I find writing the first draft to be hard. And because it is, I’ll settle for some rather sketchy writing just to get to the end of it. However, I like to tinker with words, so that once I have some sort of version down to tinker with, I enjoy fleshing out the story in subsequent drafts. However, in this case, the story is not all that complicated, and probably would be better with less words than more. But, as I tell myself, “Good luck with that!”

At this point Keiree is a standalone story, though it could easily be the opening episode of a longer, episodic novel. But I’m happy to have just a story, and have no plans, or even ideas, about what sort of novel length story might follow. I will have more to say about the story itself in the coming weeks, but suffice to say that it is set on Mars. A Mars that is in the same “universe” as The Lost Star Stories, the Tales of the Tropic Sea, and even Beneath the Lanterns. But I think the time frame is a bit earlier, by at least 10,000 years, than any of the those stories. (Though they vary among themselves by more than that.) And since it is set on Mars, it touches on the expeditions sent out by the Terran solar system civilization to distant stars like the Tropic Sea’s Dara lll and the Nine Star Nebula.

My target release date is mid to late September 2020.

But enough for now. Stay tuned.