Hanzea

I’ve been thinking again lately about one of my old conworlds. Hanzea. Or maybe it was Ilzea; one was the name for a language, the other for the world, don’t ask me which was which. Anyway, I came up with the basic notion five-ish years ago. I was sick and tired of fantasy worlds that are all planets – continents in oceans, populated by ethnic groups and nation-states, covered haphazardly in mountain ranges and rivers. Of course creating such a world can be quite entertaining, and I still participate gladly in a project or two along such lines. But come on, can’t we try something else once in a while? Terry Pratchett does something wonderfully different with the Discworld: a flat, disc-shaped world, that rests on the backs of four monstrificously oversized elephants, who stand, in turn, on the back of Great A’Tuin, the giant space turtle. Who floats through space much like a solar system would. The oceans are constantly pouring off the edges in ginormous waterfalls… don’t ask how the ocean water is replaced. That’s silly. The sea level stays the same not because of some kind of mechanism for replacing the water that falls off the rim but, quite simply, because everyone knows that’s how oceans should be. 

Jeff Burke has spoken before at some length on the difference between science-based fantasy worlds and fantasy-based fantasy worlds. Science-based worlds all have in common the general notion that providing Earth-plausible realistic explanations for everything possible, and detailed, systematic, self-consistent underpinnings for the rest, is a good idea. How many fantasy books or series have magic systems that involve the users taking energies, of well-described character, from a precisely specified source, and mentally shaping them in painstakingly intricate ways to achieve the desired effects? With clear-cut descriptions of what can and cannot be done by magic-users under the system? Not that there’s anything grossly wrong with such worlds, they just get old after a while. 

Burke cites Tolkien’s Middle Earth as a canonical example of a world that goes the other way; people and elves and dragons and so forth all behave as they do not because of factors X, Y, and Z but because it’s what we, as readers, want from them. Little attempt is made at explanatory underpinnings, and indeed it would almost be offensive to Tolkien’s vision to try to provide any. But even Middle Earth remains, basically, a Typical Planetary Conworld in its physical setting – it’s a landmass in an ocean with territory divided between groups. So there, too, we have some of the old mindset of anchorage to Earth. 

Hanzea drops all that business – instead, the fantastic can truly be itself. That’s my goal with it, at least. Visionistic fantasy without any of that tedious business of having to explain anything or look like places we’ve all already been to. And, well, there’s some kinks I haven’t worked out, yet. Like, I still need some kind of conflict source. There’s gotta be something dark. I like dark. So the human side I’m not so sure of, yet.

So… where does all that get us? For one thing, the physical setting I am absolutely confident of. Granted, it draws much of the initial inspiration from something else. To wit, the Kingdom of Zeal, in the 12,000 BC era in the classic SNES game Chrono Trigger. But there’s just something about those people living in the sky that sobs desperately for much greater elaboration, to be freed of its video-game vignette and allowed a true exploration. 

Next up: actual description.

!! Dream Recursion

Just woke up, having dreamed in my sleep of waking up and blogging my dreams on WordPress. FIE, WORDPRESS! A CURSE ON THEE TO THE SEVENTH GENERATION! Stay out of my head. For shame!

68th Avenue NE

There’s something about the street out here at night that leaves me more often in a mood to write something, on average. At the very least I have found inspiration for a poem and a short story out there, although I regret to say that both have since been lost, buried in the graveyard for dead hard drives. In this case it happens to be garbage collection day tomorrow and in taking some trash up the driveway I realized I had something to write a first blog post about.

Not an especially interesting street, really. And that poem could have found its inspiration anywhere, it just happened to be there – it was an exploration of chill, nighttime, full-moon-illuminated crystalline hoarfrost, in onomatopeic alliteration. Though that probably makes it sound better than it was. In any case it’s just a suburban street, the section of street after it stops being an arterial but before it takes on a truly residential character. Uphill, lots of trees around, a few houses. Not a lot of traffic. Lonely at night… and there’s the key. In years gone by, before I learned to drive (which I did not get around to until age 27), I walked up and down that hill just about daily. I know that hill like the back of my hand. At night it can be a touch on the scary side at times, as there are many places where the side of the street (there is no proper sidewalk) passes by pitch-black spots between trees and buildings and so forth, and more than once I’ve been startled by the sudden discovery someone was there – undetected until I was practically upon them – in one of those spots. One time it was some poor guy trying to find something in the trunk of his car with a flashlight, he looked up and I saw his light the same moment he saw me, only arm’s length away, and we both abruptly yelled out, out of sheer startlement. So it became habit to keep my eyes and ears open and my wits about me when walking up the hill in the dark, especially late at night. 

Streetlights. Streetlights are what I’m trying to arrive at, here. There aren’t quite enough of them along the way. It’s about a 3/4 mile trek from the bottom of the hill to my house, and there’s maybe seven or eight streetlights along the way. On a normal night you can look up from the bottom and see all of them receding into the distance like an artist’s study on perspective, and it can even feel like they constitute a beacon somehow pulling me up the road like some kind of tractor beam out of Star Trek. 

Foggy nights, the streetlights turn into another sort of entity entirely. Something bizarre and primally mythological. On nights with thick fog when you are standing under one streetlight, you can see the next, but only barely make out the one after that. They become witch-lights, that pop in and out of existence by sensitivity to your presence, a will-o-the-wisp leading you through the mists, along a path between night-dark trees, only to drown you in a mire… your whole world contracted to this one pool of light, all else cut off by blackness and 3 AM silence… and of course there’s the gap, the spot around 190th street where there should be a streetlight but isn’t. On a very foggy night, standing at that last streetlight before the gap, you cannot see the next one and have to proceed on sheer faith into the dark, until the next light becomes visible.

The nighttime fog walk I have done perhaps half a dozen times in my life. It has never failed to leave me in quite a mood… tense, or ponderous; or dread apprehension; or perverse joy at such things really existing – at the world containing more than sitting at a desk under a fluorescent light.

Of course I have not had one of these walks in some years, and I drive a car now so it seems unlikely to happen again soon. But someday it will again, and even if I am eighty, I will again be just a little boy following Hansel and Gretel’s trail of streetlights through the dark scary forest.