The Change.
Tales of downfall and rebirth.
edited by S. M. Stirling.
INTRODUCTION.
The Change as Setting and Secondary World.
There are a number of perils you can encounter when building a fictional world, particularly if you intend to set a number of stories in it. Running out of story you really want to tell, which induces boredom, is one-Arthur Conan Doyle eventually desperately tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes, whose fame was obscuring the historical novels that he felt (with some justification, they're very good) were his best work. Edgar Rice Burroughs' reputation would probably be much higher if he'd written only the first three or four books in his Tarzan and John Carter of Mars series, though more with the former than the latter. Africa was wall-to-wall Lost Races and Lost Cities by the 1940s, and you'd think some would show up from the cabins of the Imperial Airways planes flying over it by then.
Which brings up another potential problem: simply running out of space, even if you want to continue and have stories to tell.
Patrick O'Brian ran into this problem with his wonderful Aubrey-Maturin series, set during the Napoleonic Wars; eventually he was reduced to unofficially splitting the year 1813 into, as it were, 1813a and 1813b-sort of alternate history versions of the penultimate year!
The wars against Napoleon spanned more than a decade; if you throw in the beginning of the struggle against Revolutionary France it covers a full generation-around twenty-five years, with one short truce. Men like Stephen Maturin and "Lucky" Jack Aubrey would have spent their entire adult careers in the period between the fall of the Bastille and Napoleon's exile to Saint Helena, and by the end of it most of their subordinates would have been born into the wars. That's more than enough for a series of books!
What tripped O'Brian up was simply that he didn't anticipate how many books he would be writing with this (quite large) cast of characters, and so passed over a good many years as he skipped between the time periods of the earlier books.
I took this lesson to heart when starting the novels of the Change, what some call the Emberverse. It tied into another desire, that of making a world that felt ample. Even if you're worldbuilding for a single novella, it should feel "big," not fading into nothingness beyond the tight frame, not "thin." The characters should be aware of an entire universe around them, full of people and things going about their own business. Look at our own world, even in this age of globalization when there's scarcely a city on the planet where you can't ask directions or order lunch in English. How vast and varied and interesting it is, both in terms of nature and of how human beings live on it and with each other!
Many of the great fantasists-Le Guin, Howard, Tolkien, Martin-have achieved this feeling of having an entire world that exists on its own, with the narrative taking place in only part of it. Howard was one of my early influences; I spent a hot cross-country trip in the late sixties dripping watermelon juice on the Lancer Conans as my family drove an un-air-conditioned car from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
He achieved it by using what was supposedly, like Tolkien's Middle Earth, the remote past of our world. Even the maps of the Hyborian Age and Middle Earth are similar, if you look carefully. Both Tolkien and Howard did glorious mashups (the concept is older than the term) of historical cultures in their antediluvian worlds. Tolkien has late-medieval Gondor, Anglo-Saxon riders of Rohan, largely Nordic Dwarves, Regency English yokel hobbits, vaguely Middle Eastern and Central Asian Easterlings and Corsairs, plus the totalitarian nightmare of Mordor, with its pollution and its population known by their file-numbers. Howard went completely berserk, and had high-camp-medieval Aquilonians, English longbowman Bossonians, ancient Egyptians in Stygia, Afghans in (where else?) Afghulistan, and something close to nineteenth-century Zulus and Sudanese on the "Black Coast." Not to mention Vikings, Cossacks, Bedouin, archaic-Semitic more or less Assyrians and Babylonians in the cities of Shem with their ziggurats and brass idols, seventeenth-century buccaneers, eighteenth-century pirates, Turks, Renaissance Spaniards, and Picts who are pretty much Iroquois as seen by the frontiersmen of the Mohawk valley with the odd demon and giant snake thrown into the slumgullion for flavor.
Conan, of course, was essentially pre-Christian Irish, and cheerfully chopped up an entire multicultural host of opponents without fear or favor.
Taking the planet Earth (geographical amplitude and variety) and historically attested cultures (human, ditto) solves the most basic problem of worldbuilding; it's extremely hard to come up with an entire world and its inhabitants and be convincing, to avoid thinness and sameness as everything takes on the cast of your own mind. Not to mention your own limitations with regard to geography and ecology. Hence the multitudes of one-note planets in science fiction; desert world, ice world, and so forth, often inhabited by races who have only one "hat" or trait. Super-logical, super-emotional, super-aggressive, you name it! As the saying goes, worldbuilding is good occupational therapy for lunatics who think they're God, and a lesson in the almost paralyzing complexity and interconnectedness of reality.
