A test reader for my upcoming book Gods and Monsters suggested an idea that could be fun. We’ll see. Here it is, a bunch of my unreadable story notes edited and vomited out into a hopefully entertaining manner that can give you a better understanding of the story. Apologies, my editors haven’t gotten at this content so much of it may be unreadable and broken English. My grammar teachers will be very disappointed. Spoilers ahead or whatever. I’ll include an additional spoiler warning if that content is especially egregious or covers things beyond the first book. These writings are largely from my developmental notes, however if anything changed prior to the release of the book those changes have priority and final say in terms of canonicity unless I say otherwise.
The book was originally much more scholarly and encyclopedic in nature, but readers found it boring. The lore and ideas from that version became the basis of the world of the new story. Posts and writings like this are filled with parts of the old book that I was able to find. Some parts may be outdated or contradictory to later material.
On the one hand, a lot of this being left up in the air is the result of editing pushing the book to be more character focused rather than about the setting of Graia generally, which is a bit disappointing. On the other hand, I also read the like 10 rougher drafts for this book which were waaay too filled with lore dumps. Like, if you read the finished book and think it is too world-building heavy, just know that 90% of this side content your currently consuming was once also meant to be crammed into the novel. Thank test readers and editors that the damn thing isn’t as long and tedious as war and peace. As much as I complain about cut content and edits compromising my vision or whatever, the book is at the very least more readable because of them. Editors, they can be a pain, but we need them.
The concept is that in the Universe that the story takes place in, there is actually a book called “Gods and Monsters” that is closer to the more scholarly original text. That book is written in the far future of the main story by a scholar from the University of Athens named Ky Sahasrara (a character from a future book). The idea was that the book displayed the truth of the ancient world that Ky was so close, yet so far away from uncovering.
The books are a fiction, but I hope they have real world value.
About Graia
Graia is one of the few remaining civilizations that clung to life in an emptied cosmos after the apocalyptic struggle between the Titans and the gods. A briefly developing mankind that clawed its way out of stone age savagery into early advancement was nearly killed in its infancy after a series of catastrophes akin to the bronze age collapse.
The collapse of the old civilization was predicated on the sudden rise and then fall of a rebellious warrior caste of renegade gods known as the Titans who spread this first ever Empire from Graia to the rest of the Kosmos. The destruction of this regime during the 10-year long cosmic war was not without great sacrifice and now humanity has to rebuild. But what should be the character of the world that came after? How can people learn from their mistakes and march confidently into a new era? Is it already too late to salvage things with a clown like Zeus at the helm? Probably.
The best time to start fixing Graia was one hundred years ago, when the anti-Titan revolution’s victory was still fresh, and Zeus hadn’t used his wartime exploits to justify founding a new world in his image. Things definitely aren’t as bad as they were under Typhon, but the overall improvements have been underwhelming to say the least.
That being said, even if the best time to fix this has passed… the second-best time to start fixing Graia is now.
But what is Graia? Graia is a smaller part of a larger cosmos inhabited by early bronze age equivalent humans. I say larger cosmos because despite still being in a stage of civilizational infancy, humanity has somehow already found itself inhabiting multiple earth like planets. The bronze age savages have no clue as to their origins or how they were so unnatural dispersed across the Universe.
Human migration across the Universe is a mystery that nobody in the setting can explain. Did identical species of humans independently arise on those planets, or did they come from a single planet and spread out? Nobody knows. Well, I know but won’t say. No spoiler questions!
The distribution of humankind across space gave rise to regions of politically and economically aligned planets which are largely analogous to nations in our own world. Strangely, these alien humans also seem to be traveling down similar yet different versions of early human history from earth.
What is earth? They don’t know. The closest thing any of these people have heard to earth is a person named Terra. The continents of Africa, Asia, Europe and beyond are unknown to them, but the interstellar regions of Alkebulan, Asia and Europa are emerging regions of the kosmos.
Basically, this setting is a prehistoric alternate history of earth but in space. Sounds confusing and needlessly convoluted? Yes, it is. But as far as I know, nobody else has done it yet so I’m running with it. The idea is, hey you know the continents? Well blow them up to entire regions of the Universe. The planets within that region make up the individual major cities. The planets in clustered regions form countries.
Planet clusters resemble regions of earth ie. Graia is like Greece spread across different planets: it is a region in space where the planets of Athens, Sparta and Thebes are all located. Each planet is located relative to each other in ways that parallel real world city placements. For example, Thebes is closer to Athens than either planet is to Sparta. The planets of Crete, Samos and Naxos all exist within the Aegean galaxy between Graia and its neighbouring region of Anatolia.
These real-world placements are largely so that you the viewers/ readers can easily keep track of locations and more importantly so that I the writer don’t pull my hair out keeping relative locations consistent. Of course, the map being a 3D stellar one instead of a 2D ocean one is a bit of a headache but leave that for me to worry about.
Graia is a collection of culturally and ideologically aligned worlds that are a blown-up recreation of ancient Greece in space. All countries are referred to by either their endonyms or ancient internal names rather than by modern ones. For example, Greece is Graia (the name the Romans called them), India is Bharat, and the Hittites are the Nesili.
The cosmos of this setting is very similar to our own: it is inhabited by humans with very similar races, cultures and myths to our own world. But it is an alternate history and a fantasy book so there are some differences.
There are some fun deviations from this rule such as Rome being called Reme, because in this setting it will be Remus that kills his brother Romulus and found the city, but such cases are the exception to the rule. There are other such alternate history deviations that will come to this cosmos, but those are yet to happen. For now, we lay our scene in ancient Graia during the time period analogous to the age of Greek myth.
