'The Wandering Inn' Allows Us to Properly Fear the Sea
The Wandering Inn is one of the greatest stories ever told. It’s a fantasy web novel that updates weekly— think The Pickwick Papers for the 21st century. Since its inception in 2016, The Wandering Inn has amassed nearly 8,000 Patreon subscribers and over 13 million words.
The Wandering Inn is part of the isekai genre, which focuses on "a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, game world, or parallel universe without the possibility of returning to their original world" (Wikipedia). Isekai is popular in Japanese media, but many works in the genre have been criticized for devolving into shallow male power fantasies.
However, The Wandering Inn uses its unique format to turn the isakai genre on its head. Because of its formidable length, The Wandering Inn can afford to follow not just one but thousands of “Earthers”, who get dragged into the world on a continental scale. Not only that, but it can spare time on every single corner of its lush fantasy world, colloquially known as the "Innverse".
One of the Innverse’s strangest qualities is its flatness. Voyagers who sail past the world’s borders simply vanish beyond an edge called the “Last Tide”, never to be seen again. Like many strange Innverse mechanics, residents don’t see anything unusual about this— after all, it’s all they’ve ever known.
The known sea of the Innverse is terrifying on its own, but beyond lie even greater depths. Eldritch horrors called “Seamwalkers” are said to wait below the edge, coming up from who-knows-where. While the world is mostly mapped, there is always the possibility that some unknown horror comes floating up from beyond the Last Tide, a place about which little is truly known. This gives the sea a far more intense atmosphere— one that is terrifying, sublime, and filled with adventure.
Humanity never had a Last Tide, but some cultures used to believe that the world sat on the back of a giant turtle. Most contemporary depictions show this “World Turtle” floating in the cosmos, perhaps to highlight its absurdity in light of modern science. But a more natural interpretation is that this World Turtle lives in a setting that a turtle on Earth might inhabit, only on a vast scale. Say, swimming in water: an even greater cosmic sea of which our world’s sea is only a small part.
If our ancestors envisioned a cosmic boundary similar to a World Turtle or a Last Tide, then we can better understand the terror and reverence that they had for the sea. Imagine if the sea was more connected to the rest of the universe, to the extent that alien beings like Seamwalkers could swim up from the cosmic dark. It would be a more dangerous world, but that danger would also be kind of thrilling, wouldn't it?
I often think about the quote “born too late to explore the seas, too early to explore the stars”. We live in an age that lacks new locations to discover. I wonder if the ancients would be disappointed by the scale of our reality. They would be amazed by how fast we zip around the Earth, but they might be equally dismayed by just how unnavigable and unreachable the cosmos really are. Sometimes it all just feels disappointingly finite— like one of the least exciting possible realities.
As a kid, I fantasized about plunging into an alien ocean, not knowing what lies beneath. I lamented the fact that I might never be able to see humanity explore unknown seas. Of course, plenty of the deep sea is still unexplored, and modern explorers still dazzle us by leaping into the inky black. But it’s not the same. The unknown ocean screams “discovery!” in a way that the emptiness of space never could. After modern science bounded the possibilities of our world, there was no going back.
But when I read The Wandering Inn, I get transported to a reality without those boundaries. I can almost feel like how I might have felt gazing out at the sea back then, wondering what strange beasts were out there. To not know the edges of my reality. To live with the cosmos in reach. To truly fear the sea.
The Wandering Inn is a web serial by pirateaba. You can start reading The Wandering Inn here.
this is the same way i feel about what lies beyond the hadarac desert in the inheritance cycle, and the other lands and countries that are still unmapped. also the same way i feel about what lies in the unknown regions of essos from a song of ice & fire, like asshai/the shadow lands/yi ti, etc.