This has become the Stock Fantasy World; an ancient or parallel Earth with historically based cultures. This can be done well (Westeros) or badly (I shall not specify, and let the libel lawyers starve). It has the virtue of giving you an unlimited canvas; after all, our own Earth is the "worldbuilding project" of endless mimetic fiction.
Another possible setting is the post-apocalyptic wasteland, where a "new future past" creates analogues to historical settings; Andre Norton was fond of this and did it very well.
Which brings me to the world of the Change.
When I set out to do the Nantucket trilogy (beginning with Island in the Sea of Time) I knew that I'd eventually return to the world Nantucket left behind when it was plunged into 1250 BCE. And that as that ancient world received the technology of the late twentieth century when a community of thousands of Americans from 1998 was dumped into its midst, so the world left behind would be denied the high-energy-density technologies. Electronics and electricity; heat engines of all kinds; and the electrochemical and high-pressure, high-energy chemical processes dependent on them.
That gave me the big world-ours-to work with, rendered even bigger by the sudden removal of fast communications and travel. Naturally, losing the technological basis of the great world-machine in 1998 would cause unimaginable chaos and destruction, comparable to a full-scale global thermonuclear exchange at the peak of the Cold War in immediate devastation and removing the possibility of reconstruction on the same basis.
Old cultures and nations would crash and new would, eventually, be born. That basic story has been told many times in science fiction, and generally with more of a time gap is the basis of a fair bit of fantasy as well-The Dying Earth by Vance, for instance, or Alyx Dellamonica's new Stormwrack series that begins with Child of a Hidden Sea. Even the specific removal of higher technology isn't entirely original to me, of course: Steven Boyett's Ariel is a lovely example, though more overtly fantasy. Dragons lairing in the Great Smoky Mountains, anyone?
But what sort of new cultures would arise in the wake of this particular apocalypse I'd come up with? Here I got hints from my subconscious, in the way I usually do when contemplating new books-scenes and characters spontaneously appear; one of them was Juniper Mackenzie sitting by a campfire in front of her Romany wagon, and somehow I knew she was a witch (in the strict sense, that is, a Wiccan). Inspiration . . . but inspiration is cheap. It's being able to connect the dots that's important.
The Change is not a random disaster, cataclysmic though it is; it's not an asteroid hitting the earth, and it's not something like nuclear war or ecological collapse that we might do to ourselves. It's precisely tailored to remove certain possibilities. And it involves what is, as far as any human being can tell, a deliberate alteration in the fundamental laws of nature.
A disaster like that wouldn't just have physical consequences; it would have cultural and ideological-religious ones. Modernism, scientistic-materialist naturalism, would be shot through the head for any but the most fanatical of its devotees, most of whom would perish with the great cities anyway. Technology wouldn't necessarily be reduced to a medieval level; there's nothing to prevent people from using McCormick reapers, water-powered machine tools and antiseptic surgery in areas that preserved some cultural continuity. But the structures of belief based on the scientific and industrial revolutions, at least the more overt and conscious ones, would be dead as the dodo because their basic presumptions would be discredited. The invariability of natural law, for instance.
Human beings need ideas, though. We don't live in the natural world alone; we live in a world of shared perceptions, assumptions, beliefs. You can't make sense of the raw data of experience without some inner framework of ideas, a theory of how things work. It seemed to me that people in the situation I'd postulated would often fall back on the past, on the ways of their ancestors. To a certain extent that would be inevitable, because the material underpinnings of our high-modernist, post-modernist world had been traumatically removed.
But as a character in an upcoming Change book notes, "History cannot be completely undone, even by the Change, nor can the past be truly brought back even if you wear its clothes."
Groups of survivors-often coalescing around some charismatic obsessive leader and his immediate followers-would think they were returning to the ways of their ancestors. What they would actually be creating would be new societies based on myths, stories and legends about the past. A group of Wiccans might call themselves a Clan and adopt Gaelic terminology and wear kilts (an eighteenth-century invention by the way), but they wouldn't be much like a group of pre-Christian Celts. A knight of the SCA might contrive to build a kingdom with (ferroconcrete) castles, knights in plate armor made in hydraulic presses and a feudal-monarchical structure, but it wouldn't be much like eleventh-century Normandy. Too much memetic technology has developed in the interim. Isolated ranches in the American West (or estancias in Argentina or stations in Australia) might think they were reverting to a more recent heroic past of bold pioneers, and traumatized English survivors led by Guards officers might think they were reestablishing a myth of Deep England; they'd be just as wrong, though more subtly so, beneath the chaps and the smock-frocks.
