Mountains in fantasy

The Misty Mountains. The Spine of the World. Mount Doom. The Frostfangs. The Mountains of Madness. The Goblins’ Teeth.

Mountains in fantasy often have evocative names. It’s probably best not to be too obvious — e.g. calling the villain’s stronghold Nightmount or Vultures’ Peak, because a little of this goes a long way — but such names can hint at a significant detail or two. You know the Frostfangs are likely to be in the Westeros version of the High Arctic.

On a map, mountain ranges should look natural, e.g. not crossing each other at right angles unless this is is done deliberately, to show some aspect of the world. I like the idea of a ring of impassable mountains guarding something at their centre. They form good borders and defenses, which always reminds me of Hannibal leading elephants over the Alps.

Plus, mountains can always be made even more dangerous than they already are. It doesn’t have to be something big like the stone giants in the first Hobbit film. Maybe mountains change ever-so-subtly, such that passes which were traversible last week will have mysteriously shrunk to the dimensions of a needle’s eye when travelers try to go back. Maybe solid rock occasionally crumbles away into a crevasse, millenia of erosion taking place in seconds. Or maybe the mountains grow much faster on your world than they do in reality.

Mountains play a role in myth and religion — there’s Mount Olympus in Greek mythology, Mount Sinai and Mount Ararat in the bible, as well as the Sermon on the Mount. Finally, there are mountain ranges on the Moon as well (though they don’t have the poetic names of the lunar seas), and even further out is the the equatorial ridge on Iapetus, the third largest moon of Saturn. I’m not sure if there are mountains of any kinds on the gas giants, but if there are, their size would be breathtaking.

Finally, you never know what you might find in a mountain—anything from cave paintings to lost treasures to an entire city. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a desert (well, a modern-day desert with air conditioning), but I’ve always found mountains exciting. And looked forward to reading about them.

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Five alternatives to human reproduction

I tried never to miss a Star Trek episode until midway through Voyager. There were several reasons for this, but the show hardly even daring to nudge the envelope was the most important. Especially when it comes to science, Star Trek could have and should have been at the forefront.

And an alien giving birth from the back rather than the front… just did not quite cut it for me. Not when there are so many more unusual methods of reproducing.

1. Parthenogenesis

The women in David Brin’s Glory Season don’t need anyone else’s genetic input for conception, except during a certain time of the year—the titular season. During this time, they can choose to mate, though of course the children produced in this way are likely to be treated differently from those conceived in the more common method.

Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines is similar; the all-female society of the Riding Women would have died out long ago if the women weren’t able to give birth to genetically identical daughters, maintaining their ancestral Motherlines.

The problem that Charnas illustrates in the novel, though, is that such a society won’t have much variation (unless mutation is much more frequent than it is in real life). Hybrid vigor will be unheard-of, and a population without genetic diversity will be that much more vulnerable to infectious diseases.

And it will be that much more difficult for people to be individuals when it comes to thought or belief or behavior as well. If identical twins are sometimes dressed alike, given similar names and expected to do the same things, imagine what it’s like for girls who know that they are doppelgangers of their mothers and grandmothers, all the way back to the first generation.

2. Mitosis

There was an Outer Limits episode where an astronaut, after exposure to something mysterious in outer space, started budding off an extra finger from his hand. He soon realized that this was just the first part of a whole new body—in other words, he was slowly but surely producing another copy of himself.

Mitosis, like parthenogenesis, doesn’t result in as much genetic diversity as sexual reproduction does, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the parent copy has valuable but recessive traits that might be lost otherwise. It could also be much more convenient — look at how hard animals (and people) work to find suitable mates.

Not to mention that budding, a la yeast cells, might be a whole lot less painful than giving birth.

3. Prions

In real life, prions scare me as much as they fascinate me. There’s something insidious about strands of protein (which technically aren’t even alive) gradually corrupting the normal proteins in your brain. But to take this concept a few steps further, what if people could change others into copies of themselves?

As a long-term method of reproduction, this would carry the same risks as mitosis or parthenogenesis, but as a short-term deal, it could have some very interesting uses. I’m imagining a hostage crisis situation where the terrorists don’t realize is that one of the hostages is a prion, and being exposed to her is altering them by the hour.

4. Egg-laying

I like the indifference of most fish and amphibians — lay eggs, wait for them to be fertilized, go on with life. Of course, this is a viable strategy because they produce offspring in such huge numbers that the death of most of them isn’t a tragedy or even a problem.

Though that could apply to a lesser degree with a humanoid race as well. If each female produced, say, half-a-dozen offspring each breeding season, she wouldn’t need to raise them all to adulthood. She could instead abandon them to compete over limited resources, such that only the strongest survived. And if it didn’t, oh well, there would always be next year.

