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.
