Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: So, Matt… you have a new novel coming out in April entitled Blade of Tyshalle. This is not Fist of Caine, which was solicited for Fall of 2000 in the back of the paperback version of Heroes Die. Can you tell us what happened? Is it the same story?

Matthew Woodring Stover: It’s the same story. Only more so. This book was originally slated for Summer ‘99, but a number of things got in the way—like a fairly major illness that stopped me from doing productive work on it for nearly a year and a half (though I never stopped trying). And then the story became vastly more complex than I had originally planned. The novel ended up taking three years to write (and rewrite), and about six months to edit, trim and revise.

The Fist of Caine mix-up came about through a series of miscommunications between me, my editor, and the Del Rey production department; by the time we straightened it out, the mass market Heroes Die had already gone to press. Nobody’s fault but mine—I have a hell of a time with titles. My novels generally go through half a dozen apiece. Blade of Tyshalle, at one point or another, has also been called The Blind God, The Hand of Caine, The Mark of Caine, The Caine Vector, and Act of War.

Gabe Chouinard: Moral ambiguity plays a strong role in your fiction. In fact, ambiguities of all sorts are threaded throughout your work, which is a far cry from the black-and-white approach of most fantasy. Was that a deliberate choice of yours?

Matthew Woodring Stover: There is no moral ambiguity in my work.

Did everybody hear that? Let me say it again, louder: THERE IS NO MORAL AMBIGUITY IN MY WORK.

It only looks ambiguous if you insist on framing a story’s conflict in terms of Good vs. Evil. It’s not that simple. Real life does not operate in those terms. Neither does my fiction.

I know it’s sometimes hard for people to get their minds around, but the whole concept of the Good/Evil duality was, essentially, invented circa 600 BCE in Persia. You’ll discover that Evil does not even appear in the Old Testament of the Bible until the Prophets—the books that were written after the Persian Captivity. It doesn’t appear in the Illiad, or the Odyssey, or any work by Sophocles, Euripides, or Aeschylus.

People who try to tell you that life is about the struggle between Good and Evil are either 1) fooling themselves, 2) lying to you, or 3) both. As Caine himself put it, “When somebody starts talking about good and evil, better keep one hand on your wallet.”

The black-and-white approach of most fantasy is bullshit. It’s laziness. By positing a Force of Supernatural Evil, the writer is relieved of the necessity of motivating his antagonists. “The Devil made me do it!” Or his protagonists, for that matter. “Of course they must be destroyed! They’re EEEEEvil!”

Yeesh. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s sick to death of that crap.

Gabe Chouinard: Your Caine books aren’t easily classified; there is fantasy, science fiction, even touches of horror and ‘conspiracy theory’. Though a good third of it is set on a future Earth, Heroes Die is subtitled “A Fantasy Novel”. How do YOU describe your work? Would you consider yourself a “fantasy writer”?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I tell people I’m a fantasy writer—but then, every novelist is a fantasy writer. All fiction is a subset of fantasy.

Think about it this way: What we now consider “fantasy” is the original whole from which all literature is distilled, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh, running through the Iliad, and Odyssey, the Bible, Beowulf, the Bhagavad-Ghita—the list is infinite. Examples are found in every culture. Every other genre (I should say: every SUBgenre) is defined by eliminating fantastic elements: by carving away the gods, fate, magic, whatever. “Fantasy” is what we call a novel that partakes of the whole of the human literary heritage.

So, yeah. I’m a fantasy writer. It was good enough for Homer, and it’s good enough for me.