The People of Graia
The people of the Kosmos are bipedal, tailless great apes with notable intelligence, at least for an animal. They are genetically based on “homo sapiens sapiens” aka modern-day humans. While the majority of populations and peoples are comparable to those of modern-day peoples on the earth and live in similar climates and habitats, there are some notable fantasy features these humans have.
Humans in this setting that are basically identical to their real-world counterparts are called mortals: unremarkable and plentiful. They make up an overwhelming majority of the total population of sapient beings. The only major differences would be that due to less nutrition and advancement, the average height of people is that of the early bronze age. As a result of less protein consumption that early agriculture provided, height has been declining slightly (from an average of 6 feet for men and 5 feet 7 inches for women during the stone age) down to the bronze age averages (5 feet 5 inches for men and 5 feet 1 inch for women).
The people of Graia are culturally descended from a group known as the Protoculture, a fantasy version of the real-world Indo-Europeans. Except rather than the Indo-Europeans moving across part of a single planet, the Protoculture spread across the stars.
But how is this possible? How could a civilization that barely invented fire also achieve interstellar travel? There are no stone age rocket ships for them to use but remember that this is a fantasy setting. Where science fails, magic more than makes up for it.
Many of the incredible powers described in mythology exist as fact and in fact the gods of Greek myths would blush at the feats of these mighty Graiac gods. Their powers have been appropriately increased proportionally to the increase in size from Greece to Graia. In Greece, Zeus can make thunderstorms and move like lightning. Cute. In Graia, Zeus can fly between star systems at speeds that make lightning blush.
Very simply, in supernatural settings, gods from earth myths don’t cut it. The beings worshipped in Graia are supercharged to be beings capable of inspiring the same awe in modern audiences that Greek gods would have inspired in ancient ones. The world of today is bigger and better understood than in ancient times. To illicit the same effect it is go big or go home.
Originally, all ancient mythologies were real within the fantasy world and coexisted, each ruling over their region of the cosmos. Norse gods governed the Norse planets, Celtic gods governed the Celtic ones and Graiac gods governed Graia as daughter civilizations of the Protoculture differentiated and grew distant from each other.
This “all myths being real” status Graia has comes with some perks from the supernatural, but Graia’s comparable advancements over Greece come with advanced problems. The anachronisms aren’t all fun and games. Some of the future’s most horrific things have come to plague Graia centuries before expected.
As mentioned before, the setting is populated by humans. The earth like planets all have earth like biomes and species of flora and fauna. It may seem odd, but all these “alien worlds” are rather familiar. No non-earth life has been found anywhere in this cosmos. Humans are the only sentient life forms in this setting.
The setting is populated by humans which can be subdivided into mortals and immortals. Mortals are your garden variety, unremarkable earth humans. Immortals are those humans that are born with supernatural gifts akin to the gods of myth. Immortals have eternal youth, superhuman power and can recover from almost any wound so long as it is not inflicted by sacred Adamant (obviously they thus make their divine weapons out of Adamant to fight each other).
The gods are those immortals who have the greatest supernatural powers and thus are worshipped by mortals (not all immortals are gods, but all gods are immortals). Where did these gods come from? I dunno. They kind of showed up one day. No joke, the way the first generations of gods tell it, one day early stone age humans just found them in the wilderness and took them in.
This first generation of gods does not know where they come from but to be fair neither do the mortals that found them. Unsurprisingly, undying super warriors quickly gained prominence in these proto communities and with a monopoly on interplanetary travel quickly gained authority in them as a ruling class.
Their exploits were celebrated in song and ritual as they went from being human to something more… they became divine in the eyes of their former peers. In Graia, those first gods and descendants still rule to this day.
Even beyond the regular gods there are 7 strange super-gods of sorts. Those 7 gods, called Solaris are the only gods that use their Roman names to set them apart. While mortal humans still refer to them by their local mythic names: Hermes, Aphrodite, Hera, Ares, Zeus, Poseidon and Athena, among the gods they alone use the strange foreign titles: Mercury, Venus, Terra, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. All other Graiac use their Greek names like normal.
The Solaris family is so mysterious not because they don’t know their origin like other Immortals, rather they are mysterious because they seem to know too much. Definitely ones to keep an eye on. A quick disclaimer. If I ever say that “nobody understands/ knows” or “nobody has ever”, it is possible if not probable that Terra is an exception (and maybe a few others like her Solaris siblings). Just keep this so called “Terra exception” in mind going forward.
The immortals control the mortals, the gods control the immortals and… the Solaris control the gods. Despite post-Titan Graiac philosophy’s claims of equality and fairness, Graia still seems to have some intense hierarchy left over just beneath the surface. Naturally, this may create some conflict.
Setting Goal
I know this setting sounds incredibly sci fi and that’s because it is. The setting was first created for a science fiction story I was writing, but as I worked backwards to create the setting, I realized that the ancient version of that world had stories to tell as well. So, to buy myself time to polish up that final sci fi story, I will go back to the beginning and tell stories from its past.
The goal is to start from prehistory and advance the story of this setting until the intergalactic setting makes sense for all the spaceships and other sci fi fanciness makes sense. It’s a big setting I want the story to grow into over time.
I like making bleak settings because they can serve as critiques of modern problems or cautionary tales. By looking at the worst things of humanities past, we can hopefully remember why we advanced past them in the first place.
Most of my settings are born out of my fears and worst nightmares. This setting is my way of making them everyone else’s problem.
This setting is the peculiar world of Graia that serves as the backdrop for my book “Gods and Monsters”. That’s right! It’s shilling time! “Gods and Monsters” is a fantasy novel based on Greek mythology but interpreted like you’ve never seen it before! Buy my book! Buy my book!
