Reblog: On Dothraki and House Elves: Developing Fantasy Cultures, from Dan Koboldt

My attention was drawn today to an excellent guest blog on Dan Koboldt's site, written by sociologist Hannah Emery, explaining why cultures don't just sit still so that fantasy writers can present each culture as a single, unchanging entity.

This is a message I've been trying to get over to fantasy writers for many years in blogs like Messy Worlds Rule OK, only expressed with eloquence and a great deal of expertise. I'd encourage everyone interested in fantasy cultures (or real-world ones, for that matter) to read the article, and then to explore this excellent blog further.

The only point I'd add to it, as I've pointed out in a comment, is that another crucial driving-force of cultural development is always going to be trade, which seems to be a fundamental human instinct.

You can read Hannah's article here.

What Is Civilisation?

If you write secondary world fantasy, the chances are that you'll be creating civilisations for your stories. It's possible, of course, to write exclusively about nomadic hunter-gatherers, but most fantasy involves civilised nations and cities.

So what is civilisation? We all know it when we see it — or do we? Most of us (and this certainly includes me) talk about customs and behaviour we approve of as "civilised" and those we disapprove of as "uncivilised". It's even possible, the way the word's generally used, to argue that those nomadic hunter-gatherers might be more "civilised" than us.

That's not what the word means, though. It's nothing to do with how a society treats its people, whether it's spiritually aligned with its environment, or even whether people are polite to one another. Fundamentally, a civilisation is a society that has cities.

It's a lot more complex than that, of course. Perhaps the best way to define what civilisation is would be to define what factors cause its development.

Food Surplus & Specialisation

The first stage to a civilisation developing is, quite simply, that a society produces more food than it needs. It's simple, when you think about it. If it takes every man, woman and child's work simply to prevent the community from starving, that's all they're going to do. They'll get other things done in what little spare time they have, whether that's making clothes or repairing tools, and they may even have just enough energy left to make music or tell tales in the evening, but no more.

If there's a food surplus, though, everything's different. The person who's best at mending tools will start mending everyone's tools, and they'll have enough spare food to give to this person in return. The same for the person who's best at making clothes. Then again, if you have more food than you need for now, you'll need somewhere to keep it, and specialists will start making pots and other containers.

Before you know it, you'll be realising there are all kinds of other services you don't know how you lived without. Perhaps, eventually, you might even start giving someone food so they can concentrate on making the music or telling the stories.

Merchants and Traders

So you've started swapping your spare food for services your neighbours can offer, but you still have some left. What else can you do with it?

Well, the chances are your area won't produce everything you could possibly want. Perhaps another region has different food you'd like to try. Perhaps it produces some material that makes better clothes. Perhaps it's a little in advance of you and has wonderful manufactured goods to sell.

Trade seems to go back a very long way — there's evidence of it in Palaeolithic times, long before civilisation — but certainly the food surplus and the growth of specialisation gives it a new impetus. Before long, you're relying on all kinds of imported products, and producing many other goods besides food to export.

Towns and Organisation

It's all a bit of a mess, though. Specialist craftworkers are scattered through countless villages; merchants have to make long journeys just to gather up their merchandise, and outside traders have to do the same to find buyers.

Sooner or later, centres begin to grow up. These may be the most prosperous villages, and the specialists will gradually gather there, while these places can conveniently act as trading centres, with produce brought in and merchants doing their deals in a fixed place.

Eventually, these growing towns will cease to take part at all in food production, and must rely on being fed by the villages that still do produce the food. This takes organisation, as does having such a large number of people living in close proximity, not to mention the foreigners coming in to exchange goods. Someone has to run all this, and usually this results in the emergence of a king and the people he relies on for support. Not always, though: for instance, some ancient cities — such as Mohenjo-daro on the Indus (above) — seem to have been ruled by merchant oligarchies.

Going to War

Warfare, in a very general sense, may predate civilisation, and it's possible its motivation could have been as a substitute for the Palaeolithic tribal hunts, which had become impractical when large prey like the mammoth died out. War certainly gives the same opportunities — communal strategy, action and comradeship, together with the chance for young men to show individual feats of skill and courage.

Early warfare, though, was probably small-scale raiding, and it took organised civilisation to initiate wars of conquest or ideology. In many cases, the ruling classes would be specialists in war, although it doesn't seem to have been a universal practice. Some civilisations — like Mohenjo-daro again — seem to have relied on commercial influence rather than force of arms, while there's evidence of others, such as the Olmec, using ritual games rather than war to settle disputes.

Still, the growth of warfare is usually part of the growth of a civilisation. Whether it relied on a specialist military class, or whether the citizen body was militarised, the city or kingdom would have prepared for war.

Religion, Ritual and Monuments

A fundamental requirement of any stable society is that most of its members must get something out of it. Not everyone, necessarily — if it's a slave-based economy, for instance — but if the majority of the population don't feel invested in the system, it's unlikely to last.

This can often be achieved through religious rituals. Like war, religion is older than civilisation, but it seems to have been when it was brought into organised cities that it developed codes and hierarchies. Where before you might have made a personal offering to the guardian spirits of a place, you now took part in communal ceremonies that both affirmed that you were part of something greater and taught you what you place was in that greater whole.

Not all communal rituals are overtly religious, although often religion lies behind them. The Athenian theatre was a crucial ritual to bring the city together, and a whole range of sports have been important in forging a sense of unity and cultural identity. As they still are, of course.

Monuments tend to fulfil the same kind of need, whether they're religious or political in nature (or both, of course). The real cultural of significance of the great monuments, from Stonehenge (left) to the Pyramids, is that they'd be impossible without a massive level of organisation. It's not only the logistics, but also the ability to take vast numbers of workers — slave or free — out of food production and feed them while they're building.

