How do you lure readers into an epic fantasy world?

The opening of a fantasy or science-fiction novel requires extra thought because, in addition to introducing the characters and kicking off the plot, writers must acclimate readers to a whole new world. In this post I’ll do a careful analysis of the opening of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun to show you exactly how she pulls us into her story world and makes us want to know more about how it works and what’s at stake.

Our initial introduction to the setting comes in the form of two maps. The first shows us the land of Meridian, curving around the Crescent Sea, with labels for the Obregi Mountains and a number of what we can assume are cities. The second is a close-up map of the City of Tova, one of the places named on the main map. The city is divided into a number of distinct regions, rather like New York City; each region is labeled with a name, and many of them are also associated with a specific clan.

The beginning of N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became also has an opening illustration (see my analysis in my post on its front matter), but that book is urban fantasy, meaning that it is set in a real-world location, though one operating under unfamiliar rules. Jemisin’s map hints at those differences and also gives clues about important details.

Similarly, Roanhorse’s map provides both visual iconography and linguistic taxonomies that help set the tone. On the Meridian map we can see icons that look like pyramids, others that look like spears, and a sun marking the location of Tova. In the corner lurks a feathered serpent figure that may remind readers of depictions of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. The names on the City of Tova map provide clues about what is considered important in this world. Clans, for example, are named for birds, and in the center of the city is a small island labeled “Sun Rock.”

If you include a map, you can’t count on readers looking at it before beginning the novel, but you can rely on it to be a back-up tool for readers who want to check a place name or reorient themselves to the broad landscape of the novel at some point during their reading. Do you need to include a map if you are writing fantasy or sci-fi? If the scope or landscape of your novel is fairly self-contained—for example, if it takes place only in a single city—then you likely don’t need one. However, if your novel world has an epic scope or a lot of place names, readers will appreciate having a map. Fortunately there are online tools that make creating such a map relatively easy and inexpensive.

Following the map and the title page (which also features a bird), we get a list of “The People of the Meridian.” Like the map, this list will be skipped by some readers, but they may come back to it later to remind themselves of which characters are grouped together or belong to a specific place. Just a brief skim, however, gives us a sense of the kinds of people and relationships the novel will include. We see familiar labels like “priest,” “merchant,” “healer,” “servant,” “tutor,” “sailor.” Note how this collection of terms implies an historical rather than a futurist fantasy world. (Consider, for example, the assumptions you would make about this set of labels: “entrepreneur,” “doctor,” “waiter,” “teacher,” “astronaut.”) The list also reinforces the importance of birds and the sun, with some characters identified as sun priests and others identified as giant crows or as members of clans associated with birds.

Next, we encounter a passage from The Florentine Codex addressed to “you,” which has the effect of drawing us into the novel. Here are the first and last lines:

This evocative passage sets our expectations for the stakes and themes of the novel: life and death, certainly, and possibly power and loyalty.

Do you see how much texture Roanhorse has provided even before we get to the first chapter? Again, the broader the scope of your novel and the less familiar your fantasy world, the more of these preliminary pieces you should consider including. Readers will draw intuitive assumptions from details they don’t yet understand and also know where to go to get reoriented.

We’re now at chapter one, but we have two more elements before we reach the opening sentence. First, we get a time stamp: “The Obregi Mountains, Year 315 of the Sun (10 Years before Convergence).” We’re starting to narrow our focus now, from that big-picture Meridian map to one specific mountain range. The time stamp, again, tells us what is important in this story world. The sun is central, and there is a key event called “Convergence” that we now know is significant. By way of comparison, think about the way the BC (Before Christ) date label centers Christianity. (For a longer discussion of time stamps, see my post on the opening of I Kissed Shara Wheeler.)

To give you a sense of the work fantasy writers must do, consider how many assumptions we bring to a time stamp like “San Francisco, Summer of 1968.” We know that San Francisco is a city in the United States, a wealthy and powerful nation that was, in 1968, fighting an unpopular war across the globe in Vietnam. The large number of readers who know about the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco know that we might see hippies, musicians, and protests pop up in the novel. Fantasy writers must fill in those associations from scratch, sentence by sentence. Roanhorse starts this work in the epigraph to the chapter, which comes after the time stamp:

The ominous tone and the plaintive question about mercy make us wonder about what calamities this year 315 has witnessed, and once again reinforces the centrality of the sun in this fantasy world. The sun is both the name of the epoch and the caster of “cruel shadow.”

