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Raven's Children - History - Fivemoon
This is part 2 in a series of posts on the history of Raven's Children. As mentioned in the last post, these are entirely skippable; when I get into the commentary on RC pages, I will be linking back to the pertinent posts as necessary.
In the last post, I mentioned that I spent a lot of time coming up with little tribal societies when I was a kid. Aside from that, I also enjoyed making up planets, just for worldbuilding kicks. Some were more scifi-ish, some were more in a fantasy vein. Some of them resembled Earth in most ways (the Raven Tribe's world was one of these), while others were built whole-cloth from the ground up, with mostly made-up plants and animals.
The main one of these that I worked on in my later teen years was Fivemoon. When I did the wholesale reworking of the Raven Tribe in 2000 that resulted in the current version of Raven's Children, I transplanted them from their geographically Asia-like, never-quite-described-in-detail world into Fivemoon, because I had done such a tremendous amount of worldbuilding on Fivemoon and had maps and cultures and everything, so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. However, this turned out to be not the brightest idea, because some aspects of the two worlds didn't mesh well at all. That'll be discussed in tomorrow's post.
Meanwhile ... Fivemoon.
Like I said, Fivemoon, named of course for its five moons, was just one of many worlds that I worked on during this time, but over the course of my teenage years it slowly took over as the one that I worked on most. Here is one of a number of versions of the world map that I drew:
(These are on different sides of the same sheet, which makes them hard to scan.)
Each map is zoomed out from the previous one: a detail of the main continent; the whole continent; and the world.
I remember sitting down with the World Almanac and working out approximately how many miles equals 10 lines of latitude so that I knew how big to make my map! And then figuring out climate accordingly, and trying to account for wind patterns and convection currents and so forth. I had dozens of binders full of this kind of thing - one notebook for each project, divided up into animals, plants, culture, geography and so on. Of the various worlds, though, Fivemoon was the one I spent the most time on.
Unlike most of my worlds, Fivemoon had magic, though it was subtle rather than the in-your-face, wizards-and-dragons magic of typical high fantasy. The world was a sphere, and it obeyed regular scientific laws. There had been a high-tech civilization on Fivemoon about 5000 years ago, which collapsed and knocked everything back to the Stone Age; at the time when most of the Fivemoon stories took place, they had just rediscovered gunpowder. However, high-tech artifacts and even genetically engineered creatures would occasionally turn up. One of the ideas I absolutely loved, and played with in Fivemoon, was the idea of actual, historical events becoming the basis of myth, legend, and eventually religion over the years. This idea also turns up in Raven's Children.
Fivemoon was the setting for a (predictably bad) novel I wrote when I was 17 called Stormsong, about a war in the Arctic part of the world; it was also the setting for a loosely plotted, several-volume quest tale that delved into its history as a once-scifi world gone to fantasy. Stormsong is where I got a couple of the Raven's Children characters, as well as the Wagaibe people and the general setting. Otherwise, the background worldbuilding that I'd done for the other Fivemoon novels contributed almost everything else to Raven's Children except the Raven Tribe themselves. The geography, the other cultures (particularly the Tolshay Kahn), the magic, and the ancient, collapsed civilization that later becomes a plot point in RC are all imported from Fivemoon.
Tomorrow: putting it all together and trying not to make a mess!
In the last post, I mentioned that I spent a lot of time coming up with little tribal societies when I was a kid. Aside from that, I also enjoyed making up planets, just for worldbuilding kicks. Some were more scifi-ish, some were more in a fantasy vein. Some of them resembled Earth in most ways (the Raven Tribe's world was one of these), while others were built whole-cloth from the ground up, with mostly made-up plants and animals.
The main one of these that I worked on in my later teen years was Fivemoon. When I did the wholesale reworking of the Raven Tribe in 2000 that resulted in the current version of Raven's Children, I transplanted them from their geographically Asia-like, never-quite-described-in-detail world into Fivemoon, because I had done such a tremendous amount of worldbuilding on Fivemoon and had maps and cultures and everything, so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. However, this turned out to be not the brightest idea, because some aspects of the two worlds didn't mesh well at all. That'll be discussed in tomorrow's post.
Meanwhile ... Fivemoon.
Like I said, Fivemoon, named of course for its five moons, was just one of many worlds that I worked on during this time, but over the course of my teenage years it slowly took over as the one that I worked on most. Here is one of a number of versions of the world map that I drew:
(These are on different sides of the same sheet, which makes them hard to scan.)
Each map is zoomed out from the previous one: a detail of the main continent; the whole continent; and the world.
I remember sitting down with the World Almanac and working out approximately how many miles equals 10 lines of latitude so that I knew how big to make my map! And then figuring out climate accordingly, and trying to account for wind patterns and convection currents and so forth. I had dozens of binders full of this kind of thing - one notebook for each project, divided up into animals, plants, culture, geography and so on. Of the various worlds, though, Fivemoon was the one I spent the most time on.
Unlike most of my worlds, Fivemoon had magic, though it was subtle rather than the in-your-face, wizards-and-dragons magic of typical high fantasy. The world was a sphere, and it obeyed regular scientific laws. There had been a high-tech civilization on Fivemoon about 5000 years ago, which collapsed and knocked everything back to the Stone Age; at the time when most of the Fivemoon stories took place, they had just rediscovered gunpowder. However, high-tech artifacts and even genetically engineered creatures would occasionally turn up. One of the ideas I absolutely loved, and played with in Fivemoon, was the idea of actual, historical events becoming the basis of myth, legend, and eventually religion over the years. This idea also turns up in Raven's Children.
Fivemoon was the setting for a (predictably bad) novel I wrote when I was 17 called Stormsong, about a war in the Arctic part of the world; it was also the setting for a loosely plotted, several-volume quest tale that delved into its history as a once-scifi world gone to fantasy. Stormsong is where I got a couple of the Raven's Children characters, as well as the Wagaibe people and the general setting. Otherwise, the background worldbuilding that I'd done for the other Fivemoon novels contributed almost everything else to Raven's Children except the Raven Tribe themselves. The geography, the other cultures (particularly the Tolshay Kahn), the magic, and the ancient, collapsed civilization that later becomes a plot point in RC are all imported from Fivemoon.
Tomorrow: putting it all together and trying not to make a mess!