I came up with the Nine Lands late in high school, while reading an epic fantasy series that shall remain unnamed, in which everybody across a large continent spoke the exact same language and had only trivial differences in culture: one or two quirky traits overlaid on a society that was the same in all its essentials.
Even before I made it to college and majored in anthropology, that annoyed me. Even if you look at an area as small as Europe, in premodern times there were significant differences between countries. I grabbed a sheet of paper, drew a continent on it, and started dropping names onto the map, decreeing that each country would have its own language, its own religion, its own fashions in clothing, and more.
That was the start of the Nine Lands, and it remains the one setting I’ve ever written in where I spent a significant amount of time worldbuilding before I ever wrote fiction set there -- in part because I had also started reading the Thieves’ World series at that time, and had the notion of creating this as a shared world in which many authors could write. There were a lot of obstacles to that plan (starting with the fact that I was an unpublished teenager, and continuing with the fact that my scope was far too large to make this a good shared world), so I wound up developing it for my own use instead. I wrote numerous snippets of history and folklore for the different countries, and then eventually graduated to actual short stories once I learned to write those without them totally sucking.
I held off on putting together this collection, though, for a reason the more alert among you may have noticed:
I call this setting the Nine Lands, and yet there are only seven stories here.
In fact, it’s even more incomplete than that. There are two Sahasraran stories in this collection (“Kingspeaker” and “The Legend of Anahata”), and two more that technically come from the same land: as hinted at by the shared Romance-language origins of Quilíbria and Eles, those used to be one country, before they split. The same is true of the Germanic-derived Mittern and Eldaan Islands, the latter of which never appears in this collection, and the former of which only shows up in the otherwise Elesie story “Execution Morning.” The Voron Steppes and the Anvil, the desert in which the Jiang-lien dwell, are similarly absent. And the Ieros share their stage with the Diamhair in “Lost Soul.”
A part of me felt like any Nine Lands collection ought to have nine stories in it, one apiece from each of the setting’s major ethnic groups. And I held off on collecting these stories for quite some time on the vague theory that I would write some additional pieces to fill it out. But time passed, and then one day I realized it had been more than twelve years since I last wrote anything set in the Nine Lands. While it’s entirely possible that I’ll return there someday, there seemed no benefit to holding these stories back in the meanwhile.
Especially since -- as you can see in the story notes -- this is a collection of firsts. Many of the stories here are career landmarks of one sort or another. Given their significance to me, I’m pleased to get them back out into the world again.
And that concludes my general remarks. For commentary on the individual stories, turn the page.