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.

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.

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.

Gabe Chouinard: On another level, your writing reminds me of a lot of action and sci-fi movies that I’ve seen lately. I’ve been describing you as the John Woo of fantasy; a lot of poetic violence, non-stop action, no clear delineation between good and evil… how much of your style is a reflection of popular culture? Do you consider yourself to be competing against video games and movies? How much do other forms of media influence your writing style?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Hey, I like the John Woo thing. I used to describe myself in terms of Sam Peckinpah, but I guess that’s just showing my age.

Gabe Chouinard: Or, hell… Walter Hill? David Fincher?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Mmm, David Fincher. I am remotely acquainted with Jim Uhls, the screenwriter for Fight Club. In my petty, envious way, I really wanted to hate that movie. Instead, I am forced to admit it’s in my all-time Top Ten.

My style is a reflection of popular culture in only one way: I write the kind of books I like to read. I’m not competing against video games and movies at all; those are entirely different forms of storytelling. You can do things in books that you can’t do in any other format—especially, put your audience right inside your characters. That’s always my goal: to make you forget you’re reading a novel. I want to make you feel like you’ve lived through something.

What I’m competing against is shitty fantasy: the books that make grown-ups embarrassed to be seen reading a fantasy novel.

Gabe Chouinard: A strong statement. Care to list specifics?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Hell, no. I can piss off more people by sticking to generalities—a lot of writers who read this will be thinking, “Hey, he’s talking about me!”

In fact, I’d like to go the other way entirely, and say that every fantasy writer living today should get down on hands and knees to kiss J.K. Rowling’s, er, feet. She not only has managed to write fantasy that adults don’t mind being seen reading on the bus, she has also created millions of new fantasy readers out there. Ten years from now, a lot of those kids will be buying my books.

May the gods rain blessings upon Harry Potter.

As far as influences—well, everything influences me. Every time I come across a neat bit of storytelling, I file it away. I steal from everybody.

Gabe Chouinard: And yet, more and more, people (especially young people) are turning away from books, going to DVDs and PS2s and Digi-Poke-God-Knows-What for their entertainment. Do you find this overall trend disheartening? How do you get people to pick up your books?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Shit, Gabe, reading was never supposed to be for everybody. Universal literacy is virtually an American invention. Novels are for people who are comfortable using their brains, and we all know that isn’t the whole human race. I’m not one of those guys who says, “Well, at least they’re reading…”

Reading garbage is no better than watching garbage on TV or any other pointless time-filler. Garbage is garbage, whether it comes on a page or in a game cartridge. Anybody who wants to waste their lives on Digi-Poké-God-Knows-What is welcome to; I’m not gonna bitch. Better that than supporting the aforementioned shitty fantasies that crowd the good stuff off the shelves.

If this makes me sound like an elitist snob, it’s only because I am.

Gabe Chouinard: I’d like to talk a bit about this Next Wave of creators. While I think that there has been a bit of a cultural tilt throughout all forms of media, it’s quite noticeable in speculative fiction. The New Wave generated a massive burst of energy within sci-fi and fantasy; it was progressive work that had never been seen before. Now, we’re certainly seeing that again through the works of people like yourself, China Mieville, J. Gregory Keyes, Michael Swanwick… What do you think attracts you to realistic fantasy? Isn’t fantasy supposed to be ‘escapist fiction’ of the highest order?

Matthew Woodring Stover: You’ve said it yourself, Gabe: we’re the guys standing outside the edifice of modern fantasy… throwing rocks at the windows. Somebody needs to shake up this pile of crap before it collapses under the weight of its own irrelevance.

Gabe Chouinard: Agreed. I was in Borders today, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer… God, almost audaciousness of it all! Shelf after shelf of “Book Seven of—” Doesn’t there come a time when people want to throw up their hands and scream “ENOUGH!!!”? But then, I guess that’s where you come in, along with the rest of the Next Wave.

