Guest post written by Queen of Gods co-authors Katharine and Elizabeth Corr
Katharine and Elizabeth Corr are sisters originally from Essex, now living in Surrey. When they both decided to write novels – on account of fictional people being much easier to deal with than real ones – it was obvious they should do it together. They can sometimes be found in one of their local coffee shops, arguing over which character to kill off next. Katharine and Elizabeth are authors of the spell-binding series House of Shadows with the second book, Queen of Gods, out now.
Building a world from scratch is (relatively) easy. Sure, there’s lots to think about. The language, the climate, the customs, the clothing. The history – the present day your characters inhabit is shaped by the past, whether they realise it or not. The world has to be believable enough (even in high fantasy) that your readers can allow themselves to be carried away by the story without any sense of jarring uncertainty. Still, the world is entirely yours. As long as the rules make sense, they can be whatever you want them to be.
We’ve built worlds before. Our previous duology, A Throne Of Swans/A Crown Of Talons, was inspired by Swan Lake, and is set in an imaginary world where the nobility can shape-shift into people sized birds that reflect their hereditary bloodlines. When it came to the House of Shadows duology, however, we realised that we’d have to manage our world building a little differently.
The House of Shadows books, Daughter of Darkness and Queen of Gods, form an original fantasy, albeit inspired by Greek mythology. They’re set in an alternative ancient Greece, where the mighty bronze age cities never fell, and the gods never retreated. The story we wanted to tell is one where gods and mortals interact, and the action flits between the realms of the gods and some of the mortal cities mentioned in the Iliad: Iolkos, Thebes and Mycenae. Our main character, Deina, is one of the Theodesmioi, marked by the gods from birth (in her case by Hades), compelled into their service and drawing a fraction of their power. Deina, and the other Theodesmioi who journey with her, start off competing for their individual freedom, but are quickly drawn into a dangerous game in which the lives of all the Theodesmioi hang in the balance, and a war between gods and mortals seems increasingly likely. Our challenge was to create a world that fitted with this story but also reflected existing myth and the bronze age historical reality that the Iliad itself draws on. To our delight, this meant we got to do lots – and lots – of research.
We began with the mythology. In Daughter of Darkness, our main characters spend a lot of time in the Underworld, which is of course ruled by Hades. Many readers will already have some familiarity with Hades’ realm, so we knew that we would need to include some of the most recognisable elements for readers to feel at home there. As you’d expect, our characters encounter the rivers (Styx, Lethe and so on), Charon the ferryman and Cerberus, the three headed dog. However, we enriched the world by including and enlarging upon other elements mentioned by authors such as Homer and Hesiod: the Wall of Night surrounding the court of Hades and the elm tree harbouring the Oneiroi, the Dream Children, for example. Having used the surviving archaic and classical texts to provide a basis for our world, we filled in the rest of the details from our imagination. While what we’ve created is original, it’s very much rooted in the ancient sources, and hopefully that helps it feel real.
History became more important in Queen of Gods. Our characters journey to Thebes and then Mycenae. Thebes is still a thriving city, but Mycenae is an archaeological site where the bronze age city has been excavated. We read books on the excavations there to get a sense of how a bronze age city would have been constructed, and we incorporated that into the description of our characters entering Thebes. We also researched what’s known about life in Bronze Age Greece and thought about how that might have developed if the Bronze Age collapse (roughly 1200 to 1150 BCE) hadn’t disrupted the development of those civilisations. For example, coinage wasn’t widespread in the kingdoms that made up Greece at that time, but for the purposes of our story it was much more useful for the characters to have access to coins than to be bartering. We also really needed them to be able to travel in much larger ships than those in use in the Bronze Age, and we wanted at least some of them to be able to read and write. This is where our love of Star Trek came in useful! Following the theory of parallel development that forms part of the Star Trek universe, we decided that a bronze age Mediterranean society that had avoided the collapse might well have developed along the same lines that we see in classical Greece or later in Rome. This allowed us to give Iolkos and the other cities coinage, and to have our characters transported in a quinquereme, a type of ship which in reality was not in use until the Roman empire. We also had them develop a language and oral culture that was (conveniently!) very similar to that of the classical Greek states.
So that’s our basic recipe for world building when you’re aiming to incorporate mythological or historical elements. Gather together some intriguing characters (including, in our case, a demi-god, a dispossessed king and a seriously hot god of death), give them a fast-paced story line (hunted by gods and mortals alike, with a side order of found family, a love-triangle and some forced proximity) and make sure your world includes enough historical and mythological ‘knowns’ that everything feels plausible, even when your characters are faced with a cast of gods, Titans, nymphs and Furies. Other than this, the only other ingredient you really need is a sizeable pinch of imagination! Just remember to have fun with it!
