Letter From The Author

Letter From The Author

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 Zdzis?aw 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.

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

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“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 ???? but have translated their ID into English ☜