Before we get to the first sentence of the novel, I want to give one practical piece of advice about time stamps, having helped a number of writers fine-tune these for their novels. In most cases, you’ll want to set a marker and then move forward in time because (unless time works differently in your world) you can rely on familiar units like days, weeks, and years. In that case, the initial marker can be almost anything or be left out altogether. You could include only a place name, for example, before the first chapter and then tag the second chapter “Five years later.” If you do have big time jumps, especially if they go both backward and forward in time, using a key event as a marker, like Roanhorse does here with “Convergence,” will help readers understand how different pieces of the plot fit together.

Now—at last!—the opening paragraph. Here it is in full:

These two short sentences ring out like a cathedral bell tolling a death. They may be grammatically simple, but they are narratively complex. Our first story question is a weighty one: What does it mean that he will become a god? Does one have to die in this story world to become a god? Does this “he,” apparently our protagonist, know what becoming a god entails? The second sentence, citing his mother as the source of this knowledge (as well as the simple grammar) implies that he might not know—that he might be quite young. Notice as well how many time structures are contained in these two sentences: “Today” signals that we are in the present, but the verb “would become” is in the future. Will he indeed become a god today? The next sentence is focused on a past moment when his mother “had told” him of this future prediction. Has she told him just a moment ago? Or has she been telling him of this prophecy throughout his childhood? Past, present, and future are all mixed together in this opening paragraph.

Let’s move forward one more step to the next paragraph and a half:

With that proffered cup, we are suddenly in a live scene, anchored in the “today” of the first sentence. And it’s a scene that is familiar to us, that could take place in our world—a mother hands her son something to drink. Roanhorse focuses on sensory details in the next few sentences, continuing to ease us into this unfamiliar world via smell and sight memories we might identify with. Only at the end of the paragraph do we get another nibble of story: The mother cultivates “secret things” that she guards carefully and has put into the drink.

It’s not until the third paragraph of the novel, in the dialogue line spoken by the mother, that we get our protagonist’s name. This choice has a way, paradoxically, of deepening the reader’s connection to the protagonist. Consider how the first line would read differently if Roanhorse had used his name in the first sentence: “Today Serapio would become a god.” A name is an external identifier—a way that others think of us. Roanhorse is showing us Serapio thinking of himself and so “he” is the better choice. It’s also part of the author’s strategy of slowly, steadily parceling out new information.

The second part of the mother’s dialogue line, about keeping the drink down, adds another note of menace to the scene. How strong, how dangerous must this drink be if the boy’s body has rejected it in the past? A couple paragraphs later, however, the drink is the least of our concerns because the mother warns the boy he must finish every drop, “Else it won’t be enough to numb the pain,” and he obeys, while looking nervously at the cords, the bone needle, and the gut thread he knows she will use on him.

Only now, when we know that something painful is going to happen to the boy and that it is the mother who will inflict this pain, does Roanhorse slow the scene a bit to provide more details about the world. Serapio notices his mother’s collar of crow feathers with dyed-red tips, and she tells him, “Your father thought he could forbid me to wear this . . . . But [he] doesn’t understand that this is the way of my ancestors, and their ancestors before them. He cannot stop a Carrion Crow woman from dressing to honor the crow god, particularly on a day as sacred as today.” She tells him that his father’s people, the Obregi, “fear many things they do not understand.” Serapio has only ever known the Obregi, he reflects, but his mother has told him she is preparing him to return to her people, the Carrion Crow clan in the city of Tova.

Do you see how Roanhorse makes this backstory and world-building context count? What could motivate a mother to hurt her son? The high stakes of the scene heighten our desire to find the answers, and it is the backstory and the story world that provide them. Without the motivation to find answers, the details about the Obregi and the Carrion Crow clans and their various beliefs would seem dry and boring. At this point we return to the live scene, to the mother using that cord and needle and thread as the sun is darkened by a shadow we recognize as an eclipse, but the mother, and now Serapio, believe to be the crow god eating the sun.

Even a reader flipping quickly through the preliminary materials would have subliminally noticed how important the sun is in this story world: the “black sun” of the title, the sun symbol on the map to mark Tova, the sun priest in the character list, the epoch of the sun in the time stamp, and the apostrophized sun in the chapter epigraph. If the crow god eats the sun and thus “holds sway over the world,” as his mother puts it, this must be an important moment indeed in the world of the story. Roanhorse dramatizes that importance—shows it—rather than tells it in this opening chapter.

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