Matthew Woodring Stover: Personally, I’m in the doorway. That’s why Overworld partakes of so much standard, albeit altered, fantasy iconography—you know, elves and wizards and swordsmen and all. I’m the shadow on the threshold in the middle of the night, whispering “Hey, wake up! There’s a whole new world out here… Sure, it may be a little dark and scary, but I’ll show you things you can’t see during the day…”

Gabe Chouinard: Heh! Like you said, you’re working at tipping the balance away from the standard crap, while pandering to those same people by giving them the trappings of traditional fantasy. A sort of rebellion from within.

Matthew Woodring Stover: You can call it pandering; I prefer to think of it as luring. “Hey, kid, you want some elves and dragons? Step over here…”

Gabe Chouinard: But tell me… do you plan on going “all the way”? What kind of books will you be writing five years from now?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Good ones.

Gabe Chouinard: You’ve certainly been very vocal in your support of Greg Keyes and China Mieville…and I must admit, today I picked up Perdido Street Station by Mieville, based on your recommendation, and from reading King Rat—which was exceptional. What have you been reading lately?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I only read books in the genre when I’m between projects (unless an editor is soliciting a quote). I’m in the middle of a Star Wars: The New Jedi Order novel right now, so I’ve been sticking to heavy hitters like Hemingway (A Moveable Feast, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms) and Joseph Conrad (Nostromo and Youth). Right now, I’m in the middle of Don Quixote—hey, once a novel’s been in print continuously for five hundred years, I can guess it’s probably worth my time.

Gabe Chouinard: I’ve heard from writers that feel bogged down when returning to worlds that were popular with readers, as if they were expected to keep writing the same thing over and over. Do you ever feel that way? What keeps you fresh when returning to Overworld, or to Barra and Company? How do you keep the passion?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Easy: you just have to remember that a world is a very big place. The Overworld sections of Heroes Die take place in one single city. Think of the multiplicity of cultures on Earth in the 18th Century: travel five hundred miles and you might as well be on a different planet. Or take Barra & Company: Iron Dawn was set in Bronze Age Tyre. Instead of going back to the same environment with the same characters, Jericho Moon moved the characters a hundred miles southeast: to Jerusalem, under siege by the Nation of Israel. All of a sudden, it’s a whole new story.

By the same token, you should bear in mind that one lifetime has room for many, many different experiences. The idea that a character has one main lesson to learn or issue to resolve is a literary convention, not a law of nature.

That feeling of being bogged down arises from being bored with your own creation. I have news for those guys: if you’re bored, you’re boring. Nobody’s forcing you to tell the same story over and over. The ones who do are just goddamn lazy. If you’re not excited by the story you’re telling, shut the hell up.

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?”

Gabe Chouinard: So, I’ve just finished reading Blade of Tyshalle... and to be perfectly honest, I feel like I’ve just spent a week in Tijuana sampling every bottle of tequila I could find. That’s a compliment.

Matthew Woodring Stover: Thanks. I’ll take it as one. Now just imagine how I felt when I finished writing the book.

When Joseph Conrad finished Nostromo, he sent a telegram to a friend saying “I feel I ought to be congratulated, as one who has recovered from a long and debilitating illness.” When I finished Blade of Tyshalle, the email I sent to my family and friends read “DONE, BY CHRIST! Don’t bother calling for the next two or three weeks. I’ll be asleep.”

Gabe Chouinard: The first word that comes to mind in describing Blade of Tyshalle is, for me, relentless. It’s an intense storyline, which most authors would be tempted to lighten up with some humor, or even a sugary romance. You’ve avoided those things… what kept you from lightening things up?

Matthew Woodring Stover: What, you didn’t think it was funny?

Maybe I should have thrown in an absent-minded wizard, or a wisecracking dragon… Too often, comic relief is an author’s way of telegraphing to the audience, “Hey, just kidding. It’s only a show, folks.”

Well, guess what? I’m not kidding.

Which is not to say there are no smiles in the book—they’re just the hard kind, the ones people share when they’re fighting for their lives. Hesse put it well in Steppenwolf: “All humor is gallows humor, and it is on the gallows that we are constrained to learn it.”

Gabe Chouinard: Don’t get me wrong… I think that’s a strength! I’ve never been one for sugary romances or absent-minded wizards… but then, that isn’t the audience you write for. Just out of curiosity, DO you have a specific audience in mind when you write?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Yes, in fact, I do.

