ADAM CHRISTOPHER

in conversation with Chuck Wendig

 

 

Okay, EMPIRE STATE reader, you have now reached the official end of the book, but guess what? We're not done. Let's tear the narrative asunder and let its author, Adam Christopher, rise from the rift – or should I say, the Fissure? – and give some of his thoughts on the book, from where his ideas come from to the novel's genre-stylings to just who would play these characters on the big- or small-screen.

  Let's get to the interview, shall we?

 

The amount of awesome stuffed into the pages of thi snovel is jaw-dropping. Superheroes, detectives, robots blimps, threads of noir, alternate realities, weird science, Prohibition, and on and on. Where did the idea for all this come from?

 

Y'know, it's one of those things where a whole bunch of different ideas sort of accumulated over a long period of time, collecting and aggregating until they reached some kind of creative critical mass. There's three separate events I can remember well enough: a flight to San Francisco with a copy of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, which I thought was the most amazing book ever and in that weird kind of haze of a long haul flight thought wouldn't it have been great if Chandler had written the Philip Marlowe books with robots in them; a misheard lyric from a song by British Sea Power, which I became convinced was about the mysterious (and non-existent) polar explorer Captain Carson – as it turned out they were singing about a type of bicycle, by as they'd written an ode to an Antarctic ice shelf it all made perfect sense in my mind; a mistyped query on Amazon that gave birth to a new pulp detective hero. Those were the main story seeds, each potentially a separate novel initially, none particularly connected to the other.

  The rest of it came from a few pet obsessions – the Prohibition, the Golden Age of comics, and the retro-science of something that wasn't quite steampunk but which meshed with the noir of pulp detectives to produce some vivid imagery – fedoras and gasmasks, superheroes powered by rockets.

  And of course parallel universes. I'm not sure why I'm drawn to them – maybe seeing the Third Doctor take his mind-bending journey sideways in time in Inferno made a strong impression on my seven-year-old brain when I first discovered Doctor Who in 1985, but I'd always loved the idea of other worlds, exactly like our own, existing concurrently in the same space and time but just… somewhere else. In Supergods, Grant Morrison talks about how he used to stand between two mirrors and try to peer into the infinite, thinking perhaps the far-distant reflections of himself were in fact his alter ego from another universe, looking back. I did exactly the same thing!

 

I get a bit of the Morrison vibe from this (though less freaky and drugged-out). It's clear you're a comics fan You've chosen a world with only two superheroes – surprisingly minimalist. Why only two? Why not go hogwild and create a world with a whole pantheon and rogue's gallery to complete the deal?

 

Oddly, I've never thought of Empire State being a superhero book – it's a science fiction detective story to me, first and foremost, which just happens to have a couple of superheroes in it. But even so, they're products of, and powered by, science and technology rather than mystical rings or the light of an alien sun. And there's certainly no spandex in sight!

  The Skyguard and Science Pirate are in the story because they were the characters I needed. But you're right, I'm a big comics fan and superhero comics in particular are a real passion. I actually wrote Empire State after Seven Wonders, although the books are coming out in reverse order. Seven Wonders is my big fat superhero book, which most certainly does feature a pantheon of heroes and their evil opposites (and LOTS of spandex). I suspect, having written something which you might look at as a homage to the Silver and Bronze Ages of comic books, that Empire State was then a natural progression, focusing on just a few particular aspects of superheroism while I told a completely different kind of story.

  Having said that, there's something of an unwritten history in Empire State. The Skyguard and Science Pirate were the protectors of New York before they turned on each other, and as Rex watches their final battle over the half-completed Empire State Building near the beginning of the book he makes reference to the "Golden Age of Heroism" – clearly there was a time when superheroes were common, probably not just in New York but all over the US and even the world. Perhaps the Roaring Twenties was a decade of superheroics, before everything goes wrong with the stock market crash of 1929?

  There's plenty of scope to explore that era – in fact, I'm hoping creators will expand on this as part of the WorldBuilder project.

