In the Beginning...

I -- and, I'm certain, many contemporary writers with even a passing familiarity in the fantasy genre -- grew up on The Lord of the Rings. It has been foundational to my conceptualization of fantasy and, perhaps more importantly, worldbuilding. The depth and detail Tolkien poured into Middle-Earth is frankly astounding, and only becomes more so the more you look into it and learn. Every ruin has a name and, somewhere in the extensive lore of the world, a people it was built by, when it was built, when it was destroyed, and who destroyed it. But it goes so much deeper. Tolkien didn't just write who built each building, he wrote down who and how the very world was built. The gods of his setting -- the Valar -- are not abstracts or debatable, they are very real, even if they are largely absent the main trilogy.

Now contrast with how, say, Martin writes A Song of Ice and Fire, a series that, while not as foundational to my understanding of worldbuilding, has been perhaps nearly as formative. Even as he's expanded upon the mythos of Westeros and Essos, he writes entirely from an in-universe perspective, all of his "historical" books penned as though written by a maester during the events of his primary novels, making much of his world shrouded by mystery and superstition. Myths are our foundation for the earliest accounts of Westeros, and no attempt is even vaguely made to explain how the world began or the magic that some characters display. Each religion -- of which there are several -- has its own version of events, and none are ever presented as being more valid than the others. And yet questions of religion and the source of magic weigh more heavily on the characters scrambling for the Iron Throne than they do on those trying to destroy the Ring. 

I find it an interesting juxtaposition, and it raises some interesting questions about how worldbuilding and story intersect. Chiefly, though, I find it interesting how it informs how each author deals with the question of morality. 

Westeros is a morally gray world. The ends tend to justify the means and the few instances of any kind of divine intervention we see don't all stem out of the same religion. Each character we are introduced to has complex motivations for what they want and how they go about pursuing it, and none of them are presented as objectively wrong in the text. Martin uses the ambiguity of the spiritual aspect of his setting to highlight the subjective morality of his characters. Terms like "good" and "evil" do not find much purchase, and indeed a strict code of morality is more a chain that weighs one down than a liberating thing. Martin uses his worldbuilding to make an argument for a complex narrative in which winners and losers, good and evil, and the worthiness of any given cause is determined by the reader and their relationship to the text.

 

On the other hand, in Middle-Earth there is a clear and sharp distinction between "good" and "evil," the titular antagonist -- the Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord Sauron -- serving as a literal embodiment of the latter. Tolkien then explores how that good/evil, white/black dynamic plays out among characters who are largely painted in gray; every character is tempted and twisted by the overwhelming power of the One Ring to the point where no amount of inherent goodness can save the day -- its corrupting influence proves to be its own destruction. Well, that, and two small acts of kindness. Tolkien, then, wanted to communicate that there is good and evil, that good is best empowered by small kindnesses, and that the power evil seeks to gather ultimately will destroy itself. He leaves little room for interpretation or nuance, but it moral meshes well with the setting; attempting to cast doubt on the lines between evil and good is counter-intuitive when the supernatural is very real and clearly follows along those lines.

More could be said about how the way they built the foundations of their respective worlds relates to how they built their stories and settings, and perhaps I will expand upon them, but today I will leave it at this: the solidity of the spiritual can determine the solidity of moral alignments. When there are plainly "good" and "evil" deities, and they are upheld as absolute and incorruptible, there can be very little question about the good or evil of any given action, and less so the more heavily involved in the narrative the deities and/or their representatives are. On the other hand, when there is no clear spiritual aspect to the world or it is heavily debated, and the foundations of the setting are the subject of superstition and myth, there is much more room to debate motivation. There is nothing inherently wrong with either, it all depends on the kind of story you wish to tell.

No New Ideas

 The other day I was, as I often am, kicking around worldbuilding ideas. I often like to mash together concepts and cultures both real and fictitious to see what comes out, sometimes without even consciously doing so. It's a background process that's always running for me, and a large part of the reason I have more ideas than finished works.

I digress.

I was playing with the idea of carnivorous societies; how to you build a civilization out of a race that can only eat meat? Without the ability to farm for their food, it seemed only natural to me that this society would develop a great veneration of its hunters, as they will bring in the bulk of the food (especially in the case of a stone or early bronze age type setting). Even in a more advanced setting, where farming has been industrialized and so massive herds of slaughter animals are easily raised and processed, hunting might still be considered a sacred rite due to its ancestral importance. So physical prowess will be held in high regard, as the hale and the healthy will make the best hunters.

