Richard Morgan interview

Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author Richard Morgan drops by to talk about his latest novel "The Steel Remains".

RBN: On your website you have an entry where you list all of the people who likely won't enjoy your forthcoming novel "The Steel Remains". I read it as largely tongue in cheek, but I can imagine that a lot of it might be literal. First off, why did you decide to take a shot at a more traditional fantasy series?

RM: Well, I’ve always quite liked good old traditional hack-and-slay fantasy, and the mythological sources it draws upon. As a teenager, I read an awful lot of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stuff, some Karl Edward Wagner and a couple of seminal fantasy novels by Poul Anderson, most notably the very brilliant The Broken Sword. And that’s without mentioning the huge amounts of Norse, Greek, Roman, Slavic, you name it mythology I was reading as well. So, in some senses I’ve always had a vague hankering to write something along those lines.

More recently, in the five years since I got published, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating a kind of “sword and sorcery” noir, something that would in effect import the sensibilities of the Kovacs books into a fantasy landscape – so it just seemed like time to stop talking and actually do the work, put my money where my mouth is if you like.

Oh, and as to that website list – it’s light-hearted, but definitely not tongue in cheek. I don’t want to sell anybody anything under false pretences, and there do seem to be some genre readers who get very angry when a book doesn’t live up to their (often quite narrow) expectations. I don’t want that to happen again, the way it seems to have done with Black Man/Thirteen.

RBN: When you knew that you were really going to make a go of this how did your publisher react?

RM: With huge enthusiasm, in fact. My UK editor read the character vignettes I’d written and immediately offered me a three-book deal. And my US editor was right behind him with the same level of enthusiasm, so I’m signed up in America as well.

RBN: Was their any trepidation on your part? Obviously your previous work is still "sci fi" but it's more of a hard sci fi, or post cyberpunk. This is quite a change for you.

RM: Well, actually not so much – part of the brief for these books was always going to be a very noirish tone, and I really haven’t made any concessions at all to the new territory in terms of style and dialogue. Anyone who liked the Kovacs universe is likely to feel pretty much at home with The Steel Remains, and that also applied to me while I was writing it.

RBN: What about your fans? Are you worried about them not following you?

RM: Yeah, I suppose it’s possible, probable even, that some readers will just be so resistant to fantasy tropes that they really can’t stomach the change of scenario – though as I said, Kovacs fans should feel right at home. But then there is also the possibility that the book will pick up a whole new audience who like fantasy but won’t touch SF. And who knows, maybe I’ll even persuade some of those readers to cross the divide the other way and read my SF.

In the end, though, I don’t think you can afford, as a serious author, to worry too much about your potential audience. Good writers write for themselves, and if they’re lucky they find an audience. That’s certainly what happened to me with Altered Carbon, and I have tried to stick with that dynamic with every subsequent book. I write for myself and just hope the readership will come along for the ride. From time to time, of course, concerns about market will creep into your mind, you wouldn’t be human if they didn’t, but like the movie says, you got to fight through that shit. Like Altered Carbon, The Steel Remains is very much the book I wanted to write – I’ll just have to hope that, like Altered Carbon, it finds its audience.

RBN: Let's talk a little bit about the actual first book in the series, "The Steel Remains". If you can, give us the lay of the land for this new world you've created...

