The Long, Long, Very Long Road to Death’s Handmaiden

Lately, I seem to have been asked where I get my inspiration quite a lot. I really don’t have a very good answer. It’s usually a lot of things. In the case of  Death’s Handmaiden, it’s a lot of things going back a lot of years.

The most recent influence is a light novel series and the anime made from it. Mahouka Koukou No Rettousei, better known in the west as The Irregular at Magic High School. (The literal translation makes more sense: ‘The Poor performing Student…’ Less catchy, however.) This is available on Netflix (at least in the UK), if you feel like watching it. It’s subtitled: you have been warned. The story is a bit typical for a high school anime, but the world-building is awesome and the characters are interesting. The protagonist (despite his protestations otherwise) has more of a personality than many. Anyway, The Irregular put in my head the idea of doing a sci-fi magic school story. or rather, it put it back in my head, because I’ve been trying to get that idea right for a long, long time.

So many years ago that I don’t want to think about it, I read a book called A Wizard of Earthsea. You may have heard of it, hopefully not just because of the fairly dreadful TV adaptation. Ursula K. Le Guinn was a rightfully-lauded author, but I have to admit that I find most of her stuff opaque at best. A Wizard of Earthsea is another matter. The world is beautifully drawn, the characters are relatable. The magic school on Roke became one of those inspirational ideas to me. (And I spent hours and hours recreating the magic system in my favoured RPG.) I recently got the trilogy as audio books, and they haven’t aged badly like some of the books I read as a teenager.

Around about the same time, I used to get art books given to me for Christmas and my birthday. Classic sci-fi and fantasy art, generally with some form of text, either fictional or fact. One of those contained a picture which, sadly, I can no longer find. It showed a floating craft of some description moving through a swampy environment, powered by magic. The vessel was obviously more to do with technology, but it was flying because its pilot was a magician. Okay, so that kind of fitted with the school on Roke Island: the students all learned to sail boats driven by ‘the mage wind,’ because they lived in a world which was basically a lot of islands in a vast sea.

And so, the ideas combined and I came up with the idea of a solar system in which magic would be learned by various races. They had to learn teleportation and levitation to get between the worlds in the system. They learned their art because FTL travel and communication relied on magic. And the idea of that system was about all I had for a long time. Eventually, probably twenty years ago, I developed it further. I now had a collection of races, each with a different speciality regarding magic, and a human newcomer who did not fit in well and would make a collection of friends from among the more put-upon races. Eventually, of course, it would turn out that he was something special. I’ve tried to kick that idea off several times, but I’ve never been able to feel the characters.

And then I got another kick in the form of The Irregular… Rehashing the old idea with one species (humans) and two magic specialities, a mysterious, out of place female protagonist, and culling the idea of spreading the school over an entire system seems to have worked. Frankly, Death’s Handmaiden came running out of me like water. So much so that I’ve gone ahead and set off on the sequel immediately. I figured I was looking at something in the 80k words region and it’s over 120k! (Don’t get used to it; the second book will be shorter.)

So, Death’s Handmaiden owes a lot to The irregular at Magic High School and A Wizard of Earthsea and some art in a book I had decades ago, but also Anne McCaffrey’s Harpers of Pern books and all those books and films where there’s an ancient, long-dead progenitor race, and all the weird ways my brain goes off on tangents when exposed to something. Where do I get my inspiration from? Just about everywhere.

Death’s Handmaiden will be out (Amazon willing) on February 1st, everywhere. (I’ll be processing it through for publication tomorrow, so even in Australia, it should be out when you wake up on the first.) The sequel, Bitter Wind, will be out at the beginning of April.