 

Any chance of EMPIRE STATE ever becoming a comic book? Who would you hand-pick to be the book's artist, in a perfect world?

 

Hey, I'd love Empire State to become a comic book! Right back when the early drafts of various bits and pieces were being read by the writer's group I used to belong to, I started getting feedback that it felt like a "graphic novel in prose form", as one reader put it! Much later, when Marc [Gascoigne, Angry Robot's publishing director] and I were looking at the cover roughs, he said he thought the one we ultimately selected looked and felt like the kind of cover you'd have on the front of a quality indie graphic novel, which I thought was a pretty cool way of looking at it.

  It would certainly be fascinating to see the transition from 120,000 words of prose into an ongoing series, although it would be a hell of a long story arc! Then again, think of the pay off for the reader when they get to the end! My dream artist would be J. H. Williams III, no doubt about it. His work is jaw-dropping – if you look at something like Batwoman it's like nothing else on Earth.

 

Private dick Rad Bradley was once known as "Rad Bradbury" – was this a reference to Ray Bradbury? You've got other potential allusions peppered throughout, too: Byron, Nimrod, etc. Are these on purpose? Any people might have missed?

 

Ah, the death of Rad Bradbury. He was the Amazon query fail – a couple of years ago, I was looking for something by Ray Bradbury on Amazon, so I typed in my search and hit enter. I looked away for a moment, then when I looked back was confused by the lack of results. The reason was a simple typo – I'd entered "Rad" instead of "Ray". Instantly the name "Rad Bradbury" leapt off the screen – this was clearly a private detective from a 1930s pulp novel, a tough guy, not afraid to punch his way out of trouble. It had a rhythm when you said it out loud, and a weirdness about it that felt just right, if that makes any sense. For some reason, he appeared to me immediately as a large black man, bald, out of shape but who you knew was a prize fighter back in the day.

  The initial draft of the book was called Rad Bradbury Versus the Empire State, again because I was going for maximum pulp. I figured soon enough that the name would be a distraction on the cover – people would easily mistake it for Ray Bradbury, or for some pastiche – so I shortened it to just Empire State, but the name of the hero stuck.

  Empire State took the best part of a year to write, and as with any writer I was so involved in the story and the characters that I really forgot about the origins of Rad's name. It was only when my signing to Angry Robot was announced that people started asking me whether Rad Bradbury was anything to do with Ray Bradbury. I was confused – I'd lived with him for so long that there was no connection at all for me, but I then realized it was a going to be a speed bump for readers, and why make trouble?

  I chose Rad's new surname because I wanted to keep the rhythm and the Rad/Brad beat that sounded so good in my head, so he became Rad Bradley. This was a much better name as not only did it lose the Ray Bradbury thing but it became a nod to another pulp detective, the great Slam Bradley, who appeared in the pages of Detective Comics a full year before Batman did.

  We were back to the beginning, to the 1930s, to pulp detectives and Golden Age comics. Rad Bradley was born.

  The other characters are less literary, more musical – as I mentioned, Captain Carson most definitely does not appear in No Lucifer by British Sea Power, but you'll find Nimrod, Mr Jones and Mr Grieves inhabiting Pixies songs (Nimrod's Son, Crackity Jones, and Mr Grieves, to be precise). Music is a big influence on my writing and I like to throw in imagery and ideas from my favourite songs where appropriate. There are a couple more buried in Empire State – see if you can find them! In fact, there are a number of songs which have a strong connection to the book for me, not just because they influenced the story or imagery, but because during the writing or editing I found myself listening to them on high rotation. Interested readers can go check out the playlist at the end of this chat.

  Byron might be named after the great poet, but he was a dog originally. Or, in the weird parallel universe where there really was a famous polar explorer called Captain Carson, he had a dog called Byron that he took everywhere, even the north pole. When Byron died, he was stuffed and now sits in Carson's library by the fire.

