Interview With Robert V.S. Redick

Robert V.S. Redick will début will Gollancz on February the 1st, with his fantasy trilogy, The Chathrand Voyage, which is already attracting enormous praise -- the U.K. Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Club has chosen it as one of its "Cosmic Five" début titles for 2008; and it's been receiving some fabulous online reviews, too: from The Wertzone and Sandstorm Reviews.

Without any further ado: the interview!

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The Red Wolf Conspiracy, your début, is due for release by Gollancz in February 2008 and, already the British Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club has it on their "Cosmic Five" list – what can you tell us about your début that makes it so splendiferous?

A:

All I can tell you is what brings me joy in the work – and ‘joy’ is a pretty broad concept for a fiction writer, often including a lot of dark things alongside the more familiar, daylit satisfactions. In the case of Red Wolf and The Chathrand Voyage trilogy, I feel like I’ve found my way into a world I’ve been dreaming of my whole life. And strangely enough it feels like home: a dangerous home, certainly, but home nonetheless. That’s an odd thing to say about a world of ixchel and Flikkermen and haunted beaches, of course. But it’s very much the case. The people of the world called Alifros are alive for me, dear to me. They’re also struggling for the things I believe in, against the most powerful and ruthless forces in the world: against those who stand to profit obscenely from a nascent war. That struggle deeply engages me. And a part of it is a struggle within the hearts of the protagonists themselves: a struggle against ignorance, prejudice, fear, all those deadly internal foes.

And what can we look forward to in the concluding volumes of The Chathrand Voyage trilogy? (Obviously, since the book hasn't been released yet, we're all still looking forward to the first book, but I like to maintain the illusion of living in the future!) How far written are the two books?

A:

To take the last question first: the second book’s well underway. It will be called The Rats and the Ruling Sea, and will be published by Gollancz in 2009. The third book’s also fully mapped out. I get a kind of psychic lump in the throat as I say this, because I know what’s in store for Pazel and Thasha and all my other characters. They tend to be headstrong. They’re awkward, impulsive, driven. To live with such traits is hard enough in a law-governed society that tempers extremes. But what happens when you literally sail off the map?

I guess this is my segue into your question about Books II and III. When you’re cut off from everything familiar, a lot of repressed urges and savage behaviour can result. And then there are all these forgotten lands and people that must suddenly be faced and fought or reasoned with, a vastly expanded tapestry, an intensified magical war. But I’d better stop there, and first let readers have a crack at Book I.

Could you tell us a little about the journey your story undertook to publication? How does it feel now to be soon-to-be published author? It must be quite a strange feeling to have your book published a continent away! Any really noticeable affect on your life yet?

A:

I feel humbled by my own good fortune. You recall what le Guin says about deserving, towards the end of The Dispossessed? To wit: it’s a lie. We each deserve nothing, and everything, and to tell yourself otherwise is to embrace a dangerous illusion. In my case I owe so much to so many people—the writers whose books have shaped my life, the teachers who gave so much of themselves, my exceptional agent John Jarrold and equally marvellous editor Simon Spanton, family, on and on and on. Beyond that sense of humility and gratitude—well, there’s just little time left to feel much more. I write until my arms ache or my brain switches off. Deadlines have a way of making you do that.

As for publishing in the U.K. first: in a strange way that too feels natural. I’ve been an anglophile since at least 1989, when I spent the happiest six months of my life in central London.

If you could co-write with one author, who would it be and why?

A:

What a great question. Vladimir Nabokov. Because we’d fight, and I mean fight. Both formally and lyrically, he’s among the most gifted novelists who ever lived. But he’s also a monumental classist and a literary exhibitionist. Have you ever noticed how the very thing that makes a book truly remarkable is also, often, what makes it unbearable? I mean, what if Nabokov hadn’t showcased his ghastly snobbery and irritating cleverness on every page of Lolita? What if Humbert Humbert had simply liked young women, instead of little girls in knee-socks? If that were the case I’d no longer think of Lolita with a shudder of revulsion. I’d not think of it with a writer's envy, either. I’d not think of it at all, for it wouldn’t be a masterpiece any longer, just another accomplished book.

Nabokov hated some of my literary heroes, among them Dostoevsky. I expect he’d rather be shot than collaborate with me. But if somehow it happened, I’m sure he’d rip through my pages with a searing disdain, challenging me to do more, more, and I’d struggle to rise to that occasion.

What do you hope to achieve as a writer?

