Welcome back to Dara!
Fiction is a process of collaborative world-conjuring (I owe the phrase to the inimitable Jo Walton) between the writer and the reader, as the reader must bring the bare words on the page to life with an imagination tempered by her life experience, fill in the blanks spaces between the words with her own assumptions and beliefs about human nature, and shape the story to fit into her personal hoard of stories, real as well as imagined, that make up the essence of a mind.
But there is another half to that dance, the part the writer plays. I hope that my comments on that part will add to your enjoyment as you bring Dara to life again, having finished The Grace of Kings.
The Wall of Storms is about the “Dynasty” in the Dandelion Dynasty. Kuni Garu, now known as Emperor Ragin, frets over the right successor among his children to carry on the revolutionary changes in the Islands. However, his carefully laid plans are ruined by the sudden arrival of an implacable invasion force from beyond the fabled Wall of Storms.
As far as plot summaries go, the above is accurate enough. But like most plot summaries, it tells you everything and nothing; it misses the point of the story entirely.
(Think about it. When has the plot of a story ever been the reason you found it memorable? “They fought over a city for ten years” is not the reason you still think about Achilles and Hector. “Adam walked out of the Garden” is not why lines from Paradise Lost continue to haunt my brain, decades after I first encountered it. We may not remember all the twists and turns in Emma’s search for love, but we surely remember the brilliance of her character, the music in her author’s prose. There are certainly books written and read purely for plot, but I’m afraid that I don’t remember anything about them. That’s why I don’t think it’s a good idea to give a plot summary when someone asks what a book is “about.” The plot is just there to keep the reader reading; it’s not what makes the book worth your time.
How would you describe a book you love to someone without resorting to a plot summary?)
As I mentioned in the comments to passages from The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms is what I consider to be the start to the series proper (with TGOK serving as a prequel). In TGOK, I was largely concerned with laying the foundations of the silkpunk aesthetic and setting up a pre-modern society on the cusp of the leap into modernity. Why did I do this? Well, a driving impetus behind this series is my desire to challenge and interrogate the conventional narrative of modernity, which is often modeled on a particular telling of the story of my country, the US of A. The Story of America is most often told using allusions to “Western” models (just think of how many aspects of American politics and national culture evoke images of America as a “New Rome” and how easily we read Thucydides into every modern conflict involving America, with America starring as the “New Athens”). But when you are constrained to one set of allusions, you’re limited in how you can push readers to see something new in a familiar tale or, even bolder, to change the narrative entirely.
Something radical had to be done. I decided to depart from the “New Rome” model and instead evoke East Asian models in this fantasy epic recasting of the Story of America — and by extension, the narrative of modernity. Thus, I borrowed much of the plot of TGOK from the Chu-Han Contention, as interpreted by the historian Sima Qian, and built up a vocabulary of non-Western political allusions and precedents that could then be drawn on in the re-imagining of the epic of modernity.
The Wall of Storms is where all that effort begins to pay off. With most of the groundwork out of the way, I can get to the meat of this story about the creation of the constitution for a new people (a constitution, in my view, is not a document, but a set of stories that form the core of a people’s self-perception, self-regard, and deepest values). The plot here no longer has a clear, specific historic analog. (Thus, identifying the people of Dara as “fantasy Chinese” or the Lyucu as “fantasy Mongols” or any people in these books as “fantasy [fill in the blank group]” would be very much misguided.) Rather, the central concern of The Wall of Storms and its two sequels is a series of questions: How can a new nation built from a collection of diverse peoples compose a new constitution, agree on a new source of political legitimacy, rally around a new foundational mythology? How do we carry out a political experiment to build a more just society without creating more injustice? What weight should be given to the wisdom of tradition by revolutionaries? Is it a curse or a blessing that a new generation must contend with the weight of history they are born into and live with the decisions made by their forebears? Is a “perpetual revolution” desirable or even possible? …
If those themes of The Wall of Storms seem to draw on my experience as a lawyer, then the next set of themes are based on my life as a technologist. TWOS is also a book about science and discovery. The Dandelion Dynasty is epic fantasy with a heavy dose of scifi—I mean, Luan Zya literally proclaims, “the universe is knowable,” a manifesto of the scientific view of the cosmos. I had some of my best writing moments in the discovery of the silkmotic force and the invention of the machines derived from its power. Many of the discoveries and inventions in this book are drawn from antecedents in China’s classical past; some are based on the work of ancient Greeks; some are modeled on the experiments of Ben Franklin; and still others are simply cut by me out of whole cloth. Being a technologist by trade, I love writing about discovery and innovation—and I’m pretty sure my readers enjoy reading about them too.
Before we go too far down these philosophical routes, however, I should note that it would be just as accurate to say that TWOS is about young people flirting and partying and being silly and awesome garinafin-vs-airship set pieces and devious battle tactics—derived from history, to be sure, but also from the author’s experience in playing video games and watching football—and legalistic dirty tricks and deconstructionist mis-readings and fantastic engines constructed from silk and bamboo and giant capacitors humming with the power of lightning … I mean, sure, themes are important, but books always need *fun*.
I wrote the book because I had things I wanted to say and I wanted to have fun. Those are the only two good reasons to write a novel as far as I’m concerned.
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