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Further Curated Sayings of Cû'jara-Cinmoi

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H:
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
(April 03, 2008)

- After writing a fantasy trilogy, what prompted the idea of writing a thriller? At this juncture in your career, did you or your agent think that it could be a risk to switch genres like that?

Three things actually came together in the genesis of Neuropath. The first was a family get together, though for the life of me I can’t remember what the holiday was. A Scientific American Frontiers show on brain science just happened to be on the tube, and over the course of several minutes all the people who had been lurching around laughing and drinking found themselves glued to the screen. Soon the house was completely quiet, except for the odd “No way!” or “Whoa that’s creepy!” That got me thinking about cognitive science, which I had always been interested in, as something that would interest a broad cross-section of people.

The second thing was teaching Popular Culture at a local college. It’s an axiom of human nature, I think, that if you lock a group of humans in a room long enough, they’re going to invent their own languages. That’s the way I think of philosophy, as a big room that’s been locked for a long, long time. So the challenge I set for myself teaching this course was to take a bunch of the issues I’d been writing about and debating and make them as accessible and as pertinent as possible to my students. I was also bent on taking a non-semiotic approach to the question of pop culture (just as the man with a hammer sees all problems as nails, English professors tend to see all problems as texts) so I came up with idea of interpreting contemporary culture as a prosthetic for our stone-age brains. The class was a blast – so much so I’ve actually dedicated the book to my old students. Many of the claims that appear in Neuropath were formulated in that class.

But my wife, Sharron, is the real reason for writing this book. Fantasy, well, let’s just say it isn’t her cup of tea. And yet she’s my primary reader and editor, so she’s been quite literally suffering for my art for a few years now. Since the psychothriller is her favourite genre, I suggested, as a warm, loving, generous gesture on my part, that I try writing one after the trilogy was completed. She laughed – a little too hard, I think – and told me (and this is almost a direct quote): “You couldn’t write a thriller if you tried! You-you, I know you. You’d have to stuff it full of all kinds of literary and philosophical crap, and that’s not what psychothriller’s are about. You’d just screw it up!”

So what began as a gesture of love on my part was instantly transformed into an exercise in spite. I had to prove the smug little… wonderful woman wrong! Given the fact that I’m always mucking up the wash, folding clothes “screwy,” loading the dishwasher “backward,” missing spots when I sweep or vacuum, and so on, I gotta tell you, it was pretty gratifying to actually hear her admit that she was wrong!

My agent did have concerns, but these seemed to vanish after he read the first draft. It’s always a risk when you jump genres, and things could still turn out to be pretty ugly with Neuropath – the business is just that capricious. But hearing your wife admit she was wrong – man, mission accomplished.

- How would you describe Neuropath to potential readers?

You are not what you think you are. Neuropath pursues that fact through a story of lust, betrayal, and a string of serial murders unlike anything you’ve seen before.

- Other than producing a good novel, were there any specific objectives you set about to reach with Neuropath? Looking back now that the novel will be published in a few weeks, do you feel that you have succeeded/failed in those endeavors?

I just got my mitts on the Penguin advanced reading copies last Friday, and I did what I always do when I get an ARC of one of my books for the first time, I play the Cringe Game. The cringe game consists of taking the book, fondling it for a minute or so, then randomly opening it here and there to this or that page, and reading a paragraph or two. Your fingers cramp. The muscles in your back tense. Your shoulders draw up. A burning in your gut bends you kneeward. You grimace, and a voice that sounds a lot like your own says, “Yeesh, I write like crap.”

This has been my experience with every book I’ve written so far: I want to take it back, to burn or to rewrite it, or to a least insert several footnotes apologizing to the reader. Or maybe slip a five dollar bill between the pages, with that note says, “Go to DQ, buy yourself a sundae.” I can honestly say that I suffered none of this with Neuropath. It was actually kind of surreal. Now this could be because the book is simply better, but since I was at Ad Astra (a con in Toronto), I was waylaid by Rob Sawyer and Hayden Trenholm before I could sit down to play the Cringe Game. I think I was on my seventh pint before I got a moment alone.

I just wanted to write a freaky-deaky thriller that would enthrall readers while making them squirm – both viscerally and intellectually. It’s not going to work for everyone – no book ever does – but I think it will succeed for quite a few.

- With this psychological thriller, you demonstrated that R. Scott Bakker has what it takes to write for a mainstream audience. And yet, do you feel that the mainstream readership is ready for something like Neuropath?

I don’t know who this R. Scott Bakker character is – Neuropath was written by Scott Bakker. What kind of pompous ass puts an ‘R’ in front of his name?

Are the muggles ready for Neuropath? That remains to be seen. The vast majority of readers will reject the vast bulk of the claims made in the book – that goes without saying, I think. Our incompetence as theory believers pretty much assures that people will refuse to acknowledge their incompetence as theory believers, and so muster all the power their myriad biases have to offer. Just for instance, you would think that encountering well-formed counterarguments would make people more skeptical of their own beliefs – after all, someone has to be wrong and it could very well be you – but research has shown that precisely the opposite is the case. Thanks to things like source bias, selective attention, confirmation bias, and so on, we almost always feel that we have utterly demolished those counterarguments, and if our position is so strong as to demolish well-formed counterarguments, well then, it simply has to be true! In other words, we draw the most irrational, self-serving conclusion possible.

This means the majority of those who find themselves arguing with the book will be convinced that they have “beaten it.” Since I knew this going in I tried very hard to make sure the story took priority, so that the book could be thoroughly enjoyed even if the cognitive science stuff was written off. At this level of engagement, my hope is simply that people will be curious enough to keep their ears pricked to all news cognitive, and that over time the itch that they are as every bit as deluded as all the people they disagree with will continue to grow and grow.

- The thesis underlying the novel is that there is no such thing as human free will and that consciousness as we know it is illusory. Do you believe that this controversial premise is the reason why it was difficult for you to find a home for this manuscript?

In the US, maybe. But I really think that the problem had more to do with the fact that the content was philosophical, more than the specific nature of that content. I had one very high profile NYC editor call me up to explain why he was passing on the book, even though he thought it was the most disturbing thing he’d read in 10 years! That’s literally what he said. What it came down to was that he thought the book was too cerebral to sell in the American market.

And who knows? He could very well be right. But since this is exactly what I was told when The Prince of Nothing first made it’s editorial rounds in New York, I’m inclined to think there’s a good chance that I may be right.

This does illustrate one big peril of jumping genres, though. It turns you into a first time novelist all over again, especially if your bona fides come from a genre with reputation as low as epic fantasy. So I’ve been forced to make all the same arguments all over again.

If you embrace the form, strive to entertain above all else, there really is no limit as to the crazy cerebral contents you can give the reader. I take the success of The Prince of Nothing as proof positive of this. The problem is that most writers interested in arguing with readers go to university, where they’re taught that forms, particularly popular commercial forms, are the devil. So they generally go on to write cerebral fiction that violates or “plays” with generic conventions, and as result end up generally writing for people who share their education and values. All their talent is squandered on people who already share the vast bulk of their thoughts – they simply become high end entertainers. Intellectual buzz merchants.

The editorial bias against intelligent genre fiction, I would argue, is the result of a pretty understandable equivocation: it’s the violation of form, the beloved rules, that turns off popular audiences, but since it’s so regularly paired with cerebral content, the latter ends up taking the blame as well.

The situation is certainly more complicated than this: there’s definitely issues of vocabulary and comprehension that are going to impact the overall accessibility of any book, but I’m arguing that it’s primarily the form and not the content that selects for or against certain audiences. Like I said, if you look at a set of generic rules as an opportunity to communicate with people at large, rather than the corporate devil, you’d be amazed with what you can get away with.

- Was it arduous to simplify all the scientific elements found throughout Neuropath so that readers could understand what's going on and follow the various plotlines?

It would have been, I think, had I not done so much work toward this end while teaching the popular culture class I mentioned earlier.

- After reading Neuropath, one can conclude that it is the work of a brilliant or extremely disturbed author. Which is it!?!

The only reason humans think they’re so smart is that our nearest competitors are still sniffing each other’s asses to say hello. All I try to do is to think one thought too many – something which is bound to make you seem crazy sometimes, I guess. The hope is that way I can expose the reader to a couple of thoughts they may not have encountered before. Whether I succeed or not is entirely dependent on the match between the book and the reader.

- What were the reactions of your first test readers? I reckon you probably scared a few people, even with the first draft.

My brother claims to still be freaked three years later. My friend Gary Wassner told me he had to go jogging for an hour after reading it. My friend Larry Nolen (whose evil intellect I can sense behind some of these questions!) says that he had nightmares. But not everybody had reactions this extreme: only those who found themselves genuinely arguing with book as they read it, I think. Others simply saw the consciousness stuff as a cool hook for a cool story. One reader I know of absolutely hated it, even claimed that it was proof that I was a sexist pig! (The whole sexploitation dimension of the genre is something I try to put under the narrative microscope. You’d think I would have learned my lesson with The Prince of Nothing…)

- Given the subject matter presented in Neuropath, do you personally have any hope that humans can overcome their "hardwiring" (whether it be via social engineering or genetic manipulation)? Or is "rewiring" something that scares you even more than the present condition?

We’re fucked.

Either we kill ourselves via anyone of a number of apocalyptic scenarios, or the technological optimists are right, and we’ll innovate our way out scrape after scrape. But if they’re right, ‘rewiring’ is inevitable. And as I like to think the narrative of Neuropath shows, rewiring is simply collective suicide by other means.

I’m not big on post-human debates because I have no faith in the kinds of conceptual arguments they rely on. It’s like the abortion debate: Where does ‘personhood’ begin? There is literally no decisive way to settle this question, which is why abortion law in most every developed country splits the difference on the issue. We know that the idea of the State moving in and telling a woman what she can or can’t do with her body is pretty damn creepy, but the idea of killing people is pretty scary as well. So when does an embryo become a ‘person’? We have no bloody idea, so we make abortion legal up to a point, then we suspend a woman’s reproductive rights – we split the difference.

Likewise, when does neural rewiring make a person not a person? You could cook up a thousand arguments, and you could probably – given how inclined we are to buy our own bullshit – convince yourself that this or that interpretation is God’s interpretation, or nature’s, or whatever. But what you can’t do is end the debate, because in the end, no matter how hard you believe, your interpretation is just as flimsy as all the others, just as susceptible to ‘death by a thousand qualifications.’

What you can predict is that the rewired will think they’re the real humans, and that the unwired will think they’re the real humans. That everyone will beat their breasts and shout “Me-me-me!” (with the exception of those rewireds who have shut off their selfhood modules). But in the meantime, because it’s our shared neurophysiology that gives us our shared experiential frame of reference, you can be assured that after a certain point the rewired will not be us. Imagine a world filled with different kinds of Kellhuses! At some point, thanks to technology, the whole of human history, its aspirations let alone it’s art and philosophy, will be little more than crayon scribbles taped to the fridge.

There’s no such thing as posterity, not anymore.

I dunno. Maybe we’ll cook up laws. But the competitive pressures will remain. Christ, we can’t even keep on top of doping in sports. I know this sounds awfully pessimistic, especially since the whole point of writing Neuropath was to make a stand against this particular Armageddon. But so long as we continue living in Disney World doom is inevitable, and I don’t see us moving out of the Magic Kingdom anytime soon.

- While portraying the Bible family, you have shown that you possess a rather deft humane touch. Frankly, based on your previous books, I didn't know you had it in you. Is this a side of your talent you wish to explore a bit more in future works?

In all fairness, The Prince of Nothing is a story about war, and war tends to grind sentiment down to the nub. It also has many, many characters, which forces you to shift narrative emphasis away from the personal and more to the public. The Prince of Nothing is a story about multiple machinations. Neuropath is the story of a Hapless Father struggling to become a Hero – it’s much more focused and intensely personal.

So I guess I’m saying it all depends on the story.

I have nothing against sentiment – it’s sentimentalism, the cartoon portrayal of human emotion that I take issue with. In that sense, I would argue that Neuropath is of a piece with The Prince of Nothing. Thomas Bible is a complicated father – as are all fathers outside of Hollywood and Disney World.

