A belated giving of credit where credit is due
I was reading several articles on anthropology and the ancient world with my morning coffee when it hit me that, in all my blathering about We (my new epic fantasy series), I never gave credit to my inspiration. The story is an ode. A love poem dedicated to my fascination with the art, the innovation, the myth and science of our ancestors.
I read frequently on the subject and draw liberally from the real world in all my writing. Obviously I buried myself in fairy lore when I was writing Into the Darkbower.
As for The Spider’s Friend, it’s a crazy mash-up of influences. The Serpent Queen was inspired by the Mayan Snake Kings and plumed serpents from across the Yucatan. The plant-folk and other elemental peoples owe their existence to Hindu folk beliefs. The civilization at the story’s center is a Mesopotamian jigsaw: Assyrian names, Akkadian dress, and the capital city, Ebillashalla, is the love-child of the Hanging Gardens and the Ishtar Gate.
We is different. A deliberate homage to the ancient world. It’s based in part on paradigm-altering developments in anthropology and genetics in the last decade, discoveries that have been vetted and peer-reviewed. And in part on a liberal dose of tin-foil hat wackiness thrown in for the fun of it.
The story isn’t located on Earth and it isn’t about our ancestors. But it genuinely bothers me, and always has, how little respect we tend to give our antecedents. It’s true they weren’t as well-fed and had shorter life expectancies, but they weren’t materially different from us.
They were every inch as adventurous, as capable of rigorous thought and innovation, and it drives me mad how eager people are to write off their accomplishments.
These dismissive approaches seem to fall into three categories: 1) aliens, 2) you can accomplish anything if you kill enough slaves, and 3) the timeline is wrong, that’s actually modern.
We is not my counterargument. It’s not on the order of a thesis. Really. I don’t believe magic and beings from another dimension are the likeliest explanation for how the ancients accomplished all the amazing feats of science and engineering we have yet to explain.
I’m not an anthropologist. I’m not even a devoted amateur. Just an avid spectator delighted to observe the blossoming of innovation and discoveries. The sum total of my qualifications in the field: I attended a summer camp in junior high where I got to help on a dig at Mesa Verde. I don’t have a theory of my own, and again, I was raised by a scientist: I’m almost always open to the notion that what I think I know is wrong.
What I am an expert at – what I consider a crucial facet of my career as a storyteller – is to be fascinated by most everything and convey that enthusiasm to you. That’s what I try to bring to my books in general and this book in particular.
If you don’t know, the use of LIDAR (light detection and ranging) has allowed scientists to look beneath surface vegetation and see what lies under some of the world’s densest wilderness. 60,000 Mayan structures we didn’t know were there; cities and highways in the Amazon basin built by civilizations we didn’t know existed and can’t put a name to.
Advances in genetics are pushing back our most basic assumptions about prehistory, too. About our earliest diaspora out of Africa, humanity’s arrival in Indonesia and the Western Hemisphere.
Some thoughts I drew on when crafting my world:
the ancient world was more populous than we assume
I don’t think Barracheh is an accurate representation; I went too far in the opposite direction for realism, because I wanted my cities to have an urban, built-up feeling to them. The principle stands, though. There weren’t 7 billion of them, but there were hundreds of millions of them. The Earth wasn’t covered by powerlines and ringing by satellites, but it was covered with us much earlier than we dreamed. Shaped by our hands to serve our needs and conform to our beliefs.
our ancestors were more traveled than we realize
The extent of this is still very much under debate, but the basic premise is inarguable; Polynesians populated the South Pacific in outrigger canoes and ginger mummies wrapped in tartan have been found in the Gobi desert. Every civilization from Japan to Mali has been tied at one time to a theory of pre-Columbian contact with the Americas. To the best of my knowledge, only Vikings in North America are widely accepted.
Thank goodness I don’t trade in facts, but in ideas that capture the imagination.
mysteries as yet unsolved
The world is filled with enthralling ancient relics modern thinkers struggle to explain. Not only their purpose and origins, but how they were brought into being. How our antecedents moved heavy things from Point A to Point B. How they worked stone with such precision. How their written languages should be interpreted.
I believe these questions have answers; the failure of information is ours, not theirs. I chose to invent something fanciful and impossible because Hello?! I write fantasy!
pyramids, pyramids everywhere!
Do I think the incredible prevalence of pyramid-building across diverse cultures over a period of thousands of years suggests contact between these peoples? Not really. It’s such an intuitive shape, its presence in multiple places is barely suggestive.
But it’s fun to imagine a different answer. A different world with startling secret connections.
Why am I talking about pyramids? Wouldn’t you like to know!
You’ll just have to read the book if you want to know what any of these subjects have to do with We.
In the meantime, poke around on Nature Magazine’s website for cool science. Watch some of Nat Geo’s newer series; I particularly recommend anything with the inimitable Albert Lin. Hell, go poke around on Wikipedia. The real world is scarcely less fantastical than the imagined realms of my novels.
Author’s note: The title is a quote from a translation of the Popol Vuh: “Over a universe wrapped in the gloom of a dense and primeval night passed the god Hurakan, the mighty wind.”
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