The size and permanence of many of these monuments may be a statement by rulers or priests, but they're also a source of national pride, a statement by the whole civilisation of their importance.

The Rise and Fall of Civilisation

Most of us think of history in chunks. We learn that the "end of the Roman period" was 476 AD (or 410 in Britain) and that mean that Roman civilisation vanished and was replaced by something unrelated. And it can seem even more like that when we have only archaeological snapshots here and there, as in the pre-Columbian Americas, or the early Middle East.

Now, I'm not saying that civilisations never disappear completely, but what usually happens is that they go into a decline and then mutate into something different. A civilisation, as we've seen, is only as good as what it offers most of its people. If it's no longer offering the prosperity and communal pride it did before, the people are going to look elsewhere for their model.

This certainly happened to Roman civilisation. The empire had been in decline for a very long time before the 5th century, and it would have been completely unrecognisable to Augustus, who founded it. Economic recession was making the cities gradually less viable, resulting in more and more "Romans" (a largely meaningless term by then, since few had any connection with Italy) moving to the country, either to own estates or to work on them.

This change in lifestyle gathered pace, until the cities, if not entirely abandoned, became peripheral to the culture. At the same time, other peoples and their cultures — the so-called barbarians — were looking far more attractive. In any case, by now many people were subjects of barbarian warlords, so they gradually began to learn the new languages, wear new types of clothes, convert to the new religions.

By the time the cities were growing again and civilisation was back, the descendants of the "Romans" were identifying themselves as "English", "Franks" or a whole variety of other peoples. Their cultures looked different, but they hadn't arisen out of nothing, and much of what was useful from Roman civilisation had slipped seamlessly into the new order.

There's a Catch?

It's not actually quite as simple as I've made it seem. You wouldn't really expect it to be, would you, when we're talking about human beings?

In reality, civilisation doesn't always behave the way we'd expect. It's always been assumed, for example, that the first cities developed as centres for an agricultural hinterland, yet the earliest walled city known (the oldest phase of Jericho, around 9400 BC) dates from before agriculture had fully developed. This was the Mesolithic era, a transitional phase when hunting was mutating into herding and gathering into growing. Perhaps Jericho's importance was actually as a centre for trading hides. Or maybe it was a stock town, if herding had developed enough.

Jericho is the earliest city to have been found, but there's circumstantial evidence that the fertile plain that's today the Sahara Desert may have also been developing towards civilisation at a similar time. Of course, any remains that might have been left would be buried deep under the sands, and it can't be automatically assumed that getting on the road to civilisation will always result in the finished product.

In any case, can we always recognise civilisation from the remains? Stone buildings are pretty difficult to dispute, but more perishable materials such as brick, wood or earth can serve contemporary needs just as well, and are no less "civilised". The culture that built Stonehenge, for instance, undoubtedly had the social organisation and the food surplus to undertake the venture, but as far as we know they built no cities. Were they simply a different kind of cities that have left no trace? Or did that particular society use the building-blocks of civilisation in a radically different way?

Perhaps most intriguing of all, there's evidence of places — in central France, for instance — where at periods of the Palaeolithic era, long before agriculture or cities, societies not only seemed to have had specialisation and trade, but to have had them on an almost industrial scale. Was this a lost civilisation, long before any civilisation should have existed? Or was it a culture that had some of the conditions of civilisation but never developed civilisation itself? It's doubtful that we'll ever know, but it's intriguing to speculate.

Still, in spite of the exceptions, the rule still more or less stands. If you want to create a convincing civilisation for your secondary world, the chances are it'll have had these preconditions — food surplus, specialisation, trade — and will have developed at least most of the typical characteristics — cities, social organisation, hierarchy, warfare, religion, social rituals and monuments.

And, from there on, each one will be unique. That's the joy of history.

The Economics of Magic Kingdoms

If you took a poll of all the fantasy writers you know, asking them to list the top ten useful things to know about for writing fantasy, I doubt if any of them would include economics. Come to that, I doubt if many would include it in their top hundred.

Why would they? Economics seems emblematic of all that grey mundanity we read and write fantasy to get away from. I'm no different: I have to make an effort not to switch off when the economic news comes on.

Economics, though, isn't an obscure, arcane lore known only to five and a half people (none of whom are in the government). The word actually means housekeeping, and it's part of all our lives. Every time you go into a shop or click on a buy link; every time your employer pays you for the work you've done in the past month; every time you sit down with your bank statement and work out if you'll have enough left this month for that holiday, or to buy the latest series of A Game of Thrones: that's all economics.

More than that, though: economics has been a fundamental part of human behaviour throughout the history of our species. Paleolithic man traded and even had factories *, and finds from at least one of the early Neolithic towns in the middle east have included clay chips that may have been primitive money. Come to that, towns themselves are an economic institution. They might also have a defensive function, but their main purpose is to provide a convenient nexus for crafts and trade.

All the great civilisations from which fantasy draws inspiration, from Egypt under the Pharoahs to Renaissance Europe, were built on an economy. It's no exaggeration to say that you can't have any organised society without economics.

I'm not an economist, and an expert would probably find holes in what follows big enough for a dragon to fly through. I'm not trying to give a lecture, though, merely suggest areas to think about and research further when creating your world.

Broadly speaking, economics divides into three areas. A society must be able to obtain resources, most importantly food, but also minerals, building materials and other things. It must have a system that allows it to acquire and exploit the resources in a mutually beneficial way **. And it must have a system that allows it to exchange its surplus resources for items it can't get directly — in other words, trade.