Me.

I’m just that arrogant, I guess. I am my own ideal audience. I’ve said it before: I write the kind of books I like to read. If lots of other people were writing books like mine, I wouldn’t bother; I’d just read theirs. Reading is a lot less work.

So, yeah. When I start to wander in a story—I fall into that “can’t see the forest for the trees” trap pretty regularly—the way I find my way back is to ask myself what would work for me as a reader. What would I be itching for? Then I try to find a way to scratch that itch in a way that’s satisfying not only viscerally, but emotionally and intellectually—and would leave me itching for more.

Gabe Chouinard: Almost everyone in the novel suffers. A lot. When things seem at their worst… they get even rougher.

Matthew Woodring Stover: Kind of like real life. But—also like real life—there is the occasional ray of sunshine. Just not always coming from the direction you expect. Part of surviving is learning to take your happiness where you find it.

Gabe Chouinard: As a writer living inside these characters for so long, what kept you from getting depressed and throwing yourself off the Sears Tower? I mean, how can you keep this relentless pace while writing, when it’s hard enough to read it?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Now there’s a selling point, huh? “Dude, you GOTTA check out this book! Made me want to slit my wrists!”

Writing it wasn’t depressing at all. Just the opposite. Sure, everybody suffers—just like in our world. But the book isn’t about their suffering; it’s about why they suffer, and what they do about it.

One of the primary themes of 20th Century literature has been the way the world—society, reality, what you will—inevitably erodes our hopes and dreams; there is volume after volume about the death of everything that’s fun about being human. There has been a time when a story could not be considered serious literature unless its protagonist is crushed by the futility of existence—the existential void—figuratively, if not literally.

I say, screw that.

Suffering is the fuel in the engine that drives the world. All progress is the result of somebody being unhappy—then making a move to change whatever it is that’s dragging them down. Suffering is not depressing in itself; what’s depressing is helplessness. What’s depressing is giving up. That’s why writing the book wasn’t depressing: because when these people hurt, they do something about it.

For me, that’s the opposite of depressing; it’s what keeps me alive.

Gabe Chouinard: One of the themes that you return to again and again is the idea of a person’s sense of individuality, and the power one can gain by recognizing that individuality and using it to overcome any adversity. In some ways, that reminds me of the old punk ethic of “DIY”, do-it-yourself. Are there parallels here?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I can see some parallels. They’re not intentional; I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. But yeah, there is tremendous personal power in recognizing that your problems are Your Problems; no matter how much they may resemble everybody else’s, they are as individual as you are. A great deal of trouble is generated in this world by people telling each other “You can only be Happy (or Successful, or Righteous, or whatever) if you try to be more like Us.”

There will always be people who want to knock your corners off so you can fit more neatly into their pigeonholes.

And a lot of them, it seems, write book reviews…

Gabe Chouinard: So, you’re a bit of a non-conformist. Has it been that way all your life? Is that what drives you to write such non-conformist books?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I’m not a non-conformist. I’m an individualist. No, screw the “ist.” I’m an individual.

Non-conformists are still mental slaves to the society they reject; they still use the rules of that society to define themselves, but negatively. They even have a uniform—I should say, uniforms, depending on the Non-Conformist Flavor of the Month.

Pretty much all my life I’ve just gone ahead and done whatever I thought was the right thing to do. It’s not that I don’t care what other people think; of course I do. It’s just that I don’t let it stop me.

I don’t set out to write non-conformist books, either. I just try to write honest ones. At the end of the day, what I do best is still pretty old-fashioned: they used to call it swords & sorcery. I just think—I really, truly, profoundly believe—that swords & sorcery (fantasy, SF, whatever) ought to be more than junk food.

If that makes me a non-conformist, then modern fantasy and SF are in a shitload of trouble.

Fritz Leiber wrote a novel called The Silver Eggheads, in which the narrator/hero is a celebrated author of “wordwooze”—which is a literary narcotic produced by machine, churned out in endlessly thick-volumed series, offering readers little soporific vacations from their real lives—and making sure they’ll buy the next installment. Leiber intended it as a satire on publishing, but his satire has become the truth. Our bookstores are full of wordwooze. Every genre, not just SF&F. You can’t get away from the stuff.

