Apparently I Have Themes

Apparently, if you spend long enough writing stories, eventually somebody points out that you keep writing the same things.

Not the same plots. Not the same worlds. Not even necessarily the same genres.

But the same questions.

I noticed it properly while putting together an image recently. I had myself surrounded by characters from three very different corners of my writing life: A Funeral for the Living, Technomancers Rise, and the much older Olyndar/Titan stories that grew out of years of tabletop roleplaying and worldbuilding.

Looking at them together, the differences were obvious. One is dark fantasy. One is science fiction. One comes from a sprawling fantasy world that has existed in one form or another for decades.

And then I looked a little longer.

Broken systems.

Difficult people.

Found family.

Identity.

Memory.

The question of what people owe one another.

And, over and over again, hope.

Apparently I have themes.

Different Worlds, Same Questions

I do not write a shared universe.

There is no secret doorway between Technomancers Rise and A Funeral for the Living. Nobody from Olyndar is going to turn up in the neXt. There is no grand cosmological explanation waiting to reveal that everything I have ever written was connected all along.

They are separate stories because I wanted to tell different stories.

But I have realised that changing the world does not necessarily change the things I want to examine.

In Technomancers Rise, those questions often appear through technology, institutions, corporations, governments, artificial intelligence, surveillance and the promises people make about progress.

What happens when a system claims to keep people safe, but some people only remain safe because others have been pushed outside the fence?

What happens when something cruel becomes efficient enough that everyone stops seeing the cruelty?

Who gets to decide what counts as progress?

And what happens to the people who do not fit neatly into the version of society somebody else has designed?

When I moved into dark fantasy with A Funeral for the Living, I thought I was leaving some of that behind.

I was wrong.

I had only changed the machinery.

Titan does not need advanced technology to become frightening. It has records. Work assignments. Food distribution. Civic offices. Reassignment notices. Procedures. Forms. People doing their jobs correctly.

The horror is not that nobody knows how the system works.

The horror is that it works extremely well.

That idea — that something can appear orderly, reasonable, even benevolent from inside while being brutal to the people it excludes — followed me straight from science fiction into fantasy.

I did not plan that as a deliberate bridge between the two.

It was simply still a question I wanted to ask.

The People Inside the Machine

The older I get, the less interested I seem to be in systems as abstract things.

I am interested in what they do to people.

That distinction matters to me.

It is very easy to write about governments, rebellions, wars, corporations, empires and movements as though those things are characters themselves. But none of them feel real to me until somebody has to wake up in the morning and live inside them.

Somebody still has to eat.

Somebody has to go to work.

Somebody has to take care of their mother.

Somebody has an argument with a friend at exactly the wrong moment.

Somebody is lonely.

Somebody is frightened.

Somebody makes a joke because they do not know what else to do.

Somebody wants to know whether there will be enough food tomorrow.

That is where stories usually become interesting to me.

Not when somebody announces that the world must change.

When changing the world means somebody has to find another bed.

That instinct goes back further than either of my published series.

For years, most of my storytelling happened around a table as a Dungeon Master. Players have a remarkable ability to ignore whichever part of the world you thought was important and become emotionally invested in a shopkeeper you invented thirty seconds ago.

That teaches you something useful.

The world cannot exist only where the plot is looking.

People have to live there.

Consequences have to survive the scene.

And sometimes the person everybody thought was important is not actually the person the story becomes about.

I think a lot of my writing grew out of that.

Heroes Are Complicated

I also seem incapable of leaving the idea of heroism alone.

I love heroic stories.

I grew up on them.

But I am increasingly interested in what happens around heroes, underneath them and after them.

Who remembers them?

Who pays for what they did?

Who gets forgotten because the legend became easier to remember than the people involved?

And perhaps most importantly: what happens when there is nobody heroic available?

A Funeral for the Living probably examines that question most directly.

Its first book begins long after the great heroes have failed. Elias Whitlock is not the person anybody would choose to replace them. He is an elderly homeless man who has spent most of his life being ignored.

He is not secretly the greatest warrior alive.

He is not waiting to discover hidden power.

He does not possess the answer everybody else has missed.

He remembers.

And once I had written him, I realised that this too belonged to a much older pattern in my work.

I keep becoming interested in people who are not supposed to matter very much.

Then I keep asking what happens when they do.

Found Family Keeps Sneaking In Too

This one may be the least surprising.

I apparently cannot leave a group of damaged people in the same room for very long without wondering whether they might eventually begin taking care of each other.

Not necessarily nicely.

That would be far too easy.

The relationships I enjoy writing are usually inconvenient.

People misunderstand each other. They argue. They irritate one another. They fail to say important things. They make decisions for somebody else's benefit and then discover that the other person would quite like to have been consulted.

But they keep coming back.

That matters to me more than instant harmony.

Found family, at least the version I seem to write, is not really about discovering a perfect group of people who finally understand you completely.

It is about becoming specific to one another.

A system can turn somebody into a number, a job, a category or a problem.

A relationship makes them inconveniently particular.

They like this food.

They hate that chair.

They disappear when they are frightened.

They always take the first watch.

They pretend not to care.

They remember your name.

Once you know somebody that specifically, losing them means something different.

So does choosing to stay.

And Then There Is Hope

This may be the one underneath all the others.

I write about hope a lot.

Which is strange, because I do not think I am naturally very good at believing in easy hope.

I distrust speeches that solve things.

I distrust victories that erase consequences.

I distrust stories where surviving something terrible automatically makes somebody stronger, wiser and ready for whatever comes next.

So the hope I keep returning to tends to be smaller.

Food.

A bed.

Work that matters.

Somebody remembering your name.

A door left open.

A person coming back after an argument.

A meal where there is enough for one more chair.

A city that is still wounded but belongs to its people again.

That kind of hope interests me because it costs something.

If you feed somebody, the food has to come from somewhere.

If you shelter somebody, they occupy space.

If you make room for another person in your life, they can inconvenience you, disappoint you, frighten you and eventually hurt you simply because now they matter.

Hope becomes real when somebody has to do something because of it.

Maybe that is why I keep writing about it.

Not because I am certain things get better.

Because I am interested in what people do before they know whether they will.

Apparently I Have Themes

I used to think moving between genres meant changing subjects.

Science fiction lets me talk about one set of things. Fantasy lets me talk about another.

I do not think that anymore.

Genre changes the tools.

It changes the language.

It changes what is possible.

But somewhere underneath, I am apparently still sitting with the same handful of questions.

What happens when systems forget the people they were supposed to serve?

What do we owe each other?

How much of a person survives what the world tries to make them into?

What is heroism worth when the heroes are gone?

And what does hope look like when nobody can promise you that it will work?

I have written those questions using computers.

I have written them using magic.

I have written them around gaming tables.

Now I am writing them in an occupied city where an old man carries a box.

Different worlds.

Same heart.

Apparently I have themes.