A:

Never to contribute to despair. Always to contribute to consciousness, to sentience, which strikes me as a condition we only achieve at moments. In Red Wolf there’s a passage in which the good wizard, Ramachni, shares a parable with Felthrup the rat about what ‘waking’ means: waking of course has a special valence in the world of Alifros, where animals are erupting into something like human intelligence, often with tragic results. But Ramachni points out that humans fool themselves when they think of sentience in black and white terms - either you have it or you don’t. No, he says, you can always take it further, you can always see more. That’s what I hope to be a part of.

A part of that is standing with people as they – or we, I should say – struggle to be good. That struggle may be a doomed one in the cosmic sense, but it is essential nonetheless. And it’s a very easy struggle to distort, to misrepresent. Exaggerate its purity and you have melodrama, and perhaps Starship Troopers. Exaggerate its pointlessness or fixate on failure and you have Céline, who whines about having to eat lentils. Get it right and you have Hamlet or Huck Finn or Genly Ai.

Although The Red Wolf Conspiracy is your first fantasy, you've written several other novels as well – would you say you've changed as a writer since then? And how different is it writing those other types of literature than writing fantasy?

A:

The first novel I ever undertook was a work of science fiction. The second was a fantasy. The third, the first I actually completed, is called Conquistadors. It’s a literary thriller and dark love story, set during the Dirty War in Argentina, a country I spent lots of time in the 1990s. It took me eight years to write Conquistadors, and I couldn’t be prouder of it. For rather complex reasons (and a lot of naiveté about the publishing world on my part) it’s not yet in print. Throughout those years I was also hungry for mentorship, and finally found it in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson, this lovely little college tucked into the mountains above Asheville, North Carolina.

All this is to say that I love what gets called ‘literary’ fiction as much as I love fantasy and science fiction. And detest it too, when it’s hackneyed or dull. But here’s what I hope and pray: that loving both has made me better at both. Speculative fiction compels one to dare, to dream big, to stay in touch with that spark of wonder that led many of us to books in the first place. Literary fiction compels one to listen for the music, the subtleties, the quieter truths of the soul.

You mentioned a science-fiction novel there -- :D – do you have any plans beyond The Chathrand Trilogy for either books within the same world, or brave new ones?

A:

Plans I’m never short of, honestly. The trouble is choosing between them. Beyond the currently trilogy, I do have thoughts, notes, even some preliminary chapters set in the same world of Alifros. They could quickly lead me into another big series. If I follow that path, one or two characters will come with me, taking the leap from the Chathrand books into new territory. But there are other kettles on the stove – a dark fantasy set in the 1960s, a mainstream literary book set in 19^th-century Virginia, and other projects too nebulous to mention. I’ll have to wait and see.

You've just had your very cool website put up – how important do you think the Internet will be to you in engaging with readers, and, let's not be coy!, selling your books?

A:

No coyness—I just don’t know how these things work. But even though I’m something of a cyber-phobe myself, I do realize that the internet is a part of our lives, and that creative people inhabit and explore and develop it in all kinds of marvellous ways. Fortunately, I have great friends who are game designers and web-gurus. They’re talking me through my issues.

And the possibilities are sinking in. I have lots of ideas for extending the reading experience via the website. It’s exciting and fun; so many of the rules are different. The only trouble, as always, is time. And of course the books come first.

Of course :) The Chathrand Voyage trilogy is obviously set aboard a ship -- could you tell us a bit about how you created the Chathrand, and the difficulties it presented? How much research went into it?

A:

Infinite, endless research. I thought I knew what I was getting into, but hell, I was a babe in the woods. The tall wooden ships of the age of sail were not only beautiful. They were also the most complex devices of their day. They required hundreds of men and ceaseless attention and a rigorous application of sailing science just to stay afloat. They had tens of thousands of components, any one of which could spell disaster if broken or misused. And the Chathrand (her name means ‘Wind-Palace’) is quite a bit larger than the largest wooden sailing ship every built in this world.

The Chathrand is also an enchanted ship in a world of magic, which lets me bend the rules somewhat. But I did have to learn those rules. I didn’t have the time or money to book a passage on one of the few enormous ships still afloat. So I did all that I could: I walked around on old ships in Gloucester and San Francisco and Barcelona and Portland, Maine. I crawled around inside H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship, in Portsmouth, England, until my family dragged me away. And I went out on the beautiful Yankee Clipper, a tall ship out of Boston, and the kind crew taught me what they could of navigation, setting sail and general seamanship. I climbed the masts and took the wheel and all that. And I devoured every book about old ships imaginable.

