World-Building Elements in My Stories: A Tale of Two Worlds

Continuing the examination of the world-building in my three (so far) published fantasy and science fiction series, I’m going to deal this time with A Tale of Two Worlds, which has at this point two titles, The Green Stone Tower and Goddess-Born. This series is alternate-world fantasy and is not set in our world, but (as the name implies) in two different alternate worlds. Human beings evolved on one of them, called the “Old World,” while the “New World” is where the Old Gods and the magic users, who became the Faerie, migrated at the dawn of civilization. I’ll deal with the worlds themselves first and go into the fantasy elements afterwards.

The Old World and the New World

The Old World is similar to our own world, but not identical. It is home to an early-modern civilization at the time when the story begins, roughly 18th-century Europe equivalent, and the nations have a European feel to them. There are five nations mentioned in the books, the High Vance Empire, the Kingdom (later Republic) of Grandlock, Corlia, Forcia, and Thurbia. The Empire and Grandlock have a more or less “English” feel to them, while Corlia and Forcia are reminiscent of France and Italy, respectively, and Thurbia isn’t clearly identified with any Terrestrial nation.

Prevailing technology is early industrial revolution: steam engines, railroads, muskets and cannon, gas lamps, etc. It would be a good base for steampunk if the steam tech were more outlandish, but it isn’t. Government is constitutional monarchy, but Grandlock is on the edge of a democratic revolution which actually takes place in Goddess-Born. Noble privilege is enshrined in law, and an established religion exists, the Church of the Good God who is believed ot have given humanity agriculture long ago. Magic is outlawed and its practice punishable by death, but it’s still practiced in secret. Some parts of the planet, notably the South Islands, are inhabited by more primitive societies. The Kingdom of Grandlock was once part of the High Vance Empire, but broke away and gained independence during a time of civil war in the Empire.

The New World was established as a human habitation some ten thousand years ago. The Old Gods led the magic users through a number of connecting portals, the Green Stone Towers, when most humans began persecuting mages. The inhabitants of the New World have evolved into powerful magicians, the immortal Faerie Folk, and created a strongly magical society, more primitive in technology than the Old World, but with advanced magic substituting for technology. When the series begins, the Faerie are divided into two groups. The larger group, who call themselves the People (and whom the other group calls the Foe), live in cities over most of the surface of the New World and worship and interact with all of the Old Gods except Malatant. The smaller group, who call themselves the Faithful (and whom the People call the Darklings) live in the Darkling Wood and the underground city of D’Kushith, and worship Malatant.

Both the People and the Faithful are hunters and gatherers, not farmers, but magic creates such abundance from the wild that the arts of agriculture aren’t needed and the bounty supports a civilized life. The Faerie in both their branches are immortal, but over time their hair turns white, they become infertile, and they enter a state called “Elderhood” and eventually retire from the world, going to other places prepared for them by the gods.

The Towers remain as portals between the two worlds, but they are difficult and arduous to use.

Magic

The magic of A Tale of Two Worlds is less solidly grounded in real-world occultism and more fantasy-leaning than that of Refuge. Magicians in Tale can cast spells that summon demons, untie knots and open locks, blind people with bright lights, directly cause harm or kill, and similar effects. There is ritual involved, invocation of the Old Gods, use of herbs, sigils, magical circles, and other occult devices, but the effects are not realistic or limited to real-world magic or a reasonable extrapolation; this is an alternate-reality system of magic.

Magicians are believed to be descended from the Old Gods, but that may not universally be true; certainly it must not have been true at one point, since human beings existed before the Gods did and magic was necessary to their creation.

The Gods

Each of the Old Gods in A Tale of Two Worlds was once a human being and a powerful magician, who became immortal and even more powerful through a death and rebirth transition. All of the gods in existence at the beginning of The Green Stone Tower emerged into their divinity before or roughly at the dawn of civilization in the Old World. (Two more came into being at the end of Tower and played a part in Goddess-Born.) The ten deities who existed at the beginning of the series are: Pashi of the Waters, Shavana the Mother of Life, Prathur the Storm Lord, Rontar the Hunter, Illowara of the Mysteries, Hephos the Tower Builder, Drithur Lord of Riddles, Olthas the Warrior, Lasatha the Wise, and Malatant of Shadow. Each of the gods has an Aspect that defines their main area of focus and the area of life where their power is greatest.

An especially important deity in both books is Malatant of Shadow, the youngest god (some ten thousand years old — by comparison, Pashi is roughly 200,o00 years old). Malatant is the god of shadow, cold, and the evil in the hearts of men. The People fear and loathe him, the Faithful adore him and respect him, and much is revealed about him in the course of the two books.

The Not-Gods

Unlike the gods, the Not-Gods are native to the New World and have no human origins. They are beings of immense power, and on a par with the gods, or even greater.

The most powerful and enigmatic of the Not-Gods is the Worm of the World, who takes the form of an enormous snake that circles the entire New World. Its head emerges from a cave in the mountains to devour its prey, who are digested alive in its belly, their struggles and suffering feeding the magic of the world; the Worm takes only the wicked and cruel to feed its hunger.

