Monday, October 27, 2014

A Bit About the World

I did a lot of research to create genuine feeling alternate history, down to the last detail. When you are deviating as much as I did, you have to make sure you are on solid ground.

That starts with the everday things. Things like the days of the week, the names of months, the way they keep time.

Charlie is from Eire, the Empire that rose up instead of England after a fateful battle went a different way entirely. This change meant that there was a new language that swept the world as a common tongue. Some countries were never formed and the borders that were drawn changed.
January became Enair, August became Lughnasa, Wednesday became Miosday.
Ireland became the most powerful of the once British Isles.

It's not even just about the words. You have to project the path of a culture into what it might have become given those circumstances. Of course there's quite a bit of liberties taken as we don't know exactly what would have happened.

More importantly though, I had the rise of the British Empire to use as a plumb line. I tracked the cause and effect scenarios to give myself someplace that felt a bit like Victorian Britain, but was also very much not Victorian Britain.

I wanted to give readers something familiar to ground themselves with and then show you how different things really are. Rule of Shadows does that to some degree but Rule of Steel is really where we get to see how some of these countries have progressed. Including a bit of information on the colonies... (Yup, America).

And of course, there's quite a heaping spoonful of folklore, magic and misty moors to come.

No comments:

Post a Comment