This has happened before. The ghost of Rome haunted the Western world for a thousand years and more, with everyone who could trying to appropriate its manna by emulation-it's not an accident that we are governed by a Senate from a marble building with domes and columns. That doesn't mean we're actually Romans, and for that matter the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire, and a lot of its population weren't Germans.
And the people who survived the Change would be inescapably modern no matter how disillusioned with the formal ideological superstructure of modernity, often in ways that they weren't conscious of. Though . . . what would their children and grandchildren, raised in a world where a mile was once more a long way, be like? Here insert a glyph of authorial hands being rubbed together in glee.
Throw in the Supernatural (in a Clarkean sense) and you've got what I decided would be a background as big and varied as the real world. It would have an array of cultures as colorful as anything in pulp fiction . . . not least because in some cases they were half-deliberately based on pulp fiction and half-remembered historical novels and bad movies. Why not? Charlemagne's Empire was based on equally bogus memories of Rome. As a bonus, they would usually be more psychologically accessible to modern Western sensibilities than something more genuinely archaic, for the real thing is always alien and often outright repulsive to many.
They would build their castles from our ruins, and conduct their wars and Quests along the crumbling line of our roads. The ancient past that gradually became half-understood myth-was Jurassic Park fiction or fact?-would be our present. Instead of sending a single individual or small group through a "portal" to another world, I could send the whole world to another world.
I had my own Hyborian Age, my own Middle Earth, but accessible through Google Maps! Including a society founded by a mildly insane Tolkien fangirl who thinks that she and her friends are the Dnedain Rangers amid the Douglas fir and redwoods . . .
The rest, as they say, is histories. The novels of the Change, or Emberverse (what comes after Dies the Fire but embers?) have been far and away my most popular work. The setting gives a stage interesting enough and big enough for a large number of stories I've found fun to write, especially when combined with my cunning trick of giving all the protagonists descendants.
Herein are some other authors who've found the world of the Change a fun canvas on which to paint, ranging from seeking fortune and adventure in the ruins of Sydney to Venetian and Greek galleys clashing in the Mediterranean. Enjoy!.
Hot Night at the Hopping Toad.
by S. M. Stirling.
CORVALLIS.
CHANGE YEAR 41/2043 AD.
Orlaith Arminger Mackenzie threw the letter down on the table and buried her hands in her long strawberry-blond hair, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment. That didn't help, since the image she was trying to banish was inside her head.
The Hopping Toad tavern just after the early sundown of November was a good place to have a private conversation, mostly because it was so crowded; the noise level was such that you could barely hear someone sitting across from you unless you leaned close and shouted, which the mostly young clientele were doing on every subject under the sun. Often waving their arms and hammering mugs and cups on the battered tables in accompaniment or shaking a finger-or in one case she could see, a half-eaten sausage on the end of a fork-under someone's nose. The Faculty Senate election provided a lot of the material, just as if it were really important.
The gaslights on the walls were turned down for the same thrift's sake that had shunned incandescent mantles, until everything was a sort of wavering umber shadow. Between crowds, noise and dim light even a five-foot-eleven blond princess just turned eighteen could be at least quasi-anonymous as long as she didn't set out to attract attention. Which would have required stripping naked and dancing on the table. Plus a lot of Corvallans were stubbornly republican and went out of their way to be unimpressed by royalty, even though the city-state had been part of Montival since the beginning.
The heir to the High Kingdom felt free to half-shriek at her best friend.
"No, Herry, no! Tell me you're not banging my annoying jerk of a little brother!" she moaned.
"I'm not banging Prince John, Orrey," Heuradys d'Ath said agreeably, folding the letter and tucking it back into a pocket in the long sleeves of her houppelande.
The words went with a charming smile. Heuradys was two years older, just a hair shorter and a trifle more full-figured than the Crown Princess; her birth mother was a notable beauty and her father a big ruggedly handsome man, and both showed in face and build. Her dark mahogany hair, amber eyes and pale slightly freckled complexion were unlike either of them.
"You aren't? He's talking about your tits in that letter, woman, that he is!"
"I'm not doing it right here and now, am I? And he's using much more elegant terminology than tits. Rose-tipped pearls is sort of a sweet, poetic way to say I'm so horny, really. Besides, you're my liege-lady and you told me to say that I wasn't. So say it I must, regardless."
"You mean you actually did?"
"Yup. And a good time was had by all."
"Euuuw!" Orlaith struggled to find words. "Herry . . . euuuw. He's sixteen! He's a virgin!"
"He's a sixteen-year-old boy, which means he's a penis with feet. I'm only three years older -"
"Four!"
