Where the f ———  is this supposed to be?

For as long as I can remember, this simple, pro­fane ques­tion has haunted my ambi­tions for fan­tasy.

Wes­t­eros is my canon­ical example. Obviously, George R. R. Martin’s bloody game plays out on a dif­ferent planet with a dif­ferent climate — yet somehow, this planet has humans on it, enacting a per­fectly con­gruent medieval fan­tasy. There are dragons, sure … and also there are horses, and swords, and beer. The setup posits a sort of per­fectly par­allel bio­log­ical and cul­tural evolution. All of the elab­o­rate world­building is there­fore founded on a premise that is non­sen­sical.

As a reader, I can get over this. I have done so many times — easily, eagerly. Earthsea, Krynn, what­ever The Wheel of Time’s world is called … I’m game. I’ll admit, I appre­ciate it when writers knit their cre­ations into the skein of reality — I’m thinking of Philip Pullman, his matrix of worlds — but if a non­sen­sical premise opens the door to some­thing fun and inter­esting, well, great.

It turns out my charity does not extend to myself. As a writer, I cannot, in fact, get over it. This was a sur­prising discovery, and a vexing one, because I have long cov­eted the plea­sures and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the fan­tasy mode.

Many times I sat and schemed, sketched and dreamed, and every time I hit the same wall; the same ques­tion; where the f —  is this sup­posed to be??

What I wanted most, of course, was the map. If I have a home genre, it’s not “fan­tasy” or “science fiction”, but rather “books with a map on the first page”. I wanted to play in that sandbox; I wanted to create on that scale.

A fresh map: desired. An impos­sible planet: rejected. That’s an inter­esting equa­tion to balance. I wanted to find a way to unreality, in reality.

Because set­ting a story in Berkeley, California, the year 13777, is simply not cool.

The hunt began, for ways to make it cool.

One obvious cheat is isekai, vir­tual reality — but, in my opinion, that ren­ders a story as weight­less as “it was all just a dream”. Why bother? (Ah, but maybe if people die in the game, they die in real life, too … No thanks, I’ve read that one already.)

What else? Roll the tec­tonic clock back­ward or for­ward a hun­dred mil­lion years — voila, there’s your fresh map. But humans (and horses) are about as likely to exist on Earth in a hun­dred mil­lion years as they are on an alien planet. Tolkien’s trick—in which Middle-earth is actu­ally Europe’s pri­mor­dial past — simply doesn’t pencil.

What options remain? At least one, and you’ll find it deployed in Moon­bound. Yes, I bal­anced the equa­tion to my satisfaction, in a way that is, I believe, both nar­ra­tively res­o­nant and geo­graph­i­cally plausible.

My thanks to Earth for pro­viding the opportunity.

Maybe there’s an entirely imag­ined land­scape in my future, a Sloansteros, if I can get over my pro­fane hangup. I do under­stand that nobody cares about this except me. Readers would sus­pend their dis­be­lief for Sloan as hap­pily as Sloan sus­pends his for Le Guin, whose arch­i­pelago exists absolutely nowhere in reality.

Yet maybe “nobody cares about this except me” iden­ti­fies the very core of what makes a writer distinct. Maybe it ought to be protected, even amplified, rather than relaxed and smoothed over. I am gen­uinely unsure!

For now: Moon­bound’s map awaits, right there on the first page. You might very well con­sider its con­tours and ask, “Where the f —  is this sup­posed to be?” If so, just wait — your ques­tion will be answered.

First published:     June 2024
Last updated: December 2024