In a world where the Roman Empire never fell, a legion under the command of general Gaius Marcellinus invades the newly-discovered North American continent. We’ve talked to Alan Smale about his debut novel, Clash of Eagles.
It’s 1218 AD and North America has just been discovered by a Roman legion transported by Norse longships. It’s quite the setting. Can you tell us a bit about your new novel, Clash of Eagles?
Love to! In the world of Clash of Eagles the Roman Empire never fell, and now in the thirteenth century is invading the newly-discovered continent of Nova Hesperia. As the book opens the 33rd Hesperian Legion, formed specifically for the task, has landed at the Chesapeake Bay and is marching inland through the wilderness. They expect this to be an easy conquest, but when they come up against the Iroquois and then the Mississippian civilization at its peak, they discover they’ve bitten off far more than they can chew. Clash of Eagles is the story of how the Roman general leading the 33rd Hesperian gets drawn further and further into this new world, and specifically the great mound-building city of Cahokia, on the banks of the Mississippi.
Can you tell us a bit about your main protagonist, Gaius Marcellinus?
Marcellinus is career military and a veteran campaigner. He’s fought in Galicia-Volhynia and against the Ayyubid and Khwarezmian Sultanates, and onward as far as Bengal and Sindh, before being assigned to spearhead the Empire’s invasion of the Americas. One of the gradual changes over the past millennium is that promotion in the Roman army is far more merit-based, and it’s possible for men to work their way up through the ranks. Marcellinus was the son of a centurion, and went through boot camp with the conscripted men, serving as a centurion and tribune on his way to the top. But the military is all he knows; his family life up till now has been a spectacular failure. Amidst the action and adventure, one of key parts of Clash of Eagles and its sequels is sharing Marcellinus’s experience as he discovers more about himself, about family and community, while forging his path through Nova Hesperia. He’s far from a perfect hero. He makes a lot of mistakes. He has a great deal to learn.
You pay a great attention to historical accuracy, but at the same time this is alternative history. How do you deal with history in such a setting and did you do a lot of research for this book?
I did a huge amount of research. I’ve read well over a hundred books on ancient Rome and Native American cultures (and many other related topics) so far in the course of writing these books. The Mississippian city of Cahokia is a major setting for the story, and I’ve read some quite academic treatises on the archeology of Cahokia and other cities and towns of the period. Only a tiny fraction of all that research appears on the page, of course! But it helps to keep me honest, makes the details of the world as accurate and credible as possible, and gives me confidence that I’m doing the best job I can with it.
My alternate history branches off in 211 A.D. I know much more about the history of that world in the intervening thousand years than I’ll ever be able to use. The books are told from the close point of view of Gaius Marcellinus, and naturally he doesn’t spend much time pondering the past millennium. But it underpins the story and hopefully adds some depth.
What goals might you have set for yourself when writing Clash of Eagles and how do you feel about the end result?
I was fascinated by Cahokia, and I wanted to do it justice. I tried to bring the city and its the people to life in a believable way; I wanted to highlight the excitement and the action/adventure without losing touch of the human characters involved. I’m painting on a large canvas, but I’m also trying to keep the story tightly focused on the individual Romans and Cahokians at ground level. I don’t know whether I succeeded on every front, but I gave it my best shot. Overall, I’m very happy with how the book came out.
How do you deal with writing such diverse characters?
By reading a lot, and thinking a lot. To be ruthlessly honest, it may be impossible to completely put yourself into the mindset of a person who lived hundreds of years ago, who grew up immersed in way of life that are alien to you. Writing the Roman characters probably came more naturally to me, since I came of age in a culture with a strong imperialist history. I’ve spent a lot of time visiting and studying Cahokia and other Native American sites, and thinking about the city, and as much time or more reading books both about and by Native Americans. I hope I’ve made a fair and credible stab of portraying the Cahokian, Iroquois, Roman, Norse, and Briton characters.
What is it with Alternative History you find fascinating?
I believe that a great deal of history is contingent: given slightly different circumstances, different luck, even sometimes different weather on a critical day, key world events could have gone a completely different way. A lot of what we call “destiny” only looks inevitable in hindsight. It’s fun to explore other possibilities. Also, knowing what happened in our own history adds a depth and resonance. Good alternate history then becomes a dialogue between our reality and other possible realities.
How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurned you on?
