I am so going to write that book

[robinturner]

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.

Comments

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

Best of luck with this project. And about finding time to write the damned thing... If you write a page a day, at the end of two years you'll have finished it. At two pages a day, you'll be through in just one year. You can almost certainly find time to write a page a day, even if you have to fit it into lots of different tiny scraps of time.

[chr0me-kitten.livejournal.com]

I want to screw up Campbell's Hero's Journey as much as I can.

Yes!

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

I'd read it.

[osymandus.livejournal.com]

Snap , yet i want to create a race of technologicaly adavnced minotaurs , that have a compination of magick and sound based vibration tech.

The humans arnt winning that one :D

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

he population is 50% female, 40% male and 10% hermaphrodite

Polyandry is sometimes practiced because of the surplus of men.

??

Not that I'm against polyandry, but how is there a surplus when men are the statistical minority? (Is there widescale female conscription, or something?)

[hyperina.livejournal.com]

oooh, I just know your book would be so good!

Tell your prospective publisher that I've already ordered a copy. That's one list I wouldn't mind being on.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I got that wrong: it should have been 50% male, 40% female and 10% hermaphrodite. I'm working on the idea that the hermaphrodites have XX chromosomes but don't get the bursts of testosterone while they're in the womb, but again, I'm leaving all that unexplained for the readers to fill in if they want—it could just as well be something in the water, or the result of fairy activity.

[solri.livejournal.com]

OK, edited the mistake now.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

I see. That makes a lot more sense.

Maybe you could hint at the genetic situation; otherwise, readers might accuse you of playing fast and loose with the fantasy aspect. Even with a hint, they could still infer whatever they like--for example, why is the genetic situation what it is (biological mutation, the water, or faeries).

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the encouragement. If my LJ is anything to go by, the page-a-day idea should work; I just turned my journal into a PDF file using LJ Book (http://www.ljbook.com/) and it came to 645 pages! As a very undisciplined person, I'd rather do the Jack Kerouac thing and write the whole novel in a week while high on amphetamines, but that would seriously interfere with my teaching, and besides, a fantasy novel in the style of Kerouac probably wouldn't go down well ;-)

Oh well, at least the physical business of writing is so much easier than it used to be. I used to write short stories, and they were short largely because, as a left-hander, I found writing tedious. (Note for younger readers: in those days we used to write with tools called "pens", a bit like a PDA stylus, but full of gunky stuff that had a habit of staining your clothes.) My first story was a fantasy parody which I submitted to Tom Shippey, whose SF seminar I was attending. He advised me to cut out the stuff that wasn't really funny then send it to Interzone (which he'd just helped found, so it was a case of near-certain publication). Being young, foolish and lazy (and having finals coming up) I didn't get round to it, and eventually forgot about it, thinking only a few people would be interested in that sort of thing anyway. A couple of years later, Terry Pratchett wrote The Colour of Magic and I was banging my head against the wall. So yes, time to get started!

[solri.livejournal.com]

It would have to be a very subtle hint, though, as I still want the book to be readable as pure fantasy rather than SF (the scientific backdrop is more a discipline to prevent me from the worst absurdities of fantasy writing). Testosterone-eating faeries?

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

Nono... testosterone-eating micro-robots created by faeries that the people think is a curse from neglected ancestors..!

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

This is exciting news! Now I'll know two fantasy novelists!

I'm on the day-a-month plan for my book on the metaphoric foundations of the environmental movement. I'd really like to get to knock it out in a week, but I just don't have the stamina. Faulkner's another one who just sat down and wrote a book. Lucky guy.

While reading your bullet points I had a lot of thought associations:

Neuters tend to hold professional, military or governmental positions - like eunuchs in the Ottoman and Chinese empires?
The number three pervades the whole culture - this reminded me of Sheri Tepper's True Game series, not because of the culture, but because her humans were late-comers on a planet where five-sidedness was the dominant biological form.
The existence of magical weapons means that warfare is conducted according to chivalrous conventions, like not vaporising city walls - here I thought of Varzil's Compact in MZB's Darkover novels. After clingfire was invented, combat had to be hand-to-hand to be honorable; even ordinary archery was out. (Darkover has an almost completely fantasy flavor but is technically science fiction because the "magic" was based on scientifically consistent laws.)
He/she will be middle aged - that was one thing I really liked about Bujold's Paladin of Souls - having a middle-aged protagonist. (She was years younger than I am, but in medieval terms, she was definitely post-youth.)

[solri.livejournal.com]

like eunuchs in the Ottoman and Chinese empires?
You got it.

I think there's a tendency to have more middle-aged protagonists these days. (Actually Frodo was middle-aged in human terms, but he was still fairly young for a hobbit, I think.) Waylander the assassin is one of my favourites.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Oh right, Bilbo! Definitely middle-aged. I think of Frodo as having been about 30 in human terms, yeah.

I'm not acquainted with Waylander, but I love Vlad Taltos (also an assassin, early 30s).

The great Chinese admiral and explorer Zheng He was a eunuch - it's unusual and interesting to get to hear about eunuchs who got to do great things without having to be behind the scenes.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Then there's the Byzantine general Narses, who kicked the Ostrogoths out of Italy, and was somewhere in the back of my mind when I was thinking about my hero's military career (long over when the story starts).

I'm not sure if the Ottomans picked up the practice of castration from the Byzantines. Hmm, I should do some reading about eunuchs in history.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

Under Justinian, sure.

(You mentioned that you haven't read Guy Gavriel Kay. He's one of my favorites, for style, but his best and most recent books aren't so much fantasy as just straightforward historical fiction, changing the names in that way that bugs you and adding in a slight amount of magic. He's got a pair set in Byzantium and Ravenna under Justinian (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors). Also there's one about the Reconquista (The Lions of al-Rassan), and one set in Britain which I thought did an awfully good job of sympathetically illustrating the differences in worldviews between the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Celts (Last Light of the Sun). They're all in the same fantasy world. Your mention of Narses reminded me of it, though I don't remember his character in the books particularly.)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

besides, a fantasy novel in the style of Kerouac probably wouldn't go down well

but I'd read it!