Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: That’s an interesting view, which I don’t think I’ve heard before. So, how do you contend with people that look down on fantasy and sci-fi authors? You know the ones… “OK, but when are you going to write something serious?”

Matthew Woodring Stover: You mean, like my mother? I tell them that I already write something serious. Everything I write is serious as an Ebola outbreak in downtown Manhattan. It’s just not solemn—it’s a sad fact of our society that solemn is so consistently confused with serious, when they’re not at all the same thing.

Fritz Leiber once wrote words to the effect that the only way to really teach somebody is to get them laughing so hard they don’t notice the lesson.

Who’s the biggest driving force in changing the world as we know it? Software designers. Engineers. Research scientists. What do they read? SF and fantasy. Who’s the biggest potential driving force for future changes in our new millennium? The kids growing up with big imaginations, high intelligence, and flexible minds. What do they read? You guessed it.

Serious enough, I think.

Gabe Chouinard: You seem a bit preoccupied with violence in your work—violence committed by your characters, violence against your characters, even violent uprisings. Does this appeal to the average reader? What is the appeal to yourself?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I should point out here that the original title of Heroes Die was Act of Violence: that novel is so bone-crunchingly, blood-spurtingly graphic because the realities that underlie violence-as-entertainment form a large part of its thematic structure.

Violence—whether fantasy, as in books or movies or campfire tales; controlled and ritualized, as in boxing or football; or flat-out ugly, as in gang fights and border skirmishes and ethnic cleansings and all-out wars and the occasional bombing raid on Iraq—has always been one of the two primary entertainments of humankind… the other being sex. In our current culture, violence is ubiquitous, from cartoon shows to the evening news. Why? Simple: because it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else.

Does it appeal to the average reader? Christ, I hope not! Screw the average reader—I want exceptional readers. People who are average don’t read SFF in the first place.

Gabe Chouinard: In your concept of Earth and Overworld, you postulate a multitude of realities akin to Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. Are there other worlds out there with other Aktiri, waiting for their own stories to be told?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Wait and see. Beyond this, deponent respondeth not.

Gabe Chouinard: Your writing itself reminds me much more of Moorcock than Tolkien. At a time when the Robert Jordans and Terry Goodkinds are burning up the bestseller lists, you’ve chosen a different route that captures the spirit of the New Wave of sci-fi and twists it on its ear. Did you consciously set out to tell a different type of story?

Matthew Woodring Stover: You better believe it. My first goal was to write a fantasy novel that was NOT the umpty-seventh rehash of a Not Quite Final Battle of Good vs. Evil. Those kinds of fantasies have their place, just like junk food can have its place in a balanced diet. But just because it has its place doesn’t mean it’s anything but empty calories.

As one character in Blade of Tyshalle puts it:

“You’ve guessed by now that what you are seeing is a Fantasy—what humans call ‘illusion.’ There will be those who will try to tell you that Fantasy is the opposite of reality, that it is the same as lies… that it is a lie because it is a Fantasy. I tell you this is not so.

“It is the greatest gift of my people, that we can bring our dreams to life for other eyes. Fantasy is a tool; like any tool, it may be used poorly, or well. At its best, Fantasy reveals truths that cannot be shown any other way.”

I’m not bashing Jordan and Goodkind and their legions of imitators; Jordan especially is very good at what he does, and they’ve created a huge readership out there. All I’m saying is that there can be more to fantasy than simple escapism. It doesn’t have to be empty calories. You can get real food.

But you have to ask for it.

As long as publishers think that the only market is for M&Ms and Doritos, they’re not going to spend their money filling shelves with swordfish steaks and roast duckling.

That’s what the New Wave did for SF: injected real literary quality—a concern with character, relevance and plain old-fashioned good writing—that helped rescue SF from the scrap heap of spacecraft, robots and rayguns.

The same thing is starting to happen in fantasy: people like Greg Keyes and China Miéville—and me—are trying to push the envelope, moving away from the standard models, into darker, grittier, more complex constructions, where issues are blurred in as many shades of gray as real life, where even magic is treated as a branch of physics.

We’re the changelings of the New Wave. I’d like to think of what’s happening at the dark fringes of fantasy these days as—if I can borrow a phrase from you—the Next Wave.