If Seth Dickinson’s debut The Traitor Baru Cormorant proves anything, it’s that he knows from world-building. He joins us to talk about the essential elements needed to construct a credible fantasy world (hint: follow the money).

Gondor is under siege. The orcs are smashing down the gates of Minas Tirith, Middle-Earth is about to fall to evil, and two insufferable people can’t stop arguing about it.

“Where do all the arrows come from?” cries Person B. “Who trains these bowmen? Where’s the farmland that feeds this huge city? Where’s the sewage go? How does Minas Tirith pay its forces, and if it’s by taxation, how does the city compel loyalty from its feudal landlords? What are conditions like for the commoner, and how do they cope with infant mortality? And plague?”

“It doesn’t matter, Person B,” sighs Person A, who might be noted author M. John Harrison. “There’s no room or reason in the story to explain those things. You’re trampling on the writing with the great, clomping foot of Nerdism.”

It’s an ancient argument (look, I’m young, decades are like aeons to me). Should our fantasy worlds be scrupulously documented and intricately constructed? Or should they be lean, effective backdrops for characters telling a story?

Like most ancient arguments, it’s kind of reductive. It’s pretty frustrating. But today’s different, comrades! Today Person B has a new weapon. They leap up crying “Have you read The Traitor Baru Cormorant by that handsome devil, Dickinson!? Economic warfare, sociological invasion, and psychological battles! Fight scenes that link fiscal policy to the patterns of death! A heroine who topples nations with banking!”

“Nonsense,” says the person who probably isn’t M. John Harrison, because I don’t think he’s read my book. “That book’s a lean, kinetic thriller with a razor-sharp focus on the main character and her relationships. It refuses to be weighted down by dry exposition.”

It’s an impasse! A clash of ideals! Who can triumph?

We can, dear reader. Like Baru, let’s take advantage of this conflict to exploit both sides and secure our own aims.

Power from Infrastructure

In 2007, we watched the whole world founder when a strange breed of mortgage poisoned the global economy. If someone had done it on purpose, it would’ve been a great villain scheme. In 2014, we saw the worst outbreak of Ebola in world history, and in the wake of that horror we all became very interested in how viruses spread and how to fight them.

No evil overlords involved. Just the weave of our civilization rubbing thin. Systems failing.

Infrastructure is inherently pretty exciting. We don’t pay much attention to it when it’s working, but we love stories about how hard it is to build stuff—and wehate it when our plumbing breaks or our banks collapse.

Why don’t we write fantasies about infrastructure, then? Would we rather chase a dragon or a topple a throne than watch an ink-stained clerk groan her way through pages of tax receipts?

Objection, your honor! We do write about infrastructure. “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, by Kij Johnson, is a great story about building a bridge. So is The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. We care so much about what happens to the people in these stories, and they care so much about bridges!

And there’s the key, isn’t it? We like stories about the complicated work of building, protecting, and altering civilization…as long as we care about the people involved. As long as the story evokes thrill and tension.

We can make anything exciting, as long as we can write a character we love whose happiness or ambition (or looming ruin) depends on it.

We need fantasy that cares about the machinery of civilization—because to ignore it is to treat it as unimportant, when in fact it underpins all our lives! And we need fantasy that can make that machinery as urgent, dangerous, and engaging as any quest.

We need a protagonist who has reason to care about where the arrows come from and where the sewage goes.

Imagine a hero who’s been denied all conventional power. Imagine Baru Cormorant. She’s a racial minority from a colonial territory, targeted by cruel racism. The society she lives in treats women as abstract thinkers—good philosophers, good mathematicians, but not good leaders. And her sexuality is anathema to eugenic law, denying her even the most basic companionship.

But Baru wants to rule the world, so that she can use that power to liberate her home. So in all her ruthless brilliance she seizes on other ways to power. Infrastructure power, power that comes before, the power to engrave her design in the shape of the world so that less brilliant minds flow like water through the channels she cuts for them.

If she cannot lead an army, she will control the funds that provision it. She will control the maintenance of the roads an army needs to march. She will raise the partisans that guide the army—or raid it in its passage. She will buy the grain that the besieged need to eat and control the taxes that empires need to flourish.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, a novel on the life of Thomas Cromwell, gave us this incredible quote:

How can [Cromwell] explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

If Baru cannot rule a nation from the throne, she will rule that nation from its organs. She will become a shadow ruler, puppeteering events from behind the scenes—all so that she can get the power she needs to liberate her home from tyranny.

If she fails, of course, if anyone understands the totality of her secret plan, then she’ll be annihilated. Every word she speaks and every glance she exchanges must be exquisitely calculated. Every moment of real emotion she permits herself is a terrible risk.

As a shadow ruler, Baru risks becoming the very kind of monster she wants to destroy.

Power from People

I’ve said all that for infrastructure, and now I’ll say this: a novel purely about infrastructure, about accounting and irrigation and road-building and fiscal policy, would be really, really boring. It would be a technical survey. A novel needs people. A novel about central banking doesn’t work. A novel about how central banking ruins lives, makes fortunes, enables dreams, shatters love, triggers rebellions, alters the course of world history—now we have something!

And our wonderful, reprehensible, unstoppable protagonist Baru Cormorant runs the same risk. She uses people as pawns. If she forgets that people matter…what will she become?

There’s something faintly troubling about a novel that celebrates knights and lords but ignores the people who make the swords, who pay the taxes, who raise the crops and midwife the children (at least until they rebel). Yes, knights and lords are exciting, and their personal drama is easier to grasp than the effects of a change in interest rates or the development of a better plow.

But how much good in the world we have today was secured by heroic sword-swinging? And how much was obtained by financial instruments, good soap, the rise of literacy, and the improvement of crop yields? Obtained by, well, the little people?

That’s why we need many kinds of stories. That’s why we need to make the machine of civilization thrilling. So we can make the little people exciting.

Baru’s firmly of the belief that feudalism and autarchy are dumb. Raised in a society ruled by loose councils of family elders, she likes to think she’s on the side of the commoner. As an Imperial Accountant in charge of tax policy, she figures out a sneaky backdoor way to run opinion surveys. She sets up a loan program to provide liquidity to commoners, so they can escape the trap of subsistence sharecropping. Later, at the height of her intrigue, she goes straight to the commoners, running a door-to-door survey about starvation, scurvy, education, and infant mortality.

But does she really do any of this for their advantage? Baru’s not just doing good work down in the trenches. She’s wrangling alliances with dukes, living a calculated social life, financing pirates, and collaborating with the secret police.

Baru has her sights set on power, because she thinks she needs power to do good! What use is populism if it’s a cynical lever for self-advancement? Is it really a good idea to collaborate with the system now in order to help tear it down later?

Deep down, that question haunts her. It may yet destroy her.

Back to Minas Tirith

And that’s where I want to leave this, with the deep and troubling conflict between our desire to do good and the methods we use to reach that good. What if all our efforts, day by day, to be good people are just propping up an unjust system? What if our voices, raised in protest, are just drowning out those who really need to be heard?

Life’s complicated. So is doing good.

And here I must admit that I’ve exploited your trust. All this was a device to talk about my book, and call myself a handsome devil. But I hope it’s been interesting — and I owe you an answer to the argument between A and B.

The very fact that fantasy rarely makes room for plumbing, accounting, taxes, and the commoner means something. It represents a conflict. We can use that conflict to drive our storytelling. We can take it apart and find its raw, screaming heart. We can send Baru to a land ruled by Dukes and let her say, this, all this feudal pageantry, all these bloodlines and marriages and armies of stamping warhorses, this isn’t true power.

I have the true power here. In this pen. In this coin.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is available now.