I am so going to write that book

After sniping at fantasy writers so much, I have decided it is high time that I started to write the fantasy novle I've been kicking around my head for the last couple of years. Well, I say "fantasy", but it's actually one of those hybrid novels that look like fantasy at first sight but have a scientific (or pseudoscientific) underpinning, like some of Sheri S. Tepper's or Gene Wolfe's books. The backdrop is pretty vague and, I might add, unoriginal: there's a world which resembles to a large extent your typical medieval-level-technology fantasy world, but there are all these magical objects and weapons which make the reader think "Ah, a lost civilisation." Following Clarke's dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the characters see these as really magical, but they could be just very sophisticated machines with a machine-mind interface. Or they could really be magical—I'm leaving it open. A possible scenario is a planet that was settled by members of an advanced civilisation who descended into barbarism after some convenient unexplained catastrophe and worked their way back up to a roughly medieval level—again, I want to leave those details up to the reader.

Another unoriginal idea is having three sexes: the population is 50% male, 40% female and 10% hermaphrodite, and our hero comes from the third sex. No genitals and, more importantly, not much in the way of sexual hormones, so non-standard emotions. Actually, I say it's unoriginal, but although I've come across a fair number of SF novels with non-standard sexes, I've yet to find one where the main character comes from one of these.

Some other ideas.

• It's in the Southern hemisphere, just for the hell of it. As Sara Douglas points out, even Australian fantasy authors make the North cold and the South hot, so I wanted to be different. (Gene Wolfe is a worthy exception—some have speculated that Nessus is a future Buenos Aires.)
• The main characters are brown-skinned; the evil invaders are pale and, just to annoy the Celt wannabees, red-heads. Again, not an original idea; I pinched it from Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, where the Archipelagans are described as copper-coloured and the Kargs look pretty much like Vikings.
• Polyandry is sometimes practiced because of the surplus of men. Land is held by women and worked by men; neuters tend to hold professional, military or governmental positions.
• Because of the three sexes, the number three pervades the whole culture: they have three deities (except for the neighbouring monotheists), the land is ruled by a triumvirate and so on.
• The existence of magical weapons means that warfare is conducted according to chivalrous conventions, like not vaporising city walls—at least until the Evil Celts turn up.
• There are nomadic barbarians riding creatures not entirely unlike wargs, just because barbarians riding wargs are cool.
• The hero is not going to be some gawky teenager; he/she will be middle aged, partly because I'm middle aged and partly because I want to screw up Campbell's Hero's Journey as much as I can.

Now all I need is the time to write the damned thing.

The First Page

I am taking ozarque's advice and trying to write a page a day. I probably won't manage it, but it's a good target. So here is the first page. The frequent blanks are because I don't want to put in any names before I can at least sketch out a language for this world—the "Old Speech" I mentioned, which most people don't speak, but will be used for names of characters, creatures and places to avoid the kind of thing I was complaining about in my last post.

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I have no experience with autobiography (in fact I only learnt the word recently) but then I suppose few people have when they write one, unless they lead lives so long and interesting as to need a second volume. I have only read a few of these tedious works, since books are hard to come by here, but I gather the way to do it is to start at the moment of one's birth (or even before, with an account of one's illustrious forebears) and write down everything in chronological order and minute detail. Maybe the boy who cleans my house and hangs on my words will one day write an official account of my life, complete with every colour I shat as a baby, but my main purpose is to recount certain events that I had a part in, and these did not take place until I was already forty years old, so I think it best, and kindest to the reader, to pass through the first half of my life as briefly as possible.

I was born in the summer of __________ in the village of ___________ in the province of __________, the child of ________ by her second husband. The birth of a neuter is usually cause for celebration, especially if there is already a wise daughter to inherit the land and strong sons to till it or, as in our case, to work down the mine. There was copper in the mountains, and so our village was wealthy; no young men had to leave to seek work elsewhere. With neuters, it was a different matter. If a village already had a chief and a doctor, there was not much else for us to do, but even a neuter who left was a source of pride, for they could spread the family's name and influence wherever they went. So it was that at the age of fourteen, I was apprenticed to a sorcerer in the town of ________. I spent two years learning to recite the Old Speech and to care for sorcerous devices, both skills that served me well later, but I had little talent for the former and less for the latter. I could use the devices well enough, especially the weapons, but the bond I had with them was erratic: I was as likely to harm a device as to heal it, and eventually, after I nearly burned down my master's house with a flame-wand, it decided that my affinity for destruction would be better put to use in the army.

Gaining a commission was easy, for neuters are much sought after as officer material. Men make good fighters, but they have a tendency toward anger and fear, those two enemies of a soldier, so it is better for them to be commanded by neuters. (Of course only a fool or a barbarian would squander women on military adventures.) I served in two campaigns with competence but no particular glory to my name. The first was one of the formal affairs with the _________ that used to spring up every ten years or so, usually on the pretext that we were persecuting their coreligionists here, even though we are a practical people who would think twice about persecution for profit, and not dream of persecuting people over a point of theology. The real reason is that once in a while their king or our triumvirate needed to impress their people and give the army something to do. As a result, few died in battle and fewer cities were conquered; by ancient custom, sorcerous weapons were limited to small arms that stunned or bewitched rather than laying waste. The second campaign was against the pirates of the ________ , whose raids had become too much for the triumvirate to tolerate. That was a nasty business: it was there that I got my scars and killed my first man. The boy listens to my stories of these wars open-mouthed; that is why I haven't told him that as well as the man I killed with my sword, I also torched a ship full of women and children. Here I should write that their dying screams still haunt my dreams, but they don't: it was an honest mistake, and besides, I couldn't hear their screams because the blast had deafened me.