The lost world

For a short time, I toyed with the idea of setting my fantasy stories on a flat world. I had obviously been reading too many of Terry Pratchett’s discworld books, which are still a personal favourite. I cannot remember any of the particulars about the stories that related to this map.

It’s obvious from my drawing that I intended there to be a volcanic island, with it’s four volcanoes at the bottom edge of the map. A desert island with a grand central mountain and four rivers. A large island covered in forest at the top of the page, and the fourth island on the right had the most pleasant farmland.

All I know for sure, is that this map was in a sketchbook that included drawings for a flying airship (I’ll share those drawings in a later article). I probably added the sea monster later as it’s not coloured in like the rest of the drawing. Seeing these old drawings makes me think about the old ideas I had, where I seemed to believe anything was possible with storytelling, and of course it is. Whilst I continue to write fantasy, I can see with these drawings how I slowly came to the idea of writing about a world more relatable to the reality we all know.

Multiple dimensions.

According to a good article on futurism.com, multiple dimensions are described as follows;

“When someone mentions “different dimensions,” we tend to think of things like parallel universes, alternative realities that exist parallel to our own, but where things work or happen differently. However, the reality of dimensions and how they play a role in the ordering of our universe is really quite different from this popular characterisation. To break it down, dimensions are simply the different facets of what we perceive to be reality. We are immediately aware of the three dimensions that surround us on a daily basis, those that define the length, width, and depth of all objects in our universes (the x, y, and z axes, respectively)”

To the world of my fiction, multiple dimensions are a proven reality, akin to the popular theories listed above.

In my first book ‘Broken Promises Journey’ I mention in the introduction about multiple dimensions, here is the extract.

“To understand the arrival of the Artens or Angels, as humans chose to call them, we need to understand how the universe is put together, according to the understandings of the people of Gear. Imagine if you can, a book, perhaps it’s bound in ancient black leather, and larger than any book anyone can comfortably imagine. On each page of the book is a layer of reality, they lay on top of one another. On multiple pages you might find the same planet, and if you could look closely enough at the tiniest markings, you’d see cities repeated layer after layer. On the first page of the book reality is ordered by science, technology and pure logic. As you head through the pages, you’ll find subtle changes, as other forces become stronger, on the very last page of the book there is a reality where magic rules supreme.”

This extract puts down my final thoughts on multiple dimensions, relating to my fantasy world in quite clear terms.

I did have an earlier idea about the dimensions being like a gobstopper, layered one upon another, yet separated by a void as distant as two galaxies and yet at the same time as close as the top and bottom of a shadow. In this sketch you can see my idea for worlds built on layers one above the other, I imagined as you move towards the centre the worlds would become more compact and need magic in order to exist. Whilst going the other way the world would expand and be better suited to hosting technology.

I abandoned the gobstopper idea, as it made moving from more than one plane of reality to another incomprehensible. As I have stated in my stories that the Artons came from a higher dimension (on a world called Astarer), they existed on a level of reality several layers away from the one containing Gear. After a scientific experiment gone wrong, the legendary first profit of an Arten who was known only as Maria, brought a part of her own world crashing through several dimensions and it collided with the magically rich reality of Gear, causing many smaller fractures in the fabric of this dimension as a result. As the reader explores more of the world of Gear they’ll discover these little riffs leading to the magical lands of the Dragons and to the hellish planes of the monsters.