Writer's Notes! - Themes, Tone, and Setting

Come back next Monday for the beginning of chapter 4 - our adventurers' first side quest!

In the mean time, here're some reflections on writing the book.

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In high school (many, many years ago), I read Howard Fast's (1951) Spartacus, in which a gladiator leads a slave rebellion in ancient Rome. The story was very different, definitely much slower, than I expected it to be, partly because it's told in an odd way. 

As I recall, Spartacus's story is actually told as flashbacks, with the main story revolving around a bunch of late adolescent, upper middle class Romans enjoying a summer vacation in the Italian countryside. It actually reminded me a lot of The Great Gatsby. Over the course of the book, their host tells them the story of Spartacus's failed rebellion (which happened before their time). It's an awkward way to tell the story about the evils of slavery, but it almost pays off in the ending.

At the close of the story, their host finally takes the young people to (the Roman equivalent) of a garment factory, where he shows them scores of malnourished, dirty people working around the clock to make his bank account fat and happy. The young Romans, of course, are shocked to learn that not one of the people in the sweatshop is a slave; while Spartacus's attempt to end slavery had failed, the practice was dying nonetheless, as savvy capitalists had realized that minimum wage laborers (many of them freed slaves) cost less and worked harder with fewer complaints than slaves kept in the shops and fields against their will. It was an unusually grim, dystopian ending for a historical fiction novel.

Though I largely hated the book for consuming my winter break, I always found that ending fascinating, and it's helped me understand a lot about modern history - primarily it helped me to understand that oppression doesn't require chains or whips, and that its most subtle forms are often the most enduring.  

So, I wanted to write a story that tackled some of those same ideas through a modern lens, adding in the component of intersectionality. Modern society isn't a simple contest of us vs. them, black vs. white, man vs. woman, but rather a sort of points system, in which you get 'privilege points' for certain luck-of-the-draw attributes. It's a robust system, resistant not simply to change, but even to notice. Someone who's scored, let's say a 5 out of 10 on that points system is playing against the same stacked deck as someone who's scored 1 out of 10, but because they got luckier with the hand they were dealt, they're much less likely to see the house's game. I think that, being neither fortunate nor unfortunate, those people don't really see the role of luck in their lives, and because of that, they struggle to understand the idea of 'privilege.' From their point-of-view, everyone has what they deserve. After all, considering the alternative would raise an uncomfortable question: "Do I deserve what I have?"

I guess I wanted to poke that hornets' nest a little, but I didn't want to write a book actually set in the real world. The way I see it, if someone can't see the problems in the world they live in, they aren't likely to see those problems in a book showing them that same world (or they're going to cross the street to avoid that book). Set those injustices against an incongruous or exaggerated backdrop, however, and the reader might be more open to what you're trying to say, and might think about those ideas a bit more critically than they would otherwise.

Or maybe that book would just provide a cathartic experience for the people who already 'get it' - I decided that would be okay too.

So, I initially chose a fairy tale setting and format, with overt satire, and a dragon serving as a metaphor for those few Americans who make money off of having money. I'm not talking about the millionaire doctors, lawyers, or athletes. I'm talking about the multi-billionaires who make a dramatic show of donating a trivial portion of their wealth to their own charity so that it can buy a private jet for them to use. The people who publicize flashy, grand gestures, rather than actually contribute to society by paying fair taxes or even just spending their money on lots of ridiculous, hedonistic things made by American workers.

I started the book in January of 2013, but dropped it due to an especially rough year of graduate school, and a sense that the satire might not play as well as I hoped - it would just be too thick. Then, in December of 2014, this interview aired, and I decided - you know, maybe that idea could have worked after all. I went back to the book; I scaled back the fairy tale prose and wrote it more as a historical fiction novel, recounting a tale from a world a bit more similar to ours - a world with universities, coffee shops, and massive debts. 

As in the United States, overt slavery and feudal serfdom are non-existent in Caelia. Though there is a nominal monarchy in Caelia, the power of wealth supersedes any notion of divine right by blood. People are educated in schools - at a cost. Effective healthcare is available - at a cost. Law enforcement is divided between noble, under-appreciated protectors and violent bullies, with little oversight to differentiate them. People complain about paying taxes while also complaining about the state of their public roads, and there are a lot of people who will accept someone ****ing on them from above if they feel like they have someone beneath them to **** on themselves. (That's the premise of trickle-down economics, right?)

