Fantasy Stream

13 November 2025

There is another gap here, at least two weeks, but I don’t think it adversely affects the current reader’s understanding. At this point, I was working on preparing Book 2, the Staff of Shigmar, for publication, and thought an explanation for the use of stream of consciousness in Book 1 was in order.

3 October 2012

Some of my readers may be wondering why I chose to use the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique in an epic fantasy, and indeed, the first Klaybear chapter (Chapter 4 of Book 1), where I use it extensively, may be a great stumbling block for many would-be readers, who reach this chapter and give up, probably encountering this modernist device for the first time. An explanation seems to be in order so that my readers will understand that there is method behind this apparent narrative lapse. This device, added to the already steep learning curve (so many new terms & vocabulary), makes Chosen of the One a difficult first read, although worth it in the end, if the reader can get past these new things. E.M. Forester wrote of this very thing, stating that fantasy novels require “a greater investment” on the part of the reader, not just Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” but Tolkien’s “secondary belief” in the secondary world of the fantasy novel.

My first reason for using stream of consciousness is that this device is not used by fantasists generally, with one notable exception: Zelazny’s Amber series, in which he used a form of stream of consciousness for shadow walking. This use has the effect of conveying the feeling that the world around the character (Corwin in the first series, Merlin, his son, in the second) changes incrementally as the shadow walker adds and subtracts attributes from the landscape. In our first instance of this device, it is Corwin’s brother Random who effects the changes as they travel and we, like Corwin (who does not remember who he really is) are slowly introduced to shadow walking. This device becomes full stream of consciousness when Corwin makes his first “Hellride” as it is called, moving through shadow as far and as fast as he can, away from where he started, usually to avoid pursuit, but we learn that only horses who have experienced this shadow shifting before avoid a kind of madness that ensues because of the speed with which the landscape changes around them. However, these ‘hellrides’ are a true use of stream of consciousness, to great effect.

For myself, once I had made the decision early on that all the heroes & heroines would be damaged–physically & mentally–I needed some device that would show the immediate consequences of the damage, and one place where it would be expressed would be in the characters’ visions of their own future. I began with Thal’s vukeetu, deciding that his vision would be interrupted by flashes of other images, out of sequence and smashed together. The maghi’s vukeetu is by its nature only flashes of future events, easily misconstrued, and so the interruptions to Thal’s vision had to be more than simple interruptions, they needed to be more difficult to understand, so they were ‘crushed’ together. For Klaybear’s vision in the kailu sacred glade, I needed to go further, doubling the visions (meaning two powers were involved) then having them repeat, forward and backward, like waves on the beach, or the tide going in and out. Further, the images are smashed together, so that Klaybear, and the reader, are unsure where one image ends and the next begins, and in most cases, the descriptors used apply to both. Stream of consciousness became the perfect device to express this warping of his vision, and the competing powers, reducing what he sees down to its barest minimum: actions and actors, with a host of descriptors thrown in, seemingly at random, although in my case, there are no random elements, which separates my use of this device from its traditional use. In the case of a modernist like James Joyce, stream of consciousness represents the random nature of our thoughts, and how easily our minds slide from one idea to the next, almost without pattern (which is difficult to achieve). Because Klaybear’s vision is so corrupted, so impenetrable, with competing versions of events, so that he, and the readers, recognize something has gone terribly wrong, the foundations of his world being overturned in that moment.

For those readers who find this section too difficult to get through, my advice is this: skim it, for now, and come back to it as the story unfolds, and my readers will find that sense will begin to grow out of what seems, at this point, to be nonsensical; there is method within this narrative madness. . . .