The real difficulty with Amnar

The past month or so has been one with a steep upward learning curve. The new series of the Amnar podcast is now available, and I’ve started working on a re-hash of the new Book Two while I wait to hear what the people who want to help me can produce. Meanwhile, when I’m not writing, I’ve set aside time to work on the language, the world, and to scrape the rust over my rather mediocre artistic talent. With the help of a tablet, a good paint programme and a good teacher, I’m trying to develop some art work that will help convey what I see in my head into the real world.

I always thought that the problem with Amnar was that I couldn’t plug into my head Matrix-style and just allow people to see, feel and experience what I do. Yet one of the prime discoveries of the last few weeks is really how incredibly difficult it is to explain Amnar accurately. I’ve tended to settle with calling it fantasy, but of course, it’s not. Set in a fantastical landscape that does not exist because it’s an amalgam of the many places I’ve visited over the last twenty years or so, and using a society of a different structure, it might seem like fantasy, but that’s where the similarity ends.

People come to fantasy with a certain set of expectations that I can’t fulfil. Amnar has no elves, no unexpectedly witty dwarves, hobbits or brave upstanding shield-maidens. It does have dragons, but they are a kind of replacement for planes because Amnari haven’t developed that far yet. Amnar is in some ways more advanced, and in some ways less advanced than us. But what’s most important is that the humanity that earth has, Amnar has. Amnar is thriller, political intrigue, romance, love, war, death, sorrow, tragedy and everything else, but it’s set in a world that doesn’t exist.

Amnar is about the people. It’s about people going through the same things that people go through, and have gone through for centuries. This is a time of great political and economic upheaval, unseen and complicated forces pulling families apart, and that’s what happens in Amnar. Two sisters in Book One face the fact that the world in which they were raised, the government in whom they’ve had so much faith, is utterly corrupt. Amnar doesn’t deal with dramatic quests to find golden eggs and cute farmboys fighting sorcerers with eye-implants. It deals with the damage done by political ideology, with genocide, with power relations, with the psychology of totalism, the complex choices people make when faced with terrible dilemmas like those presented all over the world.

It suddenly occurred to me, as I was going over a chapter for a potential release of a sample book with the first 50k words in, that much of the activity of the Capillites in regard to the political collapse of Amin Duum reflects the response of Western governments to the protests in Burma last year. Quiet disapproval and official statements, but no real action. Now imagine that, say, the leader of one Western army decided he’d had enough of standing by in Burma and Zimbabwe and decided to go into action in those countries, providing desperately needed aid and medical support, as well as physical protection, at the risk of his own life and disobeying orders. This is Amnar.

Amnar grew by itself, not just within my own mind as I let my imagination wander, but as I travelled the world to ever more politically and culturally remote locations. I’ve been lucky, in that local guides have always opened up very easily and discussed their lives and opinions with me. Being able to sneak down side alleys or look not for the big tourist attraction but the slum hidden behind it, reveals so much more about places than the official picture. This is where Amnar came from. An amalgamation of all the places I’ve been, things I’ve heard or discussed, things to which I’ve borne witness. I grew up at a time when a great order came to an end and watched the Berlin Wall come down. I saw what happened in Tianenmen Square on TV. My father was in Russia when they began tearing down the statues of Lenin.

So I think I’m going to have to stop calling Amnar fantasy. It seems to have become a law unto itself, without genre, or possibly beyond it.