Yeesh. I hate that crap.

Gabe Chouinard: I dimly recall reading an essay from Ursula K. Le Guin in which she suggested that sf and fantasy should be reviewed within the crop of mainstream works—rather than as genre pieces—by professionals that actually KNOW what they’re talking about when dealing with a work’s literary merits instead of the current incestuous methods of reviewing. Do you think that fantasy and sf in general, and your books in particular, would benefit from a few changes in current practices?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Well, yeah, I’d like to think they would, but who knows? Most of the stuff in our genre doesn’t deserve consideration as anything other than genre pieces. Sturgeon’s Law: 90 percent of science fiction is crap—but then, 90 percent of everything is crap.

Maybe someday reviewers with real expertise in SF&F will start applying serious critical standards—and writing about them with eloquence and passion—rather than just cheerleading books that happen to amuse them, or that they expect will become successful. But any such transformation has to start from inside: we need to be producing more books that merit serious criticism before we can expect to get any.

I guess what I’d really like to see is less reviewers, more critics. After all, most reviews are really just book reports, wrapped up with a sentence or two on why you should or shouldn’t spend your money on this book. Maybe what we really need is someone eloquent enough to explain to all the Wall Street Journal types why they should be paying attention to SF&F. It takes great criticism to direct the world’s attention to the 5 or 10 percent of our genre (or any genre) that’s actually worth reading.

Gabe Chouinard: Another theme that you return to is the idea of fate, or lack of fate, or what-seems-to-be-lack-of-fate-but-isn’t-really. You don’t really offer an answer to anyone that reads the book, instead leaving people to formulate their own opinions on the matter. I find that intriguing; unlike so many authors, you don’t like to hold hands with the reader. Why aren’t you definitive? How do you resist the temptation to spell things out?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Easy. I hate storytellers who are constantly dictating to me what I should think. It’s why I don’t like Spielberg’s movies, for example, or Oliver Stone’s.

I had people ask me about Heroes Die: “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about Ma’elKoth. Is he a bad guy, or a good guy, or what? Am I supposed to like him or hate him?” My general answer: “You’re not supposed to feel anything but whatever it is you feel. Make up your own damn mind.”

Even Caine himself: his activities and attitudes in Heroes Die made a lot of people—mostly reviewers—uncomfortable. Many of them were disturbed to find themselves rooting for this ruthless, amoral murderer; they were even more disturbed by the lack of moralizing from the author. Some of them even invented a “moral progression” for Caine, to excuse themselves for liking him.

But I’m not a moralist. Just the opposite. My goal is to present a story as honestly as I can; what you think of it, and how it makes you feel, is your business. I’ll tell you what the characters think, and how they feel, but the rest is up to you. My hope is that some readers will take the time to read these books more than once. They might find that these stories hit them differently, a few years from now. The meaning of any work of art depends on who you are when you look at it.

On the subject of fate in Blade of Tyshalle, I’m going to hide behind a quote from Nietzsche: “There is no such thing as free will. There is also no such thing as unfree will. There is only strong will, and weak will.”

Gabe Chouinard: You have a lot to say about the so-called duality of human nature (again, like John Woo!), even going so far as to have multiple characters who are really more than one person, especially in the Aktiri. Do you think that duality is a common factor in the average person’s life?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I think “duality” doesn’t quite capture it; human nature is more complex than that. At the risk of sounding repellently New Agey, identity is not an object, it’s a process. It’s architectural: we are constantly building ourselves, layering each level upon the foundation of the last.

I could extend that metaphor into a lengthy essay, but shit—each of the four protagonists of Blade of Tyshalle is more than one person. I’ve spent three years and a third of a million words on the interaction of personal identity, fractal reality, mythic destiny and the Meaning of Life. I’m not about to bust my ass to summarize it here.

If the truth were simple, I wouldn’t write books. I’d rent billboards.

Gabe Chouinard: Coming from a theatre and acting background, how much did you draw upon your own experiences?