- I am aware that Neuropath has been optioned for a movie. Based on Hollywood's reticence to showcase anything even remotely controversial, if a production company decided to go along and do it, aren't you afraid that what they would come up with would bear no resemblance to the novel? Especially since what they show on the silver screen must more or less be accessible to the lowest common denominator.

Optioned? That would be news to me! Apparently it’s being considered by various high people in places – I don’t know anything more than that.

Even if it were optioned, that’s about as exciting as buying a lottery ticket. So few optioned books get made into movies. The best analogy I’ve heard is that it’s like putting together a crew for a pirate ship, then trying to sail out of a port blockaded by the British Navy.

But if it were to happen, I really don’t think I’d be one of those authors who would be bummed by the “distortions” that arise when you translate a story and character between drastically different media. If the resulting movie were crap, I’d be bummed, no doubt about that. But if it were wildly different and yet excellent, I’d be ecstatic.

I think the content of the book would have to be streamlined – there’s no way around that – but I do think, rather predictably I suppose, that it would make an awesome movie. It’s been quite awhile since the last high concept thriller. Aside from a strong story, it has a novel murder hook, and it offers an entirely new palette for CGI.

In fact, I think it would make such a great movie that it would win several Golden Globes and set a record for the most Oscars, before wrapping things up with a Nobel Peace prize...

But that’s just my brain’s impartial opinion.

- With such a controversial premise, depending on how hard your publishers will be pushing Neuropath, this book could potentially cause a bit of a stir. Are you hoping/dreading this? Knowing that controversy sells, are you and your editors hoping to cash in on such a turn of events?

Hoping, of course. And dreading, certainly. The “cash in” would be nice, but only for the sake of security: as well as things have been going with the fantasies it’s entirely possible, if not statistically probable, that I’ll have to take a day job in four or five years time. Most authors that make to the mid-list usually peak then sink back out again. Since my primary artistic goal is to complete The Second Apocalypse, it would be nice to be able to afford to write fulltime for the next several years at least. Otherwise, I can’t see upgrading my lifestyle any more than I have – my environmental footprint is too big as it is!

Outside that, I have an evangelical bent. I believe in human stupidity (my own included!) so fervently that I want to shout it out to the world. Look at history. Hell, look at the evening news. We’re surrounded by evidence of our folly, and yet all we do is congratulate ourselves all the time. Our kids spend two decades being educated, and nowhere – nowhere – are they taught anything about themselves, about the cognitive shortcomings that will lead to their divorces and their addictions, to their prejudices and their self-serving delusions. They come out of university not only ignorant of their limitations, their weaknesses, but convinced that they’re tough-minded critical thinkers.

I actually have a bad habit, which I’m sure has alienated many an acquaintance. Whenever someone tells me they’re a critical thinker – and let’s face it, everyone but everyone thinks they’re a critical thinker – I always ask them “How so?” Usually the answer is that they don’t believe everything everyone tells them. They make fun of Mormons, distrust corporations, or disagree with Fox news or some such. But when I point out that no one believes everything everyone tells them, so that can’t be a criterion for being a critical thinker, they get freaked out.

You get lots of valuable procedural knowledge in school, as well as a smattering of dogma, but nowhere – not even in most philosophy programs – are you taught how to think critically. We are hardwired to bullshit ourselves, and that’s a bloody fact Jack. And what are you taught? What does our system drum into your head at every bloody turn?

To believe in yourself! Believe in yourself when all the research shows that you are in fact the least credible person in the room. Though it seems the other way around, we’re actually much better at critiquing the claims and predicting the behaviour of others than we are ourselves. Check out David Dunning’s Self-Insight if you don’t believe me.

Ignorance is invisible, and so long as we remain ignorant of our cognitive shortcomings we will be slaves to them, we will be condemned to repeat all the same mistakes over and over, only with toys and tools that grow ever more powerful.

- Both Kellhus in The Prince of Nothing and Neil Cassidy in Neuropath are "over the top" intellectually. Do you relish the challenge posed by writing about such characters?

Definitely, but I actually think Kellhus and Neil are entirely different. The one is bred and the other is “tweaked,” but when push comes to shove, the threat posed by Kellhus is spiritual, whereas the threat posed by Neil is out and out physical – the spiritual stuff simply falls out of that.

- You have already made a name for yourself in the fantasy genre. What are your hopes regarding Neuropath and a more mainstream audience? Are there any other thrillers or non-fantasy works in the future for you?

I’m actually on the hook for a second thriller with Orion, to be completed following the sequel to The Judging Eye. But as I think I mentioned above, my focus is on completing The Second Apocalypse. I have at least four, maybe five books left to write. I’ve been dreaming this story for over twenty years now: I must see it through. At the same time I have all kinds of different books bubbling around in my head, and in all kinds of different genres. But quite frankly, unless Neuropath does really, really well, I’ll have no choice but to stick to fantasies and thrillers – you can only tempt the fates so many times.

Unless you’re Iain Banks.

- I know you thought you got off the hook in our last interview, but did you really think you could somehow dodge the question pertaining to The Judging Eye? Come on, man, you have got to give us something to whet our appetite! Give us something akin to a cover blurb, at the very least!

The world is not equal in the eyes of the God. Twenty years have passed since the Fall of Shimeh, and the Three Seas are united for the first time since the days of Near Antiquity. Bent on destroying unholy Golgotterath. Anasurimbor Kellhus, the Aspect Emperor, leads a new holy war, the Great Ordeal, across the wastes of Earwa, while his wife, Esmenet, rules as Empress in absence, warring against a rising tide of heresy. And Drusas Achamian, guided by two thousand year old dreams, embarks on a quest of his own: to find Ishual, the secret fastness of the Dunyain.

- The pub date for The Judging Eye appears to have been pushed back to winter 2009. Is that accurate or just a tentative release date? Has the book been postponed because the format of The Aspect-Emperor went from being a duology to a trilogy?

As far as I know that’s tentative, and it has more to do with scheduling issues arising from Neuropath than anything else. I’ve started writing the sequel, but I keep finding myself going back to fiddle with things – I’m a chronic fiddler, probably because of the Cringe Game. Revision really is a central part of the process for me.

- Now that you got the ball rolling, how long do you figure the wait between each installment will be?

I’m anticipating that The Aspect Emperor will roll out the same as The Prince of Nothing: the first two books a year apart with a several month longer gap before the final volume – because of the intervening second psychothriller. I tend to be the most productive when I have a gun pointed at my head, and right now I’m in the middle of a Mexican standoff. The words, they are a flying!

- If you could go back in time and make a few changes to The Prince of Nothing, what would those changes be? With that in mind, are you attempting to steer clear of some "mistakes" you may have made in the first series when you sit down to write The Judging Eye and its sequels?

Steve Erikson and I had a conversation about this very thing at the ICFA a couple of weeks ago. Both of us are building very tall series on narrow foundations simply because of the sheer complexity of our first books. My bold prediction is that Steve’s next series will be every bit as successful as A Song of Ice and Fire.

If I could go back, I would exhaustively rewrite The Darkness that Comes Before to include the Kellhus chapters that I cut out, and to add a couple of others. I should have stuck with him so that the reader could have learned the complexities of the world as he learned those complexities, then I would have slowly added the alternate POVs.

Another error I think I made in The Prince of Nothing as a whole is that I think I focused too much on interior action – I spent too much time knocking around in my characters’ heads. This is one thing that I tried to rectify in The Judging Eye: there’s still plenty of internal action, but I like to think I’ve done a better job balancing it with external action.

Even still, my bold prediction is that The Aspect Emperor will be nowhere as popular as A Song of Ice and Fire, but that the world junkies among us will be pleased indeed.

- Is there any chance we might see you up your game a bit in terms of internet presence, or is that too much of a distraction and it gets in the way of your writing?

Ever since I quit smoking my concentration, which was capable of marathon sessions, has become a lot more twitchy – brittle even. Now I do all my writing on a laptop with no internet connection, simply because whenever my focus wanes and I have this way of bullshitting myself into doing phony work, such as “research,” or “internetworking.” I seem to do it all the time. It makes me feel crazy-neurotic it’s so mechanical. I’m trying to build a routine-based “healthy balance,” but I’m 41 now, and my every attempt to “balance myself” in the past has been a failure. Whatever I happen to be doing I do too much of, whether it’s drinking or reading or writing or posting. What I want to do is write too much for the next five years or so, finish The Second Apocalypse, as well as look after a couple of side projects.

- Anything else you wish to share with your fans?

Buy Cordelia Fine’s A Mind of its Own: How your Brain Distorts and Deceives. Read it, ponder it, then read it again. Know thyself. Then you’ll see that the only thing for certain is that nothing is for certain.

It thinks, therefore we fantasize.

H:
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
(December 27, 2005)

Dear Mr. Bakker,

Let me start by thanking you for being gracious enough to take some precious time off your indubitably busy schedule to answer these questions. But with the imminent release of The Thousandfold Thought, know that your fans are extremely excited about this chance to hear from you in person.

- Given the complexity of many of your characterizations, is there a character that you particularly enjoy/enjoyed writing? Why is that? By the same token, is there a character that you absolutely don't like writing about? For what reason?

There’s no one I really dislike writing - it’s more a matter of each posing their own peculiar challenges at particular points. Kellhus is typically the most difficult, simply because it’s hard to convincingly portray someone that damn smart. Others, like Cnaiur, oscillate between extreme difficulty and writing themselves. I had expected he would be the most difficult (after Kellhus of course) to write in The Thousandfold Thought, but thanks to the Melvins and Lustmord, he ended up writing himself. Conphas is easily my favourite. Sometimes I laugh my ass off while writing his sections.

- What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?

This question is hard because I still feel I have so much to learn. I think my strength is that I set explicit challenges for myself - extreme challenges in some cases. For every scene, I always ask myself what I want my words to do. Most times I fall short of my goals, sometimes I satisfy them, and every once in awhile - like the scene I call ‘Esmenet’s Song’ in The Thousandfold Thought - I sit back and think, ‘There’s no way I wrote that...’

- What author makes you shake your head in admiration? Many fantasy authors don't read much inside the genre. Is it the case with you?

I used to read everything, years and years ago, but the deeper I wandered into university, the more and more I became addicted to ‘primary texts.’ I lost the ability to read for pleasure’s sake, but I think I’m on the slow road to recovery. In the genre, I probably admire George R R Martin the most, not only for his story-telling skills, but because his books made me realize that my little hobby - writing complex fantasy - could very well strike a chord with readers. Reading him was a revelation of sorts. Most recently, I finished Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which, meta-fictional wanking and meta-wanking aside, is nothing short of brilliant.

- Many purists, epic fantasy aficionados, and critics now consider you one of the best fantasy authors in the world. Is there added pressure when it comes down to writing a new addition to the series?

Finding it. Difficult. To breathe...

This is crazy. Are you serious?

Well first off, you should know that I don’t write fantasy - only hacks write fantasy. My books are about the triumph of the human spirit which just happen to have everything you would find in The Wheel of Time...

Look. See the damage you’ve done?

Seriously though, I have found myself freaking out on occasion. I wouldn’t say I’m the most psychologically robust person in the world. I feel like an imposter answering questions like this, and I get chilled by the shadow of the giant shoe some part of me knows is about to drop. I’ve suffered a few instances of depersonalization and derealization... The jargon helps.

But when a story ‘clicks’ for me - I’m not sure how else to explain it - the old priorities reassert themselves, or so it seems. The big temptation, I think, when you start garnering critical acclaim, is to start writing for your critics, which can have disastrous consequences. You write for your readers. It’s not as simple as that, but it’s where I hang my hat.

- In addition, The Thousandfold Thought sets the bar rather high. Will you approach writing The Aspect-Emperor differently now that your writing skills have reached (in my opinion at least) a new level of quality?

Thanks, Pat. I think my writing has gotten stronger with each book, and I’m hoping to put these new skills to work in The Aspect-Emperor. I’m excited by the prospect, primarily because the canvas is so much bigger - so much more (please don’t groan) Tolkienesque. The story is still the same as when I conceived it some twenty years ago, but where I used to despair of being able to do it justice (after so long, the plot of The Second Apocalypse has become something of a religious fetish in my mind) I now feel I have the tools that I need.

