Z'mbutu's World: A Brief Primer

Z'mbutu's World: A Brief Primer of the world of Etlaus

My interest in the Sword and Sorcery genre began in college, back before people started calling it Fantasy, or even worse, Magical Realism. But, I digress.

It began with Robert E. Howard, that flaming racist and ultimately tragic mama's boy, from East Texas. Although a frightened and small-minded man in real-life, when Howard sat down at his Underwood typewriter and spun out his tales of Hyboria or Atlantis he became something greater than his parts. And much like Jack London, another racist who deplored racism in his writings, he became someone greater and more cosmopolitan than his birth-culture would allow, with a few glaring exceptions.

When I discovered Howard's world-shaking Conan, and his King Kull, I was mesmerized. To this day, decades later, I have yet to read a writer in any genre with a surer hand at adventure-writing (modesty prevents me from including myself for consideration). Howard owns Sword and Sorcery the way Stephan King owns Horror. Often imitated, as they say, but never duplicated. And no creation looms larger in Sword and Sorcery fiction than Conan himself.

I, myself, set out to try my hand at the genre after reading a handful of Howard's Conan short stories. I was just learning to write then so every one of my efforts is best forgotten and thankfully destroyed long ago. Eventually, my energies turned elsewhere. And while I remained a fan I ceased to try my hand at the genre for many years.

Then, while visiting the San Francisco Main Public Library one day (I think public libraries rank among Man's greatest achievements, along with the once glorious but now woefully broken U.S. Public-School System), on a whim I decided to look up Atlantis in the card-catalog. To my surprise I found an extensive list of books on the subject, dating back as far as the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. He was the first to put the myth of the doomed continent to pen and paper. What he actually recorded was a mangled oral history of the destruction of the quite real Minoan Civilization of the Aegean Sea.

Through the millennia many writers built upon the myths of those who came before them, until an entire Atlantian Culture emerged in the literature with many specific details of the fictional continent. To my eager mind it was world ripe for the taking. So I set out to fashion a hero fit to conquer an Atlantis of my creation. That was twenty-five years ago.

Here is the back story in a nutshell. The place is Etlaus, a world-continent, after the pattern of Earth's primordial Pangea. The time is the Mythic Age, when Magic is nearly exhausted in the world and Science had yet to gain prominence. Etlaus is just emerging from a Dark Age brought on by a devastating plague which has burned across the land for the last 500 years. It has more than decimated the population, for decimation means the death of one out of every ten, the plague killed fully nine out of ten people. Entire cities, indeed, entire regions of the world were left empty. It was also a species jumper which killed off most horses and dogs.

It is widely acknowledged that the Alchemist community, the neo-scientists of the Age, ended the scourge with their discovery of a scratch-vaccine. Beginning a century ago, this preventative was distributed without charge to all in need. Unsurprisingly, Alchemists became welcome wherever they went, crossing borders as they pleased without need of letters of transit. And in their travels they spread their budding Scientific Method, sparking an Age of Reason in the Middle Provinces and Banturia.

With the exhaustion of The Plague, and the re-population of Etlaus, extensive nation-states and empires came to bloom once more into existence. And, predictably enough, came into conflict.

The protagonist, Dion, lives in half a dozen stories and many outlines in my files. He's a scholar-monk who returns to his conquered city-state of Saweza to liberate it from the Ghilan Empire.

When my interest flagged with Dion and his adventures I moved on to other things. Until about four years ago, when I was transferring files from one computer to another and I ran across the Dion stories. I was pleased to find upon re-reading that they were good solid stories. Usually, I wince when I read all but my most recent work. I fiddled with some of the outlines for a week or so until a different character began developing in my mind, eventually to emerge into the light of day as Civilicus (see the posted stories).

Over the next months I would write a trio of Civilicus tales which took place in an entirely different part of my Atlantian world of Etlaus than that of Dion. Predictably enough, other things snagged my attention and I left the world once more.

It was the middle of 2005 when yet another Etlaus character grew in my mind, the iconoclastic Z'mbutu. An alchemist, a scientist loose in a realm of magic. His story would become the succubus tale (see posted story).

And that brings us up to present day.

To say that I was astonished by the flattering reception of the Z'mbutu tale is to understate the case. No other piece has generated either the rapid high rating nor high email response of 'By the Sweat of the Succubus' Brow'. To which I offer a humble thank you to its fans, and keep in mind that I am not normally a man of humility.

Much of the email concerns questions about the world and time of Z'mbutu. The geography of Etlaus, and whether there's another Z'mbutu story in the works. As the politicians say, I'll take the last question first. Yes, there is a another Alchemist story on the way. But, as of this writing don't expect it for a couple of months or so. It's also my intention to publish more Civilicus and Dion stories, all in the fullness of time.

As to the geography of Etlaus, there's a crude map rendered by my own hand and therefore not fit for publication at this time.

But to give you some reference points, Dion is of the Middle Provinces, an area in the middle of the vast continent. It's the part of the world most densely settled and racially mixed. Think Classical Greece and Roman cultures.

Civilicus, in his stories, moves from the frozen North, populated mainly by Whites (Norsemen) and Asians (Eskimo), down the western coast. And we last saw him embarking west across the sea toward his home Polynesian islands.

Z'mbutu is of the mid-latitudes, the Tropics, as it were. The vast territory of Banturia and all the other Black nation states are equatorial. This region is modeled after the medieval African ivory/gold merchant states. The desert-dwelling Levantines are also based on, but not limited to, the medieval period.

As to language, the tongue Transkrit is the international speech, allowing for local dialects. The exception to Transkrit is the Swahili trade tongue of Banturia, and Hawaiian language of the Island People, the Sea Folk.

And yes, I am considering requests to open the world to online role-play via chatroom, depending on sufficent interest in such a project.

My intention with the world of Etlaus is to expand the scope of Sword and Sorcery, to make a world rich with cultures which include the African, Indian, Asian, and Oceanic peoples point-of-view along with the heretofore mainstay European and Mediterranean models. To pitch not only cold sword iron against a necromancer's curse, but also the pitiless edge of Science against Superstition and its amassed host of ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties.

And that's all I have to say about that. Except again, thanks Gentle Reader for the interest in an old story-teller's tales. I wish you well.