Vengeance

Why did you write Vengeance?

I’ve long been fascinated by the fragility of political power, and in particular how the means of seizing or maintaining power can undermine the legitimacy of a nation. It happens all the time in history, and we’ve seen it recently in Australia, where I live. The current government is constantly undermined by the way the prime minister’s predecessor was overthrown in a backroom plot. In the US, Nixon’s presidency was fatally damaged, then destroyed, by the Watergate affair.

Musing on such events gave me the germ of the idea behind The Tainted Realm. The once great nation of Hightspall has been so stricken by earthquakes, eruptions and plagues that it’s in danger of collapse. Its people are burdened by a growing sense of national guilt about the nation’s brutal origins, and they feel that the stolen land is rising up to cast them out.

Then, at the worst possible time, they’re about to face a resurgent enemy they have no idea how to fight. This idea has all the elements I’m looking for in a story.

But you haven’t answered the question.

Sorry, got carried away there. I also loved Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books, and everything by Jack Vance, and the exotic stories of Clark Ashton Smith, though not for a microsecond did I think of imitating their work or attempting to write in a similar style. Rather, if I notice another writer’s influence in my own work, I rewrite to get rid of it.

So, my influences. Essentially I write the kinds of books I would have loved to read when I was younger—great, action-packed adventures roaming over vast and unusual canvases.

But I’ve also been influenced by my own working life. I’m a marine scientist, an expert in contaminated sediments, and for the past thirty years I’ve investigated pollution problems in Australia and around the world. My scientific background gives me a different way of looking at things and I often realise that I’m using scientific imagery to describe the things that happen in my books.

Perhaps that’s why I called my first epic fantasy quartet—The View from the Mirror—a Darwinian fantasy. It’s not about the battle of good versus evil but rather a struggle for existence between four different kinds of humans, all of them great, none of them evil, and each with a burning desire for survival.

Do you have a favorite character? If so, why?

I do, though it changes all the time.

Often it’s Karan, the heroine from The View from the Mirror quartet, because she’s strong and brave, sharp-tongued yet gentle and kind. She’s my sentimental favourite because she was the first character I ever fully created and I spent twelve years trying to understand her while writing and rewriting that series, over and over.

Sometimes it’s the scrutator and sorcerer Xervish Flydd, a scrawny, scarred, ugly yet charming little man who dominates large parts of The Well of Echoes quartet, and parts of the Song of the Tears trilogy that follows. Flydd emerged on the page fully formed; I didn’t know he was coming and didn’t have to work at him at all. Perhaps he’s unconsciously based on the author!

A few months ago I would have said my favourite character was Useless Ike, the protagonist of my humorous children’s series Grim and Grimmer, because Ike posed a particular challenge. I’d never written a series before about a character who was useless at everything, bottom of the class, got everything wrong and was so clumsy that he was constantly falling over his own feet. It’s not easy to convincingly turn such a character into a genuine hero. And yet, by the last book of the quartet, Ike is a genuine hero, and I’ll always love him for the way he did it.

But at the moment my favourite has to be Tali, from Vengeance, because she starts out a pitiful slave, her ancestors have been enslaved for the past thousand years, and at the beginning of Vengeance she’s lost everything, yet she never gives up.

How much of you is in your characters?

The good ones or the evil, lol?

A well-travelled writer will, in a lifetime, meet thousands of interesting, unusual and often quirky people from different cultures. And writers often have long-time partners and lifelong friends, yet ultimately the only person any writer can truly know, from the inside, is himself or herself.

Every character I write about is based in some way on my own life, thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences. For example, when I’m writing about Tali being very afraid, I’m thinking about times in my life when I’ve been uneasy, frightened or even terrified. Then I stretch or twist or invert my own remembered feelings until I have something that fits her character in her present situation. It’s much the same process for every character I write about, and every situation—the writer’s challenge is to make the character’s feelings real, yet different each time.

Are any of your characters based on real people?

None of the people I know are interesting enough to be in one of my stories, he chuckles.

Characters in popular fiction need to be larger than life; they should be the kind of people who say things we wish we had the courage to say, and take the kinds of risks in life we would never dream of taking. Sure, I know people who are larger than life in one small aspect of their lives, but at the end of the day they have to take the kids to school, then go to work and pay the mortgage.

What do you do when you aren’t writing?

Think about what I’m going to write next.

I used to bushwalk and scuba dive and do other similarly adventurous things. I also used to travel a lot for work. But, having been on about two thousand plane flights over the past few decades, I don’t have the same travel urge as I used to. These days I mainly read, walk, sit and think, plan new stories and, when it’s not raining, which is hardly ever where I live, I work in the out-of-control jungle that’s laughably called our garden. We live in the country on a few acres so there’s always work to do, and it’s nice to escape the computer screen and do some useful physical labour.

Have you always been a writer?

The funny thing is, I never wanted to be a writer when I was a kid.

I hated writing at school, and was in fact a rather lazy boy. I spent most of my time up the back of the class, daydreaming. But around the age of fourteen I decided I wanted to be a scientist, and at uni I studied chemistry and geology before eventually doing research in marine pollution. I became an expert in this field three decades ago, and set up my own little consulting company in 1986 to do this kind of work. And I still do it, when I have the time from writing.

How does a marine scientist end up writing fantasy novels?

I was doing interesting scientific work in great places, but it wasn’t enough.

About twenty-four years ago I decided I wanted to write a fantasy novel. I’d been reading fantasy for a long time by then, and ten years previously I’d designed my own fantasy world with maps the size of doors, dozens of ecosystems, nations and cultures, and ten thousand years of history. I began writing A Shadow on the Glass, the first book of what was to become the eleven-book Three Worlds series. At first it was incredibly hard and frustrating work but, within a month of beginning to write, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

What’s next?

I’m presently doing the final edits of Rebellion, book two of The Tainted Realm, and at the same time I’m working on detailed planning of Justice, the final book in the trilogy.

And after that—

When are you going to write another Three Worlds series?

Ah, my most frequently asked question.

At the end of each big fantasy series I always write something completely different. I do this for a number of reasons, one being to freshen and rejuvenate my writing. The problem with writing such vast sagas (the Three Worlds sequence runs to 2.3 million words thus far) is that I’ve used up an enormous number of different characters, settings and plot elements, and the more I write, the more I’m prone to repeat myself. Not that this is necessarily a problem—quite a few writers have made a career out of writing the same book over and over again. But I don’t want to do that.

Another reason is that, like most other writers, I crave variety: I don’t want to write the same kinds of books all the time. And a third reason: by the end of the last Three Worlds novel, The Destiny of the Dead, I was creatively exhausted and desperately needed a rest from that place.

That’s all very well, but what about the Three Worlds? What about the story you’ve been promising to write for more than a decade, the follow-on from The View from the Mirror to be called The Fate of the Children?

It’s next, I promise. Honest!

I’ll be finished with The Tainted Realm around the end of 2012, and I’m planning to start the new story straight after that. At this stage I don’t know whether it’ll be a single book, a pair, a trilogy, or longer. That will depend on what comes up when I reread The View from the Mirror, which I haven’t opened since the series was finished back in 1999. I’m looking forward to seeing how it reads after so long, and hoping I’ve forgotten enough of the story that I can see it with a fresh eye.

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