Episode 244: Inspirations For GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY

The Pulp Writer Show

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7d ago 14:06

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In this week's episode, I take a look at some of the historical influences & inspirations that went into my new book GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 244 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 21st, 2025, and today we are looking at some of the historical influences that went into Ghost in the Assembly. Before we get into that, we will do Coupon of the Week and an update my current writing and audiobook projects. And then Question of the Week, which we did have time for this week.

This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Silent Order: Omnibus One at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SILENT25. I'll have the links and the coupon code in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April 7, 2025, so if you need a new book to read for these spring months, we have got you covered.

Now an update on my current writing projects. I am 44,000 words into Shield of Battle, the fifth book in the Shield War series. I'm hoping to have that out towards the end of April, if all goes well. A reminder that the Shield War series will be six books, so Shield the Battle will be the second to last one. I have also started on the sequel to Ghost in the Assembly, and I am 4,000 words into that, give or take. I had originally planned to call this book Ghost in the Assassins, but I thought that sounded too similar to Ghost in the Assembly. So the fifth book in the Ghost Armor series will be called Ghost in the Corruption. A reminder that Ghost Armor will be six books long and Ghost in the Corruption will be the fifth of six books, so the second to last book in that series as well.

In audio news, recording has started for Shield of Deception and Ghost in the Assembly. Shield of Deception will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills and Hollis McCarthy will excellently narrate Ghost in the Assembly. I expect both of them will probably be out sometime towards the end of May if all goes well, given how long it usually takes to record an audiobook.

In Stealth and Spells Online news, I am 68,000 words into the third and final book in this trilogy. Once Ghost Armor and Shield War are complete, then I will hopefully release the final book in the Stealth and Spells Online because I've been working on that as a tertiary project for quite a long time now. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects.

00:02:17 Question of the Week

Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is of course designed to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is your favorite style of fantasy setting (like a more high fantasy, one like Middle Earth or the Forgotten Realms, urban fantasy like the Dresden Files or Kate Daniels or more steampunk like Everon and so on)? No wrong answers, obviously.

And as you can imagine this inspired quite a few responses.

Perry says: Hyperborea! Lankhmar is up there as well. Setting where magic is rare, and usually dangerous or evil. The first edition of the Forgotten Realms (the grey box from the ‘80s) was great. Enough detail to let you use the setting, lots of room to make it your own. Then all the Forgotten Realms novels started to appear with the release of the second edition in the ‘90s and everybody in the world suddenly had powerful magic at their fingertips. Elminster, the Seven Sisters, Drizz’t, and others took the appeal right out of the setting for me.

Joachim says: I like the Spelljammer Campaign setting best. A lot of great modules. It seemed it was not overly successful. A shame. I had a campaign running in this setting with some people who liked it. In addition to the Spelljammer modules, you can easily transfer any normal module centered on a small town onto an asteroid.

Evan says: A huge Sanderson Cosmere fan here, especially Stormlight Archive. I like the magical progression tied in to character development, with a bit of mystery of how things work or an unknown that takes time to unwind or tease out.

Justin says: My problem here is separating the settings from the authors. Given that near impossibility, I would cast my vote for high fantasy with a bit of techno/steampunk mixed in. Example – Andre Norton’s Witch World.

Bonnie says: I seem to gravitate towards the swords and sorcery genre like Frostborn, but I also enjoyed the urban fantasy/Nadia and the other genres. I have to thank you for introducing me to all of these.

Michael says: Okay, Jonathan, that's the second time I've noticed you indicating a preference for sword and sorcery saga where a barbarian hero travels between corrupt city states and now I really, really want you to write this. And yeah, that's definitely my favorite type of setting too.

Simone says: Definitely urban fantasy. Even in your books, which offer an unusual variety of fantasy settings, I find I enjoy the Cloak series the best.

Roger says: Being an old fogey, I prefer high fantasy always. Can't seem to get my head around urban fantasy. It jars with me.

John says: While I enjoy all settings, I'm also a traditionalist and want a non-industrial, non punk setting without some sprawling empire, more like the aftermath of empire with multiple successor states.

Jonathan T. says: Personally, Star Wars has always been fantasy in a science fiction setting, and that remains a personal favorite. Other than that, I suppose I'm for high fantasy, although I'm not opposed to high fantasy slapstick either such as the Wuntvor trilogy. At some point I must try again to surmount the obstacle known as The Wheel of Time.