If you examine a map of the real world, you'll find that there's usually a reason for important towns and cities to be where they are. Often this will be the interface between a fertile hinterland and easy transport for trade. The prosperous civilisation that flourished in the Mississippi basin at the same time as mediaeval Europe, for instance, had its great city at the point where the Mississippi and Missouri meet. Centuries later, the European settlers built St Louis in exactly the same place. The position is ideal, both to dominate an excellent agricultural region and to access all the main waterways in the centre of the continent.

It's not always food, although a city without easy access to food would need something spectacular going for it ***. Mining is always a vital industry, and some other industries thrive in specific locations. The English cotton industry in the Industrial Revolution, for instance, was centred in east Lancashire because the climate and landscape made the area ideal for cotton mills.

Economic richness can have a downside, though. The main reason for the Roman conquest of Britain wasn't self-aggrandising empire-building, it was because Britain is (or was, at least) unusually rich in mineral resources: tin and coal especially (less glamorous than gold, but far more useful) but many others too.

In fantasy novels, empires tend to expand because the king is obsessed with matching the conquests of his forebears, or because their religion has a crusading mission, or because they believe in civilising the barbarians. All of these are certainly reasons for empire-building — for public consumption, certainly — but the underlying reason is almost always because the conquered land has something the empire needs, or at least wants.

Wars are much the same: competition either for resources or to control important trade routes. Again, these aren't the reasons given, the cause used to rouse soldiers to leave their homes and fight to the death. They believe they're fighting for civilisation, for right, for the glory of their nation or their religion. In fact, they're almost always fighting for the economy.

The economy's social contract can be difficult to define, but is perhaps the most ubiquitous aspect. The contract may be a utopian system where each gives what they can and takes what they need, but the chances are it will be very unequal. The European feudal system is often seen as oppression pure and simple — and it was sometimes, especially at the stage when it had outlived its use — but the essential point was that the peasants got to keep a little of their harvest, at least, without the nearest robber-band taking it all from them, and the knights and lords were fed and could specialise in protection. It didn't always work properly, but that was the theory, anyway.

The basic arrangement is about who does the work and who gets what out of it. Even the most wretched peasants or industrial workers get something, if not much, for the simple reason that without enough to eat they can't work. Usually, though, it's more two sided than that.

Your city or kingdom in a fantasy world will have many people living their lives, and sometimes that will impinge on even the most single-minded band of adventurers. The inn they stay at will be owned by someone who has an arrangement (normally financial) with the people who serve the drinks, prepare the food and wash the dishes afterwards. The blacksmith who reshoes the adventurers' horses will have set his prices so he can cover the cost of his materials and have enough left over to buy food for himself and his family; although in a fairly primitive society, he may simply trade his work for the food itself.

Trade is the lifeblood of any civilisation, and the people who pursue it will be important in your fantasy culture, whether they adventure into the wild to obtain something in high demand (like the trappers of North America) or run a shop or market stall to sell goods from afar to their fellow-citizens. Along with local resources, prevailing trades will affect the look and feel of your culture. All those clothes, jewellery, ornaments, weapons and rare spices must have come from somewhere, and if they aren't local, it must be feasible that they could have been brought there by merchants.

This, as I say, isn't a lesson on how it works, just an encouragement to think about an often-neglected aspect of world-making. I'm obviously not suggesting you should draw up a detailed, complex economic plan for your world, any more than I'd suggest fully creating all the languages spoken in it — unless, of course, you really, really love doing that.  But, along with the geography and history and religion and customs of your lands and peoples, it's worth giving some thought about how their economies fit together.

Because, in fact, it's intimately related to all the other aspects.

 

* One, in the Dordogne region of France, seems to have used a (metaphorical) conveyor-belt system with strict division of labour to make high-class, decorated clothing. Judging by the archaeological finds, they traded all over Europe.

** Of course, the benefits won't necessarily be equal, but even ground-down peasants will normally get something out of the arrangement. The exception is slave-based societies, where a section of the population gets no benefit at all.

*** The royal seat of the Hittite Empire bucks the trend. Build purely for strength, defensibility and impressiveness, it stood high in the mountains, far from any agricultural land or trade routes. However, this was after the tribute had started pouring in from the four fertile corners of the empire, enabling the capital to survive without producing.

Fantasy and Religion

Religion and fantasy: they go together like "Attila" and "the Hun", don't they?  I'm not talking about peddling a religious message, though some do, but don't all secondary-world fantasies feature religion?

Well, yes and no.  Many feature gods and priests, but that's not exactly the same thing.  In fact, I'd go as far as to say that fantasy works which portray the gods of their world are less likely to involve actual religion than those which don't.  Religion is a human institution, although one that's present in almost all cultures in one form or another — even societies that are militantly secular tend to replace religion with something parallel — whereas as soon as gods are portrayed as individuals who can be spoken to, their religious status tends to take a back seat to their status as characters.  Religion is about belief and worship, not about whether you can share a drink in the pub with your god.

With the presence of priests, we should be on firmer footing.  They are, after all, humans upholding a human institution, which is all very well as long as there's an institution for them to hold up.  Many fantasy writers do portray the religions of their societies, but often priests will appear in isolation, usually performing unspeakable rites involving half-naked female victims which the hero is just in time to stop, but there's no sense of any religious infrastructure.  The focus is on the evil god, who invariably makes an appearance, and the priest is simply a plot device to get the god to materialise.

Now, there's nothing wrong with any of this.  I enjoy it as much as the next person when Conan or some similar hero battles with sinister, black-robed, shaven-headed priests of blasphemous gods.  I enjoy reading about gods squabbling among themselves, or manifesting themselves in the mortal world.  I've used these plot devices myself.

It's just that they're not religion.

