Once, there were monsters in the Verse.
Excerpt from Deathsong
Ages and ages ago, when the first bright Spheres were Chanted against the Void, bringing light to that darkness, the darkness fought back. Great Beasts emerged, hungry enough to devour worlds, and the shining Sphere of Artha-that-Was crumbled into dust…
From the very first time I stepped through the wardrobe with Lucy, other worlds have always called to me. I still vividly remember first unfolding maps of Middle Earth over my high school homework with my father and exploring the Ages of Myst on a 90’s desktop, all while waiting to be transported back into a galaxy far, far away. And as long as I’ve been a writer, worldbuilding has always been my muse’s first invitation into a new story.
But what is it about it about Elsewhere that so fascinates us, both as readers and as writers?
The Call to Create Fantasy
On the one hand, I find that the best speculative fiction uses imaginary concepts — magics and gods, dead religions or artefacts of power — as mirrors. They hold other worlds up to us as a way to reflect the horrors and wonders of our own. This distance makes them easier to look at, to untangle, and to ponder.
At the same time, I have always been fascinated by Tolkien’s take on fantasy:
Fantasy remains a human right: we make […] because we are made […] in the image and likeness of a Maker.
Though I divorced the idea of any supreme creator deity long ago, something still sparks in me at Tolkien’s claim. In so many ways, creativity is our mortal call to divinity. Whether or not we attribute the beginnings of this world to some higher power, by creating our own worlds (as fantasists, fabulists, all us purveyors of Faerie stories), we seize the chance to think larger and dream wider than the bare scientific facts and statistics so often presented to us as “truth”.
Into the (multi?)Verse
At the moment, most of my writing time involves one particular setting. This has given me the best excuse to completely submerge myself within its history and lore. With this effort comes the opportunity to untangle the knots so tightly drawn in our world by cycles of violence, injustice, and oppression, allowing me to imagine other ways of being.
My forays into this world began more than a decade ago, when I sketched out a universe of worlds contained in crystal spheres on my homework for Rennaissance lit. How did the old astronomers justify such a theory, I wondered. Geocentricity is impossible, of course, without the intent of some divine maker or designer.
It has been a while since our species literally believed itself the centre of the universe. Yet in that moment, I saw why our predecessors imagined that there must be some divine plan. The alternative, in their understanding, was chaos. And so, they imagined a god to speak the world into existence.
As I return to the space of online sharing, I invite you to join me on deep dives into setting and worldbuilding — including real-world inspirations and shadows. I hope to share an essay every month about a bit of lore from the Verse. Until next time, I leave you with this thought from Ursula K. Le Guin:
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.
Ursula K. Le Guin | “28. It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is”
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