  Hey, there are an infinite number of parallel universes. What I just said was entirely true. Somewhere.

  Carson's history in the Pocket – and in the Origin, specifically his involvement with the development of the Naval robots – demanded a slightly different role for Byron, and I'm afraid a dog wasn't quite what I needed.

 

Every book has the DNA of its authors wound between the words and pages. Where are you in this? Not just the pop culture influences, but how is this book clearly a book that only Adam Christopher could've written?

 

You're enjoying asking the difficult questions, aren't you?

 

That's how my Angry Robot overlords programmed me. So please answer the question, and ignore the whirrin photon cannon at the small of your back.

 

I guess when it comes down to it you're talking about voice, and voice is something that develops over time and isn't something a writer can – or should – try and influence. It's also hard for a writer to see it themselves – Empire State was the third novel I wrote, and right now as we speak I'm in the middle of Night Pictures, my sixth novel. When I compare the two I can "see" that the same person wrote both, but if you were to ask me how I can see this, I couldn't give you an easy answer. Is that "voice"? I don't know. I'm going to pretend I know what I'm talking about and say "yes"!

  Actually, thinking about it, you've asked a devilishly difficult and also very important question. To me, you can always tell a Stephen King book is a Stephen King book. In fact, you can tell a Stephen King book is a Stephen King book so well that you can also tell that a Richard Bachman book is a Stephen King book! There's no way I'm going to put myself in the same sentence as King (and watch as I squirm to avoid doing just that – damn you, Wendig!), but it's a fascinating question.

  Also Empire State is pretty far-out and weird, and I certainly don't subscribe to the theory that everything a writer writes is somehow autobiographical. I guess there's a piece of me in all the characters, but isn't that the same for every writer?

  My brain hurts. Next!

 

The book keeps you guessing – you never know where it's going next. Further, allegiances are constantly in question and we have betrayals and double betrayals and all manner of plot tangles and plot twists. Hell, some characters are actually multiple characters (Chairman/Missingest Man/Pastor). How did you keep track of it all? Both before you wrote and during?

 

I outlined the book quite heavily, although I find I work best when my outline is more like a series of linked events. When I start, I usually know the beginning, middle and end, and probably a handful of the key scenes in between. Then it's a matter of stringing them together in the right order.

  I work that way because I tend to go off on tangents while I write, so a lot of time spent on a very detailed outline seems a bit of a waste when I end up ignoring probably half of it anyway.

  But another important thing for me – and, dare I suggest, most writers – is that when things get going, the story starts to write itself and the characters start to develop a sort of weird independence. So while a lot of the twists and revelations in the book were there are the beginning, quite a few were surprises even to me, the writer! The scene where Carson turns traitor and pulls a gun on Rad near the end came completely out of leftfield – I remember writing it, finishing the chapter on a cliffhanger, and sitting back from the computer for a few minutes trying to work out what on Earth was going on. I think I was also grinning from ear to ear for the rest of the night!

  As I'm sure you know, when that happens in the middle of a project, you know something good is going on. Originally, the Pastor, the Commissioner, and Judge Crater were all separate people – or were at various stages shifting combinations of two of the three – then suddenly their conjoined identities were revealed. It was almost as if the Pastor had walked into my office and whipped his hood off before laughing manically, like Number 1 at the end of The Prisoner.

  The Missingest Man in New York was actually a real person who vanished – in fact, his disappearance was big news in 1930, so much so that "Judge Crater, call your office" was a popular joke on the standup comedy scene. I knew I needed someone from New York – a real historical figure – to have an equivalent, evil doppelganger in the Empire State, and for a while I tried using various Mayors of New York City, or other official figures, but nothing quite worked how I wanted it to.

  Then one day I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry on Judge Crater quite by accident. It was one of those lightening bolt moments – Shazam! I had my villain!

  I find it fascinating how major events of the past can be so quickly forgotten. Poor Judge Crater, whose possibly mob-related disappearance was once such a scandal. And now he's a dimension-jumping supervillain with a few too many personalities trapped inside his skull.