The first fantasy writer to take the formal mythology approach (unless we count William Blake, whose pantheon was mainly meant to represent aspects of the human psyche) was Lord Dunsany, whose 1905 book The Gods of Pegana was less a collection of stories than a series of sketches of the various gods and goddesses of a fictional pantheon, worshipped in a secondary world.  He did subsequently write stories about the lands in which those gods were worshipped, but seemed to lose interest in this and moved on to worlds that have complex relationships with ours.

Few authors went quite to this extent, although Tolkien's Valaquenta (included in The Silmarillion) is a similar work, but many invented gods for their characters to invoke — Conan always swears by Crom, for instance.  Other early fantasy writers were content to reuse existing religions.  Those who wrote alternative versions of mediaeval Europe, like William Morris, simply had a Christian background, while others used the Greek or Norse gods.  James Branch Cabell went further, plundering Celtic, Russian and Indian mythology, among others.

More recent authors have often created impressive pantheons for their works, such as Moorcock's Lords of Law and Chaos, but it's less common (though by no means unknown) for the actual religions of those gods to be explored in fantasy.  Tolkien, for instance, created a pantheon of lesser gods (or angelic powers, as he'd probably have preferred to call them) beneath Iluvatar, the One, but he shows no ritual or worship directed towards any of them, beyond occasional Elven songs in praise of Elbereth (whom some of them, of course, would have known her personally).

This probably wasn't an accident.  Tolkien, a committed Christian, would have likely felt uncomfortable if his good characters had worshipped in anything other than a Christian manner, but his setting precluded Christian worship — just as he criticised Lewis for having Christmas in Narnia, which couldn't possibly have the same religious background as our world. Tolkien dealt with the issue by having no religion.

So what is religion?  And what are the most usual forms of its manifestation?

As I said earlier, religion is first and foremost a human institution, consisting of rituals, laws and creeds whose essential purpose is to fulfil the spiritual needs and desires of ordinary people.  Whether you believe that one (or more) of our real-world religions is literally true, or whether you believe with Marx that religion is the opium of the masses, is entirely up to you, and this piece isn't trying to convince you one way or another.

In practice, though, the nature of a religion is essentially the same, whether it's complete truth or complete fabrication.  It's about people.  A bunch of sinister priests skulking in a temple doesn't make a religion — that's made by the beliefs held by the mass of the people affected by it, and the ways in which it affects how they live their lives.  Religion is a communal institution, not an elite one.

Broadly speaking, there are four types of religion: animistic, traditional, revealed and non-theistic.  This, of course, is a gross simplification, and many religions fall between the cracks of these categories, but it's good enough for a general picture.

Animism, put very simply, is the belief that there are spirits everywhere, and they all need to be respected, appeased or defended against.  An animist might need to placate the spirit of a tree he needs to fell or the animal he's hunting, or simply the spirit of a place where he wants to do anything.  And some spirits may be malevolent, and so he needs protection against them.

Animism is usually fairly low on organisation, and it tends to be presented in fantasy among primitive tribes — the "noble savage" who lives in close accord with nature.  There's some justification in this, but animism isn't necessarily simple.  Indeed, it frequently makes far more demands than other religions on the individual, and far more complex ones.  The systems of obligations and taboos arising from the Australian Dreamtime mythology, which is broadly animist, can be complex in the extreme.

A "traditional" religion (my term) is usually polytheistic, involving a pantheon of gods and rituals that have grown up organically over thousands of years.  It's likely to have ultimately grown out of animism, but the big difference is that it features temples, priests and hierarchies, as well as probably more communal worship than animism.  This kind of religion is usually seen (and presented in fantasy) in a very formalised way: you have the god of the sky, the god of war, the goddess of love and so on. 

In fact, this tends to be a late rationalisation by poets of a very much more messy

affair.  The Greek gods (the best-known example) actually all had numerous aspects, names and characteristics, many very different from the familiar ones.  Aphrodite, for instance, is normally thought of as the goddess of love and beauty, but she was originally a sea goddess, an aspect which survived into the familiar story of her birth from the sea-foam. 

It would be difficult for a fantasy writer to fully portray this in a secondary world, and most rationalised pantheons work well enough, but it would certainly give the religion a more realistic feel to make it a little less cut and dried, with conflicting cults in different regions and gods whose remits overlap.  For a feeling of just how messy this can get in reality, try reading The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, which covers all the conflicting beliefs, besides suggesting their origins in cult and ritual.

Polytheistic traditional religions seem to have a way of evolving towards monotheism (whether or not they actually reach it) as the society grows more sophisticated.  Judaism appears to have begun as polytheistic before evolving into henotheism, a belief in one god's superiority rather than uniqueness (Thou shalt have no other god before me, rather than Thou shalt not believe any other god exists).  It appears to have reached a stage of full monotheism around the period of the Captivity in Babylon.  It came into contact at this time with the Persian religion Zoroastrianism, which was evolving from a traditional religion into a dualistic system (Light against Dark), and it's reasonable to suppose they influenced each other.

At around the same time, the more intellectual among the Greeks were gradually relegating their mass of gods to the level of the Judaic angels (who themselves may have once been regarded as lesser gods) and setting up a single supreme being, although they didn't agree on its identity: Zeus, the One or the Demiurge.  It would be interesting to tackle this tendency in a fantasy setting where a society with a traditional religion has reached the sophistication level of, say, classical Greece.  In any case, realism suggests that a society's religion should have evolved over many centuries, whereas many fantasy religions seem to have been stuck since year zero.

Revealed or messianic religions, usually but not inevitably monotheistic, are those founded by a charismatic individual believed to have access to a deeper religious truth than others.  This figure might be regarded as divine or as an inspired mortal prophet — of the two best-known examples in our world, one regards its messiah as god, the other considers that very idea blasphemous.

