Welcome to SFFWorld Ben, many thanks for giving us some time here. In your own words, who is Ben Peek?
I’m a Sydney based author of big old crazy fantasy. I’ve written five books – The Godless, Leviathan’s Blood, Black Sheep, Above/Below and Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth – and one short story collection, Dead Americans and Other Stories.
Other than that, I am parts of water, plant, and various ideas. It’s best not to ask what kind of plants, though.
The second book in the Children Trilogy, Leviathan’s Blood has just been released. Can you tell us a bit about the series? How did you come up with the idea in the first place?
The series is set in a world where the gods are dead. In their war, they broke the sun into three parts, poisoned the ocean, and left their bodies around the world to become mountain ranges, mad coastlines, and the like. Occasionally, people in the world wake up with powers of the gods. Ayae is one of them. She can’t be hurt by fire.
Anyhow, in The Godless, the first book, Ayae’s home was attacked by an army led by a new god. That new god was yet unnamed, but her followers were fanatical, and frightening, and Ayae and her friends have retreated to the Floating Cities of Yeflam. Unfortunately, things are not looking too good for them, there. People are trying to kill them. There are priests. There are immortals. And, for some reason, Ayae is in the middle of it all.
What new challenges did you set for yourself with Leviathan’s Blood?
I guess it would be writing a really good second book. If you follow the model of trilogies, a second book is the dark book, the one where all your heroes find themselves in the worse position that they can possibly find. But you can’t just do terrible things to them: they have to make choices, they have to win, and lose, and you have to make the reader believe that they have come to these situations naturally. In a lot of ways, you seed for that in the first book, so when everything is beginning to look bad, it looks organic.
It’s a strange thing, actually. Before I sat down to write these books, I don’t think I had ever considered how much foreshadowing, how much seeding, went into book one to make two and three work.
What is it with Epic Fantasy you find fascinating?
I like the potential it has. The ability to create something entirely new, to play with perceptions of time, religion, to work with concepts like death and divinity in ways you can’t in other genres. It’s quite endless, really.
Naming of characters and places is something I always find fascinating. What made you name your characters and places like you eventually did?
I don’t have any big reason, to be honest. It’s a bit of a whim. I go with a name that feels right. If it settles into a culture with a naming standard, then, well things change. But a lot of the time it’s just fiddling with arrangements, changing things around. Trying not to start every name with the letter A.
You’d be surprised how often I found myself doing that.
Can you tell us a bit about the road that led to the series being published?
I actually had a pretty simple road to the book being published. I wrote the book, my agent liked it, Pan bought it. Before all that, though, I had some lean years, where I almost gave up. I wrote a different book a publisher said they wanted, then didn’t, went through two agents, had another publisher express interest and have it fall through… It was basically every awful story you have ever heard about publishing. At the end of it, I thought I might just toss it in, but after a while, I realised what I would do instead is write something for my childhood, for what got me into reading in the first place.
That was The Godless. The series is my little love letter to the kid I once was, filtered through all the things I enjoy as an adult. Quantum Entanglement theory, for example.
Anything you can reveal about the third and final book in the trilogy, The Eternal Kingdom?
It’s big and it’s crazy. Like, in a big, crazy metaphysical way.
To say more is to ruin it.
How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?
When I was a kid, one of my friends was writing a book. I think we must have been twelve at the time, maybe eleven. He said it was the best fun he had ever had, so I thought I’d give it a go.
I suppose it could have been worse. He could have said accountancy was the best fun he’d ever had.
What books inspired your career as an author, and what authors do you enjoy now?
When I was a kid, it was authors like Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. I loved Lynn Abbey, Michael Moorcock, David Gemmell, and all of those big old fantasy books that ripped off Tolkien (there must have been a thousand of them when I was growing up). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a big more diverse in the things I appreciate, which is only natural. Roberto Bolano’s 2666, Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo comic, old Philip K. Dick, Kathy Acker, Clarice Lispector, and whoever else I come across doing something neat.
What’s next, do you have more new and exciting projects you are working on at the moment?
I have another book I’m working on now, and we’ll see how it plays out. It’s about things that don’t exist. But until it’s done, I’ll just let it move around inside me. Once you start speaking about these things, you kind of talk them out of you.
But outside that, it’s just finishing up these books, getting them out, and sharing them round with everyone who has an interest.
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2016