For this to work, though, egg-production, fertilization and any necessary gestation shouldn’t demand too much of a female. In mammals, so much of the female’s resources go into developing the young that naturally fewer of them are born, and those are nurtured and protected. It doesn’t make reproductive sense to devote nine months and one’s physical health to producing a human infant, only to drop it by the wayside.

Unless someone else is prepared to bring it up, which is a whole ‘nother reproductive strategy a la the cuckoo, and developed perfectly in Bernard Taylor's brilliant but out-of-print horror novel The Godsend.

5. Hive insect reproduction

I remember when I first learned what exactly worker bees — the uniformly female, non-reproducing members of the hive — get out of this arrangement. Bee genetics are such that, by allowing the queen to devote all her time to egg-laying, workers actually pass on more of their genes.

If a worker bee mated and laid eggs, her offspring would share 50% of her genes. But when she helps the queen to do the same thing, the queen’s offspring — the worker bee’s sisters — share 75% of her genes. Therefore, it makes sense for the worker bee to want more sisters, rather than children.

As a result, this is a very viable reproductive strategy and I wouldn’t mind using it at all (as long as I was one of the workers, because being stuck doing nothing but producing child after child is not my idea of a good time).

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Hair in fantasy

“Give me a head with hair,
Long beautiful hair,
Shining, streaming, gleaming, flaxen, waxen hair…”

Hair

Hair is ubiquitous. It crops up in mythology and fairy tales, it appears in a hundred different colors, styles and permutations, and I don’t think I’ve read a romance which didn’t provide at least some mention of it. It’s a source of power, a mark of heredity and one of the ways to spot a Mary Sue—her hair is likely to be overpretty or overdescribed. Usually both.

Colors

Minus Clairol, hair occurs in a small range of hues—blond, red, brown, black, grey and white. There’s a lot of room for variation within these colors, but in a fantasy characters can have Ramona Flowers hair with streaks in it—if there’s a good reason for them to have such hair.

Unusual colors might also affect how seriously the characters are taken. If everyone has hair like Rainbow Brite’s horse, the story might come off as a parody. I’d pick just one out-of-the-ordinary color, or at the most two (say, different colors for men and women).

As for natural streaks in hair, there’s a genetic condition which produces this – Waardenburg syndrome, which also causes mismatched eyes. A group of characters distinguished by a white streak in their hair is the Mallen family of Catherine Cookson’s novels, beginning with The Mallen Streak.

Styles

Hairstyles are a good way to show people’s occupations (monks, soldiers and prostitutes will all wear their hair differently) or age. For instance, girls wear their hair in braids but ladies put their hair up. Complicated styles might also be a sign of social status, because only rich people would have the time or the luxury to have their hair teased into various shapes a la Queen Amidala.

And in A Game of Thrones, Dothraki men braid their hair and cut it off when they lose a fight—so the longer a man’s hair is, the better.

Adornment

People can wear pretty much anything in their hair, and often do. Ribbons, flowers, jewelry, chopsticks, berries, seashells, cakes of scent (in a hot climate, these will melt slowly) and even stuffed birds.

This is a good way to hint at social status too. At the start of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s braid is bound with string, but later on it’s tied with red ribbon, to show that her family’s fortunes have improved.

Power

Samosn’s hair supposedly gave him great strength as long as it wasn’t cut. Though now I’m wondering if “hair” was a euphemism for something else.

And the gift Galadriel gave Legolas was a bow strung with a strand of hair. The color of hair could also be an indication of a person’s ability, though it might be best not to go for the cliché of fire-mages having red hair.

Finally, what’s your favorite hair color? I like black or brown for most of my characters, but the one which most fascinates me is red, especially if the person has green eyes. To me, that’s about as exotic as you can get.

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Money in fantasy

Monetary systems in fantasy often fall into the gold/silver/copper lines. Partly because this is familiar and partly because it’s easier for readers to remember than, say, platinum/steel/tin.

Usually, the variations come in what the different types of coins are called. In Westeros, the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, gold coins are dragons and silver coins are stags – an interesting tip of the head to the political system, where the previous (dead) king’s symbol was a dragon, and the current king’s sigil is a stag.

In China Mieville’s world of Bas-Lag, people use shekels as currency, which I liked a lot because it reminded me of the ancient Middle East. Jack Vance’s world of Tschai is even more imaginative, though, since people there use sequins.

Sequins, on Tschai, are small colored gemstone-like objects that grow in nodes that bud unpredictably from the ground. Nodes can produce over a hundred sequins, which all start off clear, but take time to ripen to their final colors of scarlet and purple (passing through white, blue, green, etc. along the way). This sets the system in place – the clears are almost worthless while the purples are the most valuable.

So fortune-hunters on Tschai look for nodes. Needless to say, there’s an area where nodes do grow in some quantity, and it’s a hunting province patrolled by the vicious aliens called the Dirdir.