  It's how he would have liked to have been remembered, I'm sure.

 

Probably the freakiest part of this whole book for me is the nature of the Enemy. A big ol' question mark hangs over the Enemy for most of the book and even once we realize the truth it still bakes the noodle. It's great, because in a roundabout way it's saying that the Empire State is its own Enemy, and that one's greatest foe is often oneself. But where did that come from? Was it always intended to be that way? Or was that part of the story that wrote itself?

 

That was one of the things I'd planned, for sure. I wanted to explore what would happen if you endlessly reflected the different "states" within the story – so, New York becomes the Empire State, the Empire State becomes the Enemy, the Enemy becomes…?

  I loved the concept of being at war with something you can't see and don't even know the name of – the fact that the Empire State turns its citizens into killing machines and sends them off into the fog, never to be seen again, is terrifying. The Empire State is locked in this kind of stasis, a never-ending nightmare. And then one robot comes back because the Chairman said it could, and up in the boardroom when he asks the machine if they can have peace the robot immediately answers back that they can, because the Chairman is really just talking to himself through the machine. It's pure horror, plain and simple. No wonder the Chairman has a breakdown when the truth finally hits him.

  But, as you suggest, there is more to it than that, and that's where the various interlocking parts of the plot came together in various independent stages. "Theme" is like "voice" – I'm not sure a writer can fully control it. So, one's greatest foe is often oneself – as with the two sides of Crater, both working in opposing directions although both leading ultimately to the destruction of both the Pocket and the Origin. Kane tries to enlist Rad but is led astray and turns against him, with his own internal struggle where he has to pick his loyalties. And then there's Rad and Rex – a quite literal example, two opposing forces who are the exact same person.

 

You took a trip to New York City after Empire State was written, yeah? How did that feel? Was that your first time to NYC?

 

Actually, although I've spent quite a lot of time in the US and had spent a night in New York en route to Toronto back in 2003, my first "proper" visit to the city wasn't until September 2011! But I'd done a boatload of research and I was quietly relieved that I hadn't screwed much up! Writing something set both in the 1930s and in a parallel dimension probably helped too, because it allowed me to bend the real geography and history a little to suit the story. But, whether I had encyclopedic, first-hand knowledge of the real New York or not, that would have happened anyway. Empire State is a work of fiction, and both New York City and the Empire State described within are fictitious.

  One thing that did strike me on that September visit was the scale of the place. The United States is a very large country, and New York City is a very large city, but you really need to go there to understand that. I'm a city boy myself, but nothing compares to New York. It's wonderful and amazing and gigantic. Definitely my favourite place on Earth so far.

 

Did you meet your otherworldly self somewhere in Manhattan? That's actually a fine follow-up: what's the Pocket version of Adam Christopher up to?

 

There's definitely an alternate version of me somewhere in Manhattan, but he's always one step ahead. One day, we'll have our showdown. Maybe on top of the Empire State Building, rocket boots and powered armour and all.

  Adam Christopher in the Pocket universe is a mean sumbitch, of that I have no doubt. He's cold, calculating, a total misanthrope. But not necessarily a villain. If Carson owns half a block of the Upper East Side, perhaps my alter ego has a similar complex a little further uptown, in the Pocket Harlem, which holds another set of secrets and impossibilities all of its own…

 

The classic question: let's say EMPIRE STATE gets made into a television show or a film. Cast your leads…

 

This question makes me nervous because I immediately think of Brown Betty, the episode of Fringe set in the 1940s which is pretty much how I see Empire State in my own mind. I should say I didn't start watching Fringe until long after Empire State was done and dusted, but now it's about my favourite TV show. More parallel universes, see?