Matthew Woodring Stover: The biggest influence of my acting background on my fiction has been the ability to inhabit a character. A large part of effective character-creation on stage is training yourself to see the world the way the character sees it; if you can do that, all the character’s choices—no matter how bizarre or perverse they may seem from the outside—develop their own internal logic, because they arise from the way the character expects others (or the world in general) to react. That’s what makes these choices convincing, and goes a long way toward helping the audience believe the character is a living, breathing human being. That’s what Hari does in Day Two of Heroes Die, when it’s time for him to become Caine.

I do the same thing when I’m creating a character on the page. It seems to be working so far.

Gabe Chouinard: I hate to call Blade of Tyshalle a sequel to Heroes Die. I see it more as an extension of one large story. But tell me, is Caine’s story told? You left quite an opening in the last few pages. Will this grow up to be a Jordan-esque epic?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Christ, I hope so! Jordan-esque, at least, in the sense of Outselling Everything Else On Earth and Making Me Richer Than God.

Hey, a guy’s got to have a dream, right?

I’m kind of interested in discovering how many stories I can draw out of this vein before I start to repeat myself.

Gabe Chouinard: Are you going to revisit Overworld?

Matthew Woodring Stover: That remains to be seen. I want to; in fact, I have notes for two whole trilogies with a linking stand-alone. But the future of Overworld is subject to the realities of publishing, and the necessities of making a living. Which is to say: Blade of Tyshalle has to make money. It’s that simple. Putting out a book these days is expensive, and publishers aren’t in the business for fun.

I may write for love, but I also like to eat.

Gabe Chouinard: The scope of this novel is much broader than Heroes Die; there are more plotlines, more characters, more of everything. And yet, everything is fully-developed; even the villains are multi-dimensional. Is this your ultimate ideal—that everything and everyone has thousands of facets? Or is this simply your strength as a writer?

Matthew Woodring Stover: That’s exactly my ultimate ideal. One of my idols is Tolstoy—when you’ve finished War and Peace, you feel the the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs and the Bolkonskys are all people you know. You feel like you’ve known them for years, and you feel like you’ve lived through the Fall of Moscow.

I may never produce a story that true. But I don’t have any plans to stop trying.

In fact, I don’t really think of my characters as characters. I think of them as people. Even the minor characters are nodding acquaintances. They are real to me in a way that I can’t precisely describe.

Fiction, as Caine observes, is a slippery concept.

Gabe Chouinard: Obviously, you drew upon many philosphical, theological and psychological references for Blade of Tyshalle, in order to postulate the numerous philosophies underlying the novel. Did you do much research, or are you just a naturally deep thinker? (chuckle)

Matthew Woodring Stover: There’s only one philosophy underlying Blade of Tyshalle: mine. This book reflects what I believe.

All the mythologies, the epistomology, aesthetics and mystic traditions are just the bricks, the mortar and the paint on the walls.

I’ll admit to being a thinker. Whether I’m deep or not is for others to decide. The only research I did for the book was on gene-splicing for bioweapons, a little on antiviral agents, and a little on the symptomatology of rabies. All the rest of that stuff just happens to be swimming around inside my skull. I’m more like Tommie, from the book: I’m interested in things, and I pay attention. That’s all.

Gabe Chouinard: I think I saw some Philip K. Dick in there somewhere….

Matthew Woodring Stover: Sure. Along with everything else I’ve ever read, and everything I’ve ever done, everything that’s been done to me, and everything I know—or think I know—about the ways the universe works. I mix it all together, give it a squeeze and see what drips out. That’s how I write.

Readers could probably make a parlor game out of guessing from where I stole what.

Gabe Chouinard: I once asked you if you were worried about Cainism becoming a religion in reality. Your response was: “If only. That would REALLY piss some people off. But, y’know, like t’Passe says, the capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent.” I tend to agree… but you obviously hold some hope for that capacity, or you wouldn’t be returning to the idea again and again. So, tell me… how much of Caine is really you? How’s your capacity for personal freedom looking?

Matthew Woodring Stover: All of Caine is really me. So is Ma’elKoth, and Raithe, and everybody else in my books. Even Berne. Even Kollberg. If you had to pick a character who’s the most like my everyday personality, it’d probably be Kris Hansen.

