HJ reporter Scott Roche got together with author Chris Lester on Skype to talk about what it takes to build such a huge fantasy world.
Hollywood Jesus: Metamor City exists in a very detailed world. Tell me how it came into being. In my experience it’s a very unique setting, a fantasy world pushed to the future
Chris Lester: Metamor City was basically born out of a thought experiment about Metamor Keep, a shared medieval fantasy setting that I was participating in during the late 1990s. I started imagining where the world might go if technology was allowed to advance, something that hasn’t happened often in established fantasy worlds.
Along the way I had some conversations with Ryx, one of my fellow writers, that did a lot to shape my ideas for the Metamor City setting. We did a lot of brainstorming in IRC and email, and I took all of that and sort of let it simmer for a few years.
During that time I was writing down all of my thoughts about Metamor City in a big Word document, and whenever I had some new ideas for the setting I would open the file and add them. Eventually it got big enough that I needed a better way to organize it, so I constructed a universe “bible” on my web site. A few years after that I discovered Wikidot, a free wiki hosting site, and I started using it to build a dynamic encyclopedia that could be easily expanded as I added new content or refined my ideas.
One of my personality traits is that I tend to get into obsessive streaks about things that I’m passionate about. That’s pretty much what happened with Metamor City. I would start working on an article about a race (say, the Silvaan), and discussing their physical traits would lead to talking about their personality traits, which led to discussing their history, which led to a long and rambling essay about their most charismatic political leader, Jonathan Three Rivers. Meanwhile, I still don’t actually have a map of Metamor City in all but the most general features. So the wiki has tended to grow in some convoluted and fairly idiosyncratic directions.
I think that’s part of why the world feels so rich to people: I haven’t covered everything yet, but the topics that I do cover, I tend to cover deeply.
HJ: Why did you decide to podcast it?
CL: I figured that it was the best way to get noticed. I had released several of the stories to my writers’ list, which had a circulation of maybe 200, and received little or no response. I published another story, Divide by Zero, at the online zine TSAT (tsat.transform.to), and didn’t get any feedback there, either, though the editor loved the story. I never really seriously considered the print publishing route because (1) anthologies don’t sell well, and (2) I didn’t think a story that had been available for free on the Internet was publishable. I also didn’t have a lot of material—the first seven episodes of the podcast contain more finished content than I wrote in the first seven years that I was thinking about the project.
When I started listening to podcast novels, I realized that I might be able to get the stories out to an audience in that form, because I saw the tremendous sense of community in the podosphere and the way that the different podcasters helped to promote each others’ work. I also was very taken by the presentation style used by Tee Morris in Billibub Baddings and the Case of the Singing Sword, wherein he combined straight narration with voice actors, music and sound effects. I knew that if I could package the stories in a way that was impressive enough that people would listen, then the content would keep them coming back.
I wasn’t sure, at first, whether I would be able to get enough people to collaborate with me for the novel, so I used the second story, “Huntress,” as a test run. I sent the story to Leann Mabry of the Tag in the Seam podcast, whose vocal work had impressed me on Billi, and asked if she would be willing to read it. She was so enamored of the story that she agreed right away, and then went on to promise that she would do everything in her power to make me a podcasting star. The connections that she helped me form in the community, along with others that I forged for myself, helped me to pull together a sizable cast in only a few months. That’s when I knew that I would really be able to make this work.
HJ: So the community has really come behind you to help you in the area of getting voice actors and in other ways. Since you’ve gone that route what complications have arisen and how long does it take you to produce an episode?
CL:: I’ll answer those questions in reverse order. It takes about an hour for me to record the basic narration for a typical 45 minute episode. It then takes about five to seven hours to edit that down to a neat, clean chunk of narration and insert the voices of the actors—longer, if the actors’ audio has defects that need to be cleaned up. Then I write, record and edit the intro and outro, which is maybe two hours. After that I’m ready to start mixing everything together: I go into Cubase and import the narration files, then add music, sound effects, promos, etc. That takes about three hours for a simple episode—which, for me, means using minimal sound effects, and stock music that is a common part of my repertoire. If I have an episode with a lot of special effects, or one where I have to hunt for the right music track or the right sound effect, it can take much, much longer.
HJ: The music is really one of the better parts of your ‘cast. It’s a lot like Star Trek: TOS in that way.
