Fantastic Metropolis

Gabe Chouinard: One of the things that I like best about your books is that you keep me guessing for the duration of the story. You’re willing to do just about anything to your characters, which makes the threats seem more realistic. How much of this do you decide beforehand? Do you know who will live, and who will die?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I produce very detailed outlines, which are necessary to keep the complexities of plot more-or-less in order. But an outline no more survives contact with the story than a battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Things that seem perfectly reasonable in outline often look pretty damned stupid when you actually spin out the tale. In an outline, you can just push characters around; they’re really nothing more than the X’s and O’s on a football coach’s chalkboard. Once a character begins to live and breathe, they push back.

There is sometimes a character or two I have decided in advance will die, for plot purposes, usually early in the story. Other than that, anything goes. NO ONE IS SAFE. Ever. I don’t write with one eye on the future of a series. All I care about is making the book I’m writing as close to perfect as my skills allow.

That being said, though, I don’t indulge in gratuitous character-slaughter, either. A major character is an investment of a hell of a lot of my time, energy, and emotion. If I’m going to kill one off, I damn well want to get my money’s worth.

Gabe Chouinard: The fact that you don’t write with ‘one eye on the future of the series’ may be what makes your novels stand out amongst the crowd of bloated epic fantasies on the shelves. As a matter of fact, one criticism I heard from someone that had read Heroes Die was that they didn’t think there needed to be a sequel. Now, I know that Blade of Tyshalle isn’t a “proper sequel” in most aspects. But to those critics… how do you justify returning to the same characters, while railing against bloated epics?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Was I railing? I thought you were railing; I was just nodding and smiling…

Straight face now: I don’t justify squat. I don’t believe in it. The books will justify themselves, or they won’t. If they don’t, nothing I have to say about them matters a damn, anyway.

Gabe Chouinard: You envision a future Earth that is, to a certain degree, decaying with corruption. How much of this is a reflection of what you see around you today? Are we headed toward Hari’s caste-system?

Matthew Woodring Stover: It’s entirely a reflection of what I see around me today. It is a function of American culture, in our dream of the classless society: increasingly, You Are What You Do. All our old modes of self-definition—village, clan, tribe, ethnicity, religion, you name it—are continually eroded in order to make us more smoothly interchangeable as clerks or data entrars, secretaries or lawyers or doctors, teachers, mechanics, cops, whatever. In America, it’s considered threateningly bigoted to even mention our differences, unless those differences are purely voluntary, like your politics, your taste in music—or your job.

Pile on increasing deregulation of international business, the increasing power of corporations to buy and sell entire governments, a few details like the repeal of the estate tax… It’s almost hard to see how a caste-based society can be avoided.

Unless enough people wake up to the ugly trend to start the pendulum swinging back. You never know. Sometimes, people can surprise you that way.

On the other hand, I don’t see Hari’s Earth as corrupt. The term corruption implies a moral judgment that I’m not willing to make: it implies that the civilization so judged falls short by comparison with some other. It pretends that there has been, at some time, a human civilization where there really was “equal justice for all.”

Like the man said: it just ain’t so.

Hari’s Earth is human, that’s all. Too much like ours.

Gabe Chouinard: I think it was Orson Welles that said; “Nobody gets justice. People get good luck or bad luck.”

Matthew Woodring Stover: Uncle Orson knew his shit. To quote Blade of Tyshalle: “Justice? What’s that? Put some justice in my hand. No? Then just tell me what it tastes like, huh? What’s it smell like? What color is it? Don’t talk to me about justice. We’re both grown-ups here, right?”