Queen Mab's Palace is Complete

And man, once fleeting o'er the transient scene / Swift as an unremembered vision, stands

I wrote a novel by mistake. I am sorry.

How Queen Mab Started

Back in 2020 I conceived the idea of an adventure that "depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure."

The original Queen Mab was meant to be a crazy gimmick book where you could read it one way, then turn the book upside down and read it another way, engaging with two adventures;

When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then it’s a science fiction adventure.

"BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives

"the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.

The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.

In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it

will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts."

This was always meant to be, and has remained, a fully-illustrated book.

Right from the beginning, August was the intended artist and I have driven her slowly insane with my relentless over-writing and never finishing anything. I am sorry!

There is not much art in this initial post as we are still working out how much of our load to blow in promotion and how much to save for the book, but expect to see more as we get closer to the Kickstarter.

Inspiration

A key inspiration was Vincent Wards 'The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey' in which Monks from the Cumbrian Middle-Ages, fearing the advancing Black Death, tunnel through time and arrive in a modern city (1980s Aukland).

This is a film I haven’t seen in decades, and I think I only saw it once, but it left an impression, the key to which was the deep visionary strangeness with which its characters encounter modernity. The known made unknown, the familiar viewed through unfamiliar eyes, a great making-strange

Another, less-direct and later inspiration was Shellys 'Queen Mab', a radical pure-freedom anti-monarchist poem full of startling images.

"The yet more wretched palaces

Contrasted with those ancient fanes,

Now crumbling to oblivion;

The long and lonely collonades,

Through which the ghost of Freedom stalks,"

Another was a translated copy of the 'Orphic Hymns'. There are many more! There is a lot of stuff in the book.

How It Changed Over Time

Two things happened as we went on;

First, I kept writing more and more and more and more, adding monsters, characters, concepts, places and so on,  breaking them all down to be somewhat workable and part of the same reality

the other is that, as the number of things in Queen Mab grew, the complexity of the arrangement became questionable.

First, we realised that we just couldn't handle the whole two-books-in-one thing.

Then we realised we couldn't handle two actual books.

Ok, so one book only, with one adventure, but we incorporate the pseudo-medieval viewpoint of the adventurer into the text, so that, everything is described as if it is being seen from a medieval/early-modern viewpoint. The reader, and presumably the players, know they are looking at something technological and science-fictional, but the viewpoint characters don't, so that the duality exists in the mind of the user rather than literally on the page.

Then that went on for a while, (with me constantly writing more and more and more), until about June 2023

With so many other books, (I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus, Gackling Moon and Speak, False Machine were all put together and published in the period of writing Queen Mab), and projects stumbling down the track, I had just kept writing and writing and writing.

But once I got a good look at everything I had written - it was just too much. Too many places, process, creatures, characters, courts, crypts, Queens, Knights,  Ladies, Fairies, just too much of everything. It was crazy. There was no way I could turn this into a workable game-book. It would be unplayable to an insane degree, or it would take another four years to make it playable.

So instead I took one year, and turned it into a novel! Problem solved.

The Final Version

I did not think it would take me a year to completely re-write and re-arrange Queen Mab. I did think, for each of the 14 months it took, that it would only ever take "a few more weeks", but it took much longer than that.

What does it mean to turn a game into a story? They are not the same thing at all, though they seem to share organs and limbs, these things are differently arranged, so that if you try to turn one into another, without thinking about why and how they work, it will not go well.

So as time went by in the writing of 'Queen Mab', now retitles 'Queen Mab’s Palace', partly to make it a nice classic three-word False Machine name, and partly because there are a LOT of things in our world called 'Queen Mab' and I wanted this one to be searchable.

At first, it was just a travelogue, a report from the Palace of Queen Mab, but as more and more was written, and more and more actual events took place and more of a character came into play in the nameless, and at-first, genderless, Protagonist, and then secondary characters joined the journey, and then secondary and tertiary narrators, it turned into... well who knows what? A historical science-fiction travelogue picaresque adventure tragedy?

I finally finished Draft One around the middle of August and here we are!

Draft one is about 9700 words, (including appendices), and we are budgeting for 400 pages, though hope to have it in well below that.

It might be a work of genius, or at least of peak deluded narcissism. Which is appropriate considering the subject.