RM: Right. The genre shorthand for this, I guess, is to imagine a fourth volume to The Lord of the Rings – the war is over, the land is devastated from end to end, the harvests rot in the fields because all the people who should be farming the land are dead or crippled in one way or another, surviving populations starve and whole economies are on the floor; roving bands of orcs and other renegades are still a problem, though most are now interned in concentration camps or simply murdered and shoveled into mass graves; Gondor and Rohan have gone back to squabbling over territory now that there’s no-one else to fight; the veterans of Pelennor Fields and the Gates of Mordor are home but fucked up, drug addicted, homeless and living rough, can’t or won’t fit in; in other words, a total fucking mess. Of course, The Steel Remains is a social and geographical (and sorcerous) landscape all my own, it doesn’t really resemble anything Tolkeinesque, but that sketch I’ve just given you captures the spirit of what I’m trying to do; I don’t like war, I don’t like the overly romantic perspective fantasy often gives to violent conflict, and while violent combat itself may be sickly exhilarating and intense, I’m not going to pretend, whatever genre I’m writing in, that war is a cool or noble or beautiful thing. So rather than charting the war itself, its glorious victories et tedious cetera, we skip all of that and start with the aftermath, the stuff that no-one ever likes to talk or think about, the stuff that’s never commemorated in speeches or monuments or epic poetry.

RBN: The cover for the book is a beauty. Who designed it?

RM: The cover art is by Laura Brett, an in-house designer for Orion. She’s previously done covers for Joe Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss among others, and as you can see she really is something special; in fact I’ll readily confess that I tweaked the last section of the book when I saw that cover. There’s a verbal description at the start of one of the later chapters which pretty much is that image from the cover, and I’m not ashamed to say that Laura was there first with the image, not me!

RBN: What can you tell us about your protagonists?

RM: Oh, they’re a much-bloodied, weary, cynical lot – perhaps as you’d expect, given my track record so far. One of them at least has a drug problem, with the second it’s harder to tell to what extent his drug use is part of the problem or part of the solution, and the third major character deals with his frustrations and day-to-day requirements through other strategies which, to twenty first century western sensibilities, probably aren’t going to seem any more socially acceptable than the drug use he eschews. I guess by the time anyone reads this, it’s going to be no secret that the main character of the book is gay – well, suffice it to say he’s not the only one. And leaving sex aside for a moment in favour of violence, the characters are all brutally competent at killing and destroying, though some of them are more comfortable with this than others. All of them feel cheated and betrayed in one way or another and none of them have more respect for authority than you can scrape off your heel on a curbside. I think you’re going to love them.

RBN: You talked openly about wanting to apply noir tendencies to a fantasy novel. How did you find putting that into practice?

RM: In the end, it was actually surprisingly easy – turns out, the standard fantasy landscape is crawling with opportunities to go that route. In standard fantasy, there is pretty much always war, always intrigue, always an abuse of authority, always a class structure, always people killing each other with bits of sharp steel. I mean, how much darker and more underbelly-focused can you get? The trick was simply to think about the genuine human implications of all those things and then start laying down the detail. To the extent that The Steel Remains is in any way a departure from the bulk of the epic fantasy out there (and I’m really not informed enough to know if it is or not), I think it’s been a case not of dumping or changing any of the staples of the genre, so much as simply not turning a blind eye to what those staples imply.

RBN: One of the things I always look forward to in your books are your inventive gadgets and weaponry. Will we see this continue in The Steel Remains?

RM: Errrm - to some limited extent, yes, I suppose so. There are a couple of nice surprises in that line coming up in the book, but to be honest the weapons tech (if you want to call it that) is more by implication than by actual demonstrable capacity. One way of looking at this would be to say that I’ve done with some of the weaponry what I did in the Kovacs books with the Martians – it’s more about what you don’t see, what you can (maybe) infer, than it is about anything concrete. That in itself has been quite a fresh and fun dynamic to play with.

RBN: Now that you gone through revisions, how do you feel about the process?

RM: There actually weren’t any revisions to speak of – The Steel Remains is pretty much the same in its finished form as the original manuscript I turned in. Couple of stylistic tweaks here and there, one short sentence added to underline a subtle point of plot that I’d maybe left a little too subtle – oh, and in the final draft, I’ve taken eleven instances of the word fuck out of the text. It’s a fairly intense book, but you can overdo these things.

RBN: Will this book be coming to the US?