The other Not-Gods are the Phoenix, the Moonbird, the Wolf Lord, the Turtle King, the Tree Spirit, and the Mightiest Troll. Most of those don’t come into either The Green Stone Tower or Goddess-Born, although the Worm, the Phoenix, and the Moonbird play small parts.

Quasi-Humans

The Faerie Folk were originally human and are descended from the magic users of the Old World who fled to the New World. The only other quasi-humans mentioned in Tale are the trolls, who are big, dim-witted brutes of the New World, hostile to the People and even more hostile to the Faithful.

Next week: world-building elements in The Star Mages.

Goblins, Ogres, and Other Sub-Human Beasties

Let’s consider another staple of fantasy fiction: brutish goons.

These are creatures that present an ugly caricature of ourselves: goblins, ogres, trolls, giants, and similar creatures. Their depiction involves a certain stretching and distortion of human capability both physical and mental along with a sharp downgrade of human behavior in its moral dimension. Either intelligence or physique is downgraded; if intelligence is low then physical capacity may be superhuman, but certainly not both. Sometimes a sub-human beastie may be as intelligent as a human being or even a little more so in terms of tool-use capacity and low cunning, but shrunken physically. At other times it’s the opposite: the creature is as dumb as a stump, but big and very, very strong. And ugly. And usually hairy, or perhaps scaly. Its social intelligence is far below the human norm even when its technical intelligence is reasonably high; these things can’t get along with one another for five minutes without lethal fights breaking out and as for coexisting with their neighbors, they make the Balkans look like a pacifistic Buddhist ashram.

There’s a strong tendency to put creatures like this into any fantasy story. I do it myself. Both trolls and goblins found their way into my Star Mages trilogy, and I put a species of troll into The Green Stone Tower as well. On stepping outside the bounds of humanity and introducing quasi-humans into a story, it seems there’s an irresistible urge to make at least some of them into sub-human brutes. The impulse is common enough to ask what this means on a mythic level.

It doesn’t really work to say that sub-human brutes are a dim perception or memory of our evolutionary forbears or our primate cousins, does it? While some primates superficially resemble a category of sub-human fantasy beastie — gorillas are much stronger than humans physically but not as intelligent — their behavior doesn’t match the “brutal” quality of fantasy beasties and there are no smaller-but-smarter examples; monkeys are less intelligent than we are as well as being smaller and slighter. While our evolutionary forbears are extinct, making similar observations about them impossible, we have no reason to believe them to have been moral degenerates comparable to Tolkien’s orcs.

So sub-human beasties are not dim cultural memories of Neanderthal or Homo erectus with whom our distant ancestors once shared the planet. They mean something else to us, something more in the nature of metaphor and myth — something with which we contend today.

Human beings, struggling into self-awareness and evolving socially and technically towards — well, towards something (it’s often a little hard to tell what, and a subject of some controversy) — we have a disconnect between our animal natures and what we choose and strive to be. We’re the only animal species that suffers from this weird kind of schism in our personality. We evolved with instincts designed by natural selection for a radically different milieu than the one we actually inhabit. Our earliest ancestors to be considered of the species H. sapiens were born between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago. The forerunners of civilized life, what might be called proto-civilization, first appeared some ten thousand years ago in the first neolithic farming communities, and civilization proper — life in cities — came into being maybe two thousand years after that. Between the birth of the first true human beings and the establishment of the first proto-civilized communities lies a span of at least ninety thousand and perhaps as much as a hundred and ninety thousand years: at least nine times as long and possibly nineteen times as long as we have been even remotely civilized. During that time, our ancestors lived in small bands where everyone knew everyone else and most people were related. They had no formal government or hierarchical religion. Everyone worked, but no one had a “job” in today’s sense; you went and hunted or harvested wild food plants or made tools or clothes or did what needed to be done and what you had the skill to do.

Obviously, the life we live today is very different from that. And so we have a disconnect between our natures as human animals, our instincts, and the conventions and norms of civilized behavior that is suffered by no other animal species except those we raise as pets.

Sub-human beasties, perhaps, represent our animal nature, severed from our human, conscious intent and moral values, and so operating not in a truly animal fashion but in a monstrous one. This is the upwelling of our own capacity for cruelty and depravity. We see it perhaps in war: the human being given destructive power far beyond what our distant ancestors could wield and allowed — no, required — to make use of it. Soldiers on the battlefield, terrorists, controllers of military drones, all exhibit goblin-like cruelty or ogre-like brutality as a matter of course in the mad circumstances of their lives. The mass-murderer, the serial killer, the lynch mob, the race riot, all show the descent of human beings into sub-human brutality. The sub-human beastie is the human being when the moral self goes silent. It is the festering sewer in our depths, the evil to which we can sink if we allow it.

And that’s why it’s such a compelling fantasy theme. It’s a way of depicting monstrous evil without any of the softening and restraining features that are normally present in human beings: a whole society of depraved, cruel things living in a nightmare of violence, betrayal, and loveless wickedness. We can stand to write about this and to read about it more easily because, hey, this isn’t really us.