In our own past, people have used cowrie shells and salt as currency (the word “salary” derives from “salt”). Theoretically, money can be made of anything, as long as people can’t easily reproduce or damage it – coins made of glass would be unfeasible. It should also be in a form that can be readily transported and transferred.

Only in modern times has money been digital, existing as information passed from one computer network to another. I’ve thought and thought, but there seems to be no way to translate this to a fantasy world, without first setting up a banking system and teaching people finance. Until then, characters will just have to carry around their shekels, sequins, stags and so on.


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Shields in fantasy

The first memorable shield I ever read about was Athena’s, which bore the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Continuing the Greek motif, the movie Troy had the Greeks using shields in a testudo formation, plus Brad Pitt Achilles made good use of his during fights.

But there weren’t too many famous shields in fantasy, which is understandable. Swords are offensive weapons; shields are defensive. You can barely read classic or heroic fantasy without tripping over a sword that’s special in some way; not so for shields. When I started thinking of shields, though, numerous ideas came to mind.

Design

On a battlefield where combatants had their faces covered, shields could be used as an identifying device, hence the practice of painting them with a knight’s coat of arms. Of course, they don’t necessarily have to sport such a crest. They might simply be designed in such a way as to strike fear into their opponents – worked with a snarling face, for instance, or constructed of human bones.

That being said, keep the environment and the technological level of the society in mind. Not to mention the strength of whoever’s lifting the shield; a slab of granite studded with diamonds may turn aside any weapon, but it’s also completely impractical.

Purpose

Highly polished shields could be mirrors. Prince Oberyn Martell makes good use of such a shield in a climactic battle in George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords. Although he had to wait for the sun to emerge. Maybe someone with a spelled shield might be able to make it glow so fiercely that opponents would be forced to look away – if the shield bore the image of a sun, perhaps?

A shield could also have a design that produces the opposite effect. Say, a hypnotic swirl that mesmerizes opponents, or at least gives them a splitting headache. Or what if it’s a featureless blank that takes on the image of whatever most affected an enemy?

Enchantments

This is the best part, because almost anything can be done to make shields dangerous. Maybe they attract the enemy’s weapon as if it’s magnetized – meaning it’s all but yanked out of his hand. Or they could repel weapons instead.

They could be enchanted so that their wielder can see them, but the enemy can’t. They could suddenly (and scarily) sprout long clawed tendrils or chains when an enemy is within arm’s-length, trying to grab him.

They might be the portals to abysses that are terrifying and yet compelling at the same time. You can’t look away from the black nothingness before you, and yet you know that whatever goes into it – whether it’s your weapon or your arm – won’t be coming out again.

That was fun to write.



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Five ways alien eyes might see

1. Black/white

There’s no reason creatures from another world have to see in all the colors that we do. For that matter, I’ve read that dogs have dichromatic vision, rather than trichromatic, as we do.

Maybe aliens see everything in black or white – or in shades of colors like red or blue. Their identifying marks and decorations might therefore be very clear and obvious rather than relying on subtle variations in color. Or since they receive less visual information, perhaps they rely more on sound and smell cues.

Makes me think of the Jack Vance race which carried and played small musical instruments to compensate for their lack of facial expression. The type of instrument and the music played provided emotional cues.

2. Ultraviolet

To bees, flowers look like this in visible light…



…and like this in ultraviolet light.



An intelligent species capable of seeing in UV would have a distinct advantage when it came to espionage. Hidden messages could be written in chemical compounds that are only visible in UV, and those messages would be hidden from humans but blindingly obvious (pun intended) to them.

3. Ability to see in darkness/through water

Eyes capable of detecting infrared radiation would be able to see in the dark. I’ve always liked those infrared photographs with colors based on heat – white is the hottest, blue or violet the coolest. The only problem would be the detection of objects which are at the same ambient temperature as their surroundings – a rock on the floor, perhaps.

As for seeing in water… I don’t mind beautiful naked mer-people with long flowing hair, but I always wonder how they can see underwater. Water doesn’t transmit light as well as air, so even if they had a transparent eyelid (similar to the nictitating membrane) to protect the lenses of their eyes from saltwater, they’d still have difficulty seeing.

They could have relatively large eyes, as fish do, though an Ariel with huge bulging eyes would not have been as attractive. In fish, that also compensates for the lack of an neck; fish can’t turn their heads from side to side, so their eyes have a greater field of vision.

4. Ability to see gases

This might come in very handy in a world where there were pockets of dangerous gases such as carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide.

5. Transparency

I once read a book about a girl who had an illness that made everything appear like glass to her – people and trees and buildings alike. Of course, like glass, these were also transparent. She could see the inner workings of everything, from sap rising in the stems of plants to tumors growing in people.

That ability could be modified a little – allowing an alien race to look through armor, outer coverings such as clothes or even flesh. I’m just not sure what it would be called, given that X-ray vision would be misleading and would immediately make people think of Superman. Maybe just “transparency” would do.

