How do you lure readers into an epic fantasy world?
The opening of a fantasy or sci-fi novel requires extra thought because in addition to introducing readers to your characters and plots, writers must introduce readers to a whole new world. In this post I’ll do a careful analysis of the opening of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun to show you exactly how she pulls us into her story world and makes us want to know more about how it works and what’s at stake.
Our first introduction to the story world comes in the form of two maps, one of the Meridian—with labels for the Crescent Sea, the Obregi Mountains, and a number of what we can assume are cities of some sort—and then a close-up map of the City of Tova, one of the places named on the main map, which also includes the names of clans associated with various islands in the city.
We’ve seen an opening illustration once before in our Novel Study posts, at the beginning of NK Jemisin’s The City We Became, but that book is urban fantasy, meaning that it is set in a real-world location but operates under unfamiliar rules. In that case, the map provides some hints about what might be different and also gives clues about important details.
Similarly, Roanhorse’s map provides both visual iconography and linguistic taxonomies that help set the tone. On the Meridian map we can see icons that look like pyramids, others that look like spears, and a sun marking the location of Tova. In the corner lurks a feathered serpent figure that may remind readers of depictions of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. The names on the City of Tova map provides clues about what carries importance in this world. Clans, for example, are named for birds and in the center of the city is a small island labeled “Sun Rock.”
Authors can’t count on readers looking at the map first, but they can rely on it to be a back-up tool for readers who want to check a place name or re-orient themselves to the broad landscape of the novel at some point during their reading. Do you need to include a map if you are writing fantasy or sci-fi? If the scope or landscape of your novel is fairly self-contained—for example, if it takes place only in a single city—then you likely don’t need one. However, if your novel world has an epic scope or a lot of place names, it’s nice to include. Fortunately there are online tools, like Inkarnate, that make creating such a map relatively easy and inexpensive.
Following the map and the title page (which also features a bird), we get a list of “The People of the Meridian.” Like the map, some readers will opt to skip this but use it to remind themselves later of which characters are grouped together or belong to a specific place. Just a brief skim, however, gives us a sense of the kinds of people and relationships the novel will include. We see familiar words like priest, merchant, healer, servant, tutor, sailor. Note how this collection of terms implies an historical rather than a futurist fantasy world. (Consider, for example, the assumptions you would make about this set of terms: entrepreneur, doctor, waiter, teacher, astronaut.) The list also reinforces the importance of birds and the sun, with characters identified as sun priests and others identified as giant crows or as members of clans associated with birds.
Next, we encounter a passage from The Florentine Codex addressed to “you,” which has the effect of drawing us into the novel. Here are the first and last lines:
You are the substitute, the surrogate of Tloque Nahuaque, the lord of the near and far….
[You] are his wild beast, you are his eater of people, you are his judge.
This evocative passage sets our expectations for the stakes and themes of the novel: life and death, certainly, and possibly power and loyalty.
Do you see how much texture Roanhorse has provided even before we get to the first chapter? Again, the broader the scope of your novel and the less familiar your fantasy world, the more of these preliminary pieces you should consider including. Readers will draw intuitive assumptions from details they don’t yet understand and also know where to go to get reoriented.
We’re now at chapter one, but we have two more elements before we reach the opening sentence. First, we get a dateline: “The Obregi Mountains, Year 315 of the Sun (10 Years before Convergence).” We’re starting to narrow our focus now, from that big-picture Meridian map to one specific mountain range. The time stamp, again, tells us what is important in this story world: again, the sun is central, and there is a key event called the “Convergence” that we now know is significant. (Think about the way the BC/Before Christ date marker centers Christianity.)
Again, think about how many assumptions we bring to a dateline like “San Francisco, Summer of 1968.” Fantasy writers must fill in those associations from scratch, sentence by sentence. Roanhorse starts this work in the epigraph to the chapter, which comes after the dateline:
O Sun! You cast cruel shadow
Black char for flesh, the tint of feathers
Have you forsaken mercy?
The ominous tone, the plaintive question about mercy make us wonder about what calamities this year 315 has witnessed, and once again reinforces the centrality of the sun in this fantasy world. The sun is both the name of the epoch and the caster of “cruel shadow.”
Before we get to the first sentence of the novel, I want to give one practical piece of advice about datelines, having helped a number of writers fine-tune these for their novels. In most cases, you’ll want to set a marker and then move forward in time because (unless time works differently in your world) you can rely on familiar units like days, weeks, and years. In that case, the initial marker can be almost anything or be left out altogether. You could include only a place name, for example, before the first chapter and then tag the second chapter “Five years later.” If you do have big time jumps, especially if they go both backwards and forwards in time, naming a key event to act as the marker, as Roanhorse does here with “Convergence” will help readers understand how different pieces of the plot fit together.
