The Severed World is one the hardest things I have ever written and I love it more for that.
I am proud of this story even if I recognize that some parts of it fall short of perfection in my own mind. I have a richly imagined world but worry that I didn’t see through all of the ideas to their ultimate conclusions.
I know I fell back on some tropes and too-easy solutions but still, given the tremendous task I set myself, I think it is a story my readers will both enjoy and come away thinking after reading.
Because it was so hard to write, I can’t wait to find out what further adventures Lady Jane Grey and Ian Harland will have in times to come, times that were, and times that never were or will be in our timeline.
When I wrote
“Times of Life and Death,”
I set myself more than a few traps
for the sequel…
When I wrote the first story in this series, Times of Life and Death, I wrote some promises to the reader and set some traps for myself.
1) When Ian told Jane that in his time, no one would try to execute her, I knew I would have to prove him wrong.
2) When an older Jane came back to the younger Ian Harland, I described a very complicated, convoluted relationship that I knew I had to create between them. I didn’t then realize how complex it might be and my next few stories may prove as challenging to write as The Severed World.
3) Because of points 1 and 2 above, I knew my historian character Ian had to lead the charge to save Jane. How do you make an unprepossessing academic historian become a hero? What is his “superpower” that lets him find the way to save her life?
4) I am not a Tudor scholar or a historian. Where do I quickly find out enough of the history and the mindset of the royals of Tudor England to write this story? One of the answers to this, that also answers the superpower question above, is the wonderful online community of The Tudor Society (https://www.tudorsociety.com/).
5) Jane and Ian grew up speaking very different versions of English, how do they communicate?
6) More importantly, though Jane received the best “humanist” education of her time, she grew up in with a very different worldview than Ian. Hers was a world where God appointed everyone their position in life, where Jews were “Christ-Killers,” where things like time ships had to be the devil’s magic.
Ian grew up in a world defined by technology and science and a relatively less divinely stratified view of people and peoples. But he also grew up in a world that had already suffered the ravages of climate change.
7) Even climate change posed a quandary for me. Given my interpretation of time travel, this tiny ship had to be able to harness tremendous amounts of power. If a single ship could generate such power cleanly, would not climate change itself be essentially fictionally mitigated in 2085? I feel like I let our future off the hook too much when I wrote this and the events of the last two years only underscore my lack of imagination on just how bad this might get.
8) One other huge, monster landmine for me was Jane’s age. She was only seventeen when she married and ruled England for nine days. In her time, that was normal. In our time, and by extension, Ian’s time, not so much.
By most accounts, the real Jane was very self-possessed, charming and seemed older than here young age. While Ian is indeed intrigued by the young lady Jane, I promise you, my readers, I am not going to go Piers Anthony on you and will give Ian his basic morality Twenty-First Century morality here. But I set myself the task of a relationship that starts out April-November and becomes July to June. I look forward to finding out how I accomplish this.
10) Maybe the biggest challenge I laid for myself was in trying to imagine the alternate history of a world where Jane never ruled as queen of England for nine days. I’m willing to hand-wave the science but not so much the history. I love science, including physics and space travel but I am, as a writer, much more intensely interested in my characters as people and as creations of the worlds they inhabit.
It is this re-imagining of the world, Jane was not queen, Mary Tudor’s marriage was not barren, though in keeping with her probably cause of death, it is not clear in my story that she gave birth to her son. Instead, without the martyrdom of Jane and without the destruction of the Spanish Armada from our timeline, The violent reformation pursued by the Protestant Tudors failed and England became a vassal state of Spain.
I tried to imagine a world where English and other European colonialism sputtered, where the United States with all its glories and depravities never existed, where technology grew in parallel but not exactly the same way.
I love my newly imagined 2085 and I think I gave it a rich and interesting texture in the space I had within a novella but I can’t help feeling there was so much more I could have done with my germs of ideas.
I guess, and hope, and promise, that is what the many planned, already brewing sequels to the adventures of Ian and Lady Jane will bring.