Flower photographs from here: http://www.naturfotograf.com/UV_OENO_BIE.html#top
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Tattoos in fantasy

I’ll never get a tattoo – don’t like either needles or permanent alterations to my body – but I do like reading about them in fantasy.

Especially when they’re beautiful, as in the case of the marque of courtesans in Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel's Dart. Each courtesan owes a debt to their House, but can use the money they earn to pay for a marque, or tattoo, on their backs. When the tattoo is complete, the debt is paid.

With some effort, I recogmized the underlying design, which was based on a very old pattern, the briar rose. Somehow Master Tielhard had kept the dramatic vigor of the archaic lines, yet infused them with a subtlety that spoke at once of the vine, the bond and the lash. The thorny lines were stark black, accented only in a few choice hollows with a teardrop of scarlet – a petal, a drop of blood, the mote in my eye.

Tattoos, as such, are a mark of station and status. As in real life, they can indicate what a person is, and what organization they belong to. Since it takes time and skill to construct a sufficiently realistic and detailed tattoo, in a fantasy society this can be a sign of a person’s ability to afford one.

I also liked the tattoo in Matthew Woodring Stover’s first novel, Iron Dawn. An assassin has one in the shape of an Egyptian glyph meaning Destroy. Maybe other people, in such a society, might wear prayers for the purpose of defense. Would a vampire be able to feed off someone who had a cross tattooed on his throat?

But tattoos can be a sign of shame and punishment as well. The inmates of concentration camps were forcibly tattooed with identification numbers. In a fantasy society it’s often easier to brand a person, since tattooing means they have to be still for an extended period of time. If that’s feasible, though, and if branding is not desirable, they could be marked accordingly. Maybe someone who narrowly escaped the gallows could have the tattoo of a hangman’s noose around one eye.

In a role-playing gamebook I once read (Blood Sword 5: The Walls of Spyte), a character’s tattoos contained bound demons which she could summon, and there’s a Boris Vallejo painting of a man with a dragon tattooed on his upper arm. The dragon’s upper body rises out of the ink, becoming three-dimensional, and turns its neck to sink tiny fangs into the man’s flesh.

Tattoos can be studded with rhinestones or might incorporate thin slivers of metal embedded into the skin as well. They can be as elaborate as you like – and serve a dozen different purposes.

What tattoos do your characters have?

Picture from here: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/80600827/


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Childrearing in speculative fiction

In a lot of speculative fiction – even that set on other worlds and taking place in other societies – the nuclear family is the norm. Parents raise children. But there are variations on this here on earth, and there can be even more pronounced differences elsewhere.

Some Native American tribes were matrilinear, meaning that descent was traced through maternal lines. A child was brought up by its mother and her oldest brother. One advantage was that they were sure that the child was related to them, whereas a biological father doesn’t always have the same certainty. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few alien societies like that.

Children can be reared communally (a la the kibbutz system) or by trusted and/or trained individuals other than their parents – nannies, guardians or household demons. In Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines, children of the Riding Women are born into a small group of women – one of whom is the bloodmother, who actually gives birth and one of whom is the heartmother, who will be closest to the child. The others are sharemothers.

The system takes into account the fact that humanoid children require so much care that it can be difficult for one (or even two) people to provide it all. It may well take a village.

On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be the child’s own village. That’s the premise of Bernard Taylor’s The Godsend, which begins when a pregnant stranger seeks shelter at the home of a family with four small children. She gives birth that night, but seems curiously unattached to her baby daughter, and leaves the next morning - alone. The family decides to adopt the little girl.

When their youngest son dies suddenly, they believe the new baby is a godsend. At least they have someone to fill the void. Then another child dies… and the father remembers what cuckoos do with their young.

If certain traits – those that will be the most evolutionarily advantageous for passing on genes – are coded in those genes themselves, a child doesn’t need to be taught much by whoever raises it. Nature counts for more than nurture. It may need a parent to feed and protect it until it grows to adolescence, but that’s all. Or children might be born with an adult’s knowledge or memories, as they were in the universe of Dune if the mother underwent spice agony.

Children’s education is fun to imagine as well. The best story I ever read on this topic is R. A. Lafferty’s “Primary Education of the Camiroi”, in the anthology Asimov’s Extraterrestrials. The Camiroi have a rather unique way of bringing up children.

First Year Course:

Playing one wind instrument.
Simple drawing of objects and numbers.
Singing (this is important. Many Earth people sing who cannot sing. The early instruction of the Camiroi prevents that occurrence).

As someone raised in a family and culture that stressed achievement at all costs, I can sympathize. As for what’s done with children who fail (in the Camiroi, not in my original culture), well, there’s a judicious winnowing of the herd.

That could also be done in a race which produced dozens or hundreds of offspring and which couldn’t realistically allow them all to grow to adulthood. It’s not pleasant to contemplate. But it’s also not human, and that’s what makes it interesting.