"OK, four. And he was a virgin."
"He's Catholic!"
"They do it too, you know, they just feel guilty afterwards. As I remember it-"
She cast her eyes upward in an obviously false searching of memory.
"-you lost yours at that Beltane festival in Dun Juniper when you were sixteen. Diarmiud Tennart McClintock, wasn't he? Everyone has to start somewhere, and there's nothing written in the stars saying the boy has to be the older one."
"Beltane . . . that was a sacred rite," Orlaith said a little weakly; it was among her more pleasant memories.
"All acts of love and pleasure are sacred rites."
Orlaith had to nod at that, for it was simple truth for her variety of the Old Faith. Heuradys was of a slightly different branch, but the principle held.
Perhaps my repulsion is illogical. Still and all, it's mine.
Heuradys went on: "It's amazing Johnnie made it to sixteen and three months; he is a prince, after all. I'd have expected some calculating Court lady or ambitious servant girl to kick his legs out from under him long before this. Probably he knew I wasn't after anything; he's no fool, your little Johnnie. And cute, and charming, and he has a really good singing voice, and he isn't intimidated by me, which is a nice change, and I really like him as a person. But I'll stop the banging if you want me to."
"Yes! Yes!"
"All right then, my liege. I hear and obey."
Heuradys half-rose and made a parody of a northern Court bow, doffing her chaperon hat. Its circular roll-edged form and dangling liripipe were markers of her new status as a knight, as were the discreet little gold spurs on her half-boots. Then she pushed it to the back of her mahogany curls and leaned back, waving her beer mug to attract a server.
They were drinking the excellent house premium brew, Guaranteed Tenure Ale-whose official slogan was Three Mugs and Set for Life-a richly amber-colored beer with taste like toasty caramel to start and a bitter, herbal finish.
"Mind you, I was going to stop anyway. That's why I showed you the letter, so that you could help me let him down easily."
"Why didn't you say so!" Orlaith said in relief.
She also made a note to switch to the lighter small-ale called Sophomore after dinner. Being grown-up meant you had to make your own decisions on things like that and stick to them, rather than just taking what was brought to the High King's table with a score of eyes on you.
"Because it's so much fun making you run around in circles waving your hands in the air and screeching in horror," Heuradys said, grinning and wiggling her eyebrows for a moment. "And now you're so relieved you're in a cooperative frame of mind. He is still a bit callow for anything unbrief. 'Twas one of those impulsive things in a hayloft. Over a stable at Kore Manor."
Technically Heuradys had three manors on Barony Harfang up there in County Campscapell in her own name-in what had once been called the Palouse-as part of her inheritance, but two were still empty rangeland, and Kore was only a small village and modest newly built country house. She'd been taking an interest in the land for some years now, and getting to know the people her mother-both her mothers-had working on the new settlement. Also the hunting and hawking were good there.
"Not a hayloft, that's a cliche. Stop, for the love of Lady Flidais of the White Deer!" Orlaith begged. "No more details!"
Heuradys smiled in a heavy-lidded way. "Callow, but there's something to be said for frenzied untutored enthusiasm, though, this absolute panting thrashing eagerness to get-"
"Euuuw! I so did not want that image in my head, that I did not! John cooties!"
"Well, he's your brother," Heuradys said generously. "It would be odd if you thought he was attractive."
"How would you feel if I was sleeping with Lioncel or Diomede?"
"Surprised; they're both extremely married and very Catholic. And I assure you no sleeping was involved."
She grinned, continuing the teasing: "Cliche? It was classic-prickly alfalfa hay and a smelly horse-blanket, a mad grapple, clothes raining down into the stalls . . . All right, all right, sorry, no more."
Orlaith made a sound of revulsion that was half laughter and drank more of her beer. She was in jeans, canvas-and-leather shoes-what Corvallans called sneakers, for some reason-and a roll-topped sweater, with her academic robe thrown over the back of her chair. That was standard garb for studying at the University, the city-state's ruling institution and pride and joy; she was attending for a few semesters, as much for the experience and of course for politics as anything. Not trying for a degree; only a minority of students did that anyway, and she didn't have anything like enough time. It had been deeply interesting . . . for a while. Especially the course on post-Change ecological trends, and she'd worked doggedly on law and finance though they bored her like augers.
But city living wore on you, she found, even when you could walk to green fields and woods in a half-hour. It helped that she could spend the weekends outside the wall at the Finney steading. They were prominent Corvallan yeomen and old guest-friends of the Mackenzie chieftains, a link that went back generations, even before the Change.