I’ve been writing for almost as long as I’ve been reading; my first story was called “The Mountain Children”, and it was about three kids who had essentially grown up feral (although I doubt I knew that word then). They were based on the Tarzan of the old Johnny Weissmuller movies that still showed up on TV sometimes. Two girls and a boy: Val, Su and Chay. Children at home in the jungle, having adventures. I wrote all through my teens. Took a break when I went to university and for a while after, but I always knew that writing was going to be one of my main activities, all through my life.
Can you tell us a bit about the process that led to the book being published?
It’s been quite the journey. I began a short story called “A Clash of Eagles” in 2008. The characters, ideas, and setting gripped me, and hard. It ended up much longer than I was anticipating: 25,000 words. I’d written a novella I really believed in, and it was too long for any major market.
Fortunately for me, Dario Ciriello was publishing a series of all-novella anthologies, and I’d already sold him a 31,000-word novella for Panverse One called “Delusion’s Song” about the Bronte sisters and a time-slipping anomaly centered on Haworth. Dario took “A Clash of Eagles” for Panverse Two, and it came out in September 2010. Dario also sent in the paperwork to have it considered for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, which may have been a key branching-off point in my own life…
In the meantime, I was already working hard on the first book. Winning the Sidewise just spurred me on to work even harder. made me double down on it. And I think the award helped me when I was pitching the book.
I signed with Caitlin Blasdell of the Liza Dawson Associates Literary Agency in June 2012, and did a structural rewrite for her. A year later I signed a three-book deal with Mike Braff of Del Rey, and did some more rewriting and fixing for him. And now it’s 2015, and Clash of Eagles is finally coming out, and after a great deal of work and a lot of waiting, all of a sudden it feels like things are happening very quickly.
What is the hardest thing about writing?
Finding time to read. No, seriously. I still have a fairly demanding day job, and on top of that I’m averaging 15-25 hours of writing, research, and promotion every week. It’s very important to keep reading other people’s fiction, to stay current and get stimulated by other people’s imaginations. Fitting in the time to do that is hard.
As for the writing process itself: I find that things go pretty smoothly when I’m comfortable with the characters and plot direction, and when I’ve done the research necessary to anchor the scene. It becomes somewhere between hard and impossible if I’m not happy with where the story is going, or the action isn’t true to the characters. In fact, that’s often the first inkling I have that I’m going off the rails: I start slowing down, or grind to a halt altogether. That tells me I’ve gone wrong somewhere and my conscious mind just hasn’t cottoned on to it yet.
For your own reading, do you prefer ebooks or traditional paper/hard back books?
Traditional paper books. I love the feel of them in my hand, just knowing how far through the book you are from tactile information, and being able to riffle back and forth through the pages. I do read ebooks for convenience, but my heart belongs to paper.
What do you do when you’re not writing, any hobbies?
In my day job I’m an astronomer and data archive manager at the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. I mention that first to provide the context for the next thing: in what I laughingly refer to as my spare time, I sing bass with a six-person vocal band called The Chromatics. We’ve been together some twenty years now and done hundreds of performances at festivals, museums, conferences, and private parties. We sing regularly at science fiction conventions including Balticon, Shore Leave, and Farpoint, and were Music Guests of Honor at Philcon. In addition to our regular repertoire of original music and covers we have two CDs of educational, astronomically-correct a cappella songs called AstroCappella that are in use in schools across the country. A copy of one of those CDs flew on the space shuttle with John Grunsfeld, one of the astronauts who serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. Which makes it all the more appropriate that when we sing at the National Air and Space Museum, they set up a temporary stage for us under the full-size Hubble mock-up. It’s quite a backdrop for a music show.
What’s next, what are you working on now?
I’ve delivered Book Two in the Clash of Eagles Trilogy to Del Rey and am now working on Book Three. The third book makes me nervous because it’s so intricate, so I have a whole bunch of notes and about eighty thousand words of draft scenes and such; I’m basically sketching the whole book out before I write it in a way I’ve never done before. I still enjoy working on shorter stuff, as a break from the Epic Thing; I have a standalone novelette called “English Wildlife” coming out from Asimov’s in the fall, a story of odd relationships and secret history. And I’m collaborating on a story with another writer at the moment, which is an exciting challenge. It combines two of our favorite subjects in a rather offbeat way, and we don’t really know whether it’s going to work yet, but bouncing the ideas back and forth is a lot of fun!
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015