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Childbirth in speculative fiction

There’s an episode of The Outer Limits called “The Surrogate”, where a woman is implanted with an embryo that – unknown to her – belongs to an alien race living secretly among us. I was waiting for it to burst out of her belly like something from Aliens, but at the point of childbirth, the embryo took her body over completely, erasing any mental vestiges of the host.

“She” was quite calm and happy afterwards. That was the creepiest part.

Childbirth, the sometimes dangerous process that separates one life from another, has been a source of fascination and mystery for thousands of years. In Macbeth, the titular character is assured that “none of woman born” can harm him, but at the end of the play Macduff tells him that:

Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripp’d.

Probably hinting at a primitive Caesarian section – if the mother’s life couldn’t be saved, someone decided to see if the baby could be removed alive. That makes me wonder, though. Could any special powers attach to babies who are delivered in this way, either because of the method of the delivery or because (in a medieval world) mothers would almost certainly give up their lives for it, whether voluntarily or not?

In The Verdant Passage, human/dwarf hybrids also result in the death of the mother during childbirth – plus, the hybrids are sterile. Realistic touch.

Males of the alien Tectonese species, in the television show Alien Nation, accept the developing embryos from females and then carry them until parturition – the seahorse principle, in other words. While this helps cement a pair-bond, it also means that the presence of both parents is required for the production of young, which may not be ideal.

Speaking of marine organisms, other humanoid species could mate as fish do. Deposit eggs, fertilize them and leave. The lack of parental care means they’ll have to produce thousands of eggs to ensure that at least a few of them survive, but that has other consequences too. What if humans discovered such an egg cache?

Childrearing in speculative fiction is next.




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Bridges in fantasy

Bridges are interesting even in the context of reality. I like looking down from them, especially if they’re above water. But they can be really fascinating in speculative fiction.

There’s a story called “A Thing of Beauty”, set in a future where Japan is the dominant world power and the United States is reduced to selling off national monuments. The main character sells a visiting Japanese businessman a famous bridge – yes, you guessed it, the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s got a happy ending for both involved, though.

In a fantasy, a bridge can connect lands – or worlds. Prehistoric people traveled to the North American continent via a land bridge, after all. Whether a river or a chasm separates two lands, a magically built bridge could still cross it.

Of course, it would probably be guarded at both ends and people or shipments traveling over it would have to be screened. Such bridges might also have cultural and/or political significance. Maybe the two nations built them as signs of alliance or peace. And if such a bridge was the only means of travel and trade for an isolated land, it would make an even more important target for terrorists or for an invading enemy.

Bridges could be made of unusual materials. Salt, ice, cobwebs, bones. In a role-playing gamebook I once read (Blood Sword 5: The Walls of Spyte), the characters traverse a chasm by crawling through the dessicated exoskeleton of a giant insectile creature that lies with its head on one side of the chasm and its tail within the ruined city wall on the other side.

Or the bridge might still be alive – for instance, it could be a huge worm or serpent that’s continually fed to keep it quiescent, so that people can walk into its propped-open mouth and travel the twelve kilometres to the other side.

Bridges don’t necessarily have to lead to the same place each time. One thing I enjoyed about the original Doctor Who series was that the Doctor was rarely if ever in control of where he was going. He could end up anywhere. I’d love to see a bridge like that, with one end disappearing into fog. People would be simultaneously afraid and fascinated by it.

They might try rituals and practices supposed to influence the bridge into taking them where they wanted – and it would be up to the writer to decide whether or not those worked.

Bridges could connect two times, rather than two places – if different parts of a city were medieval, industrial or modern, (like the TV show The Crystal Maze), there might be no way to travel from one to another except over the Zonebridges. And in a dark fantasy, who’s to say what might live under the bridge, emerging only to drag down anyone who didn’t drop the required price of passage?

Finally, a bridge might be perfectly mundane in and of itself and where it goes. But it could cause subtle changes in anyone who crosses it – and those would be limited only by the writer’s imagination.

Mirrors in fantasy

“Speculum, speculum,” said the Witch Queen to the magic mirror. “Dei gratia.”
“Volente Deo. Audio.”
“Mirror,” said the Witch Queen. “Whom do you see?”
“I see you, mistress,” replied the mirror. “And all in the land. But one.”
“Mirror, mirror, who is it you do not see?”
“I do not see Bianca.”

-- Tanith Lee, “Red as Blood”

Mirrors in fantasy worlds are never ordinary. They are portals to other worlds, magical devices which affect whoever looks into them or information transmitters – and even that is just scratching the surface of what they could be.

Tanith Lee’s “Red as Blood” is a dark retelling of a fairytale where Snow White is the daughter of a vampire – hence the mirror’s inability to see her. I also loved the fact that the Witch Queen and the mirror address each other in Latin. It reminds me a bit of that scene in Mary Poppins where Mary’s reflection outsings her and she doesn’t look too happy about it.