My capacity for personal freedom seems pretty solid, these days. It hasn’t really been tested for a while. Ask me again after the mid-term elections.

Gabe Chouinard: You’ve also mentioned that at one point you’d thought Blade of Tyshalle might be your last novel, and you wanted to go out with a bang. You made quite a bang. But is this your masterwork? Your War and Peace?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I hope not. I want to make each book better than the one before. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be attempting anything on this scale again for a while. My sketches for future Overworld stories are more focused, more concentrated, less sprawling. More Hemingway than Tolstoy.

You know, I never wanted to be known as a series writer, but about halfway through Blade, I realized that I had laid down the underpinnings for a multiverse I can use to say pretty much everything I might ever want to say with heroic fantasy. So, let me put it this way: If my career is to go according to my fondest wish, it would be that Blade will be not so much my War and Peace as it is the second volume of my Remembrance of Things Past.

Gabe Chouinard: Do you have any promotional plans tied to the release of Blade of Tyshalle? Will you be hitting the bookstore circuit, signing autographs and pressing palms?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Doing these interviews is pretty much the sum of my promotional plans. I may show up at a couple of cons here and there, but book signings tend to be hard on my ego—sitting around watching people who have no idea who I am skitter nervously past the table, avoiding eye contact—it can get depressing. I have better luck with writing seminars and book club talks; at least I know I’ll have an audience. On the other hand, anybody who’s really desperate for my presence can email me at brkngmad@aol.com—or call up the Del Rey publicity director and badger her to send me out on tour.

Gabe Chouinard: Now you’re working on a novel for the Star Wars: The New Jedi Order series. Can you tell us how that came about?

Matthew Woodring Stover: I was approached by Jenni Smith, who had formerly edited Barra & Company over at Roc, but was by that time working with Shelly Shapiro at Del Rey. They had a specific book in the SW:TNJO story arc that they thought I’d do very well. I confess that it took a little convincing, but when Jenni laid out the broad concept of the story they wanted me to tell, I became very interested indeed. Jenni and Shelly went to bat for me with the folks at Lucasfilm Licensing—who of course had no idea who I am; most of the other TNJO authors are better-known. Jenni sent them copies of Jericho Moon and Heroes Die, and they must have liked what they read, because here I am.

Gabe Chouinard: It’s an odd dichotomy for a Next Wave author to be writing something so mainstream. But then, Kevin J. Anderson says he’s seen the sales of his non-licensed-property novels rise quite a bit from his recognition. Was there ever, in the back of your mind, that hope of “luring” some of those Star Wars readers over to the darker fringes?

MWS: It’s not exactly PC for a Star Wars author to be luring fans to the dark side, is it?

A Star Wars book is absolutely a boost to my career; it would be for anyone in the field, I think.

And the Next Wave is where you find it: I never set out to limit myself to the Next Wave model, that’s just a name for where my books fall. Of the writers we’ve been talking about, I’m probably leaning more toward the mainstream already. Hell, I’m looking forward to the Next Wave model becoming the mainstream. I don’t see any particular merit in being a fringe writer; I just want to write good books. And get paid for it.

Gabe Chouinard: Working in the Star Wars mythos is quite a departure for someone who’s known for hard-hitting, gritty writing. Do you feel at all limited by what you can write? How have you adapted to telling a Star Wars tale?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Anybody who thinks Star Wars can’t be hard-hitting hasn’t been reading The New Jedi Order. My novel, Traitor, is going to be just about as gritty as it gets. It’s in no way as graphic as Heroes Die or Blade, of course, but you can do a lot with understatement and suggestion, and the central conflict is as intense as anything I’ve ever written.

Frankly, I’m expecting Traitor to blow some fans’ minds.

GC: So, what’s on your writerly plate now? Anything that you can talk about?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Once I finish Traitor, it’ll be the first time since about 1995 that I won’t have a book contract—with its attendant deadline—hanging over my head. I’m not sure what I’ll do. Enjoy the feeling for a while, probably. Then start to panic.