Now—at last!—the opening paragraph:
Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.
Wonderful, right? These two short, simple sentences ring out like a cathedral bell tolling a death. They may be simple grammatically, but from a story standpoint they carry a lot of complexity. Our first story question is a weighty one: What does it mean that he will become a god? Does one have to die in this story world to become a god? Does this “he,” apparently our protagonist, know what becoming a god entails? The second sentence, citing his mother as the source of this knowledge (as well as the simple grammar) implies that he might not—that he might be quite young. Note also how complex the time structures are in these two sentences: “Today” = now; “would” = future, but when?; “had told” = past, but how long ago?—and will she prove to be correct? Two short sentences that deliver a whole history.
Let’s move forward one more step to the next paragraph and a half:
“Drink this,” she said, handing him a cup. The cup was long and thin and filled with a pale creamy liquid. When he sniffed it, he smelled the orange flowers that grew in looping tendrils outside his window, the ones with the honey centers. But he also smelled the earthy sweetness of the bell-shaped flowers she cultivated in her courtyard garden, the one he was never allowed to play in. And he knew there were things he could not smell in the drink, secret things, things that came from the bag his mother wore around her neck, that whitened the tips of her fingers and his own tongue.
“Drink it now, Serapio,” she said, resting a hand briefly against his cheek. “It’s better to drink it cold. And I’ve put more sweet in it this time, so you can keep it down better.”
With that proffered cup, we are suddenly in a live scene, anchored in the “today” of the first sentence. And it’s a scene that is familiar to us, that could take place in our world—a mother hands her son something to drink. Roanhorse focuses on sensory details in the next few sentences, continuing to ease us into this unfamiliar world via smell and sight memories we might identify with. Only at the end of the paragraph do we get another nibble of story: the mother cultivates “secret things” that she guards carefully and has put into the drink.
It’s not until the third paragraph of the novel, in the dialogue line spoken by the mother, that we get our protagonist’s name. This choice has a way, paradoxically, of deepening the reader’s connection to the protagonist. Notice how the first line would read differently if Roanhorse had used his name in the first sentence: “Today Serapio would become a god.” A name is an external identifier—a way that others think of us. Roanhorse is showing us Serapio thinking of himself and so “he” is the better choice. It’s also part of her strategy of slowly, steadily parceling out new information.
The second part of the mother’s dialogue line, about keeping the drink down, adds another note of menace to the scene: how strong, how dangerous must this drink be if the boy’s body is rejecting it? A couple paragraphs later, however, the drink is the least of our concerns because the mother warns the boy he must finish every drop, “Else it won’t be enough to numb the pain,” and he obeys, while looking nervously at the cords, the bone needle, and the gut thread he knows she will use on him.
Only now, when we know that something painful is going to happen to the boy and that it is the mother who will inflict this pain, does Roanhorse slow the scene a bit to provide more details about the world. Serapio notices his mother’s collar of crow feathers with dyed-red tips, and she tells him, “Your father thought he could forbid me to wear this . . . . But [he] doesn’t understand that this is the way of my ancestors, and their ancestors before them. He cannot stop a Carrion Crow woman from dressing to honor the crow god, particularly on a day as sacred as today.” She tells him that his father’s people, the Obregi, “fear many things they do not understand.” Serapio has only ever known the Obregi, he reflects, but his mother has told him she is preparing him to return to her people, the Carrion Crow clan in the city of Tova.
Do you see how Roanhorse makes this backstory and world-building context count? What could motivate a mother to hurt her son? The high stakes of the scene heighten our desire to find the answers, and it is the backstory and the story world that provide them. At this point we return to the live scene, to the mother using that cord and needle and thread as the sun is darkened by a shadow we know to be the moon’s eclipse but the mother, and now Serapio, know to be the crow god eating the sun.
Even a reader flipping quickly through the preliminary materials would have subliminally noticed how important the sun is in this story world: the “black sun” of the title, the sun symbol on the map to mark Tova, the sun priest in the character list, the epoch of the sun in the dateline, and the apostrophized sun in the chapter epigraph. If the crow god eats the sun and thus “holds sway over the world,” as his mother puts it, this must be an important moment indeed in this story world. Roanhorse dramatizes that importance—shows it—rather than tells it in this opening chapter.