But when I reflect on The Prince of Nothing, I sometimes worry. Despite all the flaws, all the ways it makes me cringe, it seems like a kind of monument to me, like something truly iconic. It has a peculiar magic, like a spell an author can only hope to cast once in his or her lifetime. That’s the way it seems.

Pretty melodramatic, huh?

- What would you say was the hardest part of the entire process involved in the writing of the THE PRINCE OF NOTHING? Each new addition reveals yet more depth to a series which has shown just how rich and complex it truly is. What was the spark that generated the idea which drove you to write the series in the first place?

I could go on and on about the complexities. I just spent so much time layering things into the world and story - it almost feels geological when I think about it. The framework arose from my attempt to ‘make good’ on all the work I put into my D&D campaigns back in the eighties. The story proper grew around the character of Kellhus, who arose from the biggest revelation I suffered in my first year of university back in 1986: the realization that belief systems are more a product of social function than of ‘truth.’

Standing inside a given belief system, canonical claims always seem ‘obviously true,’ so much so that we reflexively use them as the yardstick of other belief systems, while remaining utterly oblivious to the fact that others are doing the exact same thing with the same depth of conviction. We seem to forget that having conviction, no matter how soulful or meaningful or redemptive, is as much an indicator of deception as it is of accuracy. Ignorance is invisible, after all. Thanks to psychological mechanisms like confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error and self-exceptionalism, we’re quite content with the embarrassing notion that we somehow just ‘lucked into’ the one true belief system. And why not, when it’s the only yardstick we have? Everything else has to come up short. Outsiders are judged and found wanting.

When you consider the pivotal role belief plays in action and the ways social systems depend on the repetition of interrelated actions to exist (if everyone starting doing different things all at once - like NYC transit workers deciding to fart in front of the TV rather than going to work - society would collapse) then you can see that the primary function of belief systems is to conserve actions, not to be ‘true.’ This is why social systems collapse when belief in them collapses, which is arguably what happened in the old Soviet Union.

Given things like this, I asked myself what a martial artist who used the functionality of belief as well as his sword and his hands would look like, and I came up with Kellhus.

- Given the choice, would you take a New York Times bestseller, or a World Fantasy Award? Why, exactly?

The New York Times bestseller, because then I could buy a World Fantasy Award - maybe two or three of them. I would like to move out of this grungy little apartment, buy a flat screen HDTV, and it would be nice to own a car with a CD player, but aside from that my primary interest is in being read. My goal is to challenge as many people as I can possibly challenge: I really believe we’re entering a phase of history where we’ll need as much conceptual flexibility as we can get. And if I can pass on a few philosophical stretching exercises, then I will have been part of the solution I think.

I would be lying if I didn’t say I was curious about the prospect of winning awards - yes, I was vain enough to think I had a shot - but when The Darkness that Comes Before didn’t even make the list for the Sunburst Awards here in Canada... well. My agent even warned me: epic fantasy doesn’t win refereed awards. I’d like to chalk it up to the perennial inferiority complex we fantasists have. It sometimes seems that the awards go to those who bring fantastic elements to a literary format, and of course I’m trying to do the exact opposite. But that’s likely just a flattering rationale.

Maybe my stuff just isn’t good enough.

Either way, life is about honour, not honours. So the cliche goes.

- What's the progress report pertaining to NEUROPATH? What can you tell us about the premise of the story? Anything new you wish to share with your fans? Something to whet their appetite. . .

I’m working on the rewrites as we speak, and I should have something for my agent to shop around by February. In many ways, I’m doing the same thing I did with The Prince of Nothing: I’m embracing the genre, telling a classic psychothriller tale, in order to explore its significance from the inside out.

I got a good vibe about this book.

- What extensive research did the writing of the THE PRINCE OF NOTHING entail?

It wasn’t so much a matter of doing specific research - like I’ve been doing for Neuropath, for example - as the result of twenty years being a student and an information junkie. I seem to be a little bit interested in everything. Outside of philosophy, I’m as shallow as an ice rink, but I’m at least as broad as the blue line.

- The series has garnered what can best be described as a cult following. However, many doubt that it will ever become "mainstream." With that in mind, how rewarding is it to realize how successful the series has been and continues to be to this day?

It probably is too challenging to go mainstream in a manner analogous to Martin or Jordan. All I know is that it has already exceeded my initially pessimistic expectations. I have regrets, especially about the difficulties with The Darkness that Comes Before, primarily because I know they are largely the result of my immersion in the world and my inexperience as a storyteller. But the fact is I’m paying my rent, all of my publishers are very happy with the numbers, and those people who love the books, really do love them. Hoping for more is understandable, but expecting more would be presumptuous and self-defeating. I started working in the fields when I was nine years old. I put myself through university by working midnights at a grocery store - fourteen years I spent there. Drudgery was my middle name. Right now my life is slack - I know it, and I’m not about to second-guess it.

- I am aware that The Darkness that Comes Before has been translated in French. How many foreign sales have you been able to secure so far?

Hmm. So far it’s also being translated into Spanish, German, Polish, Czech, Romanian, and Russian. Not bad for a newbie, I think!

- The fact that you have your own forum on the internet is an indication that interaction with your readers is important to you as an author. How special is it to have the chance to interact directly with your fans?

It’s very cool, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was a mixed bag, because it is. The web is a precarious place for an author to be. Say you knew that two people were whispering about you in the next room. What would you do? Ignore them and continue cleaning your toe jam, or hold your breath and try to hear what they’re saying. I think it’s human nature to do the latter, even though there’s something unhealthy about doing it. The web is a big whisper, and once you strain your ears to listen, it becomes very hard to stop. For me, anyway, it tends to become a kind of psychic noise pollution, and it interferes with the clarity that is so integral to my writing. The problem is that the more I log on the more I succumb to a morbid curiosity for the vox populi - even though afterward it feels like sticking myself with pins.

Some people really don’t like me.

On the other hand, however, the actual interaction is absolutely priceless - there’s no better way to work out your thoughts on a topic than to debate them on a web forum. Then there’s the desire to give back to those who actually spent a part of their lives - because that’s what money is: what we get for surrendering part of our lives to assembly lines, kitchens, highways, or whatever your occupation happens to be - to share your thoughts and your stories. And the web is the perfect way to do this, even if you find yourself saying RAFO over and over again, and your readers keep pointing out inconsistencies that you missed, or factual mistakes that you made, or seem to think your imaginative excesses offer clues to your sex life or psyche or...

Which is to say, keep you honest!

- Are you surprised by what little support you receive from the Canadian media? You and Steven Erikson rank among the best fantasy authors out there, yet both of you Canucks appear to get very little recognition in your own country.

Don’t get me started. It all comes back to the pigeonhole. We have a brain you can fit into a shoebox in a universe so big it defeats the speed of light. As a result, we constantly simplify things by using evaluative tags - things that identify, interpret, and dismiss all at once. ‘Epic fantasy,’ unfortunately, is one of those tags. And despite my early hopes and considerable literary hubris, my work has not managed to shine through.

Thanks to Penguin, I have received some attention here and there, and I sometimes wish I could pull it together enough to manage what Rob Sawyer has accomplished in terms of homegrown media exposure. Part of the problem, I sometimes think, is that here in Canada the literary culture has a powerful nationalistic subtext - not surprising when you consider overwhelming influence of American mass culture - which has led to an almost academic inwardness. The only way to get onto the conveyor belt is to write about Canada, which I have yet to do.

If I ever become commercially successful, I imagine things will change. Canadians love Canadians who manage to beat the Americans at their own game. Failing that, I suppose I could try breast implants or talking out of my butt. Worked for Pamela Anderson and Jim Carey.

- Having read The Thousandfold Thought, I've been telling everyone who will listen to me that it just might be the best fantasy novel that will see the light in 2006. For the benefit of those who have not read it, and without revealing too much, what would you like to tell your fans about it?

I thank you for that, Pat. Word of mouth has been the primary engine for The Prince of Nothing from the start. All I can tell you is what I hoped to accomplish. I wanted to create a world as deep and as consistent as Middle-earth, but as unsentimental and as gritty as the real thing. I wanted to write something that was truly epic and truly fantastic, something religiously faithful to the genre, and yet utterly unlike anything fans have read before. I wanted to tell a story that, when completed, left readers of all stripes feeling as though they had climbed something, even if the full dimensions of the structure escaped them.

The Thousandfold Thought is the summit.

- Some readers have commented on the fact that there is an inordinate amount of semen in the series. Is there a reason for that?

I read somewhere that the average man produces enough ejaculate to fill a bath-tub over the course of his lifetime. By my own estimates, the books contain a small fraction of that - a quart or so at most. So those readers are quite mistaken...

Semen was magical to our ancestors, though it has become quite taboo for us. Think of the Old Testament, which certainly spills a lot of ink about ‘seed.’ The word itself comes to us via old French from the Latin word for seed. Suggestively, the ancient Greek word, s‘ma, meant sign or token or signal. It belongs to a nexus of meanings that are conceptually crucial, I think. But most importantly, it is the visible link between generations, the rope that binds each of us both to the generations that have come before and to our shared animality. When you think of this in the context of Esmenet, who is the perspectival focal point for most of the references, I think you’ll quickly see that my use of the word is far from gratuitous.

- Throughout the trilogy, you have shown your desire to take your tale on the path less traveled. The Mideastern setting, as well as the religious and philosophical aspects, are great examples of how you took epic fantasy on a different path. Was it something that you truly wanted to work on, or did it just happen that way?

I think it just happened that way. I wanted something literate and cosmopolitan, so the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean just became the associative quarry where I cut most of my stone.

- Were you surprised that Penguin Books Canada, a publisher not particularly known for producing much works in the fantasy genre, gave you your first opportunity?

I certainly never expected it, but when you consider that they first published Guy Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry it makes sense. They’re actually something of a powerhouse when it comes to Canadian SF&F.

- Since there was no glossary in The Warrior-Prophet, I was a bit shocked to see such a comprehensive glossary in The Thousandfold Thought. Was it difficult to get your publishers to go along with the idea?

Not at all, though they did ask me to keep it as concise as I could. It was part of the plan from the very beginning. A tip of the hat to The Return of the King.

Either that or plain old thievery.

- Will we continue to learn more about the Consult and the Inchoroi from Seswatha's dreams, or will there be more information given in the next series?

There will be much, much more information. As I think I mentioned earlier, a larger part of the world, especially when it comes to the Sranc and the Nonmen, will come into the narrative spotlight. I get giddy just thinking about it!

- Speaking of the next series, what can you tell us about The Aspect-Emperor?

As those who frequent the Three Seas Forum know, I’m pretty paranoid when it comes to potential spoilers. I’m one of those people who covers their ears and sings nonsense when people even mention something I want to read or see. All I’ll say is that it begins approximately 20 years after the conclusion of The Thousandfold Thought.

- Do you have any details concerning a possible upcoming book tour to promote the release of your new novel? Fans are curious to know if you'll be stopping by in their home towns.

Not at the moment. I know I’ll be flying out to Calgary and Vancouver, but not much else.

- Honestly, do you believe that the fantasy genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

If I have my way.

I have some pretty insane ambitions and rapping the insular knuckles of the literary mainstream is one of them. Let them kneel at our pew for a change. To bring commercial genres to the literary mainstream is to use genre as a literary resource for literary readers. To bring literature to commercial genre is to use literature as a resource for popular readers. I’m not interested in singing to choir. I want to write for people who could be potentially offended by what I have to say. I want to start discussions, not rehash them or string them along. The irony, of course, is that this is what literature is supposed to do. Span perspectives, not entrench them. Somewhere along the line, we’ve lost sight of this.

I’m convinced that the division between the commercial and the literary is an artificial one, and that universities are the primary institutional culprit, not the media corporations (which is not to let them off the hook). The same firewalls that provide academic communities the freedom to explore what they will has produced standards of artistic merit drastically removed from those with only their socialization in popular culture to draw on. Isolate any conversation long enough, and it will eventually become esoteric to the point of general unintelligibility. Far from being the heights of contemporary culture, universities have become vacuums, sucking up the individuals with the talent and sensitivity that mass culture so desperately needs, using institutional pressures to rewire their priorities and tastes (just try, without embarrassment, arguing the virtues of epic fantasy in an English literature class), and putting them to work for the also-trained, where everyone can collectively bitch and moan about the commodification of culture and cretinization of the masses. They rob us with one hand, then dare wag their finger with the other. "Look how poor you are."