RM: Absolutely. As I said, my US publishers (Del Rey/Ballantine) were right behind me with this from the start. The US copy edit is winging its way across the Atlantic to me even as I type, and there’s been huge personal enthusiasm from the people who’ve read it in house. The book’s slated to come out in February next year, six months after the UK release, but that’s largely my fault because I overran a fairly tight deadline by six or seven weeks. There’s some question whether the title will be the same – my US editor was rather keen on the original, working title A Land Fit for Heroes, and they may stick with that. But apart from that, it’ll be the exact same novel.


RBN: What comes next for you?

RM: Good question. I think The Steel Remains was something of a leap in the dark for all concerned, and we’d always left it flexible as to whether I’d complete all three fantasy novels and then go back to SF, or alternate genres for a while. Now the book’s in, however, my UK editor is pretty keen to see two more like it as soon as possible. The Steel Remains is a standalone in as much as it wraps up fairly cleanly, you’re not left with any cliff-hangers; but there is of course a whole world sitting there only fractionally explored, and any characters that got to walk away at the end obviously have the remainder of their lives to live, and decisions to make as to what they do with that time. There’s also a certain amount of ambiguity contained in the ending (though no more so than in any of my other books) and I think the general sense is that readers will want all that stuff explored right now (or as soon as humanly possible). And I’ve had a great time with this book, so I’m quite happy to serve up a sequel. So right now it looks like I’ll do the whole fantasy trilogy thing, do my exploring, get it out of my system, and then head back to SF waters a couple of years from now. Feel like some Victorian arctic explorer saying that, but….yeah, that’s the plan.

Tobias Buckell interview

I chatted with author Tobias Buckell on his rousing new novel Sly Mongoose.

MC: For people unfamiliar with the universe that you've created in your novels, can you set the stage a bit?


TB: The three books so far are each books that illuminate a bit more about a series of worlds all connected via wormholes. In Crystal Rain I explored one world, Nanagada, settled by people from the Caribbean. In Ragamuffin I opened things up by showing that there were 48 worlds all connected by wormholes, all ruled by the Satrapy: Satraps being large, trilobyte-like aliens with strong colonialist ethics. Humanity is one a handful of alien races that the Satraps consider themselves Patrons to, and in Ragamuffin the book is about how humanity deals with their place in the universe. In Sly Mongoose I've shown some of the consequences to what people chose to do about the Satraps, and also focused on exploring a world and people who are caught up in the middle of all that.


MC: The buzz on this book has been pretty big. What's that been like for you?


TB: The buzz has been strong online and with early readers, yes, I still haven't made that leap into regular media buzz that an author so cherishes. So far people who encounter the book seem to really dig it, so I'm hoping word of mouth continues to spread.


MC: The setting in Sly Mongoose is fantastic. You have a world where the atmosphere and the surface are deadly to humans so they live in floating cities in the clouds. How did you come up first with Chilo and second the amazing floating cities that populate the planet?


TB: I have Geoff Landis, NASA scientist and science fiction author to thank. He gave a speech about Venus that basically inspired me to create Chilo. Geoff had figured out that Venus, at 100,000 feet, is somewhat more habitable for people if you build a floating city, thanks to air being more of a lifting gas on Venus than here on Earth.


MC: I really enjoyed the unique take on the human cultures populating Chilo, How does your background, being born in Grenada, influence that aspect of your novels if at all?


TB: Well, for one thing, I enjoy books that have lots of different cultures in them, showing the diversity and vibrancy that the future can have. Growing up in the Caribbean where you have a lot of world travelers and varying island backgrounds encouraged me to try and represent this in my books.


MC: You literally begin this book with a bang. All around ass kicker Pepper is blazing through the atmosphere in a space suit and a man made heat shield. That's a hell of a way to start the book. What can you tell people about your lead character Pepper?


TB: Pepper is as much an archetype as a character. I usually use Pepper to herald the immense change that's about to come and kick a society's ass, or upset people's lives. He's something of a harbinger, from a literary standpoint. He's also a hell of a lot of fun to write, and I get a lot of fan mail about him.


