There’s not a lot of fiction I can show you yet, as I’m unpublished, and I don’t want to undercut my ability to sell anything I’m writing by posting it all over the internet. However, I can tell you a little bit about what I’m writing. For the past ten years and more, I’ve been developing a fantasy world—in fact, I’ve been working on it in dribs and drabs since I was in my early teens, which is more like forty years ago, but things got really serious in 2010. I had an epiphany. I got swept up in a feeling that I had been put on earth to be a fantasy worldbuilder. Since then I’ve been exploring what that might mean, and working hard to bring a world to fruition. I’m now fairly close to finishing a draft of the first novel set in my world, but you don’t necessarily need to wait around for that to find out about my setting.
Olnezea is the name of my world, and of its mother goddess. At some point I’ll post some maps, histories, and other content here, but for the moment I’ll give you a general outline. In many ways it resembles other fantasy worlds: it has magic, dragons, gods, mythologies, and pre-industrial technology. In other ways, it’s different. It has several fully functional languages, and several more on the way. I imagined this would not be a unique feature when I began, but I’ve been researching this, and other examples are very few and far between. J.R.R. Tolkien is obviously the best known. Ursula K. Le Guin constructed a language as part of her worldbuilding for Always coming home. Suzette Haden Elgin did the same for Native tongue, as did the almost unknown Lorinda J. Taylor for The Termite queen (which I have yet to read). The linguist M.A.R. Barker developed a whole world with multiple cultures and languages for his well known Empire of the Petal Throne roleplaying game setting, in which he also set some novels. There are likely other examples, but I’ve not come across them yet. So this is my USP, in all probability: I’m going full linguistic in my epic fantasy worldbuilding. It’s a genre that has been characterised as imitating Tolkien, but as far as I’ve been able to tell it has imitated him by including elves, dragons, and long quests in its books, rather than taking a comparable approach to worldbuilding. My approach is, like Tolkien’s, both linguistic and mythopoeic.
Tolkien is clearly a major influence, but more on my worldbuilding than on my story-writing. Ursula K. Le Guin and Gene Wolfe are probably most important for the latter, but I’m also a big fan of Michael Moorcock, Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, Alan Moore, Iain M. Banks, Mervyn Peake, China Miéville…and I’d better stop there. It’s probably ones earliest influences that run the deepest, but I’ve been reading for a long time, and lately I’ve been reading more than ever, all of which adds ingredients to the mix. Not many of those writers are fantasy authors, exactly, and that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I love prose: I love language worked and burnished to perfection, whether that be the spare simplicity of Cormac McCarthy, or the baroque maximalism of Wolfe and Peake. I don’t see that kind of attention to language in much fantasy fiction, so that’s likely to be another selling point for me (or maybe another obstacle to publication!)
The Blackswords is a serial I’m writing set in Olnezea, following the exploits and misfortunes of a small band of mercenaries. That’s not the kind of story I get excited about, on the whole, but I wanted to find out whether my world could accommodate that kind of narrative, and I also wanted to write something that I could share on my website to give people an insight into the kind of worldbuilding and writing that I enjoy. It comes out in short (roughly 3000 word) instalments, every month. As I release episodes, they will become accessible via the ‘Fiction’ menu in the site header.
Oliver Arditi 