There’s lots of bullets that need to be bitten, I think. Pass the ammo.

Well, thanks again for accepting to do this. I wish you continued success, and wish you the best for the release of The Thousandfold Thought.

Thank you, Pat. It’s been a pleasure.

H:
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
(January 15, 2009)

- Are you satisfied with the way THE JUDGING EYE has been received thus far?

Gauging critical reactions to your work is a tricky thing, primarily because we all–me and you included–regularly confabulate reasons when trying to explain our judgments. It’s a terrifying fact, actually, but the research suggests that we should be exceedingly sceptical of the rationalizations we use to explain our likes and dislikes. We seem to just make things up. So when a reviewer tries to explain why this or that worked or didn’t work for them, chances are they’re just confabulating. (This doesn’t mean that reviewers should give up rationalizing their judgments, only that they should be sceptical of them. Sometimes you hate a book simply because your dog took a dump on the carpet).

So as it stands I’m obviously pleased that so many online reviewers are so enthusiastic about the book, and my own cognitive vanity makes me want to say these are most intelligent and good-looking reviewers to have ever walked a planet so benighted as Earth, but I always remind myself that it’s the readers I’m writing for, and that so long as the series continues its slow growth I’m doing something right.

- Are there any upcoming appearances to promote THE JUDGING EYE you'd like your fans to know about?

I’ll be launching the book in Toronto at North York Central Library on Saturday, February 21st, thanks to Peter Halasz and the excellent folks with the USS Hudson’s Bay. I’ll be at Ad Astra in Toronto this spring, of course. I’ll also be the Guest of Honour at SFERA in Zagreb, Croatia this April.

- Overlook recently elected to go with the UK cover art instead of the cover they had originally selected. Were you consulted on this? What are your thoughts pertaining to the covers of both THE JUDGING EYE and all three volumes of the Prince of Nothing series?

I get the odd query and image sent to me now and again, but unless a cover strikes me as horrible I tend to keep my counsel. Ever since I polled my students asking whether they liked the Canadian or the UK versions of The Darkness that Comes Before, thinking I could use the results to convince Darren Nash, my UK editor, to go with the Canadian covers, I’ve stopped pretending that I know what makes a cover ‘work.’

My students voted for the UK cover by a whopping 2 to 1 margin . . . Bunch of stoners.

- Did the researching and writing for NEUROPATH have any impact on writing or plot decisions made for The Aspect-Emperor trilogy, or indeed the earlier trilogy? I get the impression Kellhus and the Dunyain have a firm belief in The Argument.

When you have soup for brains everything sloshes into everything else. But in point of fact, Kellhus and the Dunyain would strenuously object to the Argument as it’s found in Neuropath. For one, the Dunyain make an ideological fetish of control, which Neil argues is a perspectival illusion. Neil is actually a far more radical character than Kellhus in this philosophical respect.

The Dunyain only seem like nihilists because for them all value is extrinsically determined. Everything and everyone is a kind of tool for the Dunyain, valuable only insofar as they facilitate this or that particular end. Since we generally think that people and things are valuable in and of themselves–which is to say, intrinsically–this makes them appear nihilistic.

- THE JUDGING EYE seems to be a notably less standalone work than even the individual novels in the Prince of Nothing, which whilst part of a greater tapestry did seem to have more resolution to each book. Was this a deliberate decision or more of a natural evolution given the story requirements for the sequel series?

When you try to tell a story as big as The Second Apocalypse, you have to go with what local resolutions you can get. This is even more complicated when your story slowly weaves together three narrative lines, as is the case with The Aspect-Emperor. What gives The Darkness that Comes Before a greater sense of closure, I think, is that it concludes with the various narrative lines coming together in the Holy War. Since I have no interest in manufacturing closure simply for the sake of closure, I had to settle for the one point where the development of the three threads of The Judging Eye lined up dramatically...

Then snip.

- Some have observed in the past that one of the hallmarks of epic fantasy is its tendency to make metaphors into actualized, concrete representations. To what degree, if any, is this true of your writing?

You could say the concretization of abstractions, whether metaphorical or not, is the hallmark of fiction period, not just epic fantasy. The thing I was most interested in concretizing in The Judging Eye was the abstract, ontological notion of a moral world. Because of our native tendency to anthropomorphize our environments, to interpret complex phenomena in psychological and social terms, our interpretative strategies are thoroughly skewed. This is simply a fact, though it rarely sees the light of day because we are pathologically jealous of our beliefs–to the point of killing one another if need be. (No matter how much lip service we pay to "critical thinking," the sad fact is that we really want no part of it–which is why we teach our children absolutely nothing about all the ways they’re doomed to dupe themselves). In the meantime, we see conspiracies everywhere we look–ghosts, gods, spies, corporations, governments... Pick your poison. No matter what our culture, we posit hidden agencies that have something planned for us, good or ill.

Humans are born drama queens. It’s always all about us.

This is the primary abstraction I try to concretize in The Judging Eye. What would it be like, what would it mean, to live in a world where everything had objective value, where everything was ranked and ordered, so that men actually were ‘spiritually superior’ than women, and so on. The tendency in much fantasy fiction is to cater to readers’ moral expectations, to depict ideologically correct worlds and so avoid all the kinds of trouble I seem to get into with my fiction. In other words, the tendency is to be apologetic rather than critical (and then to be critical of those who refuse to apologize). My interest lies in the glorious ugliness that is a fact of traditional world making. Bigoted worlds. Biased worlds. Human worlds expressed through fantastic idioms.

This is what I’m interested in realizing.

- Power is a theme you explore in several ways, especially in your latest Eärwa novel. In particular, at times it seemed as though you were making the case that power is a form of discourse in which the "willing" and "unwilling" have more active (albeit largely subconscious) roles in creating said structures. Is this observation true, or are there elements to be addressed in the series that will cast a different light on the nature of power and how someone such as Kellhus gains and maintains his power?

Control a person’s beliefs and you control their actions. This is the ancient rule of human civilization.

Since our perspective is always the rule we use to measure the moral and cognitive propriety of other perspectives, we always assume that our particular beliefs, no matter how lunatic, are true. And since the precursors to our acts are usually utterly inaccessible, we generally think of ourselves as initiators rather than products. In other words, we generally don’t think that we’re manipulated at all.

I sometimes think that those people who find Kellhus’s manipulations unconvincing are those who are the most oblivious to all the ways they themselves are controlled. Since they assume they would be immune to Kellhus’s manipulations, they end up thinking all the characters who do are implausibly weak-minded, or they are simply not convinced by the moves Kellhus makes. But the fact is that all humans are weak-minded. We know for a fact that if you put humans in situations like Abu Ghraib that they will do the kinds of things they did in Abu Ghraib–we know that a large fraction of the responsibility belongs to the planners who made Abu Ghraib possible.

So why, then, are the individual ‘bad apples’ in prison while the planners continue drawing huge salaries? Because we all think that if we happened to be working at Abu Ghraib, we would have blown the whistle. We think we would have been the exception, and so blame the weak-minded fools who let their immediate social situation drive them, and not those who manufactured that social situation. We all think this, but the sad fact is that we are almost all wrong. Study after study shows that our counter-to-fact assumptions about how we would react in various situations are often dreadfully out of whack with how in fact we do react in those kinds of situations.

We literally live our lives believing in fantasy selves. We live and die deluded, with only a vague anxiety to point us in the direction of truth. This is one reason, I think, so many of us have so much difficulty identifying with realistic characters.

But I wank. Let me get back to the question. We act as we believe, and our actions interlock to form the vast system of institutions that we call contemporary society. (This is one of the things that makes the present economic crisis so frightening: our actions have become so specialized, and the over-arching social structures so complicated, that we could have crossed some kind of organizational threshold. As far as we know, we may have created a system that has to utterly crash before it can be rebooted. But I wank... still...)

In The Prince of Nothing, Kellhus and his father were the parasitic invaders who had to rewrite the established operating system to produce actions consistent with their ends. The authors of the ‘Thousandfold Thought virus.’ In The Aspect-Emperor, Kellhus is the new operating system, continually fending off other upstart viral invaders. And as I’m sure Obama is about to find out, gaining power and maintaining power are two distinct beasts. For Kellhus, the very weak-mindedness that made the former possible is what threatens to make the latter impossible. The more powerful Kellhus becomes, the more removed he is from his followers, the more he has to rely on his flawed worldborn tools to keep the masses in line.

- I have always enjoyed the quotes found at the beginning of every chapter. How do you come up with each, and what amount of research is involved in the process?

Some of them just occur to me. Some I adapt from other sayings–rip off, essentially. But at some point I hunker down with my pipe and take several days to revise and to brainstorm. Then I fiddle and fart and fiddle, all the way to the final proofs. It’s no walk in the park coming up with wise-ass shit.

- In a previous interview you stated that reading George R. R. Martin's A FEAST FOR CROWS forced you to reconsider the number of POVs to use in the writing of THE JUDGING EYE. How then did you select which POV characters would "tell" the story of THE JUDGING EYE?

I actually scrapped my initial attempt at writing The Judging Eye because I realized I was creating characters simply because I was burned out on my original cast. Everyone rationalizes the path of least resistence, but I sometimes think that writers are particularly gifted in this regard.

At the YMCA I frequent there’s an indoor track with arrows that tell you which way you should be running. Since they switch the direction every day and since I’m perpetually distracted, I often find myself going in the wrong direction. When I’m going against the arrow and I pass people going in the right direction I catch myself thinking, "Look at all the sheep! Baa. Baa. Must do what arrow tells me." When I’m going in the right direction and I pass people going in the wrong direction I catch myself thinking, "What? Too cool to follow the arrow are we? What a fucking asshole."

Which makes me either a woolly ass or a stinky sheep.

- Considering that the "darkness" that comes before has been discussed in several ways over the course of your novels, how does prophecy fall along the lines of what comes before and perhaps after?

I once wrote a paper on Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, and the misogyny hidden in the ascription of intuitive knowledge to women and discursive knowledge to men. Cassandra agreed to sleep with the god Apollo in return for the gift of prophecy, only to renege on the deal after receiving the prescient goods. Being the vengeful sort, Apollo cursed her with the doom of not being believed, of living with the knowledge of Troy’s imminent destruction and being utterly helpless to prevent it.

The thing about Cassandra and her curse is that if the Trojans believe her predictions then they act on them, but if they act on them, they change the future, which means that Cassandra is wrong about the future, which means that the Trojans had no business believing her in the first place. So Apollo’s curse is actually a farce, when you think of it. His ‘gift’ was automatically a curse.

Prophecy is a form of cognitive time-travel: information from an otherwise indeterminate future somehow finds its way to the present. As such it suffers the same kind of paradoxes that bedevil the notion of time-travel more generally. That which comes before conditions that which comes after. So if you were to travel back into the past and kill your grandfather, then you will never exist, so you can never travel back into the past and kill your grandfather, so you will exist, so you can travel back into the past... You get the point.

The really weird thing is that the very structure of agency seems implicated in this paradox. Our actions, from an experiential standpoint, are ‘goal directed.’ In other words, from the standpoint of experience, that which comes after determines what we do, and that which comes before is covered over, obscured. This is what allows Kellhus to so effortlessly manipulate the people around him. As marketers have long known, when people don’t believe they have buttons, you can push them at will.

In other words, the ‘darkness that comes before’ and prophecy are quite tightly intertwined, conceptually speaking. And of course I play with all these things at a subtextual level throughout the novels.

- Damnation is a recurring topic among the sorcerers. Will we see any of the mechanisms behind the judgments related to this damnation as the series progresses?

Likely not. The occult and the theological are hopelessly muddled in the real world, so in the interests of realism I intend to keep things the same in Earwa.

Besides, with the possible exception death-row inmates, does anyone ever really know why they’re being burned?

- Will you be able to maintain your long-standing 'Internet silence' in the face of what promises to be many months of intense debate over THE JUDGING EYE, particularly its ambiguous closing chapters?

