Interview Steven Pemberton

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This week we have been joined by Steven J Pemberton, who is here to tell us about his novel The Accidental Dragonrider (book 1).

Can you describe your world or setting?

Just your standard medieval-Europe-before-gunpowder-and-printing-with-magic-and-dragons fantasy world 😉 Except that the dragons used to be slaves, then they rebelled and escaped to their own world, but humans still summon them back from time to time. Sometimes they cooperate, sometimes they kill the summoner, and sometimes they do worse things than kill.

There are magical devices left over from at least two ancient civilizations, whose purposes might be exciting, boring or terrifying. Figuring out the use of a device is sometimes challenging, as most of the instruction manuals are missing.

Oh, and there’s also the small problem of the sea steadily rising, after some people who thought they were doing the right thing switched off some really big magical devices that were maintaining the world in a mini ice age.

How did you build this concept, what research did you do?

There are actually two series set in this world, Dragonrider and The Schemes of Raltarn & Tomaz. Dragonrider has two books, The Accidental Dragonrider and The Reluctant Dragonrider. Schemes has only one book at the moment, The Mirrors of Elangir, though I’m planning to write another. Dragonrider is set about a thousand years after Schemes. I wrote The Mirrors of Elangir first, so I did most of the research and world-building for that, and relatively little for Dragonrider.

This is the second fantasy world I’ve built, and I decided to try to do it “right” this time. For the first world, I spent a lot of time and effort on stuff that turned out to be irrelevant to the story, and I also found I needed a lot of stuff that I hadn’t planned, which I had to make up as I went along. So the second time, I built a bit of the world to get me going, wrote until I needed more of the world, built a bit more, wrote a bit more, and so on until I finished the story. It needed some editing to make everything self-consistent, of course, but I would’ve had to do that even if I’d built the whole world in advance – I can’t hold everything in my head when I’m writing.

I took Tolkien’s advice and started with a map. I found a free program online that generates random planets and tweaked it a bit to meet my needs (my day job is in software development). I produced about a thousand different maps, most of which were unsuitable for one reason or another. (For instance, having decided I wanted the world to be in an ice age during Schemes, I researched the types of geography that help them to occur, and rejected any map without those features.)

I did quite a bit of research on sailing ships, since the characters in Mirrors spend a lot of time on one. I’ve been on board a few, though only when they’ve been docked. It always amazes me how small they are – I’ve been on modern ferries that are bigger.

I found out a bit about ancestor worship, since one of the cultures practices it. In the end it didn’t feature much in the books, though it might come in handy later. I also researched different kinds of legal systems, since lawsuits and threats of lawsuits are mentioned.

Most of my “research” is just asking “what if?” and making up something that sounds plausible. The answer will probably be based on something I read or saw months or years before, but at the time I didn’t know it was going to go into a book, so I didn’t think of it as research. (I’m one of these people who knows a little bit about almost everything, which makes me everyone’s first choice for quiz teams.)

Why did you choose this setting?

The Dragonrider series came into existence in a rather roundabout way. Many years ago, a member of a mailing list I was in (remember them?) had a quotation in her signature block, “Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.” (This, of course, is a riff on a quotation from Tolkien, “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”) I thought I might be able to get a story out of it. I wrote about 600 words of a man on a hilltop who’d just summoned a dragon and was trying to convince it to help him. After that, I got stuck, because I hadn’t yet learned to wait until I had a few of the story’s key scenes or turning points clear in my head before starting to write. Those 600 words languished on my hard drive while I wrote many more words and many more stories. As I was writing The Mirrors of Elangir, I mentioned in passing that one of the warring nations in it used dragons as airborne cavalry. I realized that if I took my 600-word beginning and set it in the same world as The Mirrors of Elangir, I’d be able to continue the story. I now had a setting, some history, and (most importantly) some motivation for the dragon’s behavior. That story became The Accidental Dragonrider.

I initially intended The Accidental Dragonrider to be a standalone book, and gave the ending a definite sense of finality. But I try not to close off options completely, and left a few loose ends and unsolved puzzles to allow myself a sequel if I ever wanted to write one. Then it proved unexpectedly popular, and I decided I should write a sequel. (I swear this never occurred to me when I was writing, but it turns out there are a lot of people who like reading about dragons.)

What’s unique about your world?

