Word of the Day

Loading…

Overview

The setting I write in (the Boralverse) is an alternate history of Earth. The original divergence from our own history is the existence of the island of Borland (Istr Boral) between Great Britain and Denmark, inspired by the real existence of Doggerland.

Stone Age inhabitants are cut off from the continent when Doggerland is submerged; Celts arrive in the second millennium BCE and establish tribal groups speaking a relative of Proto-Brythonic; the Romans invade and settle Borland shortly after Britain. Once the Western Roman Empire collapses I start properly diverging Boralverse history from our own—a different pattern of Anglo-Saxon migration, the rise of the petty kingdoms of Angland and Southbar, and so on. By 1000 CE things are beginning to go off the rails all across Eurasia and North Africa. In the modern era, my hope is that the world feels fractally uncanny: at every scale something is unexpectedly different, from political borders and languages to fashion and pop culture references.

When writing from a Boralverse perspective I employ an inconsistent translation convention, using mostly real-world English but peppering in calques of Boralverse English jargon for flavour: threshold force “nuclear power”, jalick “garment socially equivalent to a tuxedo”.

The original motivation for the setting is Borlish (Borallesc), the Romance language spoken on Borland. It descends from the same Insular variety of Vulgar Latin as the (now-extinct) British Latin, picked up Celtic loanwords from the existing population at the conquest, was heavily influenced through the first millennium by Anglo-Saxon settlement and then Norse conquest during the Viking Age, and has since accumulated borrowings from across the world.