Non-sentient mirrors are more common in fantasy, though – especially those acting as gateways. Alice’s passage through the kooking-glass was one of the earliest examples, and in one of Stephen Donaldson’s novels, The Mirror of Her Dreams, the heroine is translated through such a mirror into another world. There’s an art to making such mirrors so that they translate the correct people or things (rather than driving their creators literally insane). And the heroine, alas, isn’t the person they were hoping to obtain.

A mirror can also be a place to hide. When we look into mirrors, we usually see what we expect to see. We see ourselves. Which means someone else in that mirror, behind the shine and the silver, may go unnoticed. In Graham Masterton’s Mirror, a fading child star disappears but is actually living in a nightmarish world behind an elaborately framed, full-length mirror in his house.

And that’s not even getting into the funhouse mirrors which produce bizarre and twisted images – let’s hope the image stays within the mirror, and is never more strange than what can be explained by the construction of the glass. In Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Dwarf”, the titular character longs to be tall, but the only way he can do so is to look in one of the mirrors that distorts his reflection.

The breaking of a mirror is usually a portent.

Out flew the web and floated wide.
The mirror cracked from side to side.
“The curse has come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

Mirrors can reflect what is not in reality, the reverse of what they traditionally do with vampires. They can show people’s worst sides, like the portrait of Dorian Gray. Or conversely, they could reflect what people might have been, or want very much to be (like the Mirror of Erised in the first Harry Potter novel).

One thing that’s always fascinated me about mirrors is what’s reflected if two of them are hung exactly opposite each other. Then again, I could never resist looking at the multiple reflections of myself, from various angles, in changing rooms. :)

Mindscape : guest blog

Setting Thesaurus Entry : Mindscape

I've liked thesauruses (thesauri?) ever since I discovered a copy of Roget's when I was twelve. That book contained lists of colors - it was the literary equivalent of the biggest box of Crayolas ever. For a year afterward, whenever I wrote something, my characters didn't just wear blue or green. They were clothed in cobalt and chartreuse instead.

Once I'd gotten over those excesses, though, that thesaurus took its place in my collection. I still have it. And another thesaurus collection extremely helpful to writers is The Bookshelf Muse.

Colors, emotions, settings, symbols... this blog has it all, along with suggestions and examples of how to use these to create evocative images and scenes. It's a wonderful source of ideas for description. And the setting entries are so varied - ranging from a tropical island to a secret laboratory.

So when Angela Ackerman graciously offered to host me on her blog for a guest post on setting, at first I wasn't sure what to write about. Medieval Castle had already been done. Manor House was an option, but I wanted something unusual, something unique to Before the Storm.

Then I thought of the Inward Way.

A psychic power that encompasses deception, illusion and control, the Inward Way also creates a dangerous mindscape. This is a place shaped by the imaginations and fears of whoever walks the Way, and Alex, the heroine, confronts one of the antagonists in this mindscape.

I immediately set to describing how other writers could use such a setting - it's very versatile, easily adapted for a futuristic or steampunk novel as well. Here's the result. Stop by and take a look! And be sure to check out the rest of the Bookshelf Muse as well.

Slavery in fantasy : guest blog

I first discovered Maria Zannini's blog through her Prudent Penny posts, though the stories of her cute Rottweilers are even better. As well as being a homesteader, she's a very talented writer and social networker, and I'm delighted to have the opportunity to guest blog on her site.

Maria suggested the topic of slavery in fantasy, which sounded great to me. Slavery can be a controversial topic, it crops up often in fantasy and it allowed me to refer to a Biblical epic.

What does the word “slaves” make you think of right away?

For me, a movie and a book come to mind. The movie is Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and the book is Alex Haley’s Roots.

Read more here, and be sure to check out the rest of Maria's blog! You'll enjoy it.

A spirit of place : cities in fantasy

I love creating cities. Which is perhaps to be expected, since I grew up in them – Colombo, Dubai and Austin. And when they’re inventive and well-depicted, they form much more than the backdrop to a story. They become an integral part of the world and the fantasy, as three-dimensional as a character.

Each fantasy city I remember vividly had something unusual to set it apart. Hart's Hope, in the titular novel by Orson Scott Card, is rigidly divided into districts characterized by their purpose (trade, pilgrimages, etc) and the different gates which lead into them. Calcutta, in Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali, is a reeking, overcrowded warren ruled by a goddess thirsty for blood.

I still believe that some places are too wicked to be suffered. Occasionally, I dream of nuclear mushroom clouds rising above a city and human figures dancing against the flaming pyre that once was Calcutta.

The city of Armada, in China Mieville’s The Scar, is made of a thousand ships lashed together and floating across the oceans. Armada has a park, a prison, markets, a library called Booktown and even a Haunted Quarter. All of it protected by airships and small ironclads and menfish who swim beneath the waves.