CL: I’m very proud of the music on Metamor City. I’ve striven to create an eclectic sound that brings together a lot of ethnic and cultural influences, which reflects the multicultural nature of the city itself.
Now, happily, I have production assistants who help me with this. Bill Bowman, Scott Roche (hi Scott!), and Paulette Jaxton are all assisting with the editing process at various points, and that cuts down on the amount that I have to do substantially. So now, instead of spending five or six nights working on an episode, I’m only spending one or two.
HJ: You definitely succeeded.
CL: Thank you!
As for the first part of your question, the complications that have arisen: the first, of course, is a lack of time. I just got hired on for a new career as a science teacher at a charter school in California, so my life is in the middle of a huge transition. I have professional development courses that I have to take that are basically occupying all of my spare time between now and the end of August. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for podcasting, so I’m going on hiatus for the next month while I try to get my life back together in some semblance of order.
Other complications that I’ve faced include actors with vast discrepancies in sound quality; actors who missed lines or mispronounced words that I had mistakenly thought were obvious; and scheduling difficulties with my local actors, some of whom live almost an hour away from my “studio.”
On the whole, though, the process has gone remarkably well. I haven’t had anyone flake out on me, and when I’ve needed people to fix lines, they’ve always come through. So I’d have to say that it has been a resounding success, in spite of occasional headaches.
HJ: How many more chapters do you have before Making the Cut ends, and what will your next project be?
CL: We’re at just about the halfway point for Making the Cut. My outline has 30 chapters and an epilogue, which may be stretched to 31 if the chapters get too long.
I have at least one short story that I plan to run sometime in the next year: The Cuckoo, which I performed at Balticon 42. That’s currently waiting for my voice actors to get back to me with their recordings, so it will probably run sometime in late fall.
The next big story after Making the Cut is a Metamor City mystery called Things Unseen. This story takes us back to the present day of Metamor City, in the fall of 1999 CR, and it focuses on Kathryn Kitaen and David Silverleaf, the Magic Affairs investigators whom we met in Episodes 1 and 3 of the show. Kate and David have to investigate the death of a man who was apparently consumed by magic from the inside out. Along the way, their investigation is complicated by a high-ranking nobleman, who uses his influence to divert them into finding his missing daughter, a Paris Hilton-style socialite. Kate and David discover links between the missing woman and the dead man, which may point to a conspiracy that branches across some of Metamor’s most powerful ruling families. And things don’t get any easier when Malcolm ard’Valos, the kingpin of Metamor’s underworld, starts showing an interest in the mysterious power that apparently killed the man.
HJ: You’ve got a number of short stories and a big novel here. What are your hopes as far as print is concerned? Are you going to try and get this put out through a traditional publisher? I’m a big paper book nerd.
CL: I haven’t ruled it out, but it isn’t a priority at this point. After a little less than a year, I have about a thousand regular subscribers to my podcast, and maybe another 500 to 700 beyond that who download the episodes at the website. I’d have to get my subscriber numbers up to at least 5000 before I’d seriously start pushing Metamor City for publication.
There’s also the question of packaging. Making the Cut is large enough to be almost two novels, and it’s certainly too big to put in anthology with anything else—but I don’t really have enough other stories yet to make a good-sized collection out of those, either. I’m going to try to write more short stories next year to help flesh that out, but it depends on which ideas come to me and when. It also depends on how large they turn out to be when I’m done with them; I originally thought Making the Cut was just going to be a novella!
HJ: The part of the setting that really jumps out at me is the spiritual side. Developing a pantheon for a fantasy world is something I’m no stranger to, given my experience as a gamer. Yours has some interesting analogs to Christianity as well as a more “traditional” fantasy group of deities. Tell me about what’s behind that.
CL: The unusual religious milieu of the world of Metamor came about more or less by accident. When the Metamor Keep setting first opened up, there was a huge flurry of activity. More than a dozen writers started contributing stories to the setting, and Metamor’s creator, Copernicus, was a very easy-going fellow who didn’t want anyone to feel excluded. As a result, there wasn’t much in the way of top-down control, and several of the more prolific or visionary authors started expanding the story universe in all different directions. The end result was that, at about the same time, two different religious systems were added in by two different authors: Charles Matthias created a character who was Catholic, and I created a priestess of the Lightbringer Order and the pantheon of gods that she worshiped. Neither of us was paying much attention to what the other one was doing at first, and by the time people realized that we had real-world religion butting up against fantasy religion, a number of other writers were getting upset.