But it is, of course. And if a writer is really skilled at using this motif, the connection between the sub-human beastie and human beings will be sufficiently clear.

Image credit: shooarts / 123RF Stock Photo

Elements of Fantasy: Quasi-Humans

Elves, dwarves, fairies, ogres, goblins, trolls, giants, vampires, werewolves, what would fantasy fiction be without the likes of these? All of them talk, all are intelligent (more or less), all share some basic defining attributes with humanity, but none of them are quite human.

Fantasy deals with human beings, as do all genres of fiction because in the end we always tell stories about ourselves. But fantasy deals not only with humanity as it is, but with the archetype of humanity as well, and deviations from that archetype. Quasi-human species in fantasy represent humanity as we might have been if things had turned out a little different.

Of course, the names above cover a fairly wide range of territory. Since Tolkien redefined the idea of elves in his stories, they have come to be something more than human – immortal, inhumanly wise, filled with magic, and morally better than we are although not necessarily perfect. Because of this, if one wishes to depict quasi-humans who are significantly different from this image one cannot call them elves, although prior to Tolkien the word might have encompassed such a race. One may call them fairies, or with less confusion the faerie-folk, or one may invent a new name altogether.

But the quasi-human races in fantasy, whatever their names, always deviate from the human norm in some consistent way. Dwarves are always short and usually underground dwellers and especially skilled craftsmen; they are made by taking one defining aspect of humanity – tool-making – and emphasizing it beyond the human norm. One may take this as a general rule for the creation of a quasi-human race: take some aspect of our species, enhance it beyond what is normal for us, perhaps reduce other abilities to compensate, and there you have it. Give it a name, invent some characters from the race’s ranks by fleshing out characteristics in the usual way, and the race has been brought to life.

If the characteristic is a less than desirable one, such as cruelty and wickedness, or brutishness and savagery, the same process applies.

Regardless of its nature, a quasi-human race can have various origins. Perhaps it is a separate creation of the gods along with men and women. Perhaps it is something that men and women have turned into either individually through a process of personal change (e.g. werewolves or vampires), or collectively through a process of evolution. (There is nothing wrong with mixing science into fantasy as part of the myth-making mélange.) Perhaps a quasi-human race emerged from interbreeding of the gods with men, as is the case of my own faerie-folk from The Green Stone Tower. Perhaps it was isolation and inbreeding after an apocalypse, as occurred with the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Perhaps it was a kind of degeneration from the effect of poisoned food, or the fruit of moral decay, with the body following in the footsteps of the soul.

What is the mythic meaning of quasi-human races? It has one, or actually more than one.

First, quasi-humanity suggests that we could be very different from what we are. As with other worlds, quasi-humans suggest that the limitations we place on possibility are to some degree arbitrarily imposed. We could be better than we are. We could also be worse.

Secondly, quasi-humanity, especially when it emerges from human stock, gives us a metaphor for the changes to human nature imposed by our own moral choices. The evolution or devolution of a quasi-human race from its human origins suggests that we may be changed beyond reversal by the effects of what we choose to do at a crossroads – for better or for worse.

Finally, quasi-humans can serve some of the same mythic functions as gods, devils, and super-beings, although they are not normally as overwhelmingly powerful or intelligent. They may be mentors of humanity, guiding us as Tolkien’s Elves guided the savage, primitive Edain when they first wandered into Beleriand, or as other ancient and wise races have guided humans in other stories. Here we have the archetype of the spiritual guide, the being further along the path than ourselves, from whom we may learn if we are sufficiently humble. On the other hand, malevolent quasi-humans seek the destruction of humanity or its enslavement, and in myth serve to caution us against evil behavior, despair, or focus on self-destructive motives.

Depending on the specific nature of the quasi-humans, it’s also possible for this element of fantasy to tie into an animistic awareness of the consciousness of nature, in which the quasi-humans are a concretization of that consciousness which emerges in myth as dryads, naiads, and other spirits of the wild, just as fantasy gods are a concretization of the myths of deities. Not all versions of quasi-human intelligence is a good tie-in for this, however, so that isn’t a universal.

In the context of storytelling, what quasi-human races do is to broaden the canvas of character available to the writer. If one may choose one’s characters from a wide range of quasi-human races as well as humanity proper, one may develop characters with a wider spread of qualities than those available in non-fantasy fiction.

Or is that true?

In the end, one of the most important mythic lessons provided by the image of quasi-human races is that “human nature” is not as narrow a concept as some would have us believe. “You can’t change human nature” is often presented as a claim that some part of our behavior or our society, some flaw in our being, can never be repaired. This has been asserted in its time about a great many different things in human society that have in fact since disappeared, from the divine right of kings and nobles to slavery to the subordination of women. There may well be a core “human nature” that cannot be changed, but it is a lot more flexible in the details of its manifestation than has sometimes been suggested, and a great many facets of collective behavior that have been called at one time or another a part of unchangeable “human nature” have turned out to be nothing of the sort.

The reader or writer of fantasy is in a position to understand this instinctively, if we take the right lessons from the myth of quasi-human races, interpreting the metaphor as it should be understood.

//