MC: You also quickly introduce two other interesting leads. Let's start with Timas. He's a young man with literally the weight of the city on his shoulders. Can you talk a bit about Timas and the role he plays in the story?


TB: I've been thinking a lot about how children bear the weight of their parent's mistakes and decisions. In this novel, Timas's ancestors made choices about technology without even thinking about it, and the result is that Timas has to get into a pressure suit and be lowered to the ground of Chilo to work the mining machine down there, or the city suffers. And since only children like him can do this, it forces him to grow up early.


MC: Next is Kat, an avatar from the technologically advanced Aeolian society. What role do avatars play and what kind of society are the Aeolians?


TB: The Aeolian society is a bit of a techno-democracy. They believe government should not be embodied by professional politicians, but be the result of decisions by the community as a whole in real time. As a result, the idea of an ambassador doesn't fly with them. They pick someone at random who then has to 'represent' the nation by acting as an avatar to the will of the nation's citizenry. The end result is pretty odd, but the civil society it works for is interesting.


MC: You have honest to goodness zombies in Sly Mongoose. How much fun did you have in mashing the two genres together? And talk a bit about what the Swarm actually is...


TB: The Swarm comes about in part from an old Arthur C. Clarke piece about distributed swarm intelligences and with a nod to Bruce Sterling's Swarm in his Schismatrix series. But mainly it came about because Peter Watts created a hard SF justification for vampires in Blindsight, and I wanted to do the same for zombies before the idea occurred to him. The Swarm is passed on by biting, and it harnesses the brain power of its individual units like individual processors of a Beowulf Cluster. And the larger the Swarm gets, the more intelligent the Swarm becomes. That's the ticking clock. Unlike zombies, when the Swarm goes critical, it will start messing around with you by having individual units pretend to be okay, or by sending out messages saying 'everything's all good here, no worries.'


MC: I got a definite steampunk vibe from this book similar in some respects to Crystal Rain. Is that a genre that you think you might ever fully set one of your future novels in?


TB: I have a fondness for steampunk, so the aesthetic is fully creeping back into my work, particularly with Sly Mongoose. The excuse for blimps and floating cities makes it hard not too. The floating Straandbeest creatures powered by wind and gears, and using analog operating systems out of gears to emulate minds are the result of a full on steampunk ethos I can't shake. But the novel is essentially also science fiction. Jamming steampunk and space opera together seemed like a lot of fun. In Ragamuffin, the previous book, I also had a space ship powered by human beings doing hand computations in a steampunk way as well, though that book is all spaceships and space opera.


MC: Aside from Sly Mongoose being a rousing action/adventure story it also touches on some pretty serious issues. The price of duty and responsibility, the divide between rich and poor, eating disorders, slavery...how important is it for you to address issues like that in your writing?


TB: The action and adventure comes first, I have this terrible fear of boring people, that comes from my own short attention span. I try to pack a lot of fun into each page. But usually underneath that is this layer of issues I fold into the book. Every once in a while I get a reviewer or reader who mentions reading my books twice, once for the sheer dash and fun, and the second time paying closer attention to this stuff under the surface, and being pleasantly surprised at all the things I'm touching on because they were distracted by all the fun.


MC: Pepper is a character who you have featured in short stories as well as him being a secondary character in your other novels. This time Pepper takes center stage. What is it about Pepper that keeps you coming back to him and what's coming up for him?


TB: As I mentioned above I use Pepper to humanize the changes that are coming. He works as a harbinger. As a character, he's very much modeled after the 'man with no name' from the Clint Eastwood movies and the Japanese Samurai movies those are based on.


MC: What's next for you Tobias?


TB: I'm wrapping up a HALO novel for Bungie/Microsoft and my publisher Tor. It should be a lot of fun, showing off some corners of the HALO universe that haven't been explored. The big action and big ideas of my first three books got the folks at Bungie psyched about my brand of adventure, and I'm psyched to be working with them.