Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.
Today, we’ve got a guest post by Ben Moxon exploring the varied and fantastical worlds in indie books.
We often talk about books in terms of characters or tropes, but there’s a reason why the gravel-voiced movie-trailer narrator traditionally begins “in a world…” Genre fiction in particular offers authors the flexibility to create settings that do not and cannot exist; to explore places that operate on very different rules from our own, and get to know the people and creatures that live there. For as long as the genre has existed (and throughout its precursors) storytellers have been creating worlds, either implicitly or explicitly, for their characters to inhabit. For my contribution to this series, I thought it would be fun to talk about some of the worlds I have enjoyed discovering in indie fantasy and what makes them so interesting.
I will start with one of my all-time favourite fantasy series, Patrick Samphire’s Mennik Thorn books. These follow the eponymous down-on-his-luck consultant mage through his adventures in the city of Agatos, a classic port city-state built on trade and magical power. The series takes as much from hard-boiled detective fiction as from fantasy – although Nik is a mage (and not a very powerful one), his work involves solving tricky magical problems for his clients. This often creates friction with the city’s underworld, with the wealthy, and with the knightly order dedicated to containing rogue magic.
It is always fun to explore a well-realised city with a character who loves it even when it keeps causing them problems, but what makes Agatos so fascinating is the way that Samphire combines familiar aspects – a port city where many people’s ancestors arrived from the distant places it trades with – and leads it into fantasy. The people who have lived in Agatos over the years brought their religions with them, and consequently their gods. As those beliefs faded, the gods they were framed around died and the product of their decay is the magic that mages tap into. The city’s long history of diversity is what makes it a magically potent place – and of course, not all the gods are dead.
Agatos feels like a living city – messy, complicated, full of contradictions and danger, but most importantly full of people trying to live their lives. A perfect environment for a scrappy mage whose attempts to do the right thing keep making his life worse.
Where Agatos injects magic into the grounded and real, the world of CM Caplan’s Four Of Mercies books (starting with The Fall Is All There Is) is strange and unsettling. We’re in science-fantasy territory here – a world where technological civilisations have come and gone and our characters live among their remains, sometimes literally having to contend with their ghosts. The horses they ride are biomechanical constructs of flesh and metal, and the first book opens with the main character begging to be injected with a serum that encodes the physical expertise he needs to be able to defend himself.
The sense of eking out an existence in the shadow of richer history is a perfect backdrop for the gothic family drama at the heart of the novels. The experience of reading them is dark, strange, and unique – the kind of work that suits indie publishing well because it is so hard to pigeonhole, and one feels that mainstream publishers might be hard-pressed to figure out how to market it.
In the case of Hiyodori’s novels, the world where stories like Highest Healer And Lowest Mage and The Forest At The Heart Of Her Mage take place is both an intriguing setting and an ideal way of establishing an essential and intimate connection between characters; the perfect starting point for romantic storytelling. The world of these books is technologically modern, but full of magic and strangeness. Mages have great power that derives from their magical core, but the more they use it the more tangled it becomes, and if it becomes too tangled they will lose control. Mages need an Operator, someone skilled in untangling and smoothing out their magical core after they have used magic, to keep them from going to pieces.
The dynamic of this relationship and the cultural expectations around it make a fertile ground for romance, rivalry, and everything in between. Especially when the mage and operator teams are travelling into other perilous places, like the hostile and relentless forest in The Forest At The Heart Of Her Mage or the mysterious tower in Highest Healer And Lowest Mage. Although they are pitched as slow-burn romances, these books are deep in the fantasy genre, offering a unique take on magic, technology, and the ways that they could meet.
The world of J Zachary Pike’s Orconomics will be very familiar to anybody who has played an RPG or MMO. What makes these books so much fun is that he takes a very traditional setting – heroic crews of Professional Adventurers following guild-assigned quests into dungeons to defeat evil wizards and their minions, orcish clans, and terrible beasts – and follows it to its natural conclusion. Here the economy is built on adventuring and loot: successful corporations invest in adventuring parties ahead of expeditions in exchange for a share of the loot they will bring home. The only problem (from a corporate perspective) is that the value and quantity of loot from expeditions is diminishing quarter by quarter, putting everything at risk.
Meanwhile we are introduced to disgraced former adventurer Gorm Ingerson, forced against his will to join a divine quest with a crew of fellow losers that will restore their reputations and bring them all to the top tier of Professional Adventuring. In parallel we get glimpses of the realm of high finance, the fiscal schemes of the super-wealthy who have no interest in individuals such as Gorm’s companions, yet whose decisions impact them critically.
In Orconomics the story plays on the familiar shapes of the characters and world to give the story its humour and the satire its bite. By extrapolating the familiar to the point of ridiculousness, it exposes the paradoxical cruelty of the RPG conventions of “evil” races and the idea that heroes get to decide who does and doesn’t count as a person while carrying us on a twisty, often funny, rollercoaster ride.
The four series here are all very readable books that I have enjoyed and they show different ways a fantasy author can use the world – creating a solid city or a decaying realm in ephemeral shadow, crafting a unique world that ties together the characters and story, or leaning into the cliches and shining a light on what they might really mean. There are as many worlds as there are books to read, so explore widely and find what brings you joy – if you run into something particularly intriguing I’d love to hear about it. After all, these are all better-known series; there are endless fascinating destinations to explore for those with the will to delve deeper.
About the Author
Ben Moxon is a storyteller, musician, horse trainer, programmer and game designer best known as host, composer and game master for Crudely Drawn Swords (an actual play podcast of high adventure, low dice rolls, and intermediate levels of terrible puns.) He lives in Wales with a herd of equines, a selection of guitars, and far more mud than anyone could ever want or need. His tabletop RPG design credits include The Hallowed Walk (a storytelling game you play by going for a walk with your friends) and Trilogy, a game of epic fantasy where you create the world in play. The Redstone Rescue is his first novel.
- Website: turnanother.page/author/ben-moxon
- Bluesky: @glenatron.bsky.social
