Babel Clash

Pyr Books editor Lou Anders pointed out to me that one thing James and I have in common is our tendency to ground our fantasy worlds in the real world through a series of “nebulous connections.” I think that’s a fair assessment, certainly for me, and definitely in Midwinter.

Something I try to do with my fantasy writing, with varying degrees of success, is to make the settings as “realistic” as possible. This does two important things: it helps the reader buy into the world, by showing them things that they already know to be real; and it allows for a bit of narrative shorthand: you don’t have to describe things that the reader’s already familiar with as thoroughly, thus ameliorating the inevitable bogging-down of fantasy literature with endless descriptions of made-up things.

There are two variations on the theme that writers have gotten the most mileage out of. There’s the human transported into the fantasy world, of which there are so many examples it seems pointless to name any, and the background influence of the real world in the fantasy world itself.

Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry books. The Narnia books. I’m sure we could easily come up with a hundred other examples of regular folks who end up in fantastic settings. The usefulness of this particular trope is that it provides us with people who share our basic point of view, who don’t understand the world around them and, thus, require the characters in that world to explain things to them and, more to the point, the reader. So you kill two birds with one stone: you get a “relatable” protagonist, and you purchase your expository passages a bit more effectively.

The other variation is the influence of our own world on the fantasy setting. Gene Wolfe’s astonishingly good Book of the New Sun is a perfect example. It’s set on a future earth so removed in time from our own that it has become a fantasy world. That gives Wolfe the ability to pepper the narrative with things we recognize, and ground the language of the book in reality. I read somewhere that every word used in Book of the New Sun is an actual English word, however old or obscure.

In Midwinter, I tried to do both, bringing a guy named Brian into Faerie and injecting the world and language with as much recognizable trim as I could.

I was hesitant at first to bring in my human character, because while the “human in a fantasy world” trope has been done very well, it’s also been done a million times, and often poorly. Examples of it falling flat that spring to mind are Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, in which the “real world” sections stick out like an ugly sore thumb,” and the opening of Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, which grates against the compelling alternate world in the previous book. Perhaps the misstep (or my subjective experience of one) is that the author already went to a great deal of trouble to establish another world, and now has plain old mundane humans pointing out how not-real it actually is.

Anyway, I went ahead and created this fellow, Brian Satterly. But I tried to do a couple of interesting things with him. For one thing, he isn’t the protagonist. Like Dante in Clerks, he’s not even supposed to be there. He came over from our world to rescue his niece, who’d been changeling’d, and gotten stuck. He has no prophecy to fulfill, no greater destiny. He’s also been in the world for a few years when we meet him, so he’s not goggling, wide-eyed at everything around him. And he’s not a hero; he’s just as scared and worried and useleess as you or I would be in his shoes. Within a few days of entering Narnia, Peter & Co. are wielding swords and killing goblins and wolves left and right, which didn’t seem fair-play of Lewis to me. Satterly never learns to use a sword; he just doesn’t have it in him.

Now, the world. The Fae language used (sparingly) in the book is a refinement of a long-ago patois combining a totally made up language based on Indo-European, with a number of Middle English and French loan words and spellings. There are casual references to the human world, which is called the Nymaen world. And that very word is kind of a linguistic mission statement: “Ny” is the genetive case of the (invented) Thule Fae word for “place” or “home”, and “maen” is the Old English word for “man.”

(One of the curses of being a fantasy writer is that you are compelled to spend hour after hour coming up with clever languages and backtories for things, and then must constantly restrain yourself from telling your readers how clever you are by explaining it in the text. Because your readers probably don’t care. (Have you read the Silmarillion? I haven’t.))

Likewise, the names of other things, including the world of Faerie itself, are lifted liberally from folklore and mythology. This has been done plenty of times and is nothing original. But it’s the very fact that it’s recognizeable that makes it so useful. As I mentioned in a previous post, nobody needs to have “elf” explained to them, so not only do you get the concept, but you can immediately start playing against it.

Writing fantasy is a fairly tricky business. It’s difficult to do well, or originally, being derivative almost by definition. You have to take whatever legs up you can manage, and the judicious injection of reality into fantasy is just one of the tools in the toolbox.

James, what’s your take on this? How do you get away with it, and why? What’s the allure of the real world to you?

Related posts:

• A Letter in the Desk
  It looks like we’re out of here, to make room for the next duo, or group, or solo act of writers to come along and pontificate. In the American presidency it has become a tradition for outgoing presidents to leave a letter in the desk for the new, incoming president....
• Next guests & IO9 Book Club
  Our next guests at Babel Clash are Matthew Sturges and James Enge. Matthew is the author of the novel Midwinter and is also the writer for comic and graphic novel series House of Mystery and co-writer of Jack of Fables. James is the author of Blood of Ambrose, and its...
• Influence and Labels
  Thinking back over influences got me thinking about how the things we like don't just influence our style; they also influence how we define what it is that we do and what its place in the overall culture is. I don't think there's been any greater influence on my writing...
• Before you go…
  James, Matt and Bill, You’ve spoken a lot about influences.  What might developing writers find to be most influential in your own new books?  Can you speak to how or why Midwinter,  This Crooked Way and Peter & Max might prove influential on impressionable young minds? ...
• Things Midwinter Taught Me
  I pondered this question all weekend. What lessons could Midwinter teach aspiring writers? The self-flagellating artist in me immediately responds, “Nothing. It’s a mediocre book at best; derivative, not descriptive enough, goes off on a far-too-wide tangent about 2/3 through. If aspiring writers were to learn anything from it, it...