  Chi McBride is my Rad/Rex, although with slightly less knitwear and colourful shirts than in Pushing Daisies. Kane Fortuna was – I tell no lie – based on a ballroom dancer, but I'd be very happy with Leonardo DiCaprio or Timothy Olyphant. Throw in Cate Blanchett as Katherine Kopek, Michael Shannon from Boardwalk Empire as the Pastor/Commissioner/Crater, Seamus Dever (from Castle) as Grieves, Joseph Lyle Taylor (from Justified) as Jones, and Gillian Jacobs (from Community) as Sam/Lisa Saturn and I'd be pretty happy. Captain Carson/Nimrod for me really is the late, great TP McKenna, who was so good in British series like The Avengers and Doctor Who, but Richard Griffiths would do nicely. The enigmatic Byron just has to be Kevin Spacey. I'm sure he wouldn't mind being stuck inside a big helmet for the whole thing.

 

Chi McBride. Yes. Loved him all the way back in The Frighteners. Though I admittedly had Rad as a Ving Rhames-ian character, but these days Ving might be getting a little long in the tooth.

 

Oh, Ving Rhames! He'd be great! I think he could still play it, too. See, this is the danger when you ask this kind of question. I most definitely "cast" my characters when I write, and I'm sure most readers do the same. But the beauty of fiction is that what I saw in my head while writing is completely and totally different to what you saw when reading. Every single person picking the book up will have a different experience and will conjure their own images (and cast) in their minds. But, hey, that's how it works… and it sure is fun to compare notes. If any casting director is reading this *cough*…

 

So. The big question. The corker. Any chance of a sequel? Might there be other Pocket cities? Care to share what you feel might've happened to Rex and Kane there in the Fissure?

 

Empire State has a definitive end, but that's not to say the story is over. Carson is now in charge and Rad appears to have come to terms with the rather small universe he inhabits, but how long will that last? Carson wants to explore the edges of his little world in his airship… will he be able to resist attempting a journey beyond the fog, to the lands of the Enemy? And what else is out there? Rex and Kane didn't appear back in New York, and they're not in the Empire State… so where are they? There's a story waiting to be told, I think!

  The Empire State is a reflection of New York created by a very specific, single event, so I don't think there are any more discrete pocket universes. However, the Empire State is an imperfect copy, a degraded, second-generation clone of the original. Beyond the Empire State is the lands of the Enemy, which is itself an even more damaged, degenerated reflection of the Empire State. And so on, and so forth – I think there are endless further reflections, each more broken and dangerous than the last, until finally you probably get nothing but realms of white noise as the signal from the Origin – New York – is finally worn out.

  But if the Enemy is out there, beyond the fog, what lies beyond the Enemy? And further, and further? How far does Carson want to take a look? And if Rex and Kane didn't make it back to either the Pocket or the Origin, did the unstable fissure throw them somewhere further away?

  And if the Pocket is a protrusion of sorts of our universe into another dimension, what was there before? Is there something outside the Pocket? Maybe something that resents the intrusion…

  I like the idea that the Enemy, while being this chaotic, discarnate force, itself a corrupted reflection of data from the Empire State, may develop some kind of intelligence of its own. Perhaps a distillation of the Chairman, the Pastor, the Skyguard, etc, further distorted, further reduced and compressed into something totally evil which leads to the birth of Enemy as a single, sentient figure. A Satanic supervillain in a Sauron-meets-Darth Vader sort of way. And what if the Enemy managed to escape and get out of the Pocket altogether, into New York?

  Huh. Ask me about that sequel again…

 

Thanks, Adam, for submitting to this interview! You will, ahem, notice that I've holstered the photon cannon.

 

Always a pleasure, Chuck! Now, if you could just untie my hands, there's a good fellow…

 

Chuck Wendig is the author of BLACKBIRDS (Angry Robot, May 2012) and its sequel MOCKINGBIRD, as well as the "vampire-in-zombieland" book, DOUBLE DEAD, from Abaddon. You can find his thoughts on the writing life, including interviews with other writers (and another interview with Adam Christopher!) at terribleminds.com.