GHOST IN THE TOMBS musings

Before we begin, this post has MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR GHOST IN THE TOMBS! I’m going to talk about some of the ideas and inspirations that went into the book.

So if you haven’t read the book yet, you should probably stop reading this post right now.

One thing that was interesting to me about writing GHOST IN THE TOMBS was that it was my 156th book, and in those 156 books, it was the first time I had ever done a shipwreck plot. Like, ever! In SILENT ORDER, I had some plots with derelict starships and one crashed starship, but that’s not at all the same. I expect that the experience of surviving a shipwreck of a medieval sailing vessel would be very, very different than the experience of crashing an interstellar starship.

But shipwrecks were a very common fact of life in the ancient and medieval world because ships were a vastly superior option over land travel, which seriously sucked in the ancient world. I believe archaeologists have found around 600 Greek and Roman shipwrecks at the bottom of the Mediterranean. St. Paul wrote in his letters that he had gotten shipwrecked three times, and it a possibility those are separate incidents than the one at the end of the book of Acts where he got shipwrecked on Malta. A medieval shipwreck caused a twenty year civil war in England when King Henry I’s son and heir drowned while crossing the English channel.

So I’m not sure why it took me 156 books to do a shipwreck plot, but I did one at last!

Speaking of shipwrecks, the Red Krakens/Caphtori are inspired by the Sea Peoples. Who were the Sea Peoples? It’s well-established that the Bronze Age civilization of the Levant and the Middle East underwent a massive systemic collapse around 1180 BC, and one of the suggested causes was the “Sea Peoples”, seagoing raiders who attacked the Mediterranean coasts. Pharaoh Ramses III had an inscription boasting how he had repulsed the Sea Peoples and saved Egypt from their invasion. Some scholars suggested that the Sea Peoples could be connected to the Philistines in the Bible, though frequently scholars argue that the Sea Peoples may not have existed and could have just been bands of roving pirates. I took the name “Caphtori” from one of the tribes connected with the Sea Peoples.

Regardless of whether or not the Sea Peoples existed, I took the concept of “vast horde of invading seafaring raiders” and used it for the Red Krakens. I sort of described them as Vikings because if the Sea Peoples existed, quite a few of them were likely very early Greeks, but Old Kyrace/New Kyre is already kind of sort of based off ancient Greece.

I did have one reader that was annoyed by the addition of the land of Sokoru. But while the Empire and its neighbors are a big place, the world is even bigger, and there are lots of places Caina hasn’t been or doesn’t know about at all. Sometimes they will impinge on her life. Like, I recently saw on social media someone who was astonished to learn that the Roman Empire and ancient India had official contact, and that a lot of Roman coins have been found in India. But that’s not surprising – Caesar Augustus even boasted in his inscription about receiving embassies from Indian kingdoms, and the Roman Empire exchanged embassies with the Han Dynasty of China, though due to the vast distance between the two empires (and, once again, the difficulty of land travel) only sporadic trade happened.  So I think it’s quite realistic that there are large civilizations in Caina’s world that she will only encounter very vaguely.

So those were some of the ideas that went into GHOST IN THE TOMBS.

-JM