When I see Winterkill described as a ‘dystopian’ novel, it gives me pause. It’s not that the description is completely inaccurate. Certainly the first book has dystopic elements: a closed society governed by strict rules and ritual, a not-quite-trustworthy leadership, a girl who breaks the rules.
It gives me pause because ‘dystopian’ is not a descriptor I’ve ever used, not when writing the book and not when it was finished (really finished—you know, the eighth time), and I think that’s because I know how the world of Winterkill was born. You see, I didn’t create it by imagining current political ideals and social values carried to an extreme; I re-imagined a part of history that has already formed the political and social landscape of the place I call home.
I grew up, and live in, the west of Canada. And I most often refer to the Winterkill series as alternate history. It is fantasy, but the world is inspired by the settlement of the North American west.
I was here today. So basically, in WINTERKILL-land.
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Alternate histories present a version of a “past that might-have-been”. They are incited by a what if? question about real history, and the answer to that question forms the framework for the fantasy world. When creating the world of Winterkill, I asked myself the following: what if the settlement of the west had been a disaster for the settlers (instead of the people and animals that were already here)? What would that look like? In what circumstances would that occur?
If I told you exactly how I answered that, I’d spoil the first book and give up critical secrets in books two and three. But I can say that a part of my world-building process was incorporating this spectacular natural landscape and sometimes punishing climate, and drawing upon settlement narratives (I call them narratives as opposed to historical events, more on that below), to craft a place that is familiar, yet distinctly other.
The physical landscape is the aspect that is most familiar—particularly to those who live, or have visited, here. It is the (pre-colonized/unspoiled) Canadian west, just east of what is now known as the Rocky Mountains. And it’s a landscape that entrances me. The series, in fact, could be considered a bit of a love letter to the wilderness here: vast expanses of prairie grasses, disorienting forests, “tear-stained” coulees, powerful rivers and mountains, rolling hills. I took my favourite topographies of Alberta—the badlands, the foothills, the mountains, and the parklands—and mashed them together, locating them in closer proximity to one another.
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And how about the remoteness, the isolation? The people in Winterkill live, seemingly, at the ends of the earth; the First People have left ghost-like traces only, and the remnants of the very first settlers are scant. This, too, was inspired by this landscape. Grand, historic displays of human activity seem absent in this part of the world: there are no stone and marble reminders of the great civilizations that were. Until only recently, any human construct, built from the surrounding wood and clay, would eventually crumble and return from whence it came. But, like the “left behinds” Emmeline discovers and covets, like the Lost People whose absence she feels “like a presence”, the natural land here hums with the retained memory of millennia of human activity. Riverbeds and rock walls reveal traces of animals and people living and thriving on the land. There is a rich history in the trees and wind, if only we know to listen, and care to learn.
The climate, too, is real. To some readers, winter may seem like an impossibly harsh adversary, but even today it remains a serious threat to survival in this part of the world. In fact, without my fossil-fuel-enabled luxuries, I suspect I’d be long dead from scurvy or hypothermia or *shudder* hard work.
Which brings me to the less-familiar part of the Winterkill world: those compromised settlers who are eking out their existence, barely scraping by. That’s the fantasy element, right? Narratives about the settlement of the west are rife with tales of perseverance and resourcefulness. Settlers “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps” and, because they had a Can-Do Attitude, they tamed the land!
Didn’t they?
Hmm. Well. Certainly early settlers possessed a resiliency that I, personally, would be hard-pressed to exhibit (see above re: scurvy and hard work). Clearing the land by hand, surviving the harsh climate, keeping sane in extreme isolation—all of these things are impressive. But is resiliency the whole picture? What if the settlers had encountered no help from the indigenous people already here? What if the land hadn’t been annexed by the government and given to them for virtually nothing? What if they had to be afraid of losing everything they held dear?
The people in my world have banded together out of necessity and they cling to their own customs and languages, living in tenuous tolerance of one another. Similar to the way we settlers tell stories about our arrival here, the people in the Winterkill world have adopted their own truths. They have forgotten the exact circumstances of their history and created a collective identity based on their struggle to survive. Their cultural narrative has developed out of fear and as a result, their rules are strict and punishment is harsh. Certainly, some of their fear is warranted: there’s a monster in the outlying woods that wiped out most of the first generation, after all! But in this world, the line between survival instinct and baseless fear can be blurry.
And maybe this is where it smacks most definitely of dystopia. People making decisions out of fear, being complicit in their own, contained reality… yes, that’s definitely the stuff of disaster fantasy. Certainly no leader TODAY would consider building a wall and fortifying against a mysterious threat… *cough*
Fortunately, the world shifts drastically for Emmeline when her desire for something more outweighs her obedience, and her fear. And that greater world, while still wild and thrillingly dangerous, presents the potential for a new way forward—one that allows hope to carve the path.
& one more, because creepy weathered wood.
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