Catriona says: Epic and high fantasy are my favorite, enjoy Dark Fantasy, too. Urban fantasy is a hard pass for me.

Juana says: Sword and sorcery, parfait gentle knights, medieval societies, historical fiction like Doyle's The White Company and Sir Nigel. Wherever Nadia lives.

Justin says: Sword and sorcery, magical creatures/beasts. Definitely needs different environments like cities and wild mountains and forests. Not sure what genre that is, but that's what I like.

MG says: High fantasy.

Brandy says: I like ones with a clearly defined map. Sometimes it seems like the world wasn't thought about clearly, so it makes it hard to imagine and I find those stories the least successful. The ones I go back to repeatedly, the ones I read over and over or pimp out to other authors or groups are those I feel like they have a great structure and map, even if it's added on to later. So high, low, or middle, I just really just want the author to tell a great story and make it a great one.

Speaking as an author myself, I really dislike drawing maps, but fantasy readers really like maps, so that's why I have been doing more and more maps lately.

Pauline says: Urban fantasy is definitely my favorite.

Jeremy says: High Fantasy is my favorite. However, my favorite fantasy author is Terry Brooks. His series is Low Fantasy based on Earth. I found out years after reading the series LOL.

For myself, I think my favorite would be a pre-industrial setting with a lot of city-states and various dangerous magic, like you have a barbarian hero wandering from city-state to city-state with monster infested ruins and wilderness between them. When he gets to the city states, he can fight corrupt sorcerers, arrogant nobles, and thieves guilds, and then move on to a new adventure in the next book. So basically a sword and sorcery style setting. So that's it for Question of the Week.

00:06:30 Main Topic of the Week: Ghost in the Assembly: Inspirations and Sources

(Note: Spoilers for Ghost in the Assembly!)

This week and now onto our main topic, Ghost in the Assembly inspirations and sources that went into the book. I should mention that this episode contains mild spoilers for Ghost in the Assembly. So if you have not finished reading Ghost in the Assembly yet, stop listening and go finish reading Ghost in the Assembly.

So I thought it would be interesting to talk 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 stories because Caina had become a political figure by the end of Ghost Night 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 of course, is hard for a writer to use 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. Did they do the most for the greatest good of their people? 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 attack of the Red Krakens).

I frequently said that if you want to write a good fantasy novel, you should try to stick to about 15 to 25% of the actual harshness of the past. I don't think you want to go full Grimdark, but you don't want your fantasy world to be indistinguishable from a typical 21st century parliamentary democracy because I think that kind of defeats the purpose of fantasy where you want to visit a world that is eldritch and strange and at least somewhat different than our own.

So for Ghost in the Assembly, I went to about 15 to 25% 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 the church was ecclesia 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 attacking Syracuse and Sicily, which ended disastrously. 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 historical lesson is that a city-state, regardless of its 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 in the book is that it is not as egalitarian as it pretends and is easily swayed by both demagogues and bribes. The Athenian assembly of citizens had both these 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 an Athenian democracy, women were not allowed to vote and 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 as I said, I shot for between 15 and 25% of the actual harshness. 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 themselves. Indeed, slavery is so common in New Kyre that the other nobles see Kylon's decision that House Kardamnos will have no slaves as a sign of malevolent and sinister foreign influence.

Kalliope’s fear that she could be dispossessed and Kylon simply take her children is very real. If Kylon wanted, he probably could keep Kalliope from seeing Nikarion and Zoe ever again, though that would inevitably put him in conflict with Lysikas Agramemnos and Calliope is charismatic enough to 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, Caphtori are inspired by the “Sea Peoples”, pirates that seem to have contributed to the collapse of Bronzes 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, perhaps Mycenaean in origin.

Since having one ancient Greek-esque group fighting another would've been confusing in the book, I made the Caphtori/Red Kraken 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 concluding point here. Those were just some of the ideas I thought about and went into the story. Though I should mention that for a while I was a graduate student in medieval history and I hated the experience so much I left and 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 have to admit, I laughed at that suggestion. Kalliope would react with dismay at the thought of marrying anyone other than an extremely high ranking Kyracian 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, thank you to everyone who has read Ghost in the Assembly. I am very grateful that so many people have enjoyed the book.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes of the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

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