On the other hand, there are some very important differences from reality. Most significantly, violence is a much more tangible source of problems in Caelia than in the United States, and it's also a much more reasonable response to those problems. Highwaymen are a real threat, and no one thinks too much of it if you kill some bandits or monsters. It is, after all, a fantasy story, and being cavalier with violence is just part of the genre, right? Batman refuses to kill the Joker because it would be crossing a terrible line, but Legolas and Gimli not only kill without remorse or hesitation, they treat killing as a competitive sport; it even becomes part of a beautiful subplot about interracial male bonding.

Fantasy plays by different rules, even compared to other forms of fiction.

Fantasy also gives you a lot of room in your dialogue - after all it's somewhat silly to accept that people in a fantastical realm completely unrelated to ours speak English, but then question how they speak that English.

Given that freedom, and because so many of the themes in the book are drawn from the modern world, I wanted the characters to speak like people their age do now. Their cadence, informality, and even a little bit of their slang is modern. I felt it was an important part of the setting the book's tone. Modern communication is inextricable from the conflicts between the cynical and the hopeful, between the deniers and the 'woke SJWs', and between those who are condescending and those who are... actually, there's no real dichotomy there - communication in our world is basically 50 Shades of Disdain.

Because it was so important to me that the characters speak 'normally,' one of the hardest decisions I made was actually to trim down the four-letter words; I feel like the language in the book now is unrealistically clean for any time period, but I wanted to broaden the accessibility of the book, and 'curse words' are, strangely, a real deal-breaker for some people. Hopefully, that decision didn't significantly undermine my millennial snark.

Of course, there is a downside with the modern language; fiction never provides a complete picture of the world surrounding a story, so we tend to play fill in the blanks by making associations to what is in the story. In order to envision the world a story takes place in, I think a lot of readers look for certain benchmarks to align the setting to a real place and time in world history. I think readers look for thou, thee, verily, and wouldst to help them imagine a world with castles and swordsmen.

But then, Caelia (and the larger world it exists in), doesn't align with any particular time and place. Partly, that's because the amenities that define an era cost money, and Caelia has little. Kingstown bears some similarities to 15th century Europe (e.g., printing presses, plate armor). People from less fortunate areas, though, look at that sort of thing the way I looked at the touch screens in Jurassic Park as a child. Or Crystal Pepsi; I guess you can never really guess what's going to catch on.

But even considering that variation, the presence of magic and alien cultures have given Caelia's world a very different progression. For example:

• Ailments and injuries are treated with foul tasting potions and treatments, but these aren't the primitive hokum of medieval Europe; they work as intended (usually), sometimes better than 21st century medicine. It's like living in a world where a bottle of Pepto can heal a gut wound, but a cancer diagnosis is vague and posthumous.

• While no one is carrying a Glock under his doublet, a highly proficient spell-caster can summon fire or lightning in the palm of her hand. Quite unlike medieval Europe or modern America, Caelia exists in a world in which a post graduate education is required to effectively conceal and carry a deadly weapon. 

• Ochsner's people are incredibly knowledgeable about many of the physical sciences, but do not apply that knowledge in all the ways they could. The dwarves have never achieved an industrial revolution, due to a cultural insistence on everything being artisanal.

Admittedly, even my "immersion-meter" (as MXR might call it) twitched a fair bit when writing the book. Like casual violence, however, anachronism and alien cultures are part of the fantasy genre; shirtless barbarians rub elbows with knights in 15th century plate armor, while 19th century ninjas assassinate 10th century emperors aboard 16th century ships.

If my wife is to be believed, the best example may be T. H. White's (1938) The Sword in the Stone: it doesn't just have anachronisms, the narrator stops to identify them for the reader, and to explain why they're there.

But R. E. Howard's Conan series certainly gives some stern competition: Conan features many civilizations based on real world nations, but with no regard for contemporaneity. That includes two civilizations based on the Roman Empire - one thriving and one long dead. Basically, Conan's world includes Schroedinger's Rome. 

And then there's J. R. R. Tolkien, who turned anachronism into a thing of beauty. Owing to his books' intense level of detail, one barely gives any thought to hobbits wearing 17th century waist coats, keeping time with 18th century French mantel clocks, and smoking tobacco (or something), while their neighbors to the southeast huddle in mead halls and use trebuchets to fight off vat-grown genetically engineered armies armed with black powder explosives. 

I feel like we were really only one, harsh edit away from Return of the King ending this way:

One does not simply walk into Mordor without a cyborg super-soldier.