I came to wonder, then, how this society might view its prey. We, after all, have a tendency to only use select parts of our food, be it animal or plant, and simply discard the rest, so perhaps these people do the same. Alternatively, perhaps they find waste abhorrent and have found uses for every part of their prey; what they cannot just eat they have found other uses for. Maybe they even venerate their prey, performing rituals of thanks to appease the spirits of the slain and show that life has not been spent needlessly.

As I'm turning all these ideas over, I came to realize that none of them... not a single one... was original to me. Sure, I could rearrange them, piecemeal different practices together in potentially unique ways, but even that wasn't likely to create something wholly new. The process drove home something that I knew, logically, but had never fully realized before now:

There are no new ideas.

I often beat myself up over a lack of originality, battle against feelings of inadequacy, but I've put too much pressure on myself. The goal of writing, especially creative writing, shouldn't be to judge something by its newness, but by its creative approach to the old. Across every story that has every been told are the components of every story that every will be told. We, authors and creatives both aspiring and established, are not architects as much as we are gardeners. We harvest ideas from the trees of authors past, then use those seeds to plant trees of our own. And as long as there is joy in the planting, we've done our job well.

Stellaris: Ascension, prologue

 Hello all.

I thought it would be an interesting experiment/exercise to try and create a narrative based around a playthrough of Stellaris. For those who are not aware, Stellaris is a 4x Grand Strategy game set among the stars. You guide a civilization through its first tentative steps into the void, through first contact with various species, through trial and tribulation, to the "victory year" when you are scored against the computer to see who ran the best civilization. Who had the strongest economy? The best military? What kind of neighbor were you? What role did you take in times of galactic crisis?

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but that's the sum of it. The challenge, then, is to boil the narrative down into definite moments, the decisions that will shape the destiny of the very stars themselves and the people burdened with making them, and in the process of doing so to try and strip the game of many of its strategy elements and try to instill a more narrative-driven approach to this campaign. I believe it will prove rather interesting.

To start, we'll open with the background of the civilization I built for this playthrough....

A Very Brief History of a Very Long Project

 I believe I was ten years old, or thereabouts, when I decided to write my first book. I do not recall why I made such a choice, but I can guess. I had always been -- and still am, though not quite as much -- a voracious reader who consumed media well above my grade level. I was raised on Tolkien and Lewis, as well as a small library of illustrated classics such as Ivanhoe, Call of the Wild, and Oliver Twist. I explored the local library independently more often than not, and my favorite stop in any shopping mall was the book store. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would want to attempt a book myself.

Now while I cannot directly recall the why, I can plainly recall my initial inspiration. My father owned a copy of Myst, essentially a point-and-click puzzle game for those unaware, and it fascinated and terrified me in equal amounts. So I externalized those thoughts, forced them into an awkward marriage with various and not at all subtle references to The Lord of the Rings, and hand drafted a handful of pages in school notebook. I titled the project Yith.

I have no idea what became of that notebook. I imagine it's somewhere in my mother's garage; she kept nearly all my old school things.

Over the next few years I circled that project like a hungry scavenger, constantly revising and refining the idea. My siblings became involved, drafting characters that I would shoehorn in, and slowly the project evolved. The only evidence of its origin was the magical book which transported the main character, an unfortunate soul I seem to recall naming Phillip, into the magical world of Yith. Much of the influence of The Lord of the Rings had also been left by the wayside, at least outwardly, and the likes of Eragon had taken their place. I tried my hand at crafting an original species to serve as my enemies, began to wrap my mind around the basic elements of a character arch, and made it well into that draft, dedicating enough time to it that my mother actually invested in a curriculum designed to help me along in the process. I remember getting to what I had considered the halfway point of the book, though I could not guess how many pages or words that amounted to, when the computer I was writing on crashed, corrupted the document beyond recovery.

While none of that draft survived, somehow the idea has never fully left my mind. In college I played with yet another draft, though the only thing this project had in common with that first work was the name of the setting, "Yith," and in recent months I have revived the work yet again, adding yet more distance from its current form and its beginnings. Yet still Yith persists. Maybe, one day, I'll even finish it.

Scene: "Oathbreaker"

I was oiling my rusty writing skills with some random exercises, just playing out little scenes as they danced through the theater of my mind, and I struck upon one I rather like. The setting for this piece is vague and nonspecific, but as many of my musing do it carries an element of high fantasy. I could see myself coming back to this one day, perhaps expanding this little seed into a proper story, but only time will tell. For the moment simply enjoy the scene.