Interview with R. Scott Bakker

3 comments /

RB: With The Warrior-Prophet just released in Canada, when do you expect to see the next volume(s) published? Once completed, how many volumes will make up The Prince of Nothing?

RSB: The Prince of Nothing consists of three books, The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior-Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought. They tell the story of the crucial events that occur some twenty years before the Second Apocalypse begins. I have outlines (whose original forms, coincidentally, date back some twenty years) that sketch the story of the Second Apocalypse, starting with The Aspect-Emperor and ending with The-Book-that-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Whether these will turn into trilogies like The Prince of Nothing remains to be seen. My guess is that each will be a dualogy.

I once boasted while very drunk that I wanted to write something that would ultimately make The Lord of the Rings look like ‘Little Miss Muffet.’ It’ll never happen, of course, but I truly do want to write something worthy of the word ‘epic,’ hoping that even if I fail I’ve accomplished something interesting. Since buying into a series of books is very much like getting into a car with someone else behind the wheel, people should know why I’m wearing a crash helmet.

RSB: I took the plunge after finishing up the spring term. Against all reason the translation deals keep trickling in, and my fiancée Sharron and I are managing to scrape by. Having the Best Agent in the World helps… As it stands, I have very little time to devote to writing philosophy, which is probably for the best. Like sobriety, it keeps me from becoming too preachy. At the moment, I’m more interested in re-enacting the crime than I am in solving it.

RSB: First and foremost, Tolkien. Then Frank Herbert - especially the original Dune. In some ways I think I’ve never escaped the fences these two writers have imposed on my imagination. Outside the genre, Ernest Buckler has always been the model to which I aspire, both with regard to character and style. For some reason, I always keep a copy of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby within reach - just to remind me, I guess, of the sensitivity and nuance that thought and care can instil in one’s prose.

I just finished rereading Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, and have started rereading Deadhouse Gates, all so that I can catch up on Memories of Ice and House of Chains - I’ve just been so bloody busy! Erikson is single-handedly reminding me of how much fun I had reading before being institutionalized by University and ‘primary texts.’ Before that it was Mieville’s Perdido Street Station - an extraordinary book - and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which took some courage to read due to a bizarre near-death experience I had some years back. It’s the kind of book that carves its initials into your psyche. And before these it was Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, just to see what all the fuss was about. I’m still mystified.

RSB: I actually see myself as slavishly following Tolkien’s model… But then that was the point: to explore these enormously popular conventions by taking them seriously - turning them inside out, you might say, as opposed to upside down. When the first galleys of The Darkness That Comes Before were printed, Penguin sent me two boxes of fifteen by mistake, and following the helpful advice of John Marco, I started sending them far and wide, asking various people if they would be interested in taking a looksee. Now I knew nothing, and I mean nothing, about the bigger SF&F scene - I’d scarcely read three or four fantasy novels in the preceding decade - so I had no idea of what to expect. But I scoped out various websites, thinking the book would be better received by eggheads like myself. I started emailing queries.

Then I ran head on into this debate. First I received a couple of outright refusals of the ‘I don’t do epic fantasy’ stripe, then a couple of warnings: ‘Send it, but you should know that I hate epic fantasy.’ Given the hype surrounding Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, I thought this was understandable. Everyone knows someone who seems to hate popular things because they’re popular. You have those who cultivate what I call the ‘iconoclastic chic,’ on the one hand, and those who have a principled suspicion of the culture industry on the other. No surprise here, I thought. Every nook and cranny of culture has its own ‘literati.’ If SF&F is ‘paraliterature,’ then ‘paraliterati’ are pretty much inevitable, aren’t they? All I have to do, I told myself, is show them I’m the ‘real deal’ - they’ll come around.

So I posed a question on a message board where epic fantasy seemed to be taking a particularly hard beating at the hands of one of these reviewers. I realized something was amiss the first time I had my knuckles rapped for using the term ‘sci-fi’ instead of ‘SF.’ Then I ended up spending my time fending off a succession of strawman criticisms and attacks on my character - and I kept apologizing, thinking that it had to be my ‘e-tone’ or something like that. I mean, these people were all about celebrating difference and diversity, weren’t they?

No such luck. The grease was burning and I was on the grill!