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Beyond the Waters of the World: first contact story from the viewpoint of the native culture.

“Beyond the Waters of the World” is a continuation of my award-winning SF novella, “Looking Through Lace.”

The original inspiration for LTL was when I was reading a story in English in which little snippets of German were being thrown in, for local color, I presume — and constantly being used incorrectly. My anger at the attitude of some language imperialists who tend to think foreign languages equate one to one with their own native language was what made me want to write a story where the plot revolved around linguistic misunderstandings.

English is my native language, but I work as a translator, and I know how very hard it is to get things right in a foreign language, even after decades learning it. I wanted to make that difficulty of ever truly mastering a foreign language an integral part of my story.

For the world of Looking Through Lace and Beyond the Waters of the World, I spent months before I even started the first story creating the languages. That was fascinating!

The premise of LTL is that the women of the Mejan culture on the planet Kailazh speak a secret language that the men don’t understand. The languages had to be related to each other, but at the same time different enough for the premise to work.

I was playing with vowel shifts and consonant changes and various rules of linguistic change and applying those to my conlangs to create believable linguistic differences between the languages. It was great fun — for me at least. 🙂

As I mentioned already, I’m a translator, specifically technical translation. (Literary translation doesn’t pay enough.) The vast majority of the translation jobs I do are in IT. Both of those things have fed into my fiction, but of course not all the time.

The best thing about my work is that I’m a freelancer. As long as finances allow, I can limit the amount of translation jobs I take on in order to leave time for writing.

Right now, I’m working on a fantasy novel with literary references, Chameleon in a Mirror.

I have a PH.D. in English literature, and one of the authors I treated in my dissertation was the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn. She was an amazing figure and has long fascinated me. So I decided to send an alter ego to go visit Aphra in the seventeenth century and see what would happen. It’s quite a romp, and a lot of fun to write.

If you like Sheri Tepper, you’ll probably like Looking Through Lace and Beyond the Waters of the World.

If you like George R.R. Martin, you’ll probably like my gritty fantasy novels, Yseult and Shadow of Stone.