In order to resolve the situation, the de-facto leaders of the MK community got together and worked out a compromise: Catholicism would stay in, but the names associated with the church would be changed. Both the pantheon of the Lightbringers and Eli, the god of the Ecclesia, would be “real,” capable of responding to their worshipers, but Eli would be both more remote and more powerful. A race of demonic beings was introduced—the Fallen—whom the Lightbringers had no power to stop, but whom Eli’s priests could combat. That helped to balance out the fact that the Lightbringers were basically an order of sword-wielding, fire-calling daedra-slayers; Eli’s “magic” was more subtle, which suited the flavor of the religion well.
Ironically, what could have been a disaster turned out to bring a lot of added richness to the setting. It let us portray an ongoing, multi-layered religious conflict—not just between the polytheists and the monotheists, but between orthodox and renegade factions within each of those camps. And then there were the forces of actual capital-E evil, which sought to destroy both the Ecclesia and the Lightbringers by corrupting them from within.
For Metamor City, I decided to mix things up even more. In Metamor Keep, Charles and I and most of the other authors proceeded with the general assumption that Eli was “the” God, while the Lightbringers’ pantheon was just a collection of very powerful extraterrestrial entities who “played god,” drawing energy from the worship of mortals. That worked well enough for a medieval fantasy setting, but when I brought Metamor into the future I decided that I wanted things to be more ambiguous. The people of Metamor don’t actually know whether Eli is “the” God, or just a very, very powerful being of the same sort as the fallen gods of the Pantheon. And I had to figure that, with all of the cultural cross-pollination with distant parts of the world, and with the fallen gods themselves walking the earth, people would come up with new religious ideas to describe the universe.
That led to the idea of the Universalists, who are a major religious faction (or, rather, a collection of religious factions) in Metamor City. These are people who basically believe that the observable universe was created out of the distributed essence of an unknown Creator-god, who distributed his/her/its pieces across the cosmos and allowed them to evolve into a billion trillion different fragments so that he/she/it could experience many different ways of existing. The Universalists believe that Eli, the Elvish God, the fallen gods of the Pantheon, the animistic spirits of the lutin faith, and all of the various kinds of mortals each carry a piece of the original Divine Essence inside themselves. The key to enlightenment is to figure out what aspect of the Creator your soul embodies, and try to be as true to that essence as possible.
It’s an idea that blends together various Eastern religions with the old western polytheism, and adds in a dash of quantum theory for good measure. And it muddies the waters enough that the reader isn’t quite sure what the truth is—which is really the point, because I don’t want Metamor City to seem like it’s the vehicle for one particular religious philosophy. The Universalists allow me to explore ideas and philosophies that I wouldn’t get to tackle if I were writing in, say, an overtly theistic setting with blatantly Christian overtones.
HJ: That makes sense.
CL: It’s also been a lot of fun to come up with the different varieties of Universalists, who can have very different emphases. One branch, the Hedonists, believes that they are the embodiment of the Creator’s pleasure principle—so you basically have a whole church that’s full of people dedicated to enjoying themselves as fully as possible. Perhaps not surprisingly, the church’s priesthood is run by incubi and succubae. On the other end of the spectrum, you have very rigid ascetics who believe that they will come to know the divine through meditation on, say, higher mathematics.
HJ: That brings us to the sex question. There’s a fair amount of what a lot of Christians would consider controversial sexuality woven throughout Metamor. There are the Androgynes, who can change their gender at will, the polyamorous Psi’s, and you have a number of key characters who are bisexual or homosexual. It’s all very well written, but I’m curious as to why it plays such a large role. I’d also like to know what you have to say to folks that would criticize it.
CL: When I started Metamor City, it was partly as a way to explore themes that I hadn’t been allowed to explore in Metamor Keep, which was restricted to PG and PG-13 content by the moderators of the setting. I was looking for ways to stretch as an author, and I decided that when I started writing in Metamor City I wouldn’t hold the spin-off to those same content restrictions.
