(Re)introducing The Curious Tale
As I mentioned last time, I have two main series that I am working on which I'll be doing my introverted best to hype up here on Tumblr sometimes: one fantasy series and one sci-fi series. Here is a refresher, or for new readers a primer, on my fantasy series: The Curious Tale.
The Curious Tale is the flagship of all my creative writing. It is 24 years old, having begun in July of 1999 as a no-engine online RPG on a message board for an online game that was called Utopia and which is unbelievably still going today. I had played the game itself for a while, but gradually found myself spending more time on the message boards, especially the Politics and Roleplaying boards, and that's where I would end up planting the seed that would grow into my life's work.
That RPG, known as After The Hero: A Curious Tale, tells the story of a powerful mate named Galavar and his Galan people, who, in league with the God of Logic and Wisdom, Sourros, rise up to attempt to conquer the world in the name of changing it for the better; and the story tells also—and indeed mainly focuses upon—the many peoples who resist the Galans along the way. The RPG ran for over a year and was performed by roughly half a dozen core cast members and another dozen or so peripheral cast who were much less involved and mostly stuck around only briefly. I am very proud to say that the RPG lasted all the way to completion—a feat few RPGs ever achieve! I credit my own vision and persistence in this, and the excellent enthusiasm and passion of the core cast. When the RPG ended, I moved almost immediately into a novelization phase of the story which has lasted ever since.
The Curious Tale is not an open franchise, like Star Trek, with different productions and incarnations. Rather, the whole thing is built around one central story: After The Hero, or ATH—the story told in the RPG. As a novel, ATH has been vastly modified, overhauled, rewritten, and improved over the years; it has grown up with me and it can scarcely be called the same story at all. Many characters and plots are completely different.
Set in the magical world of Relance, After The Hero in its modern form still tells the story of the Galan Conquest to attempt to take over the world, and we still explore both the Galans and those who resist them. It isn't really a war story, defined by battles and military grit, although these things do show up from time to time. It also isn't a typical political intrigue story, like Game of Thrones or what have you, driven by treachery and political posturing per se. In fact I might say that ATH is essentially genre-less, frequently drawing from but never substantively conforming to any of the various genres within fantasy. I would like to think that ATH reads as though it were a bardic account of a real-world event in history, except in Relance rather than Earth.
The title of the story comes from the fact that ATH intrinsically subverts the core fantasy trope of a hero who must rise up to stop a great evil: In ATH, the so-called hero is defeated right at the beginning (in fact this actually happened already, in the Prelude); and the so-called great evil—Galavar in this case—is not necessarily evil at all. ATH is, thus, an exploration of the premise: "What if the villain were free to pursue their plan without a meddling hero to stop them, and what if, for good measure, the villain weren't actually saddled with all of the petty traits of villainy? What if the villain were wise and well-intentioned and not truly a villain at all?" This idea was a lot more radical in 1999 than it is in 2023, but it's honestly still pretty provocative, given that, underneath all of the mainstream applications of layers of grittiness and grayness in contemporary fantasy, there usually are still clearly-coded heroes and villains, or else everything is completely "amoral"—neither of which is the case in ATH. In ATH there are neither heroes nor villains, narratorially speaking. Everyone in the story has their own take. But there is still good and evil. It's just not seated in the protagonist and the antagonist respectively (or vice versa). There are some truly horrible people in the story, conventional villain types, but they usually dwell on the sidelines. They aren't the drivers of events, not in the grand scheme. Most characters are meant to be relatable and sympathetic (if not always truly likable), and it is my sincere hope that you will be able to genuinely root for or root against any of them depending on your personal worldview and character.
After The Hero in its current form has three elemental purposes:
Most noticeably, it is a gigantic worldbuilding story—as is the rest of The Curious Tale supporting it; more on that in a bit. ATH is a classic case of a story written to bring to life a proverbial encyclopedia. Here is the gleaming City of Sele, the seat of Gala, upon the Shos Plateau—the Plateau of the Moons—at the top of the world, roughly fifteen thousand feet above sea level. There is the thriving sanctuary metropolis of Soda Fountain, the great jeweled city of the broiling hot desert of the Sodaplains in the Easts Beyond the Edge of the World. And so on, and so forth. ATH is an opportunity to explore the world of Relance and meet its people, and to fall in love with Relance as surely as so many of us fall in love with the Earth when we bother to look upon it. The Curious Tale is extremely deliberate and intentional and bespoke; its allusions and homages to the many influences on my work are endless, but Relance and all its contents are painstakingly created to the contours of my own vision. I have my own way of storytelling, and do not follow fantasy genre conventions in most cases. If I have done my job correctly, you shouldn't be able to predict the story on the basis of tropes and stereotypes.