There’s Deepgate, the city suspended in a net of chains over an abyss in Alan Campbell’s Scar Night, and a floating city called Sanctaphrax in the Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Mechanized moving cities hunt down each other in Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines. And one reason I bought The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka was the beautiful painting on the cover – a giant tree that both grows into and supports a city.

All this is just scratching the surface. Cities can be constructed within huge living creatures which protect them like anemones do clownfish. They could be divided into different time zones – medieval, industrial, modern – where people but not technologies are able to cross over. They can be built from materials that might be extremely common in another world, such as slabs of uncut diamond.

What are your fantasy cities like?

Caste systems in fantasy

My favorite caste system is the one in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are divided into groups ranging from Alpha to Epsilon. Epsilons, if I recall correctly, are deprived of oxygen and exposed to alcohol while still in gestation vats, to physically alter them to the point where they’re appropriately suited for their work and will fit into their caste.

That’s pretty radical a change. Most fictional worlds don’t go that far, though some can be as brutal. In the Holdfast, one of the last outposts of civilization in Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Slave and The Free, fems (women) are at the bottom of the totem pole, but men don’t have it easy either. Their divisions are age-stratified.

The appropriate attitude of an older man toward a younger was wary concern, not lust.

This makes the major caste divisions clear and unchangeable.

On the other hand, caste systems can also be based on some variation of warriors/priests/workers. Substitute magicians for priests where appropriate. Workers make up the largest class, much like the serfs of the feudal system, and tend to have the least power.

Though a fantasy with more interesting political elements may allow the worker class to elect representatives who take their concerns to the ruling council, and who are given at least some respect there.

And in a world where most of the work is done by machines or magic, it may be more difficult to segregate people along these lines. A caste system rarely remains untouched by an Industrial Revolution.

A caste system produces plenty of questions which can be used to shape the worldbuilding. For instance, can people ever rise out of their original strata within that society? Or is there downward mobility? Perhaps the equivalent of white-collar criminals are punished by being made to do blue-collar work.

Do different castes have different religions – or do they pray to different gods in the pantheon? Are certain parts of the city set aside for people of other castes? Maybe the plebs use common coin as money, while the patricians have a different type of currency. What about the results of interbreeding between castes – and if this never happens, why not?

Finally, for every person who hates this stratified system where all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others, there’ll be one who is just fine with The Way Things Are. And the second person won’t automatically be wrong for holding that viewpoint. Even in the most modern of societies there are such divisions – money, education, type of work, where you live, etc. I don’t think it’s something we can ever really overcome.

Five uses for salt in fantasy

Inspired by Felicity Savage’s novel Humility Garden, which is set on a world called Salt where there were literal fields of the stuff. People rarely ventured out into those because if the wind blew crystals of salt into their eyes, the crystals would grow there and blindness would result.

1. Salt circles

Magic circles can be drawn in salt, to either provide protection for whoever is within or to keep power contained within the circle.

To make it a bit more complex, different colors of salt could hold different kinds of magic within the circle. Aluminum chloride can be pale yellow, while copper (II) chloride is blue-green.

2. Salt armor

Not as practical as chain mail or plate, but slabs of salt might be an effective defense against creatures composed of snow or ice. I’d also love to see armor covered with long needles of salt, especially if these were wont to break off and fly at opponents.

3. Salt used to attract water

Useful in the desert – sprinkle salt in a hollow dug in the ground and wait for water to well up from below. Of course, that would also attract predators who can detect salt or water a mile away.

4. Salt lenses

I read somewhere that salt lenses are used with infrared lasers, but I just like the idea of looking through such lenses and seeing things invisible to the normal eye – things which might not want to be detected.

5. Salt sown into earth

Historically, convicted traitors in Spain and Portugal could expect to have their houses demolished and salt plowed into the ruins and the land, to ensure that nothing would grow there again.

But what if this was done as a cleansing measure to remove the taint from the earth, and what if it was believed to have worked, such that other people were encouraged to live there? What effect would the salt have on them?

I’d love to see the crystals becoming semi-sentient somehow – perhaps because the traitor was wrongfully convicted, and therefore there is no taint to destroy. And so the crystals try to show the new occupants the truth.




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Disease in fantasy

When I was fourteen, I read a book called The Black Death, which is now out of print. It described how the titular plague might spread through the modern United States, and the descriptions of its effects – on the cellular level – were fascinating, like an arms race.

That began my love of microbiology, and ever since then I’ve liked learning about diseases. Not to mention writing about them, especially in the context of my other fascination, fantasy.

In pre-modern societies, people weren’t often aware of the exact means of transmission, so diseases could be passed more easily. Medieval cities also tended to have poor water treatment and sewer systems, both of which contributed to the spread of disease. Port towns were especially vulnerable because sailors and shipments could bring infections from afar; even something as simple as flushing ballast tanks could introduce foreign microbes into the water supply.