The tavern was a long L-shaped room crowded with tables to the extent that getting to the jakes at the rear required dancing skills. The day's selections were chalked on a board over the flickering fire of the hearth in the middle of the longer wall, and though the tables nearest it must be sweating half the customers howled close it! whenever someone went through the outer door and let in a blast of the cold damp. There were even patrons on the dais where musicians sometimes played. That had a small brass plaque on the wall behind it, reading: Lady Juniper Mackenzie, first Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, was performing here at the time of the Change, 6:15 p.m. March 17th, 1998, beginning the long friendship between the Clan Mackenzie and the People and Faculty Senate of Corvallis.
Which made it a family affair, since Juniper was her grandmother, mother of her father the High King; Corvallans were a little old-fashioned and still used the ancient calendar even after most folk had shifted to the Change Year count for everyday use-currently it was the tag-end of CY 41. Though from what she'd heard from Juniper only the location, name and floor plan remained of the pre-Change hostelry. Half of the other patrons in the taproom were in student garb too, though some of the jeans and robes were patched; the air was thick with the scents of beer, wine, mulled cider, hot chicory drinks and herbal teas, damp wool-it was raining outside, as it did most of the Black Months of winter in this part of Montival-moderately clean humanity and cooking.
The rest of the crowd wore wildly varied garb from all over the High Kingdom and beyond; Corvallis was a center of trade and manufacture as well as education. There were plenty of Mackenzie kilts and plaids since the dthchas of the Clan was just on the other side of the old Highway 99, and rather fewer of the baggy Great Kilt (and tattoos) worn by their McClintock cousin-rivals whose stamping-ground was in the hill country south of dead Eugene. Benedictine robes marked a warrior-scholar-monk from Mount Angel, a Rancher from the eastern plains flaunted gaudily embroidered and embellished fringed leathers, the picturesquely uncomfortable archaic jacket and tie some Boiseans still favored marked the self-declared heirs of the ancient Americans, and brown Bearkiller quasi-uniforms ostentatiously drew attention by their grim understated modest practicality. Indian garb of several varieties identified various autonomous tribes; some of it was stuff she knew they took out only for festivals and impressing outsiders with their authenticity. Plus plenty of variations on the rough and rather shapeless linsey-woolsey homespun that was what most folk actually wore.
Quite a few were from the north-realm, the Protectorate as the lands of the Portland Protective Association were known. The old border was only about fifty miles north up the navigable Willamette River and the railway, and trade and traffic were lively within Montival under the High King's long peace. Most of those were merchants or artisans or the rougher types who crewed riverboats, though, and unlike them Heuradys d'Ath was in the nobility's full fig.
In her clothes-conscious case that meant skintight claret hose, loose-sleeved white silk shirt closed at the wrists with sapphire-threaded ties, a thigh-length black doeskin jerkin edged with gold thread and a long fawn-colored houppelande coat of superfine merino wool with amber ties and long dagged sleeves revealing a pale gold lining. A jeweled Associate's dagger gleamed on the tooled leather belt looped over the back of her chair that also held a severely plain long sword with sweat-stained rawhide bindings on the hand-and-a-half hilt.
"Did you have to show up in Court dress?" Orlaith asked.
It was attracting a few hostile glances, since not everyone had forgotten the old wars against the Association in the days of the first Lord Protector of the PPA, her maternal grandfather. Who had been, she had to admit, by all accounts an all-around murderous evil tyrant bastard, if also a great man and mighty conqueror. It wasn't everyone who could claim that their grandfathers had killed each other in battle . . .
"Court dress? Nonsense," Heuradys said loftily. "This is afternoon dress suitable for informal social activity. For court dress I'd be wearing that white-work shirt and the sea-green houppelande my lady-mother just finished. It's trimmed with embroidery three inches deep! And a plume in the hat, and those really dumb shoes with dagged tops and upturned toes and bells that look like a quarter of a jester's hat, not these fetchingly tooled half-boots. And this year parti-colored hose is back. Except when I was going girly in a cote-hardie, of course. My lady-mother and her tirewomen came up with this absolutely heavenly rose-and-azure concoction for me to wear at the Twelve Nights balls this Yule, the two-peak headdress has these tails of woven silk and feathers; I've got to show it to you. Stunning, if I say so myself."
"That does sound interesting," Orlaith said.
The Royal household would be keeping this Yule in Portland, and the thought of the round of balls and masques and routs suddenly seemed attractive. It would be the first time she'd done that as more or less an adult.
"Though you are such a clothes horse," she added quellingly, while making a mental note to consult Lady Delia about her own dresses.
"Given my parents, I come by it honestly."