Concerning: Notes on The Queen of Raiders

This blog post—like a previous post on A Queen in Hiding—reveals easter eggs and my intentions in Book Two of The Nine Realms. Spoilers ahead!

 For the most part, Raiders is a Western. I hope readers conjure visions of a lonely band of riders, dwarfed by an immensity of wilderness, with their numbers inexorably decreasing. The tally at the beginning of each chapter repeats the trope of “Battlestar Galactica.” 

 The auditioning and gathering of the Raiders was inspired by The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven. I admire both the Japanese original and the American remake. In each I find the long sequences of enlisting fighters for a hopeless mission particularly stirring. The name “Kambey,” for the weapon’s master, directly alludes to the ronin “Kambei.”

 The name, “Emerald Lake,” is a tip of my hat to my childhood in Colorado, where my family often hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park.

 I also had the theme of “terrorism” in mind:  from one perspective the Raiders are terrorists, purposefully bringing havoc into their enemy’s homeland and attacking its most sacred places. Do we feel differently about terrorism when we understand the perpetrators’ motives?

 A famous photograph of a drowned, 2-year-old Kurdish boy washed up on the beach in Turkey morphed into the Sweetmeadow subplot. I wanted to stress the cost of all wars on civilians. Readers may find it interesting that the massacre at Sweetmeadow was the first chapter of the book I ever wrote, and although all my books went through extensive revision, this chapter remained essentially unchanged.

 On a more prosaic level, Sweetmeadow’s peaceful goat-herding community holds traces of my childhood fascination with Heidi. 

 Many readers have found the battle scenes of Raiders stirring. The strategies that Thalen employs started as mine, but I ran them through the wisdom and experience of a generous West Point colonel, who taught me, for instance, about the usefulness of an abattis.

 Two of the action scenes—the attack in the Iron Valley and the infiltration of Femturan—feature short paragraphs from alternating points of view. I had cinematic montage in mind.

 If you asked me to identify my favorite parts of the book, I’d point to all the business with the animals:  the goats butting the would-be kidnappers, the hawks’ cold-heartedness, the eagle’s susceptibility to flattery, or the reappearance of the Butter and Didi from out of the wilderness. For the last, perhaps I might have been channeling the heart-stopping climax of The Incredible Journey.