The Nebula’s Civilization

Letter from TNC’s author Wirae:

Hello, readers of WuxiaWorld! I am Wirae, the author of The Nebula’s Civilization. My native language is Korean, and I write in Hangul. I studied English for about nine years following Korea's educational curriculum, but admittedly, my English skills are not great since I was not a hard-working student. Instead of studying, I spent my time reading novels.

You may not know this, but the fiction genre scene in Korea is excellent and I wrote my works based on the foundation I gained from it. However, another significant influence for me was the translated novels from abroad. It was these translations that allowed me to read works like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Without the environment and translators that made these books available, my own writing could not have come into existence, and for that, I owe another debt.

In Korea, the trend of globalization has passed, and now we live in an era of hyperconnectivity. Just by unlocking our smartphones, we can see a man in Pakistan wearing sandals while forging metal, a janitor in a Chinese factory performing an impressive cleaning, or a clumsy robber dropping his gun over a counter in the USA. It's all part of our daily life now. There's a meme that says, "Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space." But considering that each person is an unknown world to another, isn't connecting with people from many different countries an exploration in itself? Despite the various crises the world is facing, I believe we are born in an era perfect for reading novels.

Lastly, I'd like to thank the staff at WuxiaWorld and the translator Greenfrog for their work. I hope you enjoyed/enjoy reading the novel.

Readers, you may have guessed to some extent, but I have never played a single game of the Sid Meier's Civilization series. I did watch broadcasts by YouTubers like Breadworld [1] but as someone who knows nothing about games, it was hard to concentrate on the broadcast for more than five minutes. The most direct reference for this novel was Total War: Warhammer 2. This game is a part of the famous RTS series Total War, incorporating the Warhammer Fantasy miniature game IP, and it features Lizardmen as a playable faction (That’s right, the Lizardmen).

Apart from the Lizardmen motif, the gameplay of the fictional games Lost World, Total War, and Sid Meier's Civilization, which I have seen a few times but never played, is quite different. I wanted to borrow the feel of gameplay, but I didn't intend to recreate the gameplay itself. The motif of gods and their creature creations came from Black & White 2, which I also haven't played but remembered from a game stream I saw at some point.

The occasional mention of fictional strategies in the novel might have been because I was a fan of the RTS StarCraft (the first novel I remember writing was a StarCraft fanfic). I aimed to portray a game that I wanted to play but did not exist, and so I used these games as references for creating a game that was difficult to exist in real life because I needed to write a fantasy game novel, not create a game. Just as Son Hee-Joon and Kim Youn-Kyung did with their manga Yureka, I aimed not to recreate real games but to express games in our fantasies.

The references in this novel were not only from games. Since this work is categorized as a novel, other novels have also had a major influence. And, as you might have predicted by now, I have neither read Bernard Werber's Us,Gods nor Chwiryong's World Maker. Like with Sid Meier's Civilization

, I received many recommendations before I started serialization but unfortunately didn't have time to take a look at them due to my busy writing schedule.

The motif of the gods interacting came from Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, and the competition among those with excellent abilities was based on the same author's The Chronicles of Amber. Not to mention The Lord of the Rings, and the TRPG Dungeons & Dragons series' setting of Forgotten Realms, probably had the greatest influence on the world of the Lost World.

As someone had said, the latter part of the novel was more influenced by D&D's major event transitioning from edition 3.5 to 4.0, Time of Troubles, than by Norse mythology's Ragnarok or the book of Revelation from the Bible. Moreover, who could ignore the lineage from The Lord of the Rings to Forgotten Realms in the genre of fantasy? I respected the lineage. The Halfling species that appear in this novel without much importance are along the same line as D&D's Halflings, The Lord of the Rings’ Hobbits, and Delicious in Dungeon's Half-Foots.

There is more to talk about regarding gods and images. As mentioned in the novel, the main images of the good gods came from Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, partially from Salvador Dalí's The Temptation of St. Anthony, and from unidentified medieval illustrations. And the evil gods, of course, had motifs from H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński's paintings. For the players, while some direct motifs were mentioned in the novel itself, the physical images of the gods were also influenced by Beksiński and Peter Mohrbacher's (Tumblr: @bugmeyer) illustrations.

There is also an artist that overall binds the images in my works, which is René Magritte. Many contradicting or surreal landscapes in the novel were created with René Magritte in mind. The Sky Castles were reminiscent of René Magritte's The Castle of the Pyrenees, the occasionally seen appearance of Sung-Woon from behind was inspired by The Schoolmaster, and when describing the object heads that appear in the novel, I continuously thought of the gentlemen in black suits with red ties that frequently appear in Magritte's paintings.

In addition, this novel may remind you of the following works, but to avoid spoilers, I'll just mention their names: Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegāna, Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, Peter Watts' Blindsight, China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, Urobuchi Gen's Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha, Geon Park's Allmaster, Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga, Bo-Young Kim's A Long Journey, Djuna's Proxy War

, Young-Do Lee's The Bird That Drinks Tears. And above all, the one that had the most influence was Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games. All are authors and works I can confidently recommend.

