Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: The New Wave writers were looked at with a bit of derision; most of them weren’t recognized for what they’d brought to sci-fi for ten or twenty years! Still, I think that media all around is darkening. Look at The Matrix, Buffy on TV, video games… Certainly there has been a trend in the comic book industry that has a postmodern, darker slant. Perhaps now IS the time for the Next Wave to gain some exposure. What do you think? Are readers ready for the Next Wave? Have they had their fill of junk food?

Matthew Woodring Stover: More than ready. There is a HUGE tidal swell of audience—the kids who have grown up on bubblegum fantasy are starting to look around for something more challenging, and more rewarding. Hell, all those Harry Potter fans aren’t going to be satisfied with the crap crowding the bookstore shelves. If they don’t find something at least that intelligent, we lose the best of them forever. They become the gray zombies who drift once in a while through the stacks in a bookstore, in bleakly melancholy reminiscence of how much they used to like this stuff…

I can’t tell you how much of the fan mail I’ve gotten for Heroes Die starts out with: “I had pretty much given up on fantasy until I found your book.”

That says less about the success of my book than it does about failures of marketing. There is plenty fantasy-for-grown-ups out there, but the publishers haven’t quite figured out how to tell people about it. That’s in the process of changing, I think. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Gabe Chouinard: You mentioned Greg Keyes and China Mieville. I’m inclined to throw in Michael Swanwick, Tim Powers, and even (to some extent) Tad Williams. Anyone else that belongs on that list? For the readers that want to know where to find these stories… where should they be looking?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Moorcock’s still writing. I found James Stoddard’s first novel, The High House, pretty impressive. I have considerable affection for Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books—no marketing failures there. And anyone who hasn’t yet read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is missing one of the finest series of novels ever written in the English language, genre or otherwise.

On the SF side, by far the best books I’ve read lately have been the Continuing Time novels by Daniel Keys Moran.

Gabe Chouinard: You also once told me that you thought George R.R. Martin was the only writer now who may save the epic fantasy series. Can you tell me a bit more? What do you see in Martin’s work that you don’t see in…oh, David Eddings?

Matthew Woodring Stover: First of all, Martin is a brilliant technician; there is not a single scene in Game of Thrones that is slow or superfluous. He is also willing to highlight a lot of the brutality and twisted sexuality that most fantasies leave buried. I admire the way he manipulates the conventions of traditional epic fantasy—he knows his audience has been reading this stuff for years, so we have certain expectations. He sets up traditional situations, then pays them off in extremely un-traditional ways. He’s writing for grown-ups, and setting a high standard—those books sell a TON, and when they’re all gone, his fans are gonna start looking for something that can move them the same way. That’s what I mean about saving epic fantasy: teaching the fans to insist on better books.

I’m not going to dis the Eddingses, either—they’re ploughing a different part of the field, that’s all. What they seem to be up to is fulfilling the expectations that Martin subverts, and working very hard to do so in satisfying ways. The Eddingses operate more through archetypes—I believe David E. himself has described the archetype as the “crack cocaine of heroic fantasy.” Their stuff is much more in the traditional vein, but they manage to generate a pretty convincing aura of mythic inevitability. To a classicist like myself, that has its own value.