Science Fantasy

I have set out to create thoroughly evil characters on occasion, but generally end up finding good points in them. For example, with Rulke in THE VIEW FROM THE MIRROR. I originally conceived him as an arch-villain, then a likeable, magnificent one (rather like Satan in PARADISE LOST, as it happens). But the more I wrote about him the more I saw him as a man who had been greatly wronged, and one who, whatever he did, acted for the best of all reasons , the survival of his species! That is ultimately what THE VIEW FROM THE MIRROR is about, and why I call it a Darwinian fantasy. There is no good or evil in nature; no right or wrong. There's only survival or extinction.

However these days, I suppose I do deliberately react against the good versus evil business in fantasy because it has become such a cliché and, more importantly, it makes the book predictable. Once the arch-villain is identified, the rest of the novel is really just a chess game. I want to see realistic characters. I want my books to be more like real life, where people are complex and sometimes do things out of character. And where you never know what's going to happen next because the characters have a variety of motivations, not just 'Exterminate!' But having said all that, I'm finding that a minor character in my new fantasy trilogy does look like turning evil after all. This puts me in rather a quandary. Oh dear!

The new trilogy is called THE WELL OF ECHOES and the first volume, GEOMANCER, will be published in Australia in September 2001. It's set in the same world as THE VIEW FROM THE MIRROR but several hundred years in the future, when the world is greatly changed as a result of what happens at the end of the Quartet. I also wanted to get away from all the old characters, though that proved harder than I had expected.

The future has been created by the past and ultimately, all ten books of THE THREE WORLDS SERIES are bound together by it. It seems some of those long-lived characters had plans I didn't know about at the time, and some of them do reappear in later books. After 2500 pages of the Quartet, they'd learned a trick or two about survival. In fact you could say that the world of THE WELL OF ECHOES has been designed to achieve one character's centuries-old objective. Good or evil? Survival or extinction? I can't wait to find out myself.