Liner Notes for On The Sea Of Glass
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I’ve called this series an Age of Sail Fantasy and sometimes there’s been more emphasis on the age, sometimes on the sail and occasionally on the fantasy. This one goes full on with sailing and the fantasy. Here’s where the really odd ideas find a home, the ones that I came up with but filed as the world came together as being very analogous to the real 18th Century. Elves, curses, flying serpents, all can be more or less inserted into such a setting without causing it to fall apart at the seams. A sea of glass and ape pirates on squid-drawn sledges feels a bit more out there. Something to be relegated to sailor’s tales, or legends and fancy, or banished to the underworld.
Which is why they take a short cut on seas mortal man is not supposed to voyage on! Yes, here are all the banished creatures and seas, the things too strange and weird to survive the light of day. And Robin Button, a man who takes things as they are, who understands his job but not the world, is the best narrator as he accepts the strangeness. He knows it’s strange, but so is everywhere else he’s sailed. No need to get excited about it.
As is the case with Button’s stories, this is a little episodic, ending on a pause rather than a full stop. This is partly the nature of his experiences – when everything is a bit odd and inexplicable things don’t wrap up neatly. It’s also a little bit of the nature of the sub-genre. Weird fiction doesn’t always have an explanation. Mostly though it’s because now we’re into the last third of the series events are moving towards the conclusion. The stories from here on in become sequels to one another. Hopefully they’ll still stand alone, but they will certainly make more sense if you can keep in mind what happened in the previous month’s story.
Beaching small ships to do work on them was a common practice, especially when repairs needed to be done but there was no friendly dock nearby. Portaging them across land was less common. Boats and canoes were often carried or dragged between rivers in North America and there is the famous diolkos across the isthmus of Corinth that allowed galleys to cross from the gulf of Corinth to the Aegean Sea. Most ocean going vessels would have too deep and sharp a keel for the transformation worked in this story. Fortunately advanced elven construction techniques (beginning with the growing of special trees some centuries in advance of building) and the fore-knowledge that a voyage into the underworld might be necessary improves In No One’s Wake’s ability to be re-built into a sailing sled.
Ice sailing usually requires nice flat pieces of ice, though when this was the fastest method of travelling in winter mixed water and ice as well as rough and damaged areas were sometimes used. The Sea of Glass is not ice, having coagulated in such a manner as to be perfectly flat, as well as having little friction. It exists in a dream world.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the ape pirates from the Land of Vengeance came from a dream. I’m afraid not. The idea of ape pirates was on the board from before I had finally decided to go for Age of Sail. Just think; if I had picked, say, 30s pulp our hero Johnny North Dakota might have been fighting them while sailing up the Zambezi; if it had been cyberpunk then our dubious hackers might have discovered that Ape-ocalypse Industries had cyborg chimpanzees hijacking drone heli-barges. So many possibilities. A sledge attack came with the idea for the Ice Witch but John Toris wisely decided to leave the Freemark before one could manifest. Not to worry, I re-use all the pieces.
The squids came about after I eliminated every animal that actually is used to pull sledges in reality (reindeer, horses, dogs) and that I was aware of in fiction (bears, mammoths, tigers), and chose some outlandish alternatives. Snakes of course, which would be cool. Apes, suggesting an ape caste system of some sort. Either could be adapted or equipped to deal with the slick glass surface. Squids come equipped with tentacles and suckers, useful in pulling on ground that offers no grip, so were a “natural” fit.
Were we too familiar with the elves? Were they a bit too much like cool, long-lived, perhaps knowledgeable humans? A strange culture to be sure, but nothing to aggressively differentiate them from the mortals.
Hopefully this story gives them back a bit of magic and mystery. Decider on deck for days at a time, steering a ship out of normal time and space. Then using magic – and blood – to call up a storm she cannot put down. Meanwhile Immaterial Tricks, unspeaking, yet clearly held in the deepest respect by her countrymen. Deadly with a staff, aware of her surroundings without watching.
I do my best here to try and give an air of genuine difference to the elves, and to lay in some groundwork for when the magic starts to get out of hand in later stories. Is that a spoiler? Sorry about that.
The Royal Navy didn’t allow chants and shanties and working songs, in part so the men could hear orders but mostly because that was the way they did things. I had the Whitland Navy follow suit. This is probably just as well as otherwise I would have had to write half a dozen shanties and undoubtedly they’d end up dull or rubbish or perhaps lewd (which is true of real shanties as well; there are lots of good ones but you can swiftly find many that aren’t. In some cases it may be that they were poorly transcribed, but not every marching or work song is a stone cold winner). Here you get a brief hauling chant, Button starting with a (fictional) standard one, then Walker taking over with some improvisation.
The map is even less of use than usual, not only a fictional landscape (or seascape) but an unearthly portion of it that cannot be reached by normal means. Or exited by normal means for that matter. How Immaterial Tricks returns them to the waking world is unknown, how much more so where they will appear. Somewhere interesting one hopes.
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