Revealed religions are likely to have at least as much structure, hierarchy and communal ritual as traditional religions, but they also tend to place a far greater emphasis on the individual, and particularly on individual morality.  On the whole (and, again, this is a broad generalisation) traditional religions are more concerned with rules and taboos than with morals.  This can be seen in Greek attitudes.  Oedipus, for instance, wasn't punished because he'd sinned — his "sins" were, after all, committed in complete ignorance — but because he'd broken two fundamental taboos, and his motives for doing so were irrelevant.  The Greeks didn't really start taking an interest in personal morality until the time of Socrates.

Revealed religion tends to be a lot more rare in fantasy than traditional religion, and when it does occur it's often portrayed in rather simple terms, as a crusade by a fanatical priest.  The best-known example of a full portrayal (lying on the borders between SF and fantasy) is Frank Herbert's Dune series, although Shardik by Richard Adams also tackles this idea.

Most real-world religions are based around belief in one or more deities, although these figures can range from the supreme being of the universe to local tutelary spirits, but some treat gods largely as irrelevant — notably Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.  Such non-theistic religions may evolve beliefs in beings that take the place of gods, such as the buddhas and bodhisattvas of Buddhism, or they may respect traditional gods side by side with their own teachings.  They may also engage in communal rituals, but they're essentially about the moral and spiritual development of the individual, rather than about collective worship.

In some ways, this comes full circle from the animist position, in that both tend to concentrate on the individual's behaviour, but the similarity ends there, for the most part.  Where animism, like traditional religions, is about placating beings in ways that might be entirely arbitrary, non-theistic religions generally regard the individual's behaviour as internally important, whether for their moral or spiritual development.

In the modern world, in particular, non-theistic structures often take the place of god-based religion for individuals or whole communities, whether the belief is in a state, an ideology or a sports team.  It's unlikely that this kind of institution would loom very large in a more traditional secondary-world fantasy, since those kind of societies tend to still retain their more established religions, but the moral/spiritual-based style of religion could be used more.

First and foremost, religion tends to be seen not in its hierarchy and certainly not in its gods, but in the effect it has on people's characters and everyday lives.  Their behaviour, and their reaction to the behaviour of others, will be informed by the rules of their religion, whether those rules are ritualised or morally based.  The round of their lives will be affected by everything from religious duties to festivals and holy days to the very language they use.  A society's religion permeates everything.

 

As I said at the beginning, I'm certainly not discouraging any fantasy writer from showing us their gods as people, or from having sinister priests skulking in corners and sacrificing virgins.  But the world we're shown will be that much more realistic if we can see the religion itself, not just its trappings.

Spire City: Guest Post by Daniel Ausema

One of the best authors I have the privilege to know — though only through the medium of the interwebs — is the Colorado writer Daniel Ausema.  Dan has a stunning ability to come up with strange and wonderful fantasy settings, and his latest venture, being published by Musa Publishing, is his Spire City serial.  Here he is to discuss it.

 

First of all, thanks to Nyki for doing this blog swap. I hope everyone reading this hops on over to Twigs & Brambles to give his post there a read as well.

I've known Nyki through his writing for many years, and one of the things he's done a stellar job on is posts about his worldbuilding process--how to create a secondary world that feels real and believable. One of the big differences in writing between Nyki and me is he has one fabulously invented world that spans thousands of miles and thousands of years, and most of his stories take place within that world. I don't have one world for my stories, preferring to come up with a setting depending on what a given story needs.

Several years ago, I read a wonderful story in one of the pro zines and followed on to the writer's blog. There she had a post with a title along the lines of “Confessions of a serial world-builder.” The writer wrote about how she creates new settings for every story, so that plot and character and setting all rise organically from each other. That resonated with me. I love to imagine new places. I love to evoke the mood and sense of strange cities and unknown lands. And the whimsical and surreal twists of an unknown place often give rise to and develop along with the stories I'm writing.

The danger, though, is that worlds made up on the fly can become thin. If immersion is important in a given story (which isn't always the case, but...), then the bare spots of a poorly imagined setting can work against that and weaken the entire thing. So how do you avoid that?

With my serial fiction project Spire City, I initially wrote a single short story set there. For that, the main character was a banker, and the mood was inspired by Kafka, so those two things affected what I needed to portray of the city. That's the first key. See your setting from the eyes of your characters. (And hear it from their ears, smell it from their nose, etc.) An obvious premise at first glance, but something writers don't always do well. Are the cobbles important to mention? They are if it's something your character would notice. The origin of the stone used to make them? Not so much in this story...and yet I'll keep in mind that it may prove important for some reason. The giant beetles that pull Victorian carriages through the streets? Perhaps. The singers chained to the city's steeples? Absolutely. The economics of how those singers are supported, fed, trained, etc.? In this story that wasn't important to him at first. He noticed the songs and the sounds of their voices. As the story progressed, he found himself needing to learn some of those other aspects, and so the world builds by necessity.

When it came time to do the episodes of Spire City, the banker was gone, as was most of the Kafkaesque mood, and there were going to be numerous characters whose minds would be our windows into the city. So I did spend some time just working through various aspects of the city. Regular, old-fashioned brainstorming. How does the city fit into the broader world? Does it have a local language, a dialect of a broader language, a mixture of languages? This question led to the presence of an immigrant community within the city, which proves important as the series progresses. And other questions helped tease out the various dimensions of the city, past and present.

At a certain level, too, you can have some things that you just present as true. It requires a certain arrogance that just says this is how things are. It was a dozen years ago that I first discovered some of the works that have been labeled New Weird. Part of what I loved about those books was that very sense of apparent arrogance, as if they were saying, “No, this doesn't make sense, but it's how it works anyway.” Because they're presented in the right way, their very improbable-ness is part of the enjoyment.

