The Story Behind the Shadow of Malabron
by Thomas Wharton
When my kids asked me if they could read my adult books I told them they weren’t old enough yet. So they asked me to write something that they could read. It took me a while but I've finally got around to it.
Writing a fantasy for younger readers wasn’t as much a departure as I thought it would be. As a kid I was a voracious reader of fantasy and science fiction. When I grew up I put all that behind me and started to write realist fiction. But no matter how “real” my stories were when I start writing them, by the time I got through with them they’d become fantastical in one way or another. At a reading once someone referred to my book Salamander as a fantasy, and I suddenly realized, that’s right, that’s what it is, though I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
When I was eleven or twelve I began to work on a fantasy book inspired primarily by J.R.R. Tolkien. I mapped out the geography, compiled histories, came up with character names and background stories. But I never actually got around to writing the book itself. This unwritten epic lingered in the back of my mind over the years. Years later, when I went looking for a fantasy story to write for my kids, I dusted off some of these old ideas and started there. This is what eventually became the first book of The Perilous Realm.
Although the novel is set in a made-up world of stories, the geography is based on places that I have lived or know well. The journey that Will, Rowen and the others make to the Shining Mountains is loosely based on the landscape one would encounter traveling west from my home city of Edmonton, to the Rocky Mountains. I love mountains and glaciers, and so I wanted the travelers to spend some time in this kind of landscape. I also couldn’t resist slipping names of real places in Alberta into the story. Only someone who lives here is likely to recognize these names, so it’s very much an “in” joke.
In the second and third books there will be other landscapes based on real places I know and love, such as the badlands of southern Alberta. When I was a child I was scared to go to the badlands because that’s where dinosaur fossils are found, and I worried that there still might be real live dinosaurs living there. So the badlands have always loomed large in my imagination. Even though this is a fantasy trilogy, it’s still influenced very much by the world I live in.
The Perilous Realm is the world (or worlds) from which all stories come. Dreamers and storytellers have journeyed in the Perilous Realm and returned with the tales that tell us who we are, who we may be. To those who live in the Realm, our world is known as Elsewhere, or the Untold.
The Realm is apparently infinite in extent, although in places it conforms to a geography and a cosmology similar to ours. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The moon circles the earth and the earth the sun. The seasons have their cycle, and the directions conform to what we know: the further north you go, the colder and more barren become the lands. To the south are warmer climates.
Within this familiar framework, however, there are unusual distinctions. The Realm is home to innumerable storylands, each of which is (or was, before the Great Unweaving) separate and distinct from any others. Stories come from innumith, the “storystuff” that lies in potential in the realm, in its earth, trees, water, stone, and all beings.
Read more about the Shadow of Malabron and Thomas Wharton.