Character Spotlight - Jinga

Quick Facts	...
Place of Origin	Nixir City, Gonsai Wall, Ul Sadh
Race	Human
Ethnicity	Nixian
Magic Type	N/A
Mentor Spirit/God	God of Smiths, Hou Rok
First Appearance [Book/Chapter]	Tears for the Moon God / Baduhrak's Diplomacy

Diverse Settings in Fantasy

For context, I enjoy my medieval fantasy as much as the next person, but I've often found myself dejected with the Pseudo-European landscapes and cultures presented in many of these works. Over the last few years, I've been delighted to see far more worldbuilding informed by other regions and time periods in the genre. R. F. Kuang's Poppy War Trilogy hooked me with its World War Era setting and focus on colonialism in China, and was made richer for the author's background as a Chinese historian. While I hated every character in Black Leopard, Red Wolf, I nonetheless loved the world it was set in, with all of its Afrocentric flavors and the emphasis on African culture as innovative, sophisticated and diverse. I have also, over the last weeks, been enjoying Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan for its exploration of a Chinese inspired pantheon and the character work that went into it. And in reading Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erickson, I have been endlessly fascinated by how big, and deep, eclectic and lived in his world feels without placing the focus on specifically European tropes, or limiting what technology is capable of in the works he writes in the world.

Building the Waxing World

When I set out to build the world the Luckborn Series is set in, it was coming on the back of having trunked a previous novel set in another world I had constructed. I had spent a considerable amount of time on the world building associated with that book, and I am currently refreshing the prose and fleshing out some plot details so that I can rerelease the series and then continue writing on Book 2, a decision I am not taking lightly.

With Luckborn and the Waxing World, I decided to go back to the drawing board and build something that was just as elaborate, but was not aimed at telling just one story, which meant producing something vast, deep and reflective of my sensibilities as a man who was quickly approaching thirty. The result was the Heart Realm, one side of which is the Waxing World, which abounds with gods and spirits, fantasy races...all of those things you'd expect from an epic world. But...I wanted to explore something a little different with this world and the stories set in it, so I decided to focus on the relationship between technology, innovation, the natural world, and conservation. The result is a world in which technology is shunned in some places, and embraced in others. In which technology is coveted by those who possess it, and to which access is restricted where cooperation is deemed unlikely or unnecessary by those who develop it.

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The result is a stratefied world in which the bastion of technological innovation is Baduhrak, a kingdom ruled by the God of Smiths, whose capital serves as his God House. a kind of locus of power. In order to continue developing new technologies, Baduhrak puts out a call to peoples from diverse backgrounds the world over in order that they might learn the trades necessary to become prominent engineers for their communities. Through this diplomacy, they ensure that their technology is disseminated to friendly others, and that they retain the resources they need in order to continue expanding and reaching toward greater heights.

Jinga the Engineer

Jinga is Nixian, and one such engineer. Trained in the God House of Smiths at Tao Baduhr, he specializes in the development of cadrewallers, a diverse suite of machines that facilitate easier farming and mining activities, and brings those technologies to the people of Sanguhr and Nixir. Jinga's role in the story is as a fated friend to one of the main characters, and a father to someone who may not quite be the son he always hoped for.

In developing him as a character, I was faced with a couple of challenges. First, that he was one of those who appeared in the original timeline and needed to be kept consistent with it even as his timeline deviated in new directions. Second, that through him, I need explore technologies that may appear almost magical to the people around him. And third, that I was presenting him as a man with a complicated past who believed he was being led by the nose into a situation he may not like, but nonetheless needed to explore out of a sense of moral obligation. These features helped craft Jinga into a well rounded and morally gray individual through whom much of the story of two characters who have little to do with each other at this stage in the plot could be explored. There is, in Jinga, the man and his memory, and those two entities are not the same. Nonetheless, I found myself enjoying writing him as a scrappy old man with a chip on his shoulder who cared deeply for those people he loved.

Jinga in the original timeline, is the estranged father of a katcyakin (a demigod child of the God of Luck) since recalled, and his story arc is divided as such. What you see of him reflects on two different people who share the same likeness and the same soul, but whose experiences have shaped them into entities who would not recognize each other. The Jinga who exists in the main timeline is a caring man with no children who values a balance between the technologies he brings to his people and the natural powers that allow them to survive in the harsh wasteland where they have made their home. The other man is a reflection of a bygone era, who lived to see the image of his son shattered and replaced by a monster, and who then made the difficult choice to keep his distance from him. These two images compete with each other to bring depth to a nuanced individual and allude to where his story is heading in Book 2 of the Luckborn Series and beyond, as he seeks to get Lisandra Almaine, an old woman who will do anything to protect her homeland, safely to her destination beyond his homeland in Nixir.