The last thing is key not just to this question, but to how I approach writing in general. Don't shut any idea down. As you write, give yourself permission to toss out the most random and bizarre thing that comes to mind. World-building, as Nyki has argued here on his blog, ought to be messy. Lines are never straight. People never fit perfectly into our preconceptions, and neither do cities or nations. Sometimes that bizarre thought will lead to an entirely new wrinkle that impacts all the other parts of the story. Sometimes it has little bearing on anything else. Yet even so, those kinds of things help make the setting more real. Even now, as I'm doing final revisions on the season 1 episodes, I find myself excited by new details that seem to come from nowhere and make the world of Spire City more real. Of course the immigrants' cooking consists primarily of a pungent gourd and glazed nuts. Of course Spire City has a tradition of folk tales about people becoming animals and transforming back, stories that will be especially poignant to our protagonists, as their infection is uncontrollable and permanent. (Actually I just came up with that as I wrote this post...but now it has to find its way in somehow...)

Thanks, again, for the chance to come here and for reading. Let me know any other tips you have in the comments, and check out Spire City, Season One: Infected when you get a chance. Episodes 1 and 2 are out, with episode 3 coming on January 10, 2014.

Spire City is home to mighty machines of steam power and clockwork, and giant beetles pull picturesque carriages over cobbled streets, but there is a darker secret behind these wonders. A deadly infection, created by a mad scientist, is spreading through the city, targeting the poor and powerless, turning them slowly into animals. A group of those infected by the serum join together to survive, to trick the wealthy out of their money, and to fight back.

 

Technology in Fantasy - Oxymoron or Opportunity?

How many fantasy writers does it take to change a light-bulb?  None — technology belongs in science fiction.

But does it really?  Leaving aside types of fantasy with more modern-style settings, is fantasy technology really such an oxymoron?  We tend to think of technology in terms of the recent — computers, jet engines, nuclear power stations and the rest — or what we might have in the future, such as warp drives or matter transportation.  We might stretch a point to include devices from the age of steam, but no further.

But that's misunderstanding what technology is.  A water-mill is technology; a suit of armour is technology; a plough is technology.  Hell, even bashing two rocks together to crack nuts could be regarded as technology.  The most successful piece of technology ever invented is arguably the wheel — though the plough might give it a run for its money.

Whatever kind of world you might create, it's going to have technology of some kind, and that means the technology is going to have to make sense.  Inventions aren't made in isolation; sometimes you can't have one thing without another.  The light-bulb (the one fantasy writers won't change) couldn't have been developed before the later 19th century, because it required a near-vacuum inside and depended on the development of high-quality vacuum pumps.

This kind of thing goes on all the time.  One of the most persistent misunderstandings about the ancient world is the belief that the Greeks invented the steam engine, but were too otherworldly to realise its potential, but that misrepresents them.

The first known steam engine was invented by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD.  Called the aeolipile, it was a device that used pressurised steam to make a sphere rotate.  No records survive of it being put to practical use, but it's unlikely that this was pure otherworldliness.  Others of Hero's inventions, such as his force pump, were used, as were many inventions of the Greek world.  Archimedes's famous eureka moment is often seen as a breakthrough in pure physics, but he was actually addressing a very practical problem, while his irrigation screw was so successful that it's still in use for some purposes.

The Greeks were actually a highly practical people, and the Romans even more so.  So why didn't they see the potential of the steam engine?

The answer is that steam production requires huge pressure, and the materials need to be strong enough to withstand this pressure.  The reason steam power became a practical option in the Industrial Revolution was that metallurgy had reached the point that steel could be made strong enough to do the job.  Hero had to make do with inferior iron which, though it would do for occasional demonstrations and "miracles", would have exploded if the aeolipile had been used on an industrial level.  Perhaps it did.

There's a number of these myths about technology in other cultures, especially China.  The Chinese came up with printing long before Europe had it but, we're told, it took Gutenberg to think of using movable type.  Well, not quite.  The Chinese did develop movable-type printing, but it just never caught on.

This is because of the difference between the writing systems.  A European printer needed, with upper and lower case, numerals and punctuation, perhaps seventy or eighty drawers of blocks (a big drawer for e and a rather smaller one for q).  Chinese script has thousands of symbols.  Although systems were developed to make the blocks more accessible, it just took too long.  In that time, you could have etched a whole plate and been on to the next.

A rather different misunderstanding applies to the Chinese use of gunpowder.  Again, they had it long before we did, but supposedly only used it for fireworks, leading some people to regard them as naive, others as more civilised than us.  Actually, by at least the 13th century, if not before, Chinese armies were equipped with bombs and ballistic rockets, and even had a device for launching multiple rockets simultaneously.  The only thing they didn't manage to come up with was the gun as a means of delivery.

These examples illustrate three of the main elements that control what technology a culture might or might not have: the state of the supporting technology, cultural necessities, and mere chance — whether anyone happens to think of the idea.

Even if you're presenting a primitive culture where some genius has come up with the concept of the wheel, the invention will rely on whether he or she has the tools to create a circle of wood.  Or the idea might be there (from using logs as rollers, perhaps) and the challenge is to develop tools and products at the same time.

Technologies affect one another in many ways, and this is especially true in the technology of warfare.  In the mid-mediaeval period, for  instance, when the cutting-edge weapons (erm, sorry) were the sword, lance and mace, chain-mail armour was good enough to give a knight a sporting chance of survival. Crossbows were more deadly, but they took too long to reload to be a serious problem.

Then the longbow came into its own: incredibly fast loading and capable of piercing mail.  The answer was plate armour, but that came at a price.  Many of the French knights felled by arrows at Agincourt actually drowned in the mud of the battlefield, because the weight of their armour prevented them from rising once they were down.

