I have a lot of fun coming up with worlds for my books. Sometimes the world design is largely dictated by the plot or the basic pitch – for The Shadow Campaigns, for example, I knew I needed a world with a lot of similarities to Europe in the 1800s, because that story mirrors the Napoleonic Wars. For others, like Ashes of the Sun, I have only a few fixed points that the plot requires, and I spend a lot more time puzzling over just how to set things up.
One of the things I knew I needed was a fallen civilization, with the story taking place in its aftermath. This is a pretty common ingredient for fantasy (baked into our collective experience by medieval Europe's awareness of the Roman past?) which for me usually means I want to come up with an approach I haven't seen very often. Yes, Lord of the Rings has relics of fallen civilizations – mostly the ancient kingdoms of Men, but also places like Moria – but they're typically not very different from those of the present, just more powerful. Books like Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time are more what I have in mind, with the collapsed civilization being clearly set apart from what comes after. These kinds of ruins are also a staple of Dungeons and Dragons and many other RPGs, where they make excellent places for the heroes to fight ancient guardians and acquire powerful magic unknown in modern times.
One common element, though, is that in all these settings the ruins tend to be fairly rare. In Gentlemen Bastards, the Elder relics are so unique that cities are built around them, and in most of the others they're confined to the corners of the world and left for heroes to deal with, while the majority of the population lives a relatively standard-fantasy-medieval lifestyle.
Thinking about my world, I knew I wanted the collapse to be relatively recent, about four hundred years before the story begins – as opposed to the thousands or even tens of thousands of years that seem more common. I also knew that the civilization in question, called the Chosen Empire, had achieved a very high level of sophistication indeed. They're essentially equivalent to modern humans in their capabilities, or even greater, using magic instead of technology. And if there's one thing that we know about modern humans (unfortunately) it's that they leave stuff everywhere.
That was the thought that sent me down another track entirely. This isn't a fantasy-style ancient civilization, it's a post-apocalypse-style one. Even after four hundred years, the world is covered in Chosen arcana. Their nearly indestructible unmetal litters the landscape, their cities are broken down but still clearly apparent, and aftereffects from their greatest weapons still scar the sites of battles. The setting is less Lord of the Rings and more Mad Max, with not just heroes plundering lost tombs but everyday people making use of the remnants of a prior age as best they can. New cities are built using crashed skyships as fortifications, high-strength cable and material is repurposed to haul loads up and down a cliff face, and alchemists refine ancient bio-products into crude chemical weapons.
This turned out to be a great world for Ashes, because it helps tie one of the central conflicts – the question of the nature of power: who is qualified to wield it, and on what grounds – into the world itself. With remnants of the ancient world all around, those who can use them to control even a fraction of the power of the ancients – in this case, the Twilight Order, a society of sorcerer-knights – has almost unchallengeable authority. That knowledge could do enormous good if widely spread, but it could also enable the forces that brought down the Chosen in the first place.
The whole exercise has brought home to me how wrong it is to dismiss broad concepts on the grounds that ‘it's been done before.’ Everything, ultimately, has been done before. But by breaking things down to their basics – considering which features are core to an idea, and which are merely associated with it because of past examples – you can often come up with a very different take on something that breathes new life into it. New combinations and interesting approaches are always possible. I hope I've managed it with Ashes of the Sun, and I'm already looking forward to what I'm going to try next!
I have a lot of fun coming up with worlds for my books. Sometimes the world design is largely dictated by the plot or the basic pitch – for The Shadow Campaigns, for example, I knew I needed a world with a lot of similarities to Europe in the 1800s, because that story mirrors the Napoleonic Wars. For others, like Ashes of the Sun, I have only a few fixed points that the plot requires, and I spend a lot more time puzzling over just how to set things up.
One of the things I knew I needed was a fallen civilization, with the story taking place in its aftermath. This is a pretty common ingredient for fantasy (baked into our collective experience by medieval Europe's awareness of the Roman past?) which for me usually means I want to come up with an approach I haven't seen very often. Yes, Lord of the Rings has relics of fallen civilizations – mostly the ancient kingdoms of Men, but also places like Moria – but they're typically not very different from those of the present, just more powerful. Books like Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time are more what I have in mind, with the collapsed civilization being clearly set apart from what comes after. These kinds of ruins are also a staple of Dungeons and Dragons and many other RPGs, where they make excellent places for the heroes to fight ancient guardians and acquire powerful magic unknown in modern times.
One common element, though, is that in all these settings the ruins tend to be fairly rare. In Gentlemen Bastards, the Elder relics are so unique that cities are built around them, and in most of the others they're confined to the corners of the world and left for heroes to deal with, while the majority of the population lives a relatively standard-fantasy-medieval lifestyle.
Thinking about my world, I knew I wanted the collapse to be relatively recent, about four hundred years before the story begins – as opposed to the thousands or even tens of thousands of years that seem more common. I also knew that the civilization in question, called the Chosen Empire, had achieved a very high level of sophistication indeed. They're essentially equivalent to modern humans in their capabilities, or even greater, using magic instead of technology. And if there's one thing that we know about modern humans (unfortunately) it's that they leave stuff everywhere.
That was the thought that sent me down another track entirely. This isn't a fantasy-style ancient civilization, it's a post-apocalypse-style one. Even after four hundred years, the world is covered in Chosen arcana. Their nearly indestructible unmetal litters the landscape, their cities are broken down but still clearly apparent, and aftereffects from their greatest weapons still scar the sites of battles. The setting is less Lord of the Rings and more Mad Max, with not just heroes plundering lost tombs but everyday people making use of the remnants of a prior age as best they can. New cities are built using crashed skyships as fortifications, high-strength cable and material is repurposed to haul loads up and down a cliff face, and alchemists refine ancient bio-products into crude chemical weapons.
This turned out to be a great world for Ashes, because it helps tie one of the central conflicts – the question of the nature of power: who is qualified to wield it, and on what grounds – into the world itself. With remnants of the ancient world all around, those who can use them to control even a fraction of the power of the ancients – in this case, the Twilight Order, a society of sorcerer-knights – has almost unchallengeable authority. That knowledge could do enormous good if widely spread, but it could also enable the forces that brought down the Chosen in the first place.
The whole exercise has brought home to me how wrong it is to dismiss broad concepts on the grounds that ‘it's been done before.’ Everything, ultimately, has been done before. But by breaking things down to their basics – considering which features are core to an idea, and which are merely associated with it because of past examples – you can often come up with a very different take on something that breathes new life into it. New combinations and interesting approaches are always possible. I hope I've managed it with Ashes of the Sun, and I'm already looking forward to what I'm going to try next!
—Django Wexler
