When I sat down to write City of Stairs – my first secondary world novel – I realized I felt I’d written secondary worlds before.
My first novel, Mr. Shivers, ostensibly takes place in our own world, as the characters pursue a murderer across the Dustbowl at the height of the Great Depression. There were obviously some parameters to the story that were set in stone: I could not, say, stick Georgia next to Minnesota, or get the years or presidents wrong. But I knew that I wanted this book to feel slightly detached from reality, mostly because that was how the characters would feel: lost in a land turned alien and strange, pursuing a man who showed no sign of understanding any civilized or moral law. To chase this man, in other words, would mean passing into a strange, new world with its own rules.
And that’s really what makes a secondary world tick: its own rules.
This might not be the first thing you think of when you come to secondary worlds. Most people will tell you that secondary worlds need ancillary material: maps, timelines, family trees, and maybe even pronunciation guides. They will tell you that these elements are the steel girders and struts supporting the entire secondary world experience.
But I don’t think this is true. I think there’s a danger one might use them purely as ornamentation, giving a superficial gloss of strangeness to a world. A solid secondary world needs more.
In writing my own secondary world, I found that these “ornamental” elements work best when used to explore and unveil the rules and nature of that world, which are often different from our own (or are the same rules as our world, just turned up to 11).
For example, I wrote a five page timeline of the world of City of Stairs, but when I started writing the actual story, I found that the last thing I wanted to do was to spend any time in the text telling people about what that timeline was.
Rather, the only times I needed to use the timeline was in giving the story the structure and rules it needed to jump off of.
In a lot of ways, City of Stairs is a story about history: one group – the Continentals – has had its gods assassinated by a second group, the Saypuris. The Saypuris have now made it completely illegal for anyone to reference the gods ever again – in essence, they’ve forbidden the Continentals from ever truly knowing their history.
But on a deeper level, City of Stairs is about what a lot of my other books are about: witnessing the collision of reality with the vain inventions and denials of people who do not wish to live in reality.
To explore this, there are two big rules in City of Stairs that make up the nature of its secondary world, informing and catalyzing all of the action of the story. These two rules – like a lot of big rules – are somewhat contradictory, and the conflict of the novel hinges upon an attempt to reconcile them.
The rules are:
1. History is largely inaccessible. We cannot truly know the past. The past is a foreign place that we can neither travel to nor resurrect – and it is deeply dangerous to glamorize it.
2. However, despite being mostly inaccessible, the past weighs down on the present with every passing hour and day. What happened to the preceding generations will inevitably echo in your own, and to deny the past will also be deeply dangerous.
These two rules fuel the plot and form a foundation for nearly every single action in the book. For example, some miracles – artifacts of a past world, in other words – still function in the world of City of Stairs, like little whirring machines left behind by mysterious creators. This would follow with rule #2, the past echoing in the present.
However, no one understands how the miracles function, or why they still persist – they’re fundamentally mysterious and dangerous, thus in keeping with rule #1, the inaccessibility of the past.
A second example: in the world of City of Stairs, the Saypuris have introduced laws called “the Worldly Regulations,” forbidding the mention or acknowledgment of the Divine – essentially forbidding the history of the Continent to have any influence on the present, in other words. This is in violation of rule #2, denying the echoes of the past in the actions of the present, and, as one would expect, has less-than-great consequences.
However, though the Continentals object to the Worldly Regulations, wishing to restore their heritage, they are not really sure what their heritage is: leading a lot of them to just make up their own, which has similarly less-than-great consequences, in line with Rule #1.
And the protagonist of City of Stairs, Shara, is a walking, talking example of the two rules in conflict. On the one hand, she is an intelligence officer of Saypur, working to dispatch any threat to Saypur – and, sometimes, eliminating any remnant of the miraculous, to make sure no element of the past world remains.
But on the other hand, what makes her good at doing this is her own profound fascination with history, her detailed, exhaustive knowledge of the long-running entanglements between Saypur and the Continent. She wishes to know the truth of what happened – even if the immediate use of that truth is to help deny it ever happened.
This use of “alternate” rules to our world is what makes books feel different, strange – like it’s taking place in a secondary reality. There are plenty of mainstream literary books that use the same technique to accomplish a similar goal: even though Cormac McCarthy’s books take place in our world, one would be hard pressed to say that Blood Meridian or Suttree feel like any reality we’ve ever known. And David Foster Wallace’s much-lauded Infinite Jest feels like it exists in a satirical, trippy, hyperactive version of our near-future, despite taking place in Boston.
Actually, sometimes I think all novels really exist in secondary worlds – it’s just that some worlds are a little more secondary than others.
Robert Jackson Bennett is a two-time award winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel (American Elsewhere in 2013 and Mr. Shivers in 2010), an Edgar Award winner for Best Paperback Original (The Company Man in 2012), and is also the 2010 recipient of the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer, and a Philip K Dick Award Citation of Excellence. His fifth novel, City of Stairs, is in stores now.
He lives in Austin with his wife and son. He can be found on Twitter at @robertjbennett.
You can see a short video of what Robert’s future writing plans are right here.