The armourers fought back, developing plate armour that was both light and tough, and this (along with Joan of Arc's inspiration) played a large part in the eventual French victory in the Hundred Years War.  Even this new armour, though, wasn't a match for the hand-held, anti-personnel guns that emerged.  Through the 16th and 17th centuries, armour became increasingly more irrelevant, and was eventually abandoned.

Technology is a vital part of world-making, and it needs as much thought and research as anything.  Of course, unlike the "harder" forms of science fiction, fantasy offers plenty of short-cuts and cheats, and it's sometimes possible simply to create an alternative that doesn't have the same requirements.  You want artificial lighting in a society too primitive to have sophisticated vacuum pumps?  Just call it a glow-globe, and imply that it doesn't work the same as a modern incandescent light-bulb.

And, of course, there are always the standard fantasy get-out-of-jail-free cards: It's the product of magic, and no-one understands how it works or I know it doesn't make sense, but the god who created this world ordained it so.

On the whole, though, it's far more fun if your world makes sense.  That means that the technology needs to make sense too, whether it's a cart, a suit of armour, a ship or a light-bulb.

So, how many fantasy writers does it take to change a glow-globe?

 

(Light-bulb by Trixyrogue)

 

Sisters & Cousins & Aunts: Language Families for Fantasy Writers

Last year, I posted Fantasy Languages for Dummies here, where I outlined some of the basic issues to think about when inventing words and names for an imaginary language.  Judging from the number of hits, it seemed to be something that interested a lot of people, and I thought I'd try something a bit more advanced, for those who want a little more out of their fantasy languages.

Most fantasy writers who create a secondary world invent imaginary languages to some extent, even if it's only a handful of names.  Some, of course, stick strictly to real-world languages, but most have something invented.  In many cases, these don't offer any consistent sense of phonology or morphology, but there's usually a hint of it, even if it's only the Burroughs Universal Constant (that, wherever you go in the universe, female names always end in a).

Writers who take a genuine interest in language and naming, though, might put a lot more thought into the matter, creating names that follow similar linguistic forms when they come from the same culture and distinct forms when they don't.  Well and good; but few fantasy writers (unless they happen to be linguistically orientated professors of English from Oxford) seem to consider how their various languages relate to one another.

Languages don't exist in isolation.  Well, OK, some do, like Basque or Burushaski, but they're exceptions.  We'll come to that later.  Most languages, though, are grouped into a hierarchy of families, super-families, super-super-families etc. in structures so similar to biological taxonomy that the same terms are often used, though not consistently.  English, for instance, is a Low German language, belonging to the West Germanic division of the Germanic family, part of the great Indo-European phylum.

What exactly does that mean, though?  Everyone knows that English is essentially a rag-bag language that contains French, Latin, Celtic and Greek, as well as words from almost every part of the world the British Empire ever came into contact with.

There's an easy experiment that can show what the classifications mean.  Well, easy to imagine and explain: not quite so easy to do.  Take an average passage of English (not too scholarly or technical, not too monosyllabic) and list every word in it.  Then look up the origins of those words (a good dictionary would give that) and count how many words derive from each source.

What you're likely to find is that the great majority are either Germanic, whether from Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, or Latin, whether directly or via French.  There'll be a smattering of Celtic and Greek, together with odd words from further afield.  The balance of Latin and Germanic will probably be roughly even, maybe with more Latin words. 

So why isn't English counted as a Latin language?

Now repeat the experiment, but counting each word each time it occurs, and you'll find a dramatic change, with the vast majority derived directly from Anglo-Saxon.  This is because the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of English includes the most common words, repeated over and over: the, and, to, for and so on.

This is what linguists mean when they classify a language as belonging to a family, and it's easy enough to see why.  Vocabulary changes all the time in a language.  It's not hard to imagine foreign words for, say, house or table becoming fashionable and eventually replacing the original words, but why would anyone create a different word for the?  These words do change, of course, but very slowly and usually only in ways that can be easily followed.  That makes them a breadcrumb trail back to where the language has come from.

Languages drift apart when two groups of speakers don't often interact.  They borrow different foreign words and coin different words for new concepts, but their pronunciation often diverges quite radically.  Pronunciation is changing all the time.  It's true what the old people say: youngsters don't speak the way we did at their age.  Of course not; and, over the centuries, it can become completely different, till a linguist comes along and explains how it's really all related.

There's a saying I remember hearing long ago: when comparing languages, vowels count for nothing, and consonants for very little.  That's not quite true, but you have to understand how the different letters are formed to understand why one can change into another.  One of the most famous sets of changes is known as Grimm's Law (yes those Grimms — they were primarily linguists) which explains how the Germanic languages differ from other Indo-European groups.  For instance, the English word foot is actually the same word as the Latin equivalent, whose stem is ped (as in pedal).  Under Grimm's Law, p mutates into the related sound f, d into the related sound t, and the vowel just mutates.

It goes further.  During the 1st millennium AD, the Western Germanic dialects divided into High German and Low German (that's not like High Elvish, by the way, just a matter of whether they were spoken on the upper or lower Rhine) and foot in Low German (which includes English and Dutch) became fuss (the vowel's pronounced much the same) in High German, which is modern German.  Similarly, in many cases d again turned into t — door/tur, deer/tier etc.

These might seem small changes but, with large numbers of them going on over thousands of years, together with word replacement, languages that started almost the same can change beyond recognition.  In a context without a strong, centralised political or cultural structure, this will take a form where the language spoken in village A and village B diverge a little, although not too much for them to understand one another.  Similarly, the villagers in B won't have too much trouble understanding the speech in village C, but those in A might struggle a bit.  By the time you reach village Z, there appears very little similarity at all.

