Interview with Steven Erikson

Do you know if Tor Books plan to one day reach a point where they and Transworld can simultaneously release a Malazan novel?

SE: That should be coming -- TOR is releasing every eight months. By the tenth we should be in sync.

Who are your favorite fantasy authors/series?

SE: Oh I've listed them many times before, I'm sure.

Do you have any idea, using ballpark figures, how many books the Malazan series has sold so far?

SE: No, and I put my fingers in my ears when the subject comes up.

Any word on The Return of the Crimson Guard by ICE?

SE: It goes, although I could not tell you when it'll be ready. You'll have to ask Cam that.

What's the latest news on the Chain of Dogs movie?

SE: Right now all of Chris's energies are directed at The Dark. Projects as massive as Chain of Dogs will take time and plenty of groundwork before anything's set. He's got another feature film that Cam and I wrote to deal with first -- since it's already on the Telefilm funding track. And two other FF scripts where we've had a hand in at the writing stage. Writing up the 12-minute episodes for the Dark has been a blast (kinda like Bridgeburners in space!).

Just a couple final comments on the Malazan site. I checked in a while back and followed some fascinating threads (the q&a with Paul Kearney, for example) and one that jumped out at me was the thread on politics in fantasy writing. Cogent stuff. I am aware to some extent of Goodkind's objectivist dogma and his belligerent defense thereof. Years back I read through all of Ayn Rand's stuff, met Leonard Piekoff (the 'inheritor' of the movement at the time) and then, in my usual obsessive fashion, I researched Rand herself. One of her first tenets is: if one perceives a contradiction, one must challenge one's own assumptions. To follow: there are no contradictions. Now, that intrigued me, because clearly she lived in a different world from mine. The final nail in the coffin was reading about her personal life, wherein the greatest contradiction possible was revealed in a torrid, nasty list of backstabbings and betrayals and outright malice. And it occurred to me, if an idea collapses in its practciability then it's got problems (Thatcher took it to a similar extreme when she asserted that society does not exist, then promptly set about destroying every notion of society she could find). While Piekoff was very much a gentleman, most Objectivists OOTC (out of the closet) that I have met have come across as not only belligerent and arrogant, but also diffident, judgemental, inflexible and cold. All this tells me is that the philosophy attracts people with pre-existing proclivities (like Nazis to a swastika); and in the end the philosophy serves to justify the person's most egregious characteristics, no doubt to their own smug satisfaction. Leading me back to re-consideration of the tenet mentioned earlier.

Didactic fiction is a bore. I have always believed that Rand's first novel, We the Living, was also her most successful in the literary sense, all the more impressive for it having been written in her third language. Now, she made no bones in her later novels that the form existed in service to the theme. In We the Living, it was the other way round and for me far more powerful for that reason. A shorthand approach to her form of libertarian take on things can be had by reading Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' or of course Heinlein's 'The Roads Must Roll.' Both pretty much sum up Rand's ideas and in a lot fewer words.

Didactic fiction is a bore, but it's also impressively popular. Wish-fulfilment writing has always had its place, where the good guys win and the baddies, being weak and leftist and obstinate and pretty much useless in the face of manly rigour, are squashed flat (yeah, been reading Ringo again). Where it fails lies in its author's aversion to challenging his or her own assumptions (ironically) through the sweating-blood process of writing. As far as I'm concerned, if your theme survives the telling of the tale, then you effed up bad -- you weren't ruthless enough with yourself, with your most cherished beliefs. You didn't let your characters challenge them, tear them to pieces (as they are wont to do); you didn't let the story demand its own truth (which may be that there are many truths); in short, you took the coward's approach to writing fiction. But damn, it sells books, don't it?

Cheers to all,

Steve

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Interview by Patrick
fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com