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Part of the fun of writing fiction is the dialogue that arises with readers if you're lucky enough to have any. Since I've always enjoyed learning about an author's thought processes and how it shaped what they wrote, I've created this page to describe what I was thinking and some of goals in writing this book. The result is a kind of FAQ (that I'll expand on request), with three main sections:
Part of the fun of writing fiction is the dialogue that arises with readers if you’re lucky enough to have any. Since I’ve always enjoyed learning about an author’s thought processes and how it shaped what they wrote, I’ve provided this postscript to describe what I was thinking while I wrote this book and some of my goals. The result is a kind of FAQ that I’ll expand on request.
Morley is what we moderns would call an achondroplastic dwarf. I’m told the term of art these days is “Little Person”, but I’ve chosen the older wording because it fits better with the pseudo-medieval tone of the story world. Morley’s mostly blessed with freedom from pain and gross physical deformity. That allows him to function more or less normally, which is a prerequisite for him to lead an active life with the King’s foresters, which is in turn an essential part of his background. There are many problems that can accompany achondroplasia as a medical condition, and I chose not to dwell on them; like all fictional heroes, Morley should represent the best of what we are, whatever our body size and shape, not the worst, and frankly, I already felt bad enough about what I was putting him through.
In making that choice, I recognize that I’m risking cultural appropriation: I’m not a dwarf, and thus have no experience of being one other than what I can achieve through empathy. If you, ungentle reader, are offended by my choices or feel that I didn’t do an adequate job of dealing with the issues raised by living as a dwarf, I apologize: mea maxima culpa. Please communicate via my blog (see the last page of this manuscript for details) to inform me of what I did wrong, and how I can fix it. (A note to friends and colleagues: Please don’t defend me against any criticisms raised by this story: typically, this degenerates rapidly into unproductive name-calling and overly defensive behavior. In particular, please don’t try to defend me against legitimate complaints that come from people who know better than we do. My intentions were good, but that doesn’t justify getting important details wrong.)
On one level, I chose to make Morley a dwarf because I wanted to remind readers of the prejudices we moderns try not to acknowledge, and because I wanted a character who would be an outsider and have to deal with the consequences of being different. To a pseudo-medieval culture such as that in the story, particularly one with many superstitions still haunting them after a disastrous experience during the vanished age of magic, the diminutive stature and “subtly wrong” facial and body appearance of a dwarf would be truly scary and disturbing. I’d like to think such biases are gone from modern life, but a little Googling suggests it would be naïve to make any such claim. It’s also true that I wanted to provide a plausible reason for Morley to sympathize with the Goblins, and a literary parallel that I hope was clear without being too blunt.
As a survival mechanism, Morley has been in a severe state of denial about many things for most of his life: he’s had a nasty past, and it’s left scars that still bedevil him. This is a large part of why so many things that seem obvious to the reader appear obscure to him. There are definitely better coping mechanisms than denial, some of which he’ll learn by the end of Jester. Others will await discovery in a future book. During the course of creating this story, I grew to like Morley a lot, and to admire his courage, and I hope to have him star in a future book when I have time to write it.
The world of Jester is what might be described as “high medieval” or perhaps even “early Renaissance”, but let’s be clear about one thing: it’s a pastiche of many different and potentially incompatible things that I chose for the sake of creating a flavorful stew rather than an attempt at historical verisimilitude. As is revealed in the novel, and as is revealed somewhat more cryptically in the prequel, Chords, human civilization was quite advanced before the magical catastrophe that led to the Exodus and arrival of humans in the new world—at least as advanced as early European Renaissance civilization, and more advanced in some ways because of the possibilities opened up by the use of magic. This explains the relatively sophisticated language and level of education of most urbanites, and why there are actually such things as public libraries (and other things such as public schools or their equivalent that don’t intersect the story arc). It also explains some of the modern-ish gender politics in the story, not that we really need an excuse in a fantasy world.
