The Big Idea: Elizabeth Bear

Posted on March 28, 2012    Posted by John Scalzi      10 Comments

Dear world: Elizabeth Bear is awesome. Range of Ghosts is her new book. This is her big idea. Also: She is awesome. That is all.

ELIZABETH BEAR:

There’s nothing new under the sun in epic fantasy, or so I’ve heard it said.

So when I was trying to come up with a Big Idea for an epic fantasy–a genre I’ve loved since before I wrote my first derivative plot coupon fantasy in fifth grade (it was deeply inspired by The Dark Crystal and Piers Anthony, but it had the best dragons ever–and I’m still stealing bits of my mad juvenile inventiveness and recycling them into other settings) it seemed to me that the obvious solution was to invent a different sun. Or maybe a whole slew of different suns.

So I did. Everybody gets their own sun! Or suns. And a set of skies to go with them.

Because the gods of this world are real, and the heavens–perforce–reflect their will.

It was important to me that this world have an economy. I wanted these books to question the too-easy monarchy “restore the king” plots that so often proliferate in our genre.

I wanted the fun and adventure of swords and sorcery, but I didn’t want to hew too closely to either the broad tropes of traditional heroic fantasy or the grittier perspective of the heirs of Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson. Instead, I wanted a middle path–heroic, but not morally unexamined.

One of my best friends is a direct descendent of Genghis Khan. (It’s possible that I am, too–something like twenty percent of human beings alive today are, and my great-grandfather was a Cossack, a group that famously claims descent from the Golden Horde.) Her sons are my godsons, and as I considered settings, that coincidence–and the fact that have heard from friends of Asian and African descent over and over again how hard it is for them to find stories that acknowledge their heritage and cultures–influenced me.

There have always been exceptions, and this is changing, but too many fantasy worlds traditionally have not only failed to step outside of Tolkien’s worldbuilding, but don’t question the Eurocentric view of world history so many English speakers (I can’t say “the majority,” because I believe at last check India has more English speakers than most of the rest of the world) are given in grammar school. We speak of Alexander the Great, after all–and the terrifying Mongol Hordes. But the roles of Alexander and of Genghis Khan in history are not actually so very different.

Both men were conquerors. The difference in perspective–who is the hero and who is the scourge–has a great deal to do with cultural observer bias.

So I wanted these books to focus on the cognates of cultures that epic fantasy so often marginalizes–those mysterious Easterners, usually portrayed as a swarthy, untrustworthy threat on the borders of our heroes’ empire.

The intersection of those influences was the inception of the world of the Eternal Sky, of which Range of Ghosts is the first book. I knew I wanted a world of vast scope and deep history, inspired by the multicultural swords-and-sorcery milieu of classic genre works like the Conan cycle–but I hope with a bit less unexamined colonial baggage. And I knew I wanted to completely excise the usual Western European fantasy backdrops–so this is a world where the Prague-equivalent is a coastal city and Western Europe just doesn’t exist at all. No Greece, no Rome.

But a complex system of empires, khanates, caliphates, principalities–and trade routes dominates the cultural landscape.

Because dirty politics is fun.

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Range of Ghosts: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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