You get jaded, I think. I sometimes feel I’ve pretty much seen it all when it comes to responses to my books, but who knows? Something might outrage me yet. I still see red every once and awhile, usually when I come across someone poo-pooing my books to position themselves in some flattering intellectual light. If I have a public reputation for being a smarty-pants, then taking me down a notch becomes an easy way to assert your own intelligence. (There really is no underestimating the degree to which these kinds of status ploys snake through our aesthetic judgments).

But then I imagine much of what I say strikes others much the same way. Look at that Einstein idiot. Ooooh, my relativity is so special...

- Whilst not trying to give anything away, the end of Akka's storyline in THE JUDGING EYE has been seen by quite a few reviewers as a homage to an iconic Tolkien sequence, although with a very different ending. Was this a conscious decision and if so how did you reach it?

Cil-Aujas was part of the original storyline from way back when–I’m a former D&D geek, remember! Since I was such an idiot back then, I’m really not sure whether the choice was deliberate or not. It certainly became self-conscious at some point. The thing to remember is that Tolkien himself was paying homage to the epic tradition more generally when he conceived his version. Homer, Virgil, and of course, Dante. You always kiss a lot of dead ass when you decide to embrace an established literary form.

- What's the progress report with THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR? In our last interview you seemed confident to be able to release volumes one and two a year apart. Is it still the case?

I’ve actually been working on both The White-Luck Warrior and the sequel, so I’m not as far as I hoped to be at this point. I also have an April deadline for Disciple of the Dog, another thriller. This might sound like I’m hopelessly overloaded, but in point of fact I’ve discovered that I write far more per day when I can swap through multiple projects. It actually feels like I'm going through some kind of creative renaissance or something. Even still, I’ve decided not to take on any new side projects until The Second Apocalypse is completed in its entirety. My goal is to have the entire thing finished in four to five years.

This story... man. I know it’s impossible not to fall in love with ideas you live with for a long time–and I’ve done everything but sign the pre-nup when it comes to The Second Apocalypse. But I’m telling you, people are in for one helluva a ride!

- THE JUDGING EYE is a vast introduction to The Aspect-Emperor series. Is it harder to write THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR, now that you have quite a few marbles in the air?

The Aspect-Emperor is actually proving to be easier to write simply because I have learned (the hard way, you might say!) how to keep a large number of narrative balls in the air. No teacher like experience!

- There seems to be a a complex relationship between the World and the Outside. What are some of the ways in which the World influences the Gods/Outside and will we see more of a metaphysical exploration of what seems to me to be a symbiotic relationship between the two?

If I were to give some definitive metaphysical interpretation of the relation between the Outside and the World, as opposed to the hairy, haphazard, contradictory mass of hints and explanations I’ve given, I think I would actually be doing a disservice to Earwa. The bottom line is that no one really knows... Though, like the real world, there’s no shortage of people who would pop a cap in your ass you for suggesting otherwise.

As much as people hate uncertainty, the best they can do is try to ignore it. Naysayers, on the other hand, can be put to bed permanently.

- What is "blindness" to a divinity? Can the Hundred Gods be fallible, or is this something beyond the ken of the people of Eärwa?

Once again, it depends on who you ask in Earwa. Maithanet says that Yatwer is deceived, whereas Psatma Nannaferi says otherwise.

- Are you baffled by the fact that, though you have pleaded your case several times, some readers continue to interpret your writing style as misogynic?

‘Disappointed’ would probably be a better word than ‘baffled.’ It’s human nature to mistake depiction for endorsement, I think. And I actually think the criticisms of more sophisticated readers, that negative depictions reinforce negative stereotypes, have a valid point to make–one that I would take quite seriously were I writing after-school specials. You know, stories about an Elfen child having difficulty growing up in a Dwarven home.

On the one hand I understand that many readers require overt ideological fidelity to enjoy books–why else would there be religious bookstores? People find agreement agreeable–full stop. On the other hand censoriousness is simply a fact of human nature, no matter where a person falls on the political spectrum. Since we all implicitly understand the power of representations, we often fear them as well. And of course, we all naturalize our values. So you have well-meaning fools like those behind the hate-speech legislation here in Canada, who have no real sense of just how prosperity-dependent democracy is, and so design legal tools to illegalize the public expression of bigotry, all under the daft assumption that those tools will always be used the ways they want them to be used.

- Which would be closer to the "darkness" that comes before: a symbol, a representation, or the "meaning" of an object, person, or event? Depending on the one chosen, could it be presumed that if one grasps an "essence," that one could gain a semblence of control over how that symbol/representation/meaning is applied in say religious or political affairs in Eärwa?

Like any philosophical concept, ‘the darkness that comes before’ can be used in innumerable ways. In The Prince of Nothing, I primarily use it to refer to the way our ignorance generates the illusion that we are always in control of our actions–an illusion that leverages simplistic notions of things like responsibility and the political intuitions that follow. But I'm just another reader now.

- Anything you wish to add?

Every time you hear some version of the imperative "Believe!" cringe and fear for the future. It is the clearest symptom that we live in a culture of wilful delusion–one that actively encourages billions to think they’ve won the Magical Belief Lottery.

H:
Interview with R. Scott Bakker
(July 18, 2004)

Rob Bedford (RB): You have obviously put a lot of time and emotion into your work. How much time and effort did you put into The Darkness that Comes Before prior to contacting an agent or publisher? Did you contact an agent before submitting the book to publisher(s)?s

R. Scott Bakker (RSB): The world of Earwa was born in the basement of a small house in Port Stanley, Ontario, in the early 1980’s. The rudiments of the story started evolving in 1986, my first year of University. I actually have multiple versions of the story, and aside from one sterile exception, I never sought publication. It was my hobby – and one I felt an inordinate amount of shame about, actually. I’ve been working on the monster for a long, long time – so long that its meaning has long ago escaped me.

The only reason I’m published at all is because of Nick, my closest friend while I lived in Nashville working on my philosophy PhD at Vanderbilt University. Though I think the actual language he used would be inappropriate, one drunken night he said something like, ‘Get off your friggin’ ass and send that frigger to my old roommate!’ who just happened to be an agent in New York. Yet another ‘who you know’ story, I’m afraid. Anyway, it took a couple of years, then things just started to happen. I’m still pinching myself.

RB: The cultures you present in the saga, thus far, have a strong sense of familiarity about them. Which cultures or peoples did you use as a basis for the people of this world?

RSB: The analogy I always like to use when discussing worldbuilding is sculpture: when you build a world, what you’re doing, it seems to me, is taking a lifetime of shared cultural and historical associations and sculpting them into different shapes. When writing contemporary fiction, you simply say ‘New York’ and all the associations come ready made. But when you say, ‘Carythusal’ or ‘Nenciphon,’ the words are meaningless. The fantasy author really has one of the most difficult jobs in fiction: he or she has to make the meaningless deep with meaning – the more authentic the better, as far as I’m concerned. This is one of the things, I think, that makes Tolkien such a genius.

Some fantasy authors, Guy Kay comes to mind here, take things ‘ready-made’ from that quarry of shared associations. The advantage is that much of the work is already accomplished: once the reader realizes that Sarantium is an alternate Constantinople, the associational image is immediate and clear. Others mine the collective quarry in a more eclectic, fragmentary, or mysterious fashion – here the work can be more difficult, since nothing comes ready-made. Because my interest lies in exploring and extending the conventions of Tolkienesque epic fantasy, I followed his ‘middle approach,’ making use of fragmentary but still extensive parallels, drawing primarily on the Hellenistic Mediterranean, which I find so interesting because of its inclusion of the far more ancient contexts of Egyptian and Sumerian societies. I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world – something I could have fun destroying.

RB: You probably had intentions of publishing all along, but some writers say they reach a point when the story clicks and say to themselves: “I’ve got it.” How far were you into the writing of Darkness when you realized things clicked?

RSB: As you might have surmised from above, I actually finished writing The Darkness That Comes Before quite a while before that first ‘click.’

For the longest time I thought publication was a pipe-dream, like saying ‘I wanna be an astronaut’ in elementary school. I sent the original manuscript ofThe Prince of Nothing away once, in my early twenties – I can’t even remember to whom anymore. It was rejected, I remember that. And I also remember thinking that some editor had stolen my names: shortly after the manuscript was returned several of the names I used started popping up on the Whorf/Klingon episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation! Ah, the heady days of creative paranoia…

But even then I think I looked upon the whole thing as an impossibility. I pretty much knew ‘I lousy writer was,’ and that the themes I set myself were beyond my ability to explore in anything other than a hackneyed fashion. There was always this gap between what I wanted to write – the reflections, the feelings, the tapestry of actions – and what I was actually able to write. I never sent the manuscript out again. Instead, I started rewriting from the very beginning, and elaborating and remoulding the world of Earwa.

And I continued doing this into my mid-thirties – at this point I regarded the project as little more than an embarrassing hobby. I was living with my fiancée, Sharron, and my dissolute ways had started to dissolve. I had discovered philosophy, and the endorphins were coursing through my veins. I was hellbent on becoming a professional academic. As strange as it might sound, this was when things ‘clicked’ for me writing-wise. I still farted around with the world and the story, but for the first time, it seemed that I actually could write what I wanted to write. Expression and expectation became one and the same thing. “Some day I’m going to finish this damned thing” – that was my mantra. But as a worshipper of the great god Procrastidemus, I never really believed it. When you’re a radical pessimist, life is full of pleasant surprises.

RB: Much like fellow Canadian author Steven Erikson, your work appeared up North and across the Ocean before hitting the US shelves. Do you feel being a Canadian/non-US writer was a hurdle or obstacle to finding a US publisher? And how important was it to you to be published by a US publisher?

RSB: I’m green, so many of my opinions on this issue are simply guesswork. Many US publishers, I think, have simply rolled the Canadian market into the larger American fold, so for them, purchasing works without Canadian rights can be something of a pain in the ass – this was a barrier at places like Tor, for instance. So I guess it was something of an obstacle.

From what I understand, it’s very hard to make a living as a writer unless you have some kind of US presence. Since eating becomes an issue when you can’t make a living, you could say that getting a US deal was pretty important. Up there with sex, definitely…

Jokes aside, there are benefits to being published in Canada first. There’s what I like to call the ‘home son effect,’ which allows even a lowly fantasy author a crack at radio and television interviews. And the publishers here know the Canadian market much better than those in New York, (where Canada often seems, as A. Whitney Brown puts it, little more than “a summer camp with its own currency”). As a first time author, you’re literally at war with your own obscurity. Building a readership, I’m discovering, is far more difficult in the vast clamour of the American market.

RB: You’ve received some high praise from well-known and regarded names in the genre; specifically the blurbs on Darkness from Steve Erikson and John Marco and on The Warrior-Prophet from Kevin J. Anderson. How rewarding was this acknowledgement from you peers and did it help secure a US publishing deal?

RSB: Peers – I’d never really thought of them that way before! The acknowledgement is good, very good. I can still remember the day when my editor forwarded Steve’s blurb to me… I was floored. Here I was, this egghead with a small deal in a small market, casting about looking for ways to reach those I thought would love the book: world-junkies (such as myself), and those who’d abandoned epic fantasy when they went to university. All I could think was ‘9-out-10-first-novels-fail-9-out-of-10-first-novels-fail…’ You really feel helpless in that situation: As I said, I hadn’t taken publication seriously, but once I had the taste… That first book seemed like a hopelessly tiny doorway I had to squeeze through. Then without warning, Steve kicked open the cover from the other side and cried, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

It’s hard to explain. All I can say is that I’m very grateful to those who helped during the darkness that came before The Darkness That Comes Before. I intend to pay it forward.

RB: With Darkness, you probably did not have a deadline and the most pressure was probably from yourself as your own editor. In completing The Warrior-Prophet, was there a deadline and/or external pressure, to complete the book? Did the critical success of Darkness have an impact to your approach to writing The Warrior-Prophet?

RSB: I can honestly say that last year was the most trying year of my life – labour-wise. I taught part-time at Fanshawe College here in London, rewrote and defended the prospectus to my dissertation, and completed The Warrior-Prophet. I woke up at 5AM every morning seven days a week. Between May 2003 to March 2004, I took only one day off (to get messy with my buddies and watch The Return of the King). I wrote on Christmas. I even worked (with a hangover) on New Year’s Day.

