Conversation with Richard K. Morgan
By: Static Multimedia |
Monday November 17, 2008 |
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..author of Steel Remains, first in a trilogy. |
| Fantasy novel, The Steel Remains is due to be released January 20, 2009. Known as a sci-fi author from the Takeski Kavacs trilogy, Market Forces and Thirteen, this is his first epic fantasy book. Let's see what he has to say about it. You are known for your gritty science fiction novels, but you are now turning your writing talents to fantasy. Why the switch? Richard K. Morgan: To be honest, I think I’ve always had a hankering to write some good old-fashioned hack and slay fantasy. I grew up reading master practitioners of the form like Michael Moorcock, Poul Anderson and Karl Edward Wagner, and there’s a brutal, brooding pulp appeal to. those stories. Plus, I’ve been talking a good fight for a number of years now about importing a genuinely noir sensibility into the fantasy arena, and various people, among them my editor, finally suggested I should just shut up talking and get on and do it. The great thing about having the published backlist I do is that people will let you try things like this out — both my UK and US publishers had a look at the character vignettes I’d written and agreed — quite literally — to buy into the ride. What drove me after that was really the desire to just dial everything up to maximum intensity and push the dynamic until it shook itself to pieces. Has this switch from science fiction to fantasy required a change in writing style? No, not at all — that was part of the noir brief I was working to. I made no concessions to the more flowery of fantasy conventions in terms of prose and dialogue. The Steel Remains may take place in a world of swords and sorcery, but it reads as hard-boiled as any contemporary crime novel you care to name. Your protagonists tend to be anti-heroes. Do you dislike the more traditional, gallant archetypes? More than dislike, distrust. And by that I mean I distrust the cultural conventions whereby such saccharine knightly archetypes are put together. You know, the towering ‘figure of successful slaughter who then hangs up his weapons, goes home and marries the girl next door and lives happily ever after in a Little House on the Prairie with a white picket fence. Thing is, this is a relatively recent lie we’ve been telling ourselves here, something that’s flourished with the movie industry and its cheapest, most venal moments. If you look back at the genuine heroic canon, all the way from Achilles to Che Guevara, you’ll find that what’s common to all these heroes is a brooding and sporadically brutal ambivalence; they are all very iffy double edged tools for the causes and societies they represent. They’re unpredictable, lonely and pretty effectively estranged from what we would understand as human happiness or civilized society. I think this is an honest vision, a kind of folk wisdom that human society has owned for millenia, and here we are in the twenty first century, supposedly at our most sophisticated as a race, and we’re in danger of throwing that wisdom away in favor of cartoon rhetoric, catastrophic foreign policy and a fast multiplex profit. I’m repelled by that dynamic, and I write against it almost instinctively. Why did you choose veteran soldiers as your heroes? Well, it’s one of the most transparently obvious illustrations of how those in power lie and manipulate us — troops marching off to war are high profile media objects of desire; but returning veterans, in boxes, physically or mentally crippled by what they’ve experienced, scarred or disfigured, unable to adjust or fit in, are made invisible. The government will spend billions maintaining a standing army, training, arming, feeding and clothing, deploying these men (and latterly women); but when it comes to picking up the pieces after the war (and the damage) is done, suddenly it’s all down to charities and underfunded welfare department sub-divisions. Far from honoring these men and women for the sacrifices they’ve made, as a society we really don’t want to know too much about them, and that’s because in this incarnation they make us uncomfortable. Marching out, they stand for the glory and grandeur of a frankly adolescent immaturity about war. Coming back, well — they’ve been standing a little too close to the flames, and the burns they display beg too many questions, tell us too many truths about conflict that we don’t really want to hear. But of course those are the questions and the truths that interest me most. Many epic fantasy writers have their whole worlds mapped out, along with histories of the people, lines of royalty, past wars, etc. Have you taken a similar approach to inventing your world? Not at all — I’ve taken my usual approach, which is to develop the background detail as and when it’s needed in the story. You get fragments here and there, and there is a sort of underlying geography to things, but it’s very vague and it only comes into focus when there’s a narrative need for it. Any more would just distract from the characters and themes of the story. What authors have had an effect on your fantasy writing? I think Michael Moorcock can claim the lion’s share of my early fantasy influences, with Karl Edward Wagner coming in later and to a lesser extent, and then all the usual suspects; Tolkien, Dunsay, Peake et al. But above and beyond all that, there’s the towering impact of a single novel — Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, which effectively uses the same Norse and Anglo-Saxon influences as Tolkien (and at the same time — it was first published in 1954), but pisses all over The Lord of the Rings in terms of style and maturity of subject matter. There really is nothing to touch it in the fantasy canon Do you see this particular novel as describing the “aftermath” of war, or the beginning of a new one? Very much the aftermath — I’m looking to undercut the trumpet fanfare of marching off to war against a great external evil, so beloved of common fantasy tropes, and look instead at the evils inherent in the way humans run their affairs instead. The war that has just passed in The Steel Remains was very much unavoidable (think, by analogy, the war against Hitler between 1939 and 45), but what was gained in it is now being pissed away by venal creatures of power for their own personal gain. Same as it ever fucking was. What do you think of the early reaction to the book? On the whole, I’m very happy — people seem to have responded well to what I’m trying to do. There’s been a little fuss over the issue of having a gay male hero front and center — the word “gratuitous” is suddenly getting tossed around a lot where the sex scenes are concerned, and often by people who seemed to have no problem with the equally explicit straight sex scenes in my other books. Can’t be helped, and we’re probably going to see some more of that when the US edition comes out — there is a deeply conservative element to the fantasy readership and of course those guys were never going to welcome something like this, any more than they’ll be happy with the essentially nihilistic approach to conflict in the book, the shades of moral gray, or the mature rated and utterly modern dialogue. Then again, I’m not writing for those guys. I don’t have a target audience, any more than I ever did. I’m just writing the kind of thing I want to read — and hoping there are enough like-minded readers out there who’ll want to come along for the ride. |
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