GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY: inspirations and sources

!!!SPOILERS!!! follow for GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY. So if you haven’t finished GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY yet, STOP READING!

I thought it would be interesting to write about some of the ideas and influences that went into GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY.

I have to admit it took me a few years of thinking between GHOST NIGHT and GHOST ARMOR to figure out how to write more Caina books because Caina had become a political figure, and political figures typically do bad things for personal advancement and then lie about it. That is, in some ways, the essential definition of a political figure.

This is hard to write as a sympathetic protagonist.

Of course, I eventually realized the way around this. The success of a political figure cannot be judged by their personal morality or even their political morality, but by the results of their decisions. Therefore, I just needed to write a political figure who did somewhat sketchy things (like subverting the Kyracian Houses via buying up their debt) in the name of the greater good of the people (defending them from the impending Caphtori attack).

I’ve frequently said that if you want to write a good fantasy novel, you should try to stick to about like fifteen to twenty-five percent of the actual harshness of the past. Like, you don’t want to go Full Grimdark, but you don’t want your fantasy world to be indistinguishable from a typical twenty-first century parliamentary democracy.

So for GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, I went for about fifteen to twenty percent of the experience of ancient Greek democracy.

For the entire time that New Kyre and the Kyracians have been in the series (GHOST IN THE STORM was way the heck back in 2012, and the Kyracians were mentioned before that), they’ve always been very loosely based on the democracy of ancient Athens. In fact, the very name “Assembly of New Kyre” comes from ancient Athens, where the gathering of voting citizens was called the “ecclesia”, which translates into English as “Assembly.” Interestingly, this is also the origins of the word “ecclesiastical” in terms of a church, since one of the first words for a church was “eccelesia” in the sense of the “assembly of the believers in Christ.”

Athens wasn’t the first ancient Greek democracy, but it was one of the most successful. It was also one of the democracies that self-destructed in the most spectacularly dramatic fashion possible – the Athenians decided to convert the Delian League from an alliance of city-states into their own private empire, a demagogue convinced them to waste enormous resources on attacking Syracuse in Sicily, which ended disastrously, and the Athenians were eventually defeated by the more militaristic Spartans.

People have debated for centuries whether or not this means democracy is inferior to the Spartans’ harsher system, but that overlooks the key fact that a few decades later, Athens, Sparta, and all the rest of the Greek city-states were conquered by the Macedonians anyway. I suppose the actual lesson is that a city-state, regardless of government, is no match for a larger centralized state with better leaders and better military organization. In fact, historically city-states tend to eventually get subsumed into larger political entities. If they last for a long time, it tends to be because of geography (like in ancient Greece) or because of weak and/or remote central authority, like the medieval Italian city-states, which were ostensibly under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor but in practice tended to do whatever they wanted. (Places like modern Vatican City tend to be special exceptions.)

Caina’s criticism of the Assembly of New Kyre is that it’s not as egalitarian as it pretends and is easily swayed by both demagogues and bribes. The Athenian assembly of citizens had both those problems, but far worse. You needed to have a substantial level of property to be allowed to vote, and there were numerous examples of the votes swinging on bribes or last-minute orations. The Athenian assembly was easily swayed into making bad decisions, such as supporting the disastrous attack on Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War that was the start of Athens’ downfall.

In GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, Lady Eirenea Tritos is one of the nine chief magistrates of the city, but in Athenian democracy, women were not allowed to vote and they most definitely were not allowed to hold political office. The ancient Greeks in general did not have a very high opinion of women – one Greek orator said that men had wives to produce legitimate heirs, concubines to attend to the body’s “daily needs”, and prostitutes for pleasure.

Because of things like that, I thought a setting with a hundred percent of the harshness of ancient Greece would be off-putting to the reader, so I shot for between fifteen and twenty-five percent. New Kyre is definitely richer, better governed, and less elitist and chauvinistic than the ancient Greeks. That said, New Kyre isn’t an egalitarian place – nobles have vastly more rights and money than commoners, and both nobles and commoners own slaves, and only the poorest commoners own no slaves. Indeed, slavery is so common in New Kyre that the other nobles see Kylon’s decision that House Kardamnos will have no slaves as the sign of malevolent foreign influence.

Kalliope’s fear that she could be dispossessed and Kylon simply take her children is very real – if Kylon wanted, he could probably keep Kalliope from seeing Nikarion and Zoe ever again, though that would inevitably put him in conflict with Lysikas Agramemnos and Kalliope is charismatic enough to win powerful allies to her side. If Kylon did in fact refuse to allow Kalliope to see their children, he might well set off a civil war. But Kylon, who lost both his parents when he was young, doesn’t want to deprive his children of a loving mother.

Of course, the ancient Greeks never had to fight the Red Krakens and orcs. The Red Krakens, the Caphtori, are kind of written like snake-worshipping Vikings. In fact the Caphtori are inspired by the “Sea Peoples”, pirates that seemed to have contributed to the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Historians argue endlessly about the impact of the Sea Peoples or whether they existed at all, but if they did exist, they might well have been proto-Ancient Greeks. Since having one ancient Greek-esque group fighting another would be confusing, I made the Caphtori/Red Krakens more like Vikings. Which I suppose is a bit of historical anachronism, but GHOST ARMOR is a constructed world with elves, orcs, and sorcerers, so it’s not like I’m writing period-accurate historical fiction here.

So these are some of the influences that went into GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY. I don’t have any grand point here. Though I should mention that for a while I was a graduate student in medieval history, and I hated the experience so much I went into IT instead. That said, decades later, it has proven a useful source of plot ideas for fantasy novels, so it worked out in the end.

One final note – a reader suggested that Kalliope Agramemnos and Mardun Scorneus might hook up in later books, and I admit I laughed at that suggestion. Kalliope would react with dismay at the thought of marrying anyone other than an extremely high ranking Kyraican noble, and at the prospect of marrying Kalliope, Mardun would think about it, fake his death, and flee back to the Empire, preferring to take his chances with the Magisterium rather than Kalliope.

Anyway, thanks for reading GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY! I am grateful so many people have enjoyed the book.

-JM