Because I had about 15 years to finish The Darkness That Comes Before, I really had no idea what I was getting into when I signed the deals for The Warrior-Prophet and The Thousandfold Thought. Suddenly my private passion had become a collective enterprise – and I just don’t mean the immediate circle of commercial interests that suddenly spring up around an author (your agent, editor, publicist, greedy relatives, and so on), there’s your readers as well. Buying into an uncompleted series, especially by an unknown author, is an act of faith – $26 is a tank of gas or a week’s worth of groceries for me! The idea of defaulting on my end of the bargain tormented me, and the idea of writing anything other than the book I felt compelled to write was unthinkable. Pressure-pressure.

Add to this all the crazy reviews The Darkness That Comes Before was racking up. I really thought the book was a ‘love it or hate it’ work, which was no problem as far as I was concerned, because I didn’t write it for everybody. I thought the reviews would be split, and that the raves, if I received any, would be peppered with telling criticisms. After all the reviews the book has received, I think the first review I read (and what a nail-biting experience that was!) comes closest to my own feelings toward the book. Everyone else has been too kind – including you, Rob!

This is where I think the pressure was a good thing. Because my schedule was so tight, I really had no time to fret (that much) over whether The Warrior-Prophet would live up to its predecessor. All the collective concerns faded into a single imperative: ‘Write, write, write your ass off!’ And as strange as it may sound, suddenly there was me, the world, the characters, and a blank screen – just like the good old days.

Now that I have time, I’m freaking out.

RB: Was The Warrior-Prophet a more difficult work?

RSB: Both books were difficult for different reasons. One of the things about The Lord of the Rings is that the story it tells is a story that can be told (and has been told) in any number of different worlds. One of the many things that makes the story so remarkable is the way it engages the breathtaking intricacies of Middle-earth without really depending on those intricacies. People usually crinkle their noses when I say this, so let me explain a little.

When I started my first exhaustive rewrite of The Darkness That Comes Before, this time with the intent on getting published, I joined something then called the Del Rey Online Writers Workshop (or ‘the DROWW’ as we called it), where I learned fairly quickly that although I could write, I really knew squat about storytelling. If you want to write something mysterious, the first tendency, I think, is to make everything mysterious. And if you have a vast world of which you are overweeningly proud, the first tendency is to try to reference everything. Both are big mistakes. In order to interest readers in a mystery, you need to give them firm ground to stand on – concentrate on the mystery rather than on making everything mysterious. Likewise, in order to interest readers in a world, you have to give them a clear road into that world.

One of the lessons I’d learned from Tolkien is something I call ‘narrative transcendence,’ which expressed as a rule might be something like: In epic fantasy, the world must transcend the story – it must, like our own world, seem like a place capable of containing innumerable stories. To me, this meant creating a detailed world. Reality, afterall, is a function of detail. But Tolkien has a storytelling lesson that’s the compliment to this worldbuilding one: no matter how detailed the world, keep the story simple, stupid, at the beginning at least. Give the reader a clear road.

Now, through the rewrite, I had little difficulty with the mystery problem, but the ‘clear road’ problem proved nearly insuperable. Unlike Tolkien, I had a story which, though universal in abstract (the Son searching for the Father), turned in so many ways on different details belonging to the world. Since I set out to write an epic fantasy as convincing as a historical, you might think this is a good thing – and perhaps it is – but it sure made rewriting The Darkness That Comes Before difficult. I’ve lost count of all the various ways I tried making the Three Seas and Earwa accessible. And in some ways I think I failed.

With The Warrior-Prophet, I already had the world in place, and in certain respects, this made things so much easier. Even still, I found the new difficulties that arose just as challenging, but I’ll save that story for the next question.

RB: Again, comparing the two novels, Darkness, as an opening novel, naturally had more background and back-story to bring to the fore. Was focusing more on the progression of the plot in The Warrior-Prophet a more challenging or enjoyable process?

RSB: The main difficulties I faced in The Warrior-Prophet stemmed directly from the outrageous goals I had set for myself. In a sense, the book is about conquest, the myriad and often bizarre ways in which humans submit to one another, whether through violence or seduction. So on the one hand there’s the conquest of the heathen by the Holy War. I really wanted the Holy War to come across as a living, breathing thing – as an alternate protagonist, in fact. Doing this, however, required a line of quasi-historical narration (which I patterned off of Harold Lamb’s Iron Men and Iron Saints) threaded through the various strands of character narration. Since I wanted to play these two lines against each other in interesting ways, they became painstaking affairs. Also, I find the tendency is to gloss over the details when telling the story of collective actions – to narrate at a level that invites abstractions. This is what makes history boring to so many people. So there was also the continuous struggle to keep the Holy War concrete, to keep it alive in my reader’s imagination. If I think I succeeded, it’s only because I recognize that it’s impossible to carry everyone with you – the detail that enlivens historical narration for some is going to overwhelm others. There’s no way around that. As a writer I think it’s very important to pick your reader.

On the other hand, there’s the conquest of the Holy War from within – by Kellhus. Here my goal was to tell a story that shows a prophet coming to power, rather than simply telling it. Think about the difference between describing a conversation that captivates a listener, and actually giving that conversation. The former need not be captivating at all, whereas the latter has to be, somewhat, if the reader is to find its consequences plausible. Now I’m as conceited as the next guy, but I have no doubt that if I met Kellhus he would have me washing his drawers while marvelling over my good fortune. It’s bloody hard writing someone that much smarter than you! I just used the shot-gun approach, writing stupid thing after stupid thing, until I got lucky and wrote something improbably intelligent.

RB: With The Warrior-Prophet just released in Canada, when do you expect to see the next volume(s) published? Once completed, how many volumes will make up The Prince of Nothing?

RSB: The Prince of Nothing consists of three books, The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior-Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought. They tell the story of the crucial events that occur some twenty years before the Second Apocalypse begins. I have outlines (whose original forms, coincidentally, date back some twenty years) that sketch the story of the Second Apocalypse, starting with The Aspect-Emperor and ending with The-Book-that-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Whether these will turn into trilogies like The Prince of Nothing remains to be seen. My guess is that each will be a dualogy.

I once boasted while very drunk that I wanted to write something that would ultimately make The Lord of the Rings look like ‘Little Miss Muffet.’ It’ll never happen, of course, but I truly do want to write something worthy of the word ‘epic,’ hoping that even if I fail I’ve accomplished something interesting. Since buying into a series of books is very much like getting into a car with someone else behind the wheel, people should know why I’m wearing a crash helmet.

RB: With the publication of The Warrior-Prophet can you commit yourself to a full-time writing career? How much of your writing time do you devote to writing Philosophy?

RSB: I took the plunge after finishing up the spring term. Against all reason the translation deals keep trickling in, and my fiancée Sharron and I are managing to scrape by. Having the Best Agent in the World helps… As it stands, I have very little time to devote to writing philosophy, which is probably for the best. Like sobriety, it keeps me from becoming too preachy. At the moment, I’m more interested in re-enacting the crime than I am in solving it.

RB: Growing up and finding your own authorial voice, which writers/books influenced you, both in and out of the Fantasy & Science Fiction genre?

RSB: First and foremost, Tolkien. Then Frank Herbert – especially the original Dune. In some ways I think I’ve never escaped the fences these two writers have imposed on my imagination. Outside the genre, Ernest Buckler has always been the model to which I aspire, both with regard to character and style. For some reason, I always keep a copy of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby within reach – just to remind me, I guess, of the sensitivity and nuance that thought and care can instil in one’s prose.

RB: What authors are you finding time to read, again either in or out of the genre?

I just finished rereading Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, and have started rereading Deadhouse Gates, all so that I can catch up on Memories of Ice andHouse of Chains – I’ve just been so bloody busy! Erikson is single-handedly reminding me of how much fun I had reading before being institutionalized by University and ‘primary texts.’ Before that it was Mieville’s Perdido Street Station – an extraordinary book – and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which took some courage to read due to a bizarre near-death experience I had some years back. It’s the kind of book that carves its initials into your psyche. And before these it was Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, just to see what all the fuss was about. I’m still mystified.

RB: With all the fervor surrounding the Tolkien/LOTR films and Epic/High fantasy becoming a more recognizable genre, there also seems to be an undercurrent of writers who espouse to writing fiction in a vein quite the opposite of the Tolkien tradition (Elves, Wizards,and what not). While this is a good thing for the growth and (lack of a better term) diversification of the genre, there also seems to be a bit of derision towards Professor Tolkien’s works. In our Fantasy forums (http://www.sffworld.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=6), there is a continual debate regarding the genre and where it is going, are there too many Tolkien clones and are there not enough “original” voices in fantasy, writers who don’t exactly mimic Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Though your work straddles the line between the two in the best possible way, something reminiscent of the spirit of Tolkien’s work mingled with an incredibly detailed, rich, vibrant and new world, where do you personally stand, in terms of diversity in the genre from Tolkein-ish fantasy to the New Weird writers like China Mieville?

RSB: I actually see myself as slavishly following Tolkien’s model… But then that was the point: to explore these enormously popular conventions by taking them seriously – turning them inside out, you might say, as opposed to upside down. When the first galleys of The Darkness That Comes Before were printed, Penguin sent me two boxes of fifteen by mistake, and following the helpful advice of John Marco, I started sending them far and wide, asking various people if they would be interested in taking a looksee. Now I knew nothing, and I mean nothing, about the bigger SF&F scene – I’d scarcely read three or four fantasy novels in the preceding decade – so I had no idea of what to expect. But I scoped out various websites, thinking the book would be better received by eggheads like myself. I started emailing queries.

Then I ran head on into this debate. First I received a couple of outright refusals of the ‘I don’t do epic fantasy’ stripe, then a couple of warnings: ‘Send it, but you should know that I hate epic fantasy.’ Given the hype surrounding Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, I thought this was understandable. Everyone knows someone who seems to hate popular things because they’re popular. You have those who cultivate what I call the ‘iconoclastic chic,’ on the one hand, and those who have a principled suspicion of the culture industry on the other. No surprise here, I thought. Every nook and cranny of culture has its own ‘literati.’ If SF&F is ‘paraliterature,’ then ‘paraliterati’ are pretty much inevitable, aren’t they? All I have to do, I told myself, is show them I’m the ‘real deal’ – they’ll come around.

So I posed a question on a message board where epic fantasy seemed to be taking a particularly hard beating at the hands of one of these reviewers. I realized something was amiss the first time I had my knuckles rapped for using the term ‘sci-fi’ instead of ‘SF.’ Then I ended up spending my time fending off a succession of strawman criticisms and attacks on my character – and I kept apologizing, thinking that it had to be my ‘e-tone’ or something like that. I mean, these people were all about celebrating difference and diversity, weren’t they?

No such luck. The grease was burning and I was on the grill!

At the time the reasons behind the flames escaped me, but now I think it had to do with an attack I made on postmodernism – something which only became clear to me after I had read Perdido Street Station. If I remember correctly, I was in the midst of reading Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and apart from being awestruck by his incisive observations and immaculate prose, I found myself disappointed by what seemed – to me, anyway – an almost mechanical reproduction of a number of post-modern tropes: the use of ‘existentially subversive’ doubles and mirrors, the continual references to hybridity and the carnivalesque, the decentred self, the eschewing of motivation and ‘psychological realism.’ So much of it seemed straight out of the po-mo manual to me, to the point where I started playing, quite against my intentions, ‘spot the trope’ while reading. Even worse, it seemed to me that he was using them uncritically – or worse yet, thinking them inherently critical rather than the statement of an alternate status quo.

I think the reason I was flamed was simply that these tropes, which seemed a tired expression of a bankrupt formalism to me, actually seemed exciting or important to those I debated. Their reaction, I think, was akin to the reaction lovers of Jordan or Brooks must have when one of the paraliterati parachutes in and starts enumerating and dismissing all the recycled tropes they adore. They got their backs up.

Of course none of this means that postmodern tropes can’t be made interesting – I actually think Mieville has one up on Wolfe in this regard. And of course, an indictment of postmodernism is not necessarily and indictment of the New Weird. Personally, I look forward to sharing their explorations as a reader and an unabashed fan.