Footnote on gender politics in the world of Jester: Yes, this is a male-focused society and told from an almost exclusively male perspective. This is because I explicitly set out to critique that perspective in Chords, the prequel to Jester. There, you’ll learn much more about Margrethe’s history and the untold part of the traditional male-centric story. Let’s be clear that her much richer story in Chords is probably far more historically accurate than the narrower perspective of Jester.
Many old technologies were preserved at high levels after the Exodus, particularly those that would have helped the early colonists survive. These include things such as weapons manufacture, the construction of extremely strong fortifications such as the fortress of Volonor, and basic Renaissance-level medicine and medical skills. Other technologies may have been preserved, but were not deemed sufficiently important for survival to be actively practiced; this is why bound books are only now, more than two centuries after the Exodus, beginning to replace scrolls.
The complete absence of anything resembling religion from the book’s human society is not an accident. Morley’s reading of the scrolls in the library provides some hints, but his frustrating dialogues with the Elves and Goblins should be all you need to infer the answer. If you’re saying to yourself “this is one whopping great anomaly”, and that it’s unreasonable for such a huge level of mystical censorship of human thought to exist, you’re not wrong. Remember, this is fantasy, not alternate history, and that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. That leaves only one possible explanation, and when you eliminate the impossible, the explanation that remains should be clear, even if the details aren’t. I’ll resolve the mystery in a planned third book set in this world.
There are many deliberate anomalies, such as why detailed accounts of certain aspects of the Exodus were preserved when all such records were described as having been destroyed, and how a ragtag band of refugees in overcrowded boats built a colossal fortress such as Volonor. Then there’s the question about the existence of (at least two!) wizards when all such were said to have been destroyed before the Exodus. The answer is the same in each case: the preserved stories of the Exodus are severely flawed, and the reality must have been something very different indeed. It was, and the planned third book will explain some of these mysteries.
Although I undoubtedly had thoughts of the conflict between Western (European) culture and Islam on my mind when I began describing and characterizing the Goblins, I want to make it perfectly clear that there is no allegorical intention here. The Goblins are ***NOT*** standing in for Muslims. Similarly, although the invasion of a new continent by people who more closely resemble Europeans than any other culture, who traveled from the east to a western continent, and who largely destroyed the native cultures is a strong part of my cultural consciousness, this too is not a deliberately allegorical comment. I am specifically ***NOT*** equating the Elves or Goblins with native Americans. My explicit goal for including both races in this story was to make it clear that colonizers rarely make an effort to understand the native peoples they displace, nor any effort to find peaceful ways to coexist. Furthermore, I wanted to make it clear that although it’s convenient to demonize cultures such as the Goblins, they deserve more understanding than they receive in most stories. That allegory is one that I will confess to perpetrating, and if you want to apply it to the treatment of Muslims and native Americans by European-derived cultures, that would be a limiting but reasonable interpretation.
Language choice is always an issue when you’re writing something ostensibly “medieval” or set in a foreign culture. Since linguistic games weren’t my goal, I didn’t adopt the Tolkein approach and try to create my own languages or even a subset thereof. Neither did I want to painfully salt the book with thees and thous or made-up words that sounded foreign but were really pulled out of (to be polite) my hat. Instead, I opted for a somewhat stilted and ornate style that would suggest formality rather than modern informality, and evocative words such as Amelior to suggest a concept (amelioration, because its founders saw it as an improvement over the society they were leaving) rather than as clumsy symbols.
Speaking of clumsy symbols, Ankur isn’t one of them: I didn’t choose that name as a clumsy symbol for “anchor”, an interpretation that could be justified by reading Chords in a certain way. If memory serves, I chose it long ago (how long I won’t reveal) because I was reading about Turkey, and liked the Turkish city name Ankara. Ankur is here not because of any resemblance to Turkish culture, past or present, but rather because of the city’s long history and importance as a crossroads. That made the name seem appropriate.
You may have noted that with the exception of those times Morley spends with the Elves and Goblins, certain words are missing from his vocabulary, and for the most part, only appear during conversations with these races. That’s not an inconsistency; that’s the magical gift of tongues bestowed upon him by Orgrim. For historical reasons that you should be able to infer, Orgrim is also the only human who is able to use these words, even if nobody else can understand him.
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