I’ve always had a little wisp of a dream in the back of my head that I might one day throw open Overworld as a shared-world environment for anthologies. There are, after all, a lot of Studios, a lot of Actors, and a lot of history; the Studio operated on Overworld before Hari was even born. I’d like to anchor each volume with a novella from Caine’s early career, then see what some of the other asskicking fantasy writers out there can do with the concept. But those are far in the future, and won’t be happening at all unless that future turns out to be the Jordan-esque one we were talking about earlier.

Gabe Chouinard: You mentioned in another interview that I read (I believe it was on the Curled Up With A Good Book website…) that several writers had already expressed an interest in working on an anthology. Anyone in particular? Just in case an editor somewhere is reading this….

Matthew Woodring Stover: That was three years ago; I don’t want to put anybody on the spot. On the other hand, should the opportunity arise, I’m guessing I won’t have any trouble filling out a volume. You’d do a story, wouldn’t you?

Gabe Chouinard: What about the Flash Gordon novel you’ve written? Is it going to come out? Will we get to read it?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Your guess is as good as mine. My editor at HarperCollins Entertainment loved it. The marketing staff loved it. The Hearst Communications honchos loved it. In fact, everyone who’s ever read it—what’s the phrase I’m looking for? Oh, yeah—loved it… except for one yutz over at King Features (a Hearst subsidiary) who unfortunately is the actual rights manager for the Flash Gordon franchise. His official line is that the book’s “unwholesome.” I suspect the real problem is that the book’s good, and if he lets it see the light of day, it’ll make the rest of his Flash Gordon spinoff stuff look like the cynical, vapid, imagination-challenged fun-deprived pile of mastodon turds it is.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Gabe Chouinard: Hmmm…an unwholesome Flash Gordon, eh? I think that would be great to read!

Matthew Woodring Stover: It’s been done already, and not by me. You know which movie I’m talking about; I didn’t like it. In The Real Flash Gordon, there isn’t even any language stronger than the occasional goddamn. Anyone who knows me understands the profound respect I have for the classics in our genre. That’s why my book is named The Real Flash Gordon. My Flash is exactly the true-blue champion of the American Way that Alex Raymond dreamed up, and my novel works just like the original Flash Gordon strip: it goes like lightning from one incredible situation to the next, and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger. There is enough mind-bending super-science, rock-jawed heroism and plain old-fashioned adventure for five books; there is true love defying time, distance, even death; there is dark villainy of such depths as to beggar any power of description. There’s even some laughs. Not to mention gorgeous babes in scanty outfits.

Hey, like I said: it’s faithful to the source material.

Anybody out there who wants to read this thing, direct your calls and letters and emails to King Features Syndicate and Hearst Communications. All together now: FREE FLASH GORDON!

Gabe Chouinard: I know you don’t like to talk about your personal life, but come on; comic books, role-playing games… you’re just a geek like the rest of us. So, for all the aspiring writers out there (and you know they’re reading), what kind of advice do you have?

Matthew Woodring Stover: Yeah, you caught me. I’m a geek. SF, comics, RPGs… I was a little old by the time the really cool computer games came out, so I missed that particular addiction, but otherwise, I admit it.

In fact, I’m proud of it.

Because there’s no such thing as “just” a geek. I, for example, am a hardcore geek—and I’m also a 6’1” 210-pound superheavyweight kickboxer. Which means I can not only argue Nietzschean themes in superhero comics from Siegel & Shuster to Alan Moore, I can take you outside if you start to get lippy.

So here’s one piece of advice: take care of your body. You don’t have to run a marathon or study karate, but your mind can’t be healthy for long if your body isn’t. Mind and body aren’t two separate things, no matter how much some of us would like to pretend they are. A lot of intellectuals disdain physical exertion. It’s a mistake. Whatever you can do to make yourself healthier, do it. And make it something fun; taking care of yourself should never be a chore.

My only other piece of advice for aspiring writers is this: Tell the truth. Whatever you’re writing, make it as real as your skills permit. We pursue one of the most privileged trades in the world: we get paid to tell the truth. How many others can honestly make that claim?

Gabe Chouinard: Well, from a rock-climbing, kendo and fencing practicing, hardcore hiking canoist geek… thanks for your time.

Matthew Woodring Stover: My pleasure. FREE FLASH GORDON!