By Kate Klimo, The Children’s Book Review
Published: February 27, 2012
Kate Klimo talks about character development for “Centauriad: Daughters of the Centaurs“ (Random House Books for Young Readers, 2012), the first book in her new series.
What’s in a Centaur’s Pocket?
How does a centaur dress? How does a centaur go to the bathroom? What do a centaur’s home furnishings look like? What do centaurs eat? And what is it like to inhabit a body that is half-horse? These are just some of the scads of questions for which I had to know the answers before I could even sit down to write Daughter of the Centaurs. The inimitable Martin Scorsese says that you have to know what is in your characters’ pockets before you can put them on the screen. Well, I had to figure out whether centaurs even had pockets before I could fill them and then put them on the page. Where to even start?
Doing research for a fantasy novel is a tricky business. After all, it isn’t our world. But it does need to have a certain internal logic, which is to say that it needs to make sense within its own context. Being a fantasy writer is a little like being a god of the Deist school. You devise the World Machine—with all its spinning wheels and cogs and gears—and then you wind it up and see if it works. The first order of business was to research centaurs in myth. This, I told myself, might provide me with some crucial cogs and gears, if not the whole machine.
Centaurs are a manifestation of the human psyche and imagination that first showed itself in the days of antiquity. I read about Chiron, the wise centaur who taught Hippocrates—Father of Modern Medicine—the healing arts. So far so good. But then all the other centaurs I went on to read about were pretty much a pack of bloodthirsty louts, the offspring of Ixion and Nelphele. They were also thought to be the children of Centaurus who mated with the Magnesian Mares. This tribe of composite horse and human dwelled in Magnesia and Mount Pelion in Thessaly and on the Malean Penninsula.
The central story in myth starring centaurs cast them as arch villains, as lawless gang members who crashed a wedding of the Lapithians, who were actually the centaurs’ human cousins. The centaurs ran off with the Lapithian bride and all of the female guests. Those centaurs all had names. There is a long list of them. There are females listed but female centaurs aren’t featured in the Wedding Crashers story; nor are they pictured in any of the sculptures depicting centaurs until much later in history. As far as I could make out, the centaurs represented the lower appetites at war with civilized behavior.
This gave me the idea of creating a highly civilized centaurean society that, by the time the central action of Daughter of the Centaurs opens, has risen above its base nature and learned to control its animal appetites. It had done so through the teachings of a wise centaur named Kheiron (a bow to the Chiron of myth.) When Kheiron first came among the centaurs they were so murderous that they had, in fact, wiped out one of the last human cities and occupied it. Kheiron had taken these lawless louts in hand and preached to them the virtues of vegetarianism, temperance, and non-violence. Some of the centaurs rejected the teachings of Kheiron and ran off to pursue their lawless ways (these “Wild Centaurs” make their appearance in the second book of the trilogy, The Backbone of Heaven
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