Todya’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Karin Lowachee! Her short fiction includes “A Borrowing of Bones” (selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List), “Meridian” (a Sunburst Award finalist that was also selected for The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3), and “A Good Home” (selected for The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 2). She is also the author the Philip K. Dick Award–nominated novel Warchild and the rest of the books in The Warchild Mosaic, my favorite science fiction series largely because of her fantastic work with voice and characterization. Her newest works are The Mountain Crown and The Desert Talon, the first two books in a fantasy trilogy featuring dragons that will be completed with the release of A Covenant of Ice on July 29. I’m excited she’s here today to share more about her wonderful new series in “Character and Worldbuilding in The Crowns of Ishia.”

About The Crowns of Ishia:

The Crowns of Ishia is a dragon riding frontier fantasy trilogy of novellas, with mosaic points-of-view across each story. The series tackles issues of colonization, war and its refugees, loss and longing, and the price of healing. At its heart, it’s a journey through love, revenge, and the sometimes bloody consequences of betraying the natural world.

Character and Worldbuilding in The Crowns of Ishia
Karin Lowachee

I am often asked how I go about worldbuilding a fantasy or science fiction milieu. Do I start with the character, the setting, the initial conflict, a concept? Over the years of creating many worlds both in short stories and novels, I discovered that the process varies. Sometimes it begins with a concept, sometimes a general interest (like dragons!) that I want to explore. But however I build out a world, the process of creation and exploration, for me, is always anchored in character.

But this process isn’t hierarchical. Often, ideas develop like a web and connect through a branching method of discovery. Simply put, I investigate and interrogate my own world, and this often leads me into surprising new avenues virtually all at the same time.

For my fantasy trilogy The Crowns of Ishia (The Mountain Crown, The Desert Talon, A Covenant of Ice from Solaris Books), I thought simultaneously about the first point-of-view character (Méka), her culture (the Ba’Suon), the dragons (suon), and their “magic system”—which I knew early on was not going to be a “magic system” per se, like the kind you find in traditional fantasy. One of the earliest ideas I had for this story involved the consequences of a schism of belief between two peoples. Essentially, in the same way science fiction is often concerned with developing technologies and their impacts, I wanted to explore the concept of developing “magic” over centuries and how this might impact whole cultures. For that, I had to understand the beginning, or the origins, of this “magic,” in order to prognosticate the people who are impacted by its changes. Beginning the trilogy, even the introduction to my world, through Méka’s eyes offered the reader a fundamental knowledge of the people and culture (the Ba’Suon) who exemplify this “magic” in its most natural form.

The idea of “magic” being tied to nature isn’t new, but I wanted to avoid the overt use of spells and incantations, or even rituals that incorporate tangible aspects of nature. I was more interested in “magic” on an atomic level and the idea of a culture and a people who are so intrinsically connected to nature, they don’t even codify this understanding in any way. They simply live it. “Magic” then becomes a way of being, not a learned practice, and is by definition neutral (it simply exists as a fundamental part of reality, like air or the stars). Developing this idea inevitably led to the question: how would this way of being shape the people who live it? The Ba’Suon culture arose from this inquiry.

To explicitly answer this, I was inspired in part by the philosophy of wu wei, a key concept in Daoism that encompasses the idea of acting in harmony with the flow of nature. ‘The Way never acts yet nothing is left undone’. This is the paradox of wu wei. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means ‘effortless action’ or ‘actionless action’. [theschooloflife.com] When fantasy narratives tend to depend on actiony heroes heroing actionally, I wanted to explore another angle while still addressing personal themes of war and colonialism, industrialization and resource exploitation.

I knew it would be a challenge to depict a point-of-view character like Méka who isn’t constantly threatening her world with violence or revolution as The Answer to aggression. As my milieu was inspired by North American frontier literature, where the “stoic cowboy” is an entrenched trope, I became more interested in a female protagonist that embodied the kind of stable, quiet, only-acts-when-necessary personality often attributed to men in this genre. She is so centered in herself, aggression as a first reaction is counterintuitive, even if she’s usually the most powerful person in any room. It made sense that if her Ba’Suon culture was born from an intrinsic understanding and connection to nature and the cosmos, her way of moving through the world is one of “wu wei,” not only because of disposition, but because any violent disturbance to her world would be, quite literally, felt. So, in this way, my worldbuilding of the Ba’Suon, Méka, Ishia and the archipelago’s history all became intertwined. To understand one, I had to understand all the other elements.

Furthermore, introducing Ishia and the Ba’Suon through Méka allowed me to deconstruct the world through subsequent points-of-view: first Janan (in The Desert Talon), who is a Ba’Suon veteran of war (a contradiction, and he bears the consequences of it), and Lilley, the “enemy” Kattakan who probably possesses the most familiar point-of-view to Western culture audiences. However, by the time we arrive at the third novella, A Covenant of Ice, which is through Lilley’s eyes, this more “recognizable” Western personality is rendered actionless. He can’t “fight” in the conventional way Western protagonists are often expected to fight.

In developing the world and its characters, I became more interested in exploring situations and people who traditionally are not given the opportunities for “action” and must work within the “system” that has been foisted onto them. In a way, the characters are dropped into a flow of nature against which they either fight or find ways to exist within the parameters they can actually control. A repeated phrase through the series is “nature will always rebalance itself” (even if it takes centuries) and people, also as much a part of nature as the suon and the land, are intrinsic to this reality.

Taking into consideration all of these aspects, as well as many others, allowed me to flesh out the whole world and the characters. It becomes impossible to compartmentalize any of these considerations under topical headings. My understanding, as the author, of how the Ba’Suon, and Méka, and the suon, and every other part of the story informs one another consequently directs not just what is being told in the narrative, but how it’s being told. For me, building fantastical worlds and characters to live in them isn’t about having a schematic so much as it is about having a philosophy—a point-of-view or approach to narrative that’s carried through to the most minute details, some of which make it onto the page, and others that remain in the realm of the unconscious that readers may or may not pick up on.

Worldbuilding as an aspect of fantasy writing is still, at its heart, storytelling. It may start as a cool idea you want to explore (like I had the desire to write my version of dragons), but it doesn’t end there. Once I realized that my dragons would be both symbolically and literally a representation of the inexorable forces of nature, the philosophy of my world and its characters—and thus the narrative as a whole—began to feel real, and became something that would be reflected in my story through multiple aspects. Hopefully, this approach created an immersive world and unique characters.