A Fantasy World for the Digital Age Mind - by John Robin
In this highly digitalized age, I’ve often wondered just what I have to contribute as an epic fantasy writer. Why not write science fiction to inform on more immediate issues of our technological future? My background is computer science and mathematics, yet somewhere out of that field of intense academics, I rose up as a storyteller and decided that stories were more important to me. And not just any stories: stories about magic, an imaginary world with its own mythology, a world with its own properties radically different, yet uncannily similar, to our own.
Even though this world is fantastical, it is to me immediately relevant, and it informs on a message just as immediate as science fiction or speculative science articles. Magic as I explore it in my story world, is its own technology, the process of discovering some deep, hidden knowledge of reality and what is possible in reality. Technology – the whole of science since it evolved out of the Renaissance – is no different. Show our iPads and iPhones and cloud-integrated technology to someone from Newton’s day and they would marvel. Show it to someone from the Dark Ages and it would be witchcraft, or devilry.
I consider my writing more modern, even though the historic period invokes a pseudo-Industrial era. I didn’t just do this because I didn’t want to be another medieval fantasy author (in my opinion, that one has been done to death), I did it because I wanted to enter into a world much like the post-Renaissance, where minds were awakening to the infinite possibilities of what reality might offer. Magic is an analog of technology in my world, and the world of Blood Dawn, and subsequent stories to follow, is one undergoing magical revolution – much like ours is undergoing the technological equivalent.
This is how I am re-bottling the myth in this modern era. Though there is something to be said for the beauty of anachronism in epic fantasy, the escape to an older time and a pre-technological world more rooted in nature, I am interested in exploring an alternative fantasy world, one where nature itself is being redefined. What does it mean to enter a new world where what it means to be human is going to change? Is changing every day? Is it good to forget what you were and instead embrace being something newer and better? For example, we are now mostly on laptops without floppy drives. We’ve left floppy drives behind, but do we begrudge the loss of that clunky technological intermediary? Do we really want to go back to a room full of vacuum tubes? Those questions might be applied to the human condition and the human being’s place in the post-Renaissance world. While there is a call – often fear-based – to reclaim our roots, there is also an advantage to moving on and letting go. That is very much the message I like to explore in the fabric of the world I set my tales in.
That is my modern myth. A world that is not round, built by the fires of seven dragons who descended from the void. Dragons who have gone to sleep but will soon awaken. A man who was nearly a god incarnate, who showed humanity a pathway to mastering the secrets of the world, whose dream has faded after he fell from power – but has not been forgotten by the ambitious who saw the potential, and alternative paths, of his vision. A world that is going to change, where the Seven Sacred stones of the Dwarf Men – the residual fires of the world-building dragons – will transform from mysterious components of the earth to the basis of a science that will allow a new age of immortality and mastery over reality to come into being. Much like our world has transformed from one where mysterious electrum coursed through the stones of ancient Greece, to one where electricity is the basis of almost everything that makes our world hum and move.
I write about people, people who ask questions about their place in the world, who define themselves and make the best of what they’ve been given. The world and its mythic foundation, however, is its own backdrop, a medium for driving these people toward the questions that will change them and change how they think about themselves in the world. Blood Dawn, and the stories I plan to write for many years to come, is a tapestry, a collection of life stories, all coming together to define the bigger story of our world on the cusp of chance, where we will never be the same again.
And the biggest question that lingers in the back of that – in my story, and in the modern world we live in – is this: is that really a good thing?
Brief biography on John Robin:
From the time he first looked at Tolkien's map of Wilderland as a ten year old boy, John Robin knew he was destined to make his own world and tell stories about it. So, as he grew up and read the great fantasy epics, he began to create his own world with its own stories, history, and myths.
Over twenty years, he learned the craft of storytelling, writing three novels just for practice (unpublished), and all the while his fantasy world and unique vision as a writer ripened. The evolution of the Internet and the exciting possibilities of what technology just might do for human beings further inspired John to model his magic system and epic tale to also communicate a message about how mastery over one's environment might change the human condition.
After working for many years in academia and adult education, John left his job to pursue a career as a full-time editor, starting his own company, Story Perfect Editing Services. He has edited more than forty stories to date.
John's work has appeared in the Tantalizing Tidbits anthology (“One Who Waits”, a prequel short story to Blood Dawn). Blood Dawn is the first of many stories John plans to write in a series of stand-alone novels that will follow the evolution of a world undergoing magical revolution.
If you’d like to read the opening thirteen chapters, and follow his progress, you can can visit his page on Inkshares HERE.