The second elemental purpose of ATH, and actually the most important one, is that it organizes itself around the character Silence Terlais, the closest thing to a sole main character that ATH has, even though Silence is offscreen more than onscreen. Silence is a Guard of Galavar—one of Galavar's inner circle. She is tasked with peacefully swaying the hearts and minds of the nations of Relance as a preferred alternative to military conquest. Amid this task she is also grappling with the treachery of the Gods, the growing hubris of Galavar himself, and her own past secrets and unanswerable dreams. After The Hero inevitably follows Silence's undertakings, her personal growth, and her many adventures and conflicts. Silence is also the central character in The Curious Tale as a whole, not just After The Hero, inasmuch as all plots flow through her and she is at the center of the ultimate question of "Why?"
Finally, the third elemental purpose of ATH is to genuinely and fairly test the so-called Galance Ideal, the political–ethical vision that Galavar and his Galan people have of taking over the world to change it for the better. Like so many others, I have been frustrated and bewildered from a young age by the intransigence and injustice in our real world of Earth. ATH is my life's best attempt to present a viable solution. I know how audacious that is, and I am not promising a solution that will actually work. I'm just giving it my honest best shot. ATH can, if desired, be read critically as an enormous political manifesto wrapped in an illustrative story.
Supporting ATH are most of the other stories of The Curious Tale. These are called The Interludes, so named because they are standalone stories which are nevertheless connected to and interspersed among ATH at strategic points to flesh out specific characters or events where ATH itself would be too heavily detoured or would otherwise be unable to turn its attention. The Prelude to After The Hero, the novel I published in 2015, is an Interlude, and, as the front-side bookend to After The Hero, is named "Prelude" instead of "Interlude." Another Interlude is the incomplete and long-on-hiatus story The Great Galavar, which I published in the mid-2010s as a weekly serial (and which I will get back to at some point!). A third Interlude is the story of the place-singer and travelling bard Afiach Bard, Mate of Song, which came to me as an inspiration in 2012 and 2013 but which has not been published yet due to much of it not actually being written down (despite the story itself being completely developed) and because the various Interludes are intended to be read at certain points during ATH, and Mate of Song's turn is quite a ways off in the distance. And there will likely be other Interludes too, provided I live long enough to write them.
Finally, rounding out the contents of The Curious Tale as a whole, there are some more peripheral elements arrayed loosely as constellations around ATH and its Interludes. If you remember the satire series Empire on Ice, or my Curious Score musical compositions, or my Curious Tale Saturdays essays, those would all be examples of this stuff. While the website is woefully out of date these days, you can find most of these contents over at CuriousTale.org, as well as additional information / orientation / welcome information about the world of Relance.
I have mentioned that I am working on two novels, The Curious Tale novel and the Galaxy Federal novel. But that's a little bit misleading. I conceive of After the Hero as one novel, but in terms of printed books it would have to be an entire series of them or else the novel would end up being considerably thicker than it was tall. So, while it is true that I am working on the ATH novel, the actual discrete "book" that I am working on is merely Chapter 1 of it. The original ATH RPG had thirteen chapters if I recall correctly. While I don't know how many chapters the ATH novel will have, it will be more than a few. This should give you a sense of how big this work truly is. You can see now how I expect this to take the rest of my life!...and perhaps even longer. =/
That's another point I need to make. I would be a hypocrite not to warn you that I am no Stephen King. It takes me a long time to write my books. I anticipate becoming faster in the future (and indeed have already sped up over the past decade), but even still the terminus of ATH is decades away. Don't get invested if you need resolution right now. Even Chapter 1 of ATH is almost certainly several years away from being done.
Speaking of Chapter 1, it tells the story of the first day of the Galan Conquest, where the Galans, reeling from the failed but destructive assault of the Hero, desperately set out to capture the aforementioned desert city of Soda Fountain. We meet many Galans and Sodish, and others, all beneath a mysterious river of fire that fades in across the sky and grows fiercer by the hour.
