Guest Post: Victor Milán On Mixing Culture, Language, and Thunder Lizards

Across my career I’ve learned that the books that won the most and longest-lasting fan love were the ones that I had the most fun writing: lowest on self-consciousness, highest in what I thought was cool. Still, in writing the novel character and story came first for me, cool factor second. To keep me honest I had the invaluable support of my writers group, Critical Mass.
To specifics—we know why dinosaurs? Because they’re cool! That’s just science.
Because of the way characters and story came to me I gave the novel a European-derived setting, ruled by a feudal aristocracy. The main characters are mostly nobles. They needed the power to act within the story and move it along. In such a society that’s primarily the nobility.
It’s also pretty standard Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D fantasy. I love a lot of that—Tolkien, for example. But standard wasn’t what I wanted to do.
So to deviate from fantasy’s northwest-European norm, I made the Empire of Nuevaropa’s dominant culture Spanish-derived. I’m Spanish-derived—and it just felt cool. I also reckoned there’re many Latinos in this hemisphere, in the US and elsewhere, who might enjoy reading about characters—in English, Spanish, or Portuguese—from a similar culture. Writing’s my livelihood, so when cool and potential sales coincide, that’s doubly cool.
I made Paradise a lost Earth colony so I could derive its many cultures from Terrestrial ones. One of my pet peeves is fantasies (again, some of which I enjoy) where you have countries which are obvious analogues of, say, France and Japan, and they speak made-up languages that sound vaguely like French and Japanese. That just bugs me. So I made my cultures—African, Asian, and Native American-derived no less than European—into daughters of their originals.
But I also fudged, because I don’t speak every language, even every European one. (I do all right in English, mostly.) So Paradisiacals speak dialects of the parent tongues, which have diverged to the extent that either my fancy or my incompetence kicks in.
I find the result—kinda cool.
Cultures deviate from their originals as well: much as the setting resembles Europe during the Renaissance, it isn’t. Sexual and religious attitudes differ. Clothing styles do too: it’s hot and often humid on a dinosaur-friendly planet, so there are generally few nudity taboos. In Nuevaropa, functional and ornamental clothing often resembles that of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. There are no satisfactory fur-bearing animals—but a lot of feathered ones.
You didn’t expect me to use bald dinosaurs, did you?
Some choices I made on another basis—such as self-defense. Some people question my inclusion of a foreword, brief as it is. “Why worry what Christian Fundamentalists think?” they say.
I don’t. I welcome all readers, but the SF and fantasy fans who form my core audience run heavily to the opposite view. Such that for years, a common response at SF cons to my “knights riding dinosaurs” description was, “Oh, Creationism, huh?”
Not the way you mean it, no. That’s why the foreword states: the setting isn’t Earth.
I didn’t want to blow my chances of earning readers’ suspension of disbelief on the first page. Nor did I want the paleontologically inclined (including, well, paleontologists) to choke on the fact that I also show dinosaurs coexisting who were further separated from T. rex in time than you are.
I want them to have fun too.
My deep conviction—and this applies solely to me, since one of my few Iron Rules of Writing is that one size never fits all—is that, if it wasn’t fun for me to write, how can it be fun for you to read?
I hope it is. Enjoy!
Victor Milán is best known for his award-winning novel Cybernetic Samurai. In previous worlds he’s been a cowboy and Albuquerque’s most popular all-night prog-rock DJ. He’s never outgrown his childhood love of dinosaurs…and hopes you didn’t either. The Dinosaur Lords, the start of a sprawling epic fantasy series, is available now.