This is how the book starts;

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Queen Mabs Palace

 - how I came to the seat of the Queen of Air and Darkness and what I learned there of her Courts, Ladies and Thanes, and her lesser Servants and Rude Rabble that do occupy thereabouts, from one who has journeyed to that Realm overlong and returned, but not unchanged, may God have mercy on my soul.

The Missing Children and the Frozen Knight

Let me live in memory for a while, and write with glass within my glass, to the spirit which resides there. May-be in writing and remembering in line, as pearls on string, one upon another, I may escape my dolour, and know again what once it meant to be astounded or surprised. For it was surprising, and most strange.

It came about in the grieving of the year when gold first touched the green that the night, black as sleep, chill as stone, made strange music and some heard voices of beasts who spoke as men.

We barred our doors and hid, trusting to prayer and cold iron. With the sun came silence, and then the wailing of women, my sister among them. All the children fit to work were gone, and their parents mazed and made curious numb, like empty pots. And these were Jory my Sisters Son, the Blacksmiths Child, Ceyln the old Maids helper, the Dog Boy, Haswa, and Dgibert the Fat Squires boy.

Some said was bandits, others fae, but while the sun still halved on the skys rim, a dog found scent and the bravest set forth and doing so, made for me to come, for I could both read and write and had been the teacher of those lost, and also my Sister was grieved and made me go.

We had gone not far but we found a Knight wounded by the path, strangely armoured, fit to die and rimed with frost.

The Knight made gesture for one to come forth and hear him and I was made to by the rest for I might give him Grace, though I am no Priest and did not wish to.

The Knight spoke twice-ways. He whispered words I could not understand, but as I spoke to him and gave him succour, soon came another voice, this like cold iron, but an echo of the first, yet I knew the tongue.

He said; “You seek those taken, as once I so sought.”

I said aye this was so and how came he here.

He said; “They are with Queen Mab. Knowing this, would you still go?”

This name I knew. The Queen of Air and Darkness, Empress of the Eld, timeless and undying whom the wise have called a myth. I asked how Queen Mab might be found and the Knight said; “There is a Door. It is a cut in the air. You do not have long.

Then he said; “Do not go, but if you do, know this; First; never promise, never disagree. Second; speak well and listen more. Third; eat not fairy food or you shall never leave.”

Then he grieved and said;

“Your life is death to me, and mine to you. I do not know where I am. My seals are broken and the stars unknown. I die lost. But I am under a sun and above a land. And I am myself. So ends my story. Put me under stone, far from water, where none go.”

Then he died. I said words from the Book. Then, though I meant first to tell the others with me of what the frozen Knight had said, a madness came upon me and, thinking but to test its truth,

I stepped forth into a haze, like mist, cut like a slice, which hovered close.

This is how I came into the Palace of Queen Mab, and often I wished I had not, for I returned much changed; marked with strange service and cursed with queer passions and wild hungers, that I think none could fulfil, and I am placed here in this cell, and mocked and much wondered at I do not doubt.

But still my mind and my soul are my own, which not all I have seen can say, and I have ventured far, more far than men might dream of. So I make this book within my glass, where none may look upon it less I allow it, for only I have its print and key. And I make it as a warning and confession, so those who read its words will know that I have seen and spoken true, and like that frozen Knight I say; do not go, but I fear some shall, through some Dream or Autumn door, and Mab alone knows if you have or will for in that place there is no other God but Her, Christ have mercy on me.”

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What Next?

In the words of Joesky; an adventure is on, as the fearful scribe ventures into what they see as the Fairy Palace of Queen Mab, crawling through its Crypt, visiting its Courts, speaking with (gently) its Knights and Ladies, and trying as best he can to get back the missing children and go home.

Well, from the opening text, you know they make it home, but you don’t know how, or what they see, how they are changed and who else makes it back with them.

This is Queen Mabs Palace, an adventure through a decaying, dying space-ship inhabited by crazed transhumanist radicals, through the eyes of a Medieval Scribe.

The main text is done. August is still working away on images. We are getting quotes in and preparing for a Kickstarter which should hopefully start around (or maybe before), Autumn, which seems appropriate for the Queen of Air and Darkness.

Gird your loins and batten down your marketing hatches, expect to here me going on about this for a while!

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*not really but whatever what we think of as Medieval is usually early-modern and even writing from a complete early-modern perspective was a challenge so in effect the main point of view is pseudo-early modern masquerading as pseudo-medieval.