But this encounter, which dismayed me at the time, set me thinking long and hard, not simply about fantasy, but about what fantasy should be. As a result, I’ve come to a handful of tentative conclusions, any of which I’d only be too happy to be argued out of…

i) Intellectual conventions, such as the po-mo tropes I mention above, can be every bit as stifling as commercial ones – perhaps even moreso, given the way they seem to fool otherwise intelligent people into thinking they’re doing something critical, or even worse, revolutionary. The ‘traditional paradigms’ of self, meaning, and representation crashed a long time ago.

ii) Defecting from conventions is cheap. Rule-breaking is simply a formal exercise, and one which can be pursued, as modern art has shown, to the point of utter inaccessibility. It does not magically possess a more privileged relation to originality than rule-following. The issue, it seems to me, is always one of how we break or follow the rules.

iii) Commercial conventions can be profound. The paraliterati, I’ve found, often gloss over the dialectical nature of the culture industry and claim that media corporations dictate what the masses read – this is every bit as weak as the libertarian or market fundamentalist claim that the masses dictate, through their purchases, what media corporations produce. Obviously the two are in dialogue with one another, and the pendulum swings.

Any mass market product is in some way the result of collective desire, which is to say, the result of some collective lack. Now in the case of many mass consumer products, I would agree that the lack at issue is largely a corporate contrivance: diamond engagement rings are the classic example here. Ashamed you can’t afford a decent rock? Thank DeBeers, who in their wholesale promotional videos openly admit to engineering new ‘cultural imperatives.’ Epic fantasy, however, is a different story: Tolkien’s original publisher simply stumbled upon the collective lack it answers to, one that predates any marketing campaign and seems damn near universal.

This makes the sub-genre, and all the family resemblances belonging to it, horribly significant. Epic fantasy is a cipher, a way to decode who we are during this strange and dangerous time in our history. For me, this means the conventions of epic fantasy need to be understood far more than they need to be lampooned. Those who think they already understand, that the case is closed, are nothing more than dogmatists. There’s precious few open and shut cases in cultural criticism. It’s interpretation all the way down.

iv) If epic fantasy is a symptom of a far more fundamental phenomenon, then wishing away its commercial dominance simply makes no sense. This, I think, is the crux of the ongoing debate. If epic fantasy was simply an arbitrary phenomenon, a historical accident or a corporate imposition, then perhaps the tactics of the paraliterati would make sense – perhaps. I have my chits on the opposite side of the table, and a host of what I think are compelling arguments (some of which are summarized in an old article I submitted here at sffworld called Why Fantasy and Why Now?. But even if I’m wrong, I’m not sure what the paraliterati hope to accomplish by continually railing against epic fantasy. Surely they don’t think the demise of epic fantasy will mean the end of commercially dominant conventions, do they? Perhaps they simply want their conventions to become commercially dominant, though you’d think they’d realize, given the way the market caters to our all too human need for flattery, simplicity, and certainty, that the chances of this seem pretty bleak.

It’s pretty hilarious when you think about it: epic fantasy fans on the one side, dismissing the paraliterati as arrogant cranks, and the paraliterati on the other side, dismissing epic fantasy readers as ignorant fools. Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? Generic conventions aren’t the only things being repeated ad nauseum!

So what should fantasy be? Enjoyed. Explored. Criticized and extolled. Arguing the form it should or shouldn’t take, it seems to me, is something of a mug’s game.

H:
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
(June 01, 2011)

- You seem quite pleased with the way THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR has been received thus far. Did Overlook and Orbit market this one differently than its predecessor, or has the novel just built on the wave created by THE JUDGING EYE?

There’s as many answers to this question as there readers of the series. One of the factors, I think, has to do with the difficulty of The Thousandfold Thought. Combined with the delay, many readers took their time moving onto The Judging Eye, so there was no real sales bump you often see in fantasy series. Then of course there was the fiscal crisis... Dark fiction generally doesn’t fare that well during dark days.

The bottomline is that I’m walking a tightrope with this series, balancing what I think is a celebration of the high fantasy genre with various staples of literary fiction in what I think are novel and interesting ways. It’s a rich and heady brew, and it’ll take time, I think, to move through the cultural gut. My agent worries. My wife worries. I’ve actually been offered substantial sums to abandon the series!

And I always say, "Wait... wait until its done. Then you’ll see." The catechism of the Wishful Thinker, perhaps.

Perhaps the response to The White-Luck Warrior is the first glimmer... Who knows? Hopefully people keep talking.

- THE JUDGING EYE was your most accessible book to date, yet many hardcore fans bemoaned the absence of your "spending too much time knocking around in your characters’ heads." In that regard, THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR seems to be a return to what made the Prince of Nothing so distinctive. Was that a conscious decision, or did the narrative simply demand such a return to form?

I’m always tweaking, of course, especially while working on revisions, but I think this as much a function of the story as anything else. I still think there’s too much unmotivated interiority in The Prince of Nothing, points where I wallow in this or that perspective for the sake of exploring this or that nuance of character–nuances, which, frankly, strike all but the most careful readers as bald repetition. So in The Thousandfold Thought, for instance, I was bent on exploring the fingerprint, down to the trough and whorls, of religious submission to another. This angle and that. Spin it this way, articulate it that. I see it as a meditation on some very curious facts regarding power and passion, and I indulged myself, saying, ‘Well, if they’ve followed me this far...’

‘This far,’ I now think, was ‘too far.’ All along I wanted to write an epic fantasy that rewards careful reading, the kind of scrutiny generally reserved for so-called ‘literary texts.’ A fantasy that wouldn’t be ‘ruined’ by a literature PhD, let alone a BA. At the same time I wanted to write an epic fantasy that rewards casual reading as well–to literally have it both ways. This is the tightrope. The temptation for me would be scoff at the casual readers, upbraid them for not being ‘careful enough.’ But the failure is mine: I’m the one who set the task of writing something that works at multiple levels of resolution, so it would be dishonest to simply jump from the one to the other depending on the charge. I need to have both to satisfy my own yardstick.

This is why I like to think I’ve been much more careful in The White-Luck Warrior, dipping into the souls of my characters, yes, but with more an eye for advancing the story. The nuances are all still there, and I’m sure many will bitch about ‘getting it the first time,’ but not quite so many, and I’ll take that as a measure of progress.

Otherwise, I think the book has more than enough hysterical psychodrama to please the navel porn junkies out there.

- Why was the original title, THE SHORTEST PATH, ultimately dropped and changed to THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR?

I was never quite happy with The Shortest Path, and I always liked The White-Luck Warrior, more so once the structural parallels to The Warrior-Prophet became increasingly apparent. I love blurs, the way repetitions, twisted through the lens of changing contexts, create resonances and ambiguities.

- What's the basic timeline we can expect for the release of your next few books? I understand there is a "Can-Lit" novel that will be released in the near future? What can you tell us about that novel?

We were working on a deal that would have seen Light, Time, and Gravity published this fall, but unfortunately, things didn’t work out. A couple years back I took this recipe I had been using to spoof CanLit (up here on the boreal fringe of the United States, we’re forced to subsidize culture to convince ourselves we’re more than just Americans who think they’re better than Americans) and used it to pitch a project to the Canada Council, an institution notorious for high-brow bigotry. And lo, I received a cheque for twenty G’s in the mail a few months later. Loathe to part with the money, I decided to actually write the book.

The idea is the same: embrace the genre, then stuff it with as much craziness as I can get away with. When you write a literary novel you are entering a certain kind of ‘judgment space’ (one where many of the things you and I love are regarded as ‘silly’ to varying degrees). I know there’s a lot of people like me out there, people who for whatever reason find themselves stuck between judgment spaces. (As the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy!) What I try to do in Light, Time, and Gravity, is put these warring pieces in narrative and theoretical motion. The point was to tell a kind of inverted ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’ tale, or Bildungsroman, to use the ten dollar term. What I wanted to show was the bullshit at the heart of so many intellectual bootstrapping tales you hear in academia and literary circles, how transcending one’s ‘benighted origins’ was simply a movement from a set of vulgar conceits to a more insidious set of sophisticated ones.

Values are judgments, so when you abandon one set for another, as happens to so many in university, you are in effect learning how to play a different ‘judgment game.’ The assumption, of course, is that the new game is better than the old, that the humanities, as people like Nussbaum argue, teach people how to think ‘critically,’ that it produces ‘citizens,’ that it somehow elevates individuals above the popular mire, and so preserves some essential kernel of true culture.

Bullshit. It teaches people how to rationalize (typically canonical) conclusions, not to think critically. Teaching people how to write essays is teaching them how to cook up reasons after the fact. This, given the world we live in, is an absolutely essential skill, but there’s nothing ‘critical’ about it. Rationalization is the primary obstacle to the possibility of critical thinking. My (entirely hypothetical) claim is that if you put an English professor in an MRI and pose a number of controversial cultural claims that they would access the problem-solving centres of their brains no more than would a Christian evangelical. (I think I’m actually a kind of proof: If the literary world were even remotely ‘self-critical,’ then you would think they would be discussing critiques such as these, rather than lace the blinders like the ‘cretinized masses’ they lampoon.)

Even worse, it stigmatizes ‘intellectualism,’ renders it the marker of an adversarial social identity. To be intellectual is to belong to a particular, ideologically entrenched out-group, one that generally assumes the cultural worst about ‘regular Joes’ like you. Brainwashed. Oppressed. Kissing the boots that kick us.

As if they were anything more than another boot. The primary social function of post-secondary literary studies, as far as I can tell, is to sift through the masses, identify the critically and creatively minded, then convince them to turn their back on their community. To make fun of popular culture rather than transform it. The sad fact is that the humanities evolved in near absolute ignorance of the pedagogical and social problems they pretend to address. Now, given their prodigious rationalizing skills, they cling to the model that secures their livelihood and prestige.

And I remain another lunatic in the institutional wilderness.

- In THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR we get some hints about the stakes that are being played for, the notion that the Consult want to reduce the population of Earwa to a specific decimal number which has Biblical significance. Was your intention here to draw a direct parallel between the story of Kellhus and the Great Ordeal and that Biblical source, or was it merely an easter egg and the correlation itself is not significant?

Is an ‘easter egg’ the same thing as a herring? If so, there’s a whole whap of them in the books.

- Many early readers of THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR have speculated over the meaning of "144,000." Considering there is a reference to that in the biblical book of Revelation, it does spark curiosity. However, what I'm more curious about is symbolism in the series. Are you consciously connecting "revealed truths" and prophecies with what is unfolding in your narrative?

In a sideways manner, definitely. Fantasy is about ‘blurring,’ taking a shared semantic palette and painting new things–new worlds. Tolkien took Northern European myth as his primary palette. I’m blurring scripture, pursuing the idea that epic fantasy is a kind of ‘scripture otherwise.’ So I employ a variety of strategies to spin a kind of scriptural tone, a certain diction, a certain kind of repetition, a certain moralistic attitude, and so on. Story-wise, I often draw content from the Bible, milking old religious associations to create something new.

Few things are more epic than the Holy Bible.

- After months of relative internet silence, you have elected to create your own blog. What prompted that decision?

I was told this was what contemporary writers have to do to keep their publishers happy nowadays. But for some reason I don’t think my blog makes anyone with a commercial stake in my work happy.

Having something to sell–like I do–makes honest communication bloody difficult. And I am always, always haunted by this. Yet I blunder on. I know that for many readers, no matter how often I spoof myself, no matter how often I reference my own foibles to condemn this or that social idiocy, I come across as a pretentious, arrogant blowhard. How could it be otherwise when I spend all my time telling everyone that they’re far less intelligent, far less rational, far less right, than they credit themselves? The endless qualifications don’t matter. The stupendous amount of research doesn’t matter. The automatic, instant assumption is that I must–at some level–consider myself the magical exception. Nothing makes people more defensive than impugning their intelligence.

Tweak someone’s pride and your wit becomes snark, your insight becomes pretense–the whole tone of everything you say is transformed. Once a brain is primed to find fault, there really is no stopping it, given the ambiguity of language and the world. I sometimes think the very premise of the Three Pound Brain makes it untenable.

This is why I fear the blog is actually doing real damage to my book sales. But what the hell can I do? Transform it into market friendly pap? I just don’t have it in me. Abandon it? I’m beginning to think this is the best solution.