Of course the Chathrand is more than a vehicle: it’s the primary setting of The Red Wolf Conspiracy. Before I could set Pazel and Thasha and Arunis and Master Mugstur loose on it I had to be able to see it precisely. The only way to do that was to make my own deck plans. So I did, for all seven decks and the hold. The Victory was a great help in this regard. She’s tiny compared to the Chathrand, but she was built for similar purposes of war and statecraft, and she’s the most well-documented tall ship on earth. Without her I’d have had a much harder job of it, no question.

This is along the same vein as the last: with twenty languages being spoken aboard the Chathrand, how did you go about creating them without giving yourself, and the reader, a headache ... assuming of course, that you're not like Tolkien and speak every language under the sun?!

A:

Not me. I just married one of those prodigies. My partner Kiran speaks seven languages, five since early childhood in India. I speak rather good Spanish, and what little I recall of the Russian and French I studied years ago. I confess, though, to being fascinated by language itself: the coded artefact, and the social realities it shapes.

I put immense effort into my fictional languages. I want each one to have its appropriate euphony, its meter and music. But the writer also must decide just how much invented diction he or she can ask the reader to absorb. Too little and you impoverish the world you’re dreaming into existence; too much and your story devolves into an exercise.

Much of Red Wolf takes place in a world that’s had a lingua franca stamped on it by military hegemony. The imperial language, Arquali, also dominates life on the ship itself – and in most chapters it’s simply rendered as English. But beneath this intelligible surface is a boiling sea of other tongues – Ormali, Ix, Opaltik, Mzithrini. And while I have certain phonetic, rhythmic and grammatical ideas about each – no, I couldn’t pass the Foreign Service Exam in any one of them.

That said, in Red Wolf language takes on vast importance precisely because it’s a story about difference, and finding one’s true community as opposed to the easy categories of belonging we’re born into. Language is one of the main ways we encounter, struggle with, and overcome difference. Or fail to – sometimes with cataclysmic results.

I'm sure there are many aspiring fantasy authors out there (more than a few people who run these review blogs for example!) so are there any precious nuggets of writerly advice that you'd like to share?

A:

Oh, I’m full of advice—just don’t ask if I can take what I dish out! Let’s see. Be selectively permeable to criticism—that’s probably the single hardest and most important suggestion I can make. Sometimes you have to seek out the advice of good, smart readers and writers, and believe it, particularly when they tell you you’ve failed at something. And at other times—and this is essential—you have to shut those same people out entirely, and hear only yourself. Doing either one of these all the time pretty much guarantees failure. Trouble is, nobody can tell you when to do which.

Also, listen carefully to your reading self. You’re the world’s leading expert on what speaks to you. And then – hide away, and silence all externals, and dream as if your life and everyone else’s depended on it.

When writing a fantasy novel such as The Red Wolf Conspiracy, what risks are taken in the writing? And what constitutes a risk, anyway?

A:

Risk is what it’s all about – but the second part of your question’s the kicker. Where to begin? There’s the risk of defining your career around writing at all: faith hardly get more reckless that that. And there’s the risk for somebody who wears the tattoos associated with the gang called ‘literary fiction,’ trying to hang out with the gang called ‘speculative.’ That’s all to one side of the writing, of course.

Some risks are specific to fantasy: the overfamiliar wonder, the cookie-cutter elf, ornamental rather than organic strangeness, worlds that just fail to ring true. Above all you can’t treat your story elements like a deck of cards you bought off the shelf. Have warriors and dragons, if you like, but make me see them anew, as if I’d never met with them before. Do you see what I mean? A trout in a pond is a emblem, stale as yesterday’s toast. But when John Crowley takes hold of that trout, and names it Grandfather, and sends it spinning dumbfounded about its mountain pool, trapped in a dream of past lives, and makes it a young bride’s confessor to boot: wow. We’re transported.

Or at least I am. Somebody else might say: What the hell, a fish? But what if Crowley had been afraid of that someone, and hadn’t dared? One of the worst choices you can make is to steer clear of anything someone might dislike, or fail to understand, or be made uncomfortable by. At their worst, college writing programs reward that sort of bland fiction-by-consensus, and it reeks to heaven. It’s simply deadly to hazard nothing. There’s no such thing as safety.

Well... I think that'll do for the moment! I wish you every success, of course, and huge, huge thanks for participating in this interview! It's been great fun :)

A:

I’ve enjoyed it too, Chris! Thanks for making these interviews happen, and giving them a place to live on the net.

:D