An Interview with K. J. Bishop
Mike Simanoff: Besides books, did anything else inspire you to write your novel or influence the story?
K. J. Bishop: Travel, certainly; I was inspired by places I’ve been to. Regarding the plot—and this is back to evil again —one important event in The Etched City is based on an actual murder. It happened in the family of a girl I knew, years ago. Obviously I changed a lot of the details. But it was this thing where professional criminals took revenge for something through someone’s family. It made me think a lot about humankind’s perennial fascination with violence—from which I don’t exclude myself. I love westerns and gangster movies. I guess we like to go to the movies and identify with the powerful figure of the killer, and trick ourselves into feeling stronger and safer; even if we really know that it takes more courage and more genuine strength to abandon the power trip and put the gun down.
Mike Simanoff: M. John Harrison has written that “[y]ou cannot make a reliable map” and that “[t]he great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric.” Your lands likewise have a rich but uncharted geography and eschew the maps and tedious explication of commercial fantasy. How did you create the geography of The Etched City and what are your thoughts on world-building in general?
K. J. Bishop: For years I’ve had a mental image of people living on a very high plateau with a desert underneath. I like something about that, aesthetically. To a large extent the characters brought the geographical elements with them; there were certain environments they wanted to be in. The Copper Country has some basis in reality. It’s a mixture of outback Australia and Morocco, via Sergio Leone. Ashamoil is more nebulous; I couldn’t tell you much about what it looks like. I took a few things from the place where I live, which is a Victorian-era suburb, with bits of old industrial architecture and places where the trees are getting the better of the buildings. There’s a bit of Rome in it, and some imagery from India, which I’ve only seen as an armchair traveller. But I tended to use whatever my subconscious came up with, if it seemed to fit. I was usually just trying to create a climate, an impression. I hoped that if I described details now and then, the reader would fill in the rest to his or her own liking.
On world-building in general, I’m not sure that I have any firm opinions. I don’t have the kind of mind that thinks up mappable, explicated worlds, so it’s probably a good thing that I’m not interested in making them. An imagined place can have an incredible presence—think of Gormenghast—without having long histories or architectural plans to shore it up. Or you have Jeff VanderMeer’s city of Ambergris, which he presents both as fiction and as metafiction, and that works wonderfully; that’s the particular style of his magic show. But I also enjoy the immersive experience of being in the mapped kind of fantasy world, as long as there’s a sense of wonder when I look around. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a very solid illusion, but he still presents it as myth; there’s still the sense of “Once Upon a Time” in it. I think it’s when you don’t have that bit of fairy dust, that feeling of a tall tale, that fantasy becomes tedious.
Mike Simanoff: You mentioned that you didn’t start writing until you were in your 20s. What were your first stories like, and how do you think you’ve developed since then?
K. J. Bishop: The first things I wrote were about a sort of fairyland where some of the otherworld denizens had kept in touch with human society, and had brought some of the technology into their world, so they had their own versions of cars and TV and things. They weren’t proper stories, just fragments. I only wrote three stories, about a year apart, before I got started on The Etched City. They were all decadent urban fantasies. Two got published. The first one, “The Art of Dying,” had the cliff and the desert, and a beta version of Gwynn, who gets the full treatment in The Etched City. Since then I’ve gotten more interested in surrealism and in the fantasy world as a purely psychological, dreamlike terrain. Hopefully I’ve learned a few technical things about writing, too.