There is more I would like to say about the various species that appear in the novel. The Lizardmen were a species intended to replace D&D's Lizardfolk, and the second species that appeared, the Frogmen, might be remnants from Warhammer Fantasy (both species are part of one faction in Warhammer Fantasy). Nixes were a species name in substitute for Dark Elves, Renards resembled World of Warcraft's Vulperas, Platys were based on the Kakao emoticon Ogu, the Pangolins were inspired while envisioning Pokémon's Sandslash, and such images were reflected in the novel. The chapters that contained fairies mentioned several species that were actual candidates to replace the fairies, but in the end, I didn’t replace the fairies so that the novel would not become too violent.

Additionally, if you were reminded of Christopher Nolan's Inception in certain scenes, you were spot on. The term ‘madman’ mentioned in the latter part of the novel was translated in terms of an otaku, a maniac. The cursed ones conversing with the spirits of demonic magic was inspired by the game Disco Elysium, and the motif of the dagger impressively used by the protagonist was a fountain pen.

It would probably be difficult to list all the references, motifs, homages, and parodies used during a year of serialization in this postscript as I haven't even mentioned the real historical events that served as motifs in the novel, but it might be better to omit this part.

Anyway, before starting this serialization, I was curious about whether it was possible to create a web novel with a vast array of characters, similar to Ryōgo Narita's works or George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. I had ideas that emerged in chapters 25 and 75, which fueled my expectation that it was indeed possible, and I believe I achieved partial success. Of course, the attempt was not specifically to experiment with an ensemble drama. Continuously introducing a variety of characters was simply my own strategy to make writing the web novel easier.

The story, originally planned to end with 300 chapters, had to make quite a detour for a smooth ending due to events in the latter part of the serialization that could only be described as physiologically or pharmacologically unusual (I will spare the details as it would be boring). As a result, a delay of about twenty days in the serialization was compensated by publishing two episodes or up to six episodes in quick succession, managing to raise the frequency from an average of 3.9 chapters per week to now 6.6 chapters. The number of purchases within twenty-four hours of the latest chapters, which had dropped below 250, is now approaching 500. It's quite extraordinary that an author, who previously struggled to finish one book a month, managed to write about two and a half books' worth of content in less than a month.

Many who serialize novels might feel the same way, but this novel truly was a challenging project. Throughout the writing process, I continually encountered the limits of my knowledge and intellect, and these limitations were clearly reflected in the novel. I’m embarrassed and ashamed. If you've read the novel and noticed parts that seemed incorrect or flawed, rest assured that your observations are valid. Though it would be too late if you've already read through the novel and are reading this postscript afterward, I ask for your understanding.

Above all, I express my gratitude.

Firstly, I thank my family and friends, who have nothing to do with my novel life. At some point, I no longer feared writing novels because life exists beyond novels. People should live life, not just write novels.

Now, I also extend my thanks to the other half of my life, my creative community. I have friends with whom I share the experience of reading and writing. I'm grateful for my friends in Seoul, who started writing web novels during the same unstable period as I did, and my university alumni with whom I still communicate with.

I also thank my oldest group of advisors, who never hesitated to offer guidance on my shortcomings, and my gaming friends who provided vocabulary and sprinkled creative ideas whenever I faced a plot challenge. There are also friends I had forgotten over time who still read my works and there are many more to whom I owe thanks. It feels as though the creative community I’ve built is too vast and grand to name everyone individually, so I wish to express my gratitude separately, beyond the limits of this text.

Finally, I am immensely grateful to all the readers who have read my novel so far and those who will continue to do so. Honestly, I believe that whether someone reads my novel or not should not be the driving force behind my writing. Writing a novel should be a personal endeavor for the author, and it should be completed even if no one reads it. If writing is motivated by positive emotions, it naturally becomes difficult to continue when those emotions fade, and always hoping for positive feedback is also brazen. Therefore, the true driving force behind writing should not be positive feedback from others, but the author's own internal fight. Despite this, I cannot deny that the support from you, the readers, has made me happy during the serialization.

After the conclusion of the novel, side stories exploring the world's past, present, and future have been completed. Following this postscript, there's a possibility of another sequel set in the distant future (intended as a kind of joke), and while it's not yet decided whether it will be written, there has been surprising demand for it. Despite the current novel not performing exceptionally well, I've envisioned a short series of side stories. However, I have other personal projects that are unrelated to this web novel that need my urgent attention, so there's no set plan for when these additional writings might begin. Therefore, I ask that you do not wait for these or for a Q&A session or a concept art book.

I don't have any definite plans for my next work. Of course, I am aware that the ending of this work has a somewhat flexible setting, as intended, but again, I want to make it clear that there are no set plans.

With this, the year-long serialization has come to an end. As I conclude my ode to this journey, I'd like to share two quotes that I discovered during the serialization but never found the right opportunity to insert:

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“A true civilization will not destroy the mountains, the river, the village, and the people there shall not be killed.”

-Tanaka Shozo

***

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

-Bible, Psalm 90:12

-Sid Meier's Civilization 5, Calendar creation method

1. The YouTuber is 식빵월드 but have translated their ID into English ☜