I don’t think any one feature is unique, though I’d hope the overall combination hasn’t been done before – or not too often, anyway. (I often tell novice writers that if they think their idea is original, that just means they haven’t read enough to realize it isn’t.) I’m more concerned about craft than art – I’d rather tell a story that’s been told before and do it well than tell a new story and do it badly. That isn’t to say it’s impossible to do both, but I’m not arrogant enough to think I can.

How do you explain the science or magic in your world?

I don’t – it’s just there 🙂 The magical force rises out of the ground, which means it works less well (or not at all) at sea. This in turn means that dragons, being magical creatures, can’t fly out of sight of land.

In some of the books (though not so much in The Accidental Dragonrider) magical devices play an important role. These are left over from a much older civilization, but tend to be in perfect working order. (I guess the makers had never heard of built-in obsolescence.) Most of them are quite mundane – lanterns, cooking pots, even a trouser press. But there are more interesting things lurking in the shadows – hand-held weapons, self-propelled vehicles, scuba apparatus, and (this was what made me decide to build the world) mirrors that allow people to communicate at a great distance.

As usually happens in fantasy, the civilization that made these devices collapsed, taking most of its knowledge with it. A later civilization rediscovered some of the secrets before it too collapsed, again taking most of its knowledge with it. An interesting difference between the two civilization is how they handled the problem of devices needing more magic than the ground could supply. (The problem arises firstly because lots of people in the same area want to use devices, and secondly because a complex device uses more magic than a simple one.)

The older civilization built something analogous to a power station in the middle of the city. This pulled in magic from deeper underground, or from the area outside the city (where nobody of consequence lived), and broadcast it to the city. Obviously this meant devices didn’t work as well (or at all) outside a city with a power station.

The newer civilization provided each device with a battery, and then built charging stations in their settlements. So you could go anywhere with a charged-up device, but had to come back to town every so often to recharge. This started as a plot device to force the characters in The Reluctant Dragonrider to come back to the charging station at an inconvenient time (the nearest one is about a week’s journey from where they live). I might retcon the difference between the older and newer civilizations by saying it just reflects different approaches in their society – a few big cities versus lots of small ones. Or it might reflect differences in their attitudes to controlling how people use magic, and who can use it.

What was the most surprising thing you found out while researching/writing your latest book?

Manta rays can fly (well – they can jump out of the water), but they can’t swim backwards. (Reverse spoiler – there are no mantas in The Accidental Dragonrider, but they play an important role in the sequel, The Reluctant Dragonrider.)

How do you handle the food in your world?

I did a bit of research into the kinds of plants and animals that are likely to be found in the kinds of climates I wrote about, but I don’t usually say much about what the characters eat, or how it’s cooked or anything along those lines. There are a couple of scenes in The Mirrors of Elangir and The Reluctant Dragonrider where the characters eat unfamiliar food in a setting that’s new to them, and I say a bit more than I normally would about what they eat. I’ve written only one scene where the characters are in danger of starvation, which is perhaps unrealistic in a relatively low-tech society, but any more scenes like that wouldn’t have fit with the story I wanted to tell.

Do you have a recipe that you could share, maybe one that our readers could try, based on the food in your world?

I’m afraid not. My parents, my sister and my partner are all excellent cooks, but I know just enough to avoid poisoning myself, so I don’t give it much thought in my books.

This perhaps belongs under “most surprising thing I found while researching,” but the wild ancestor of the banana has lots of large, hard seeds. I wrote a scene for The Reluctant Dragonrider where someone eats a banana slowly, and debated whether to mention the seeds. If I did, readers would complain that bananas don’t have big seeds. If I didn’t, more knowledgeable readers would complain that wild bananas have big seeds that would make eating them awkward. I couldn’t say anything in the text of the book, because modern small-seeded bananas don’t exist in that world, so the character wouldn’t compare wild bananas with them. I wondered whether to substitute another fruit or add an author’s note. In the end I cut the scene for other reasons, which neatly avoids the problem.

What was the most mundane item that you used that really has cool tech or magic behind it?

Apart from all the magical lanterns and cooking pots, there’s a reference to a book that was produced on a printing press. It has no bearing on the story, other than to show how rich its owner is. (The technology was lost – are you spotting a theme here? – so the books are rare.)

What did you include that you wish was real today?

Most aspects of my fantasy worlds fall under the heading of “it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” Or maybe I’m just too used to modern comforts. I wouldn’t mind taking a ride on a dragon, though, as long as I could convince it not to eat me afterwards.