The adult-themed content of the stories came in naturally and subconsciously as I was writing about those characters. I didn’t go after sex for the sake of sex, but if it made sense for the characters, I explored it—and if it didn’t make sense, I didn’t. One example of that is in “The Muse,” where a college student ends up falling into an unlikely alliance with a street-level runner who happens to be half succubus. The runner, Callie, views sex as simple recreation, but the student, Will, comes from a more conservative background and takes it seriously. He turns her down when she offers to have sex with him, because having a casual hook-up isn’t in his nature. I had one reader compliment me after that story for taking things in such an unexpected direction, but from my perspective, I couldn’t see the character doing anything differently.
As for the alternative sexualities that are presented in Metamor City, that’s something that grew naturally out of the underlying principles of setting. The androgynes were a part of the original Metamor Keep world, though they were stuck in whatever form they had changed into; once they got more control over the Curse, so that they could return to their original genders at least temporarily, it occurred to me that what we basically had here was the creation of a bone fide third gender, which would have its own culture and its own unique way of interacting with the world. On top of that, you have the prevalence of transformation magic in general in Metamor, which can allow anyone to change their body shape for at least a short period of time.
All of these factors would naturally lead to a blurring of the lines of gender identity. If 20% of your population can change sex at will, and the other 80% can do it on a temporary basis by visiting the corner magic shop, how on earth do you draw lines for gender roles? How can you draw lines for sexual orientation? What does sexual orientation even mean in such a world? It occurred to me that the people of Metamor City would perforce have to become very tolerant of a wide variety of lifestyles—which is something that they’re prone to anyway, given the history of the place. People who’ve been outcasts because they were changed by magic are likely to be more accepting of others who have likewise experienced such changes.
Thus, in Metamor City you have straight people, gay people, and bisexual people; and you have monogamous people and polyamorous people—though the latter is mostly limited to the Psi Collective, because their telepathic bonds allow them to eliminate self-centeredness in a way that isn’t really possible for mundane humans. And I don’t make moral judgments on any of it, unless they’re hurting people or being selfish in whatever it is that they’re doing.
I know that a lot of Christians want to establish very rigid lines for what are acceptable standards for sexuality and what aren’t. There are all these petitions to define marriage, or to restrict adoption by gay couples, or to otherwise put an official stamp of disapproval on anything that we might interpret the Bible as speaking out against. But the church isn’t the arbiter of what is acceptable or permissible for consenting adults to do in their own private lives—not in the real world, and certainly not in speculative fiction. SF has been traditionally been one of the bastions where it is safest to explore questions of alternative sexuality or alternative social structures, because it’s removed enough from our present-day reality that people aren’t as threatened by it. That’s how you can have a best-selling author like Robert Heinlein writing about line marriages and triads and tetrads, or where George R. R. Martin can depict a world where the entire ruling lineage consisted of marriages between brother and sister. Nobody’s calling for book-burnings of Heinlein and Martin.
So no, I don’t think it’s inappropriate for me to be exploring those sorts of ideas and their ramifications in Metamor City. If people are uncomfortable with it—if they can’t bear to see an alternative lifestyle being presented, in all of its good and bad points, without the participants being painted as sinful and awful and wicked—then I think they should probably take a long, hard look at the message of Jesus. Because here’s a guy who hung out with all sorts of unsavory types, loved them unconditionally, and saw the beauty and uniqueness of each of them and cherished it. He might not have approved of everything that they did, but that didn’t stop him from empathizing with them and being a friend to them.
I don’t think most people realize the degree to which we program our own behavior with the entertainment that we ingest. If you only expose yourself to a given stimulus or idea in a context that is uniformly negative, that’s going to color your response when you encounter that stimulus in the future. If Christians will only absorb media in which gay people are (A) nonexistent or (B) wicked sinners, then every time they encounter a gay person they’re going to instinctively respond with the same revulsion that they’ve trained into themselves through their entertainment. And once you’ve done that, how are you ever going to love this person the way Christ commands you to love them? All you’re going to be able to see is the caricature that you’ve painted for yourself. So I think it’s important, in our entertainment, to present people of all different lifestyles as people, fully rounded, with all of their good and bad points. Even if you believe that homosexuality is always wrong, unconditionally, unequivocally—and I must stress that I’m in no way convinced of that—even if you do believe that, you should still not shy away from absorbing media that present these people as real, textured human beings. Because Christ commanded you to love these people, and that’s not a rule you can take a pass on.
HJ: Thanks Chris for your time!
Chris’s work can be found at MetamorCity.com.