If, on the other hand, there's a strong state that needs to issue laws and proclamations that will be understood, or if authors and poets are writing works that are understood to be expressions of the entire culture, standard forms will gradually emerge that become national languages.  These often differ little from the language next door, but their speakers like to think of them as different for political or religious reasons: Dutch/Flemish, Serbian/Croatian, Hindi/Urdu, Malay/Indonesian etc.  Curiously, with English and American, which are almost as distinct as some of those pairs, the political separation seems to have fostered a sense of being a common language, instead.

Many of the world's languages are grouped together into widespread super-families — examples include Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian and Niger-Congo, along with many smaller families.  In the New World, the old picture of a dozen or so families has been brought down (though with disagreement from many linguists) to three, with the Amerind family covering all of South and Central America, much of the contiguous US and eastern and central Canada.

The temptation is always to try to link up language families into fewer and larger super-families, but that's not always easy.  Indo-European is a relatively straightforward case, and even that produces controversy and disagreement. 

It's a special case for two reasons.  One is that it's a relatively young family.  Although there are different models for its origin, it's probable that it descends from a group of mutually comprehensible dialects spoken between four and five thousand years ago.  The other is that it includes languages (such as Greek, Latin and Sanskrit) that were extensively written more than half that time ago, and some, such as Hittite, that have left written records from when the family was fairly young.  This makes it quite easy to establish what it was that all these languages are descended from and so identify other members of the family.

On the other hand, many language families are significantly older, and their languages have sometimes only been written down for the first time within the last few centuries.  This makes identifying their relationships even more difficult, especially when they're isolated remnants of families that have largely been replaced by a later wave, a process that's still going on, especially in areas of the world that were colonised by Europeans.  Isolated languages like Basque in the Pyrenees, Burushaski in Kashmir, or the so-called Paleo-Siberian languages may not have had any interaction with any "relatives" that might survive for ten thousand years or more.

Some languages are more conservative than others (Lithuanian, for instance, is often taken as the closest we can get to how the original Indo-European language might have been) but ultimately they all change, mutating their sounds and replacing their vocabulary with foreign imports.  There's a point beyond which current techniques just aren't good enough to detect whether two languages are related or not.

Besides, associations can be as important as "descent", as we saw with the huge quantity of imported vocabulary in English.  Sometimes these influences are greater, affecting even the structure and the stable words used by linguists.  For a long time, there was a controversy over whether Vietnamese was a Kadai language, like its neighbour Lao, or an Austroasiatic language, like its neighbour Khmer.  Most linguists have plumped for the latter, but the language is very much a hybrid.

Japanese is an even stranger case.  The jury's still out here over whether it's an Altaic language that arrived via Korea or an Austronesian language that arrived via the Philippines.  It displays elements of both.

So it's unlikely that we'll ever know for sure whether all human languages ultimately derive from the same source, or if they arose independently in many parts of the world.  The human brain appears to be hard-wired for language, so the multiple invention theory is quite plausible.  It's likely to come down to when our ancestors started talking.  Until quite recently (the idea appears in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy) it was believed that language started with a quantum leap in human intellect as recently as 33,000 years ago, at a time when the species was already spread all over the planet, and that would have favoured the multiple origin of language.

Recently, though, both circumstantial evidence of earlier symbolic thought and physical evidence of a speech-enhancing mutation of the larynx have suggested that humans were using language a great deal earlier, probably at a time when they were confined to a relatively small area of Africa.  Although this doesn't prove the single-origin theory, it makes it much more likely.

Then again, maybe they were all taught by Quenya-speaking elves.  It's possible.

So what bearing does any of this have on writing fantasy?  Unless you're going to actually create a whole raft of languages, and then treat your readers to a lecture about them, does it really matter what families they belong to?

Well, yes and no.  It's very much a background aspect, which the reader's unlikely to notice (though it may be far more noticeable if it's ignored or poorly done) but it can contribute to that seamless gloss of reality that the best fantasy worlds somehow achieve.  World-making always reminds me of a swan: seeing it gliding gracefully and effortlessly across the water gives no idea at all of how its legs are going nineteen to the dozen underwater to achieve that impression.

The sounds and elements that make up names can give away subtle relationships between their countries' languages.  Suppose, for instance, several towns in your main country have names ending in -ket — perhaps this is the equivalent of the English element -ton.  Another country (three or four across, perhaps) has a town whose name ends in -gad.  This could suggest the same kind of sound-shift as those described by Grimm's Law, indicating the two countries have related languages, but not closely related.

It can also affect the difficulty characters encounter when learning to speak foreign languages.  It tends to be easier to learn a language if we can latch onto familiar elements and harder if nothing's alike.  I have a scene in an unpublished novel where a character who's good with languages is trying to learn to speak to the people he's staying among.  He comments that it's easier to learn than many, observing that Some of the words seem a bit like Kimdyran.  Like, they say duvin for a cow, and we say tovien.  On the other hand, he tries and totally fails later to learn another, very strange language.  Besides giving an element of his character, it helps to define the relationships between languages, and therefore cultures, within his world.

On the principle that "messy worlds rule", this doesn't have to be too predictable.  In our world, even before languages like English, Spanish and French went global, some language families were extremely far flung — Austronesian, for instance, is spoken all the way from Madagascar to Easter Island, and is mixed up in places with other families.  On the other hand, bordering countries may be linguistically unconnected, such as Hungary, forming a Uralic island in a sea of Indo-European Slavonic languages.

You can perfectly well ignore all this.  Most authors do, I suspect, and often still manage to produce worlds with believable names and cultures.  It can give an extra layer of reality, though, to think about how your languages relate to one another.  And, if you're like me, it's fun.  Which is the main thing, of course.