About the Fantastic
Friday, January 29, 2021 at 6:31pm
It occurred me, as I have been working recently on my newest novel project The Ghost King, that, for the first time in my writing career I am writing something that mostly fits the generic specification known as “fantasy.” My most notable previous foray into the genre, The Shipwright and Other Stories, was set in a world I explicitly designed to lack any system of magic. The most imaginatively fantastic of my novels, Insomnium and Schrödinger’s City, are mostly science fiction. Although they contain many elements that do not have explanations, neither do they explicitly rule out our universe (or, rather, set of universes) entirely. All my other novels—Voyage Embarkation, Alterra, and The Other—fit pretty well within science fiction, albeit with inflections of fantasy.
I’ve never been a fan of adhering to generic strictures in my writing. It seems to me that the primary function of genre adherence is to prevent readers from having to think too much, an effect I am decidedly uninterested in. All of my novels, to varying degrees, blend science fiction and fantasy. All of them, so far, have been science fiction tinged with fantasy. For the first time, I am reversing that. The Ghost King will be fantasy tinged with science fiction.
The Ghost King most definitely has a magic system. On a world called Ilssmé, humans are able to channel an omnipresent energy called mahj into kinetic force, heat, even the creation of material forms (although they cannot generate new life this way; creating a rabbit, for example, results only in a dead animal carcass). The cost of using mahj is the degradation of both mental aptitude and emotional well being. If a person uses mahj too vigorously, first their cognitive skills suffer and they grow emotionally intense, then they become cognitively impaired and emotionally unhinged, and eventually, they would lose all cognitive abilities and become a vegetable. Most sufferers of mahjcraft addiction get pulled back by friends and family before they get that far, but perhaps not all exercises in mahjcraft will remain entirely voluntary for the novel’s duration.
The reason I did not include a system of magic in The Shipwright and Other Stories was because I wanted to maximize the creative potential of minimal fantastic elements (in that case, the presence of three moons instead of one), rather than piling up the fantastic elements into a complex world. The reason that I have included magic in Ilssmé is that mahj is the single fantastic element I am using for my central metaphor.
The Ghost King is perhaps my most ambitious novel project yet. With Voyage and Insomnium, I let myself sprawl, exploring all the complexity of those novels’ worlds—but at the cost of a sprawling word count, as well. In Alterra, Schrödinger’s City, The Other, and Intersection Thirteen, I practiced concision, keeping word count low and forcing myself to show only what was necessary and no more for my tightly focused theme. With The Ghost King, I’m trying something new. This novel will be longer, but that is because it is structured as five stories, all set on Ilssmé, about a century between each setting, and a frame story interwoven between them, which will tie the whole thing together thematically. Each individual story must be tight and focused and contribute to the larger story as efficiently as possible.
Of course, any foray into the unknown contains risk and tends to push outcomes toward the extremes. I will end up either with something quite compelling, or with my biggest mess to date. Here’s to hoping I can hold The Ghost King together.