People still had ways to deal with disease. As far back as prehistorical times, it was known that certain plants and plant compounds could be used to treat illnesses – the athelas of The Lord of the Rings, for instance. People with diseases could also be isolated – for instance, sent to leper colonies or sanatoriums. That kind of stigmatization happens even in modern times – as experienced by the main character of Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul's Bane.

Diseases in fantasy can be very interesting to devise. My favorite part is naming them –wasteaway, the crawling stripes, coldfever, milkeye (myxomatosis, which in Watership Down is called the “white blindness”), stoneskin, fingerfall (leprosy), the red cough (tuberculosis).

Then there’s the method of transmission. Diseases in fantasy can be transmitted in bizarre ways – through flies or butterflies or even plant pollen. They can be spread by fomites (inanimate objects). And, of course, they’re transmitted by hosts or carriers – who may or may not be aware of the fact that they’re spreading a disease.

In a fantasy world, that might even result in the host being changed into a walking repository for the disease, able to do little else but eat, to keep the organisms alive, and travel, to spread them.

Or the disease could be something that everyone in a society is born with. Star Trek: Voyager did a pretty good job of that with an alien race called the Vidiians, which was completely ravaged by “the Phage”. As a result, their bodies are a patchwork of different types of grafts and organs, scavenged from other species.

The disease might be caused by a curse, or it could be something cyclical – people start to become sick at dawn, are in the throes of the illness at noon, which is when some die, and recover as dusk approaches. The night is usually filled with feverish (no pun intended) activity, to prepare for the inevitable sickness ahead.

Disease in fantasy, as in the real world, can be heartbreaking and horrific… and extremely interesting.

Bad Fate

The idea of a character predestined to do something fascinates many people, but in fantasy there seems to be more Good Fate than Bad Fate.

Good Fate is when you’re the Chosen One, though the writer may make up other names for it. The world saw you coming before you were ever conceived, gave you special powers, a great destiny, a magical sword and maybe a birthmark to show everyone that you deserved all of it.

Bad Fate is when you’re picked or destined to do something which is likely to result in a horrible death. And even if you live, you’re not going to be very happy.

I can see why there’s more of the former, and that’s not entirely sarcastic. If you’re a soothsayer called in to make a pronouncement regarding the newborn heir to a kingdom, it may not be politic to declare that he will die in ignominy. And if there’s anything written from the point of view of such a fortune-teller, someone who sees a terrible fate but doesn’t dare make it public, I’d love to read it.

Characters often try to get around Bad Fate, especially if they have a glimpse of how their lives might have been otherwise. I enjoyed The Last Temptation of Christ for that reason. Ironically, they end up doing whatever it was they were trying to avoid, just as in the “Appointment in Samarra” fable.

A merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the market. The servant returned, trembling, and said, “I was jostled in the market, turned around, and saw Death. Death made a threatening gesture, and I fled in terror. May I take your horse? I can leave Baghdad and ride to Samarra, where Death will not find me.”

The master lent his horse to the servant, who rode away to Samarra. Later the merchant went to the market, and saw Death in the crowd. “Why did you threaten my servant?” he asked.

Death replied,”I did not threaten your servant. It was merely that I was surprised to see him here in Baghdad. You see, I have an appointment with him tonight, in Samarra.”

Sidney Sheldon’s A Stranger in the Mirror uses this technique very effectively, by beginning with a description of a strange scene on board a luxury liner. A wedding was supposed to take place on board but the bridegroom has just left on a motorboat. The projector in the theatre is warm even though no films were scheduled for that night. And on the tiered cake, someone has twisted off the head of the bride.

Then the story goes back to the beginning and events build up slowly and inevitably to the climax. The heroine struggles fiercely to make a happy and secure life for herself and almost gets it. But everything is shattered at the end, partly as a result of her own actions. The last line of the book is that there is nothing but the sea and the sky “and the stars above, where it had all been written.”

Fate plays a great role in mythology and the classics. I loved stories like Oedipus’s and Perseus’s for that reason; both were fated to kill their fathers, who sent them away after learning of that destiny. Naturally, patricide happened anyway.

It’s almost a given in fiction that the moment a character is given such a Bad Fate, that’s going to happen, since it’s usually an anticlimax for the character to either find an easy way around it or for there to be a mistake in the proclamation. That contributes to the horror, since many modern societies tend to support the right of the individual to choose his or her own lives (insofar as capability allows), rather than being controlled and doomed by some arbitrary pronounciation.

It’s possible to evoke some of the horror while not necessarily having a doomed main character, if the curse is something that can be overcome. In J. V. Jones’s A Cavern of Black Ice, there are powerful and malevolent creatures who were imprisoned thousands of years ago. But someone who can free them has been born. Her name is Ash March, her power is growing and it will consume her unless it’s released – which will, of course, doom the world.

Special abilities that people wish they never had are always fun.




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