As some of you are aware, I have a new novel coming out in March 2005, titled A Secret Atlas. It is the first in a new trilogy which is called The Age of Discovery. It's called that because that's a snappier title than "those cartography books." It also suggests the books are more than one big geography lesson, which would pretty much kill sales.
The world is a brand new one, built from the ground up. In it there are multiple schools of magic, but two predominate among the nations of the Nine Principalities: a traditional approach and the newer gyan approach. (Other races use other forms of magic which confound humans-which is pretty much how it should be, after all.) These two approaches are not really at war with each other yet, but the seeds of conflict are there.
The idea of the traditional approach was what really supplied the impetus to put the world and books together. We've all heard sports commentators refer to a player who is performing above himself as being "in the zone." Writers will talk about writing "in white heat," which means we finish a killer chapter or story and look up to see hours gone off the clock, but we just never knew the time was gone.
In looking at that phenomenon, a classic "What if?" popped into my head. What if folks who are "in the zone" are actually accessing magic, so they are supernaturally better than anyone else? This would mean that anything a person could do, if they practiced hard enough and were disciplined, could be an art raised to a supernatural level of proficiency.
That's a pretty cool idea and has obvious implications for warriors. Take a look at any Chinese fantasy martial arts film and you see that concept played out all over the place. While in my world it doesn't allow you to soar during a swordfight or anything of that nature, it does make you very good, and certainly capable of cutting through a crowd the way samurai do in movies and legend.
Of course, there has to be a brake on runaway power, and there is here. When someone does access magic in his art, there is a bleed-off of wild magic. Outside towns there are circles in which combatants can challenge each other. The circles contain the excess magic, which means snow might never melt in those circles, or plants never die, or any of a billion chaotic effects. Most folks stay away from those things for good reason, just as most of them stay away from Mystics-those who have reached that magical level of skill.
The fun of writing is that one what if begets another. If two skilled individuals fighting each other can leak a little magic, what happens when two hordes of such warriors clash? Clearly there would be a lot of magic unleashed and, nearly eight centuries before our story unfolds, that's exactly what happened. The resulting release of wild magic washed over the known world, triggering a mini-ice age that killed millions. Though the wild magic has retreated over the years, only now is the world returning to pre-cataclysm population levels.
The other type of magic is object oriented and involves creating machines or enchanting items by inserting into them mineral batteries that have captured some of this wild magic. Someone using an enchanted sword, for example, will certainly fight above his ability-at least for as long as the magic power lasts. It might not be enough to allow one to defeat a Mystic, but toss a hundred or so magically armed warriors at one and you've got a real problem. Needless to say, those who can create the machines, and the necessary ore itself (called thaumston), are valuable commodities.
Such commodities must be fought over, so politics enters the fray. Back when the Empire was threatened by a horde from the desert plateau to the north, the Empress split her realm into nine nations. She placed families born of her dead husband's other wives in charge of each and, in the words of James Madison, "made ambition counteract ambition." The cataclysm hurt the realms equally, so only now are they getting powerful enough to look at reuniting the Empire under one banner. The questions are which banner will it be and how will it be done?
The nation of Nalenyr-the home to many of our heroes-is a leading contender for economic domination. It counts as a resource the Anturasi family. They are the world's best cartographers and because of their charts, the Naleni ships have traveled far and wide to explore and trade. Under Prince Cyron they are prepared to undertake two expeditions that will change the world forever. One is to circumnavigate the globe and reach distant lands that used to be traded with by an overland route. The other is to reopen that overland route, which was closed when a portion of it became ground zero for the Cataclysm.
Of course, other nations and even factions within Nalenyr, don't want this plan for economic domination to succeed. And then there is the problem weird and savage creatures-things never seen in the world before-that are boiling up from the vast unknown reaches of the ocean. And a sadistic murderer stalking the streets of the Naleni capital, Moriande; and an occupied nation whose leaders are trying to overthrow their conqueror; and the Viruk, an ancient race that used to have their own empire in the land until a more distant magical holocaust shattered their power, and humans overthrew them.
I'll be quite frank here (as I have been in the pages of The Secrets): this first book was really tough to do. I thought a particular character was going to have one role in the book, but he rebelled and that shifted the whole nature of the piece. In bringing the book up to speed with all of that, much more got layered in. I really like all this new stuff because it's the kind of thing that makes a work live vibrantly.
The only problem with it all is that where it made me go with the book meant the original outlines for books two and three had to be scrapped. That's okay, though, because the new demands of the story make things even better than I had imagined when I came up with the whole idea anyway. It's this sort of thing that makes writing fun-at least in retrospect. (When you're in the middle of it, or when a character doesn't want to do what you expect him to do, it's a royal pain.)
I'm very excited about this book and this series. In it I've done some stuff I've not done before, and will be doing more of that. The journey from a single idea to a finished book is a long one, but full of discoveries that I'm eager to share. The early readers of the book have enjoyed it and I'm hoping you will, too.
Oh, and why cartographers? Well, until they put a place on the map, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist. They define the world for you, and without them, you can sail right off the edge. And while it's rather obvious what it means for a swordsman to be a Mystic, just imagine what could happen if a Cartographer became that powerful!
I did, and A Secret Atlas is the result.
Michael A. Stackpole
4 November 2004