I’m a critic. I’m a know-it-all. I’m a mincer and a tail-chaser. I can never quite play along–no matter what the game! All this makes me a hard sell when it comes to general audiences. The sad fact is that some authors detract from the viability of their work–they just do. Before my daughter (and the prospect of funding a post-secondary education) came along, I would have throttled forward, the torpedoes be damned. But nothing argues cowardice quite so fiercely as parenthood.

- How has your interaction with the fans and the critics colored your choices in characterization and plot? Has there been anything that you've changed because of that interaction?

Most critics are what you might call ‘extreme readers’: they tend to read a lot more than your typical fantasy fan. The paradox of reviewing is that critics are forced to offer up their assessments as typical when their training and sheer exposure to a genre almost guarantees a relatively idiosyncratic reading. So as interested as I am in what the critics say, I really don’t take much of what they say to creative heart. It’s workaday readers and the distribution of their responses that I’m primarily interested in.

I actually gave a paper on this at Aarhus University several months back, so it’s something I’ve pondered quite seriously. The argument I’ve been making ad nauseam for years now is that ‘Literature,’ whatever it is, is nothing essential. Literature is as literature does. Change the circumstances radically enough, and what once counted as Literature will cease doing literary things. And in the past couple decades I think we have witnessed a number of circumstantial game changers. First and foremost, there is market segmentation, the ever more specific and robust linking of various readers to various kinds of fiction. This transformation, I’ve been arguing, has rendered present day ‘literary fiction’ just another genre, with largely fixed audiences demanding the satisfaction of relatively fixed expectations.

The second great game-changer has got to be the Internet.

I go through these spasms of trolling the web, looking at message board responses to my work. I find it taxing at times, simply because my books seem to be so polarizing, but over the years I’ve developed a fair understanding, I think, of the ways my writing parses readers, blowing some away, and irritating others to distraction. Since I see fiction as a form of communication, an attempt to conjure worlds in the brains of others, I think this near instantaneous feedback is as invaluable as it is revolutionary.

It’s like watching the ripples your stones make when you plunk them in the pond. If you think Literature resides in the shape of the stones (the resemblance of your work to past forms), then it makes no difference if you throw them with your eyes opened or closed. If you think literature resides in the ripples (what you work does to actual readers), then you have to keep your eyes peeled, and prepare to be humbled time and again.

- In a Q&A you did five years ago, you brought up the issue of exploring sexism in the guise of what if religious tracts were correct about the "inferiority" of women. Despite this, you've received some flak for the lack of female characters that aren't variations of the "crone, whore, or saint." Has this affected your portrayals of some of the female characters?

When it comes to the misogyny charge my answer has been fairly consistent, I think. First, that I am a sexist, insofar as I think men are generally less competent than women across the majority of modern social contexts. I generally find women more reliable and trustworthy. If anything, misandry is my problem, not misogyny. Second, that people are inclined to mistake depiction for endorsement. Third, that those who decide my books are misogynistic cannot help but find evidence to confirm their view (just as people who decide my books are feminist (my intention) cannot help but find evidence confirming their view). Fourth, that I recognize the problem of the ‘Archie Bunker effect,’ that for many readers the feminist subtexts are simply too opaque to rescue the books from misogynistic misreadings.

And fifth, that the story is far from done, that my critics are passing judgment on fractions of the whole.

It would be entirely dishonest of me to suggest that I haven’t been influenced by the debate, but the fact remains that the story, the characters, and most importantly, the thematic arc, were around long before I realized how hindsight and confirmation bias would obscure my intentions. One of the recurring themes in the series has to do with the contextual vagaries of strength. I have always thought of Esmenet as being extraordinarily strong, given her oppressive circumstances. But her strength is a different strength than that of Mimara, whose strength is entirely different than that of Serwa.

The problem is that so many people think strength consists of agency and nothing more–that strength is simple. Even worse, most think they have far more agency than they in fact do. Everyone thinks they would do better than others who falter or fail in various moral situations. This is why, for instance, they overrate the value of confessions in trials: no one believes that they could be verbally cajoled and coerced into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit (when a frightening number can be). Or consider all those fast-food managers who, convinced that a sophisticated prank caller was a narcotics officer, found themselves talked into strip-searching, and in some cases, sexually assaulting, their employees.

Perceptions of authority make us do crazy things. It’s not just that nobody wants to be as weak as they are, we’re simply hardwired to believe otherwise to varying degrees (just another unpleasant human fact that we need to come to grips with as a society). As a result, many people have difficulty identifying with ‘weak characters.’ Why? Because they’re continually doing things they think they wouldn’t. A surfeit of ‘weak female characters’ they then consider a flag for misogyny. Add that to a brutally patriarchal setting, and we have a pretty compelling case that Bakker is a misogynist.

All they need do is keep reading after this point: a character will have a hundred thoughts, and they’ll pounce upon the one involving sex. That thought will have a hundred different possible interpretations, but they’ll crow about the one that confirms their criticism. The very semantic density of the works begins working against me. Competing interpretations are dismissed, particularly if they’re charitable. To preempt the possibility that I’m doing something more complicated, I get dragged through the mud in other ways. I become trite, derivative, preachy, and the list goes on.

Once people socially commit to this position, then its game over. Others challenge them (because the books really are more complicated) and suddenly making their case becomes a matter of in-group prestige. They become invested, to the point of repeating the same arguments over years. It really is remarkable. They end up sounding like, well, gay conservatives. People who act like fans in so many ways, devouring the books, discussing them, and yet spending all their air-time taking the piss out of them. Such is the need to be believed!

And the unfortunate fact is that they prime the expectations of other readers, bend the funhouse mirror in ways that tend to close the possibility of open, charitable readings–a mindset that I think the books genuinely reward. I have no doubt that sales have suffered, such is the power of labels. Books that interrogate misogyny, that ask genuinely hard questions about gender (as opposed to politically correct ones), become shunned as ‘misogynistic.’

Is this me ‘blaming the reader’? Fucking A it is. Books are not like shoes: the customer isn’t always right in the world of writing. But I’m only pointing out weaknesses that we all share, that screw with all of us all the time. Me. You. It’s just the way it works. Moral intuitions are tweaked, then the reasons come rushing in afterward. I know these reasons are convincing: for most people they’re identical to conviction. There just has to be something wrong with me or my books. It’s so obvious. And yet, when I tell friends of mine, male and female, that people ‘out there’ think I’m a male chauvinist, they laugh their asses off. People who actually know me think it’s preposterous.

This is getting really longwinded–such is the need to defend one’s honour, let alone sell books! Anyway, I was already committed to the story long before these controversies erupted. More than a few times I found myself writing material that I knew people would intentionally read against my intent, but like I said, I was already committed. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that a certain subset of readers will see flags instead of ciphers, and that this controversy will always dog the books. All I can hope is that the overall reputation of the series will survive and eventually overshadow this perplexing sideshow. For all the praise you hear about ‘risk taking,’ you still get punished for taking them. That’s what makes them risks in the first place!

The moral of the story? Be careful of what you ask for.

- There appear to be parallels between THE WHITE-LUCK WARRIOR and THE WARRIOR-PROPHET, in both name and the fact that huge armies face massive difficulties (logistical and otherwise) in traversing huge wastelands. Was this deliberate or a natural side-effect of them both being 'middle books' in their respective series?

It was always in the cards, simply because the story always involved two holy wars waged over great distances. War stories of the kind I’m trying to tell seem to possess a natural tripartite structure: assembly, transport, conflagration. Tailor-made for trilogies...

- In the past you've said that the final sequence of The Second Apocalypse cannot be named because it would be a massive spoiler. Will THE UNHOLY CONSULT - the final volume of The Aspect-Emperor sequence - reveal the name of the final sub-series? And if Kellhus is the Prince of Nothing and now is the Aspect-Emperor can we assume that the title of the final series will also refer to Kellhus?

So much will be revealed, in fact, that I can’t comment–at least not in a family-friendly interview such as this! Things. Get. Positively. Hardcore.

- You've said in the past that Cil-Aujas in THE JUDGING EYE was a nod of thanks to Tolkien and Moria. Similarly, was Cleric and Akka's adventures in Sauglish a nod at Erebor and Smaug from THE HOBBIT? Some have also mentioned McCarthy. Are there other literary touchstones in your books fans may or may not have perceived?

More than I can count. I don't have an original bone in my body. Derivations piled upon derivations. I'm kind of like calculus that way.

- In DON QUIXOTE there is a line, "History is the mother of truth." To what degree, if any, would the altered "memory is the mother of truth" apply to your novels, particularly DISCIPLE OF THE DOG and the scenes involving the Nonmen in your Earwä novels?

Beautiful aphorism, isn’t it? One thing I love about aphorisms is the way they can become a kind of conceptual haiku, how abstract claims, left to hang in isolation, seem to soak up profundity and possibility. Consider these alternatives to Quixote: History is the mother of power. Power is the mother of truth. Hunger is the mother of history. Knowledge is the mother of history. Each of these versions possess some whiff of truth: the concepts involved are so abstract, their meanings so overdetermined, that you seem to capture something in the mere act of shuffling them around. Each says something (apparently) crucial without in any way saying anything final.

History, Appetite, Knowledge and Power are of course four of the bigger thematic pillars of the series. The story literally bristles with them. With Achamian, history is indeed the mother of truth: the key to understanding the Second Apocalypse lies in comprehension of the First. With Kellhus (and the D nyain more generally) history is the mother of deception, another ‘darkness that comes before.’ In both cases, history is the frame, the ground of what happens. And the series has become somewhat notorious, I think, for the way histories are layered throughout.

With the Nonmen, history is not so much the frame as the object of appetite. They are way to explore what happens when history is piled too high, so high that the losses begin to crowd out the joys. Disciple of the Dog explores a similar theme, only for Disciple it’s the crowding that’s the problem more than what gets crowded out.

In both cases, history becomes the mother of insanity.

- Being as meticulous as you are, have you ever drawn a "world map" of the areas that are outside the ones already depicted?

I’m not sure ‘meticulous’ is a word that I have any right to. Any rigour in my worldbuilding is simply the product of having lived with (and in) Earwa for so long. I’ve actually resisted mapping out the entire globe over the years. Ideas for alternate civilizations seem to crop up like mushrooms in my imagination, and the temptation is to make good on them by giving them a ‘place.’

But way back, I wrote this paper on the difference between ancient and modern roads (in the context of a philosopher named Levinas). The signature conceptual difference, I argued, was the way modern roads enclose the globe, the way civilization, in a sense, never runs out for us the way it did for the ancients. At the time I decided the best way to remain true to the ancient headspace I was trying to conjure was to make sure all the roads in Earwa run out, to make the terra incognita in my world absolute.

But this isn’t to say that surprises haven’t been painted across the horizon.

- As the final volume in The Aspect-Emperor, will THE UNHOLY CONSULT also feature a massive encyclopedia about the setting, like The Thousandfold Thought?

I’ve already started working on the ‘Expanded and Revised’ Encyclopaedic Glossary, in fact, but more and more it’s looking as though The Unholy Consult will be larger than even The White-Luck Warrior. If so, I’m guessing that the Glossary will have to be published... gulp... separately.

- Speaking of THE UNHOLY CONSULT, what can you tell us about the final volume of The Aspect-Emperor?

Completing it will certainly be a tremendous relief, simply because it’ll allow me to finally talk about so many things I’ve kept bottled up for so many years. I’m not sure whether The Second Apocalypse will be anything more than a cult success, commercially speaking, but when you live with a story as long as I have, it becomes a kind of yardstick, something almost religious in its demands. I am very, very happy with how the tale has come along–thanks, in large part, to some important lessons I learned along the way. My brother and I used to pine and daydream about this back in our D&D days, so to see it rendered, every bit as epic as we hoped, and as profound and lyrically beautiful as I could make it... well, that’s just way, way cool.

It feels scriptural, in my imagination at least.

Now, at the top of the sixth inning, the bases are loaded and I need to hit the ball out of the park. So what I want to say is that The Unholy Consult is where most of the burning questions will be revealed. I write books that many people love to hate: my hope is that after this latest set of reveals, the series will have earned their grudging respect as something genuinely unique and daring.

- Will the final sequence still be a duology or do you think there is scope for it expanding to another trilogy?

I won’t know until I begin working on it in earnest.

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