Writing fantasy, it’s easy to forget that world-building is the story’s servant. It’s easy to get enamored with your own creation and push it in front. Even the fantasy superstar George R. R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire, does that. He feeds the reader with the minutiae of fashion of Westeros and describes every detail of food the noblemen eat, often without adding a meaningful point to the narrative.

I’m not a fan of Martin. Or, for that matter, fantasy writers in general. Authors who get lost in their own worlds do not tell interesting stories. And yet one of my favorite works of fiction is fantasy. Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen is an achievement in world-building without comparison, in the genre or beyond. 10 novels long, its complexity is mind-boggling, spanning thousands of years and hundreds of characters. The story jumps between perspectives of gods, wizards, and common people. There is no all-knowing narrator. There isn’t even a single cohesive narrative: timelines are in flux, history is unmasked as myth, events change depending on the point of view.

The world, co-developed by Erikson with a fellow writer Ian Cameron Esslemont, turns one popular trope on its head after another. It’s a world of gender and racial equality, a world of gods that need the mortals, a world where the noble savage is neither noble nor savage. But it never takes precedence over the story. It’s only a medium for Erikson to tell stories that always come back to one overarching theme: compassion.

Trust me, I tried to make it sound less pretentious. But I gave up. It is pretentious. It is audacious in its ambition. And that’s a good thing.

Erikson used an imagined world as a medium for his story and I wanted to know how and why. But it was hard interviewing him. A fan-author relationship isn’t the most fertile ground for asking thoughtful questions. It seems against the very idea of being a fan: you do not question what you worship.

And yet here I am, asking and trying to unlock for others the mind that once took me on exciting journey to a world that doesn’t even exist.

Wojtek Borowicz: What’s the most difficult thing about creating a world?

Steven Erikson: It all depends on the kind of world you’re trying to create for your fiction. On the most basic level, all fiction is world-building, even that which purportedly takes place in the ‘real world.’ A contemporary ‘real’ setting employs a sense of commonality shared with the audience, but the fictional world being presented remains an invention, given shape by the details chosen — and those not chosen. Contemporary fiction assumes a commonality even when it doesn’t exist, since different perspectives offer up different world-views and often these are barely compatible in the real world.

In epic fantasy fiction, the kind that presents a secondary world, there are both challenges and pitfalls to world-building. In essence, the only necessary commonality between the real world and the fictional one is that humanity be present (even if it’s represented by, say, rabbits with swords). The human condition lies at the heart of all fiction and epic fantasy cannot escape that, nor should it. Beyond that single linkage, pretty much anything goes. The writer is free to create any kind of world she or he can imagine.

At this point, there are technical requirements which I won’t get into much here (internal consistency, etc). Simply put, there needs to be a recognisable sense of cause and effect, or at least the potential thereof. And there needs to be mundane details that a reader will recognise, which will serve as the signposts to commonality. The risk of pitfalls comes into play at this point, when certain assumptions are carried over into the newly created world, and it is at this point that the writer needs to bear down and think things through.

What kind of pitfalls? Aren’t author’s assumptions and biases always reflected in the world they create?

Want a quasi-medieval fantasy world? Fine. But wait, what does that mean, exactly? European medieval? Japanese? Pick one. Okay, now define ‘medieval.’ What are its historical characteristics? Well, patriarchy for one. The rights of women are not equal to the rights of men. They have fewer opportunities, are often seen as war-prizes, the rewards for political alliance, subject to cloistering, necessary only insofar as producing male heirs and — in the Christian ethic of the times — also temptresses eager to bring about a man’s downfall through seduction and other poison fruits, not to mention occasionally turning out to be witches.

So, you really want all that for your secondary fantasy quasi-medieval world? If so… why? What was it about that medieval setting that you, as author, found so attractive? Swords? Knights? Damsels in distress?

Okay, so you chose the quasi-medieval setting for your secondary world. You like swords and knights and damsels in distress. Oh, and a strict class system with nobility (your heroes), maybe a few priests thrown in, and then the peasants, serfs, tinkerers and all the rest of the unmentioned unwashed. And you picked the European model because, well, you don’t know much about Japanese history. Now it’s time to create the external threat. There’s almost always an external threat. Well, barbarians to the north, of course. Oh, and how about a dark(er) skinned horde to the east — oh, let’s make them nomads who ride horses and use bows! As for the south, well, that’s a collection of decadent, steamy lands, replete with deserts and even darker-skinned people steeped in the esoterica of assassins, poisons and nefarious intrigue…

I won’t belabour this too much. Assumptions carried into a secondary world from this one can be deadly, in what they imply, in the biases and prejudices they embody.

I am not suggesting that a writer can’t do any of that — can’t select a Eurocentric medieval model for their fantasy stories. What I am suggesting is that those assumptions carried over exist, and are subject to challenge by readers and critics. So it pays to be prepared and have your reasons for doing what you did.

But I will also suggest, as humbly as possible, that maybe we’ve had enough of the Eurocentric medieval settings for epic fantasy? Maybe we’ve had enough of patriarchy taken as a given? Or of stratified class systems that reduce the common person to sword-fodder? Or of pale-skinned heroes of civilization and the eastern horse-riding hordes intent on destroying said civilization?