Author Interviews

James Enge: The Tension between Invention & Realism

Michael A. Ventrella has conducted a wonderful interview with James Enge, talking about his background, his influences, his thoughts on fantasy literature and classic myth, and, of course, his novels Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. Here’s a taste:

VENTRELLA: Creating a fantasy world is never easy, because it must be rooted in believability. What have you done to make your world both fantastic and believable? Have you found it difficult?

ENGE: I try to maintain a certain tension between free invention and concrete realism. My favorite bits in my own writing are physical descriptions which are probably invisible to everyone else. In my first story, the hero has occasion to peer through “a dark shoe-shaped patch of nothingness”. It makes perfect sense in the world of the story, but it’s not something that you’re likely to see on the street on your way to work.


Meanwhile, C.S.E. Cooney has posted a great review of This Crooked Way. 

In this book, the monsters are satisfyingly juicy and crunchable. The villains are terrifying – hardly less so when they’re desperate and likable than when they’re cackling and self-assured. The heroes are… wonderful. They bleed on everything. And Morlock’s main nemesis (why spoil it?) is utterly charming and wholly horrible and occasionally sympathetic. Egad, I liked this book.

What’s even better is she starts out saying the “episodic novel” might not be the form for her, and ends up loving the book. Nice.

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James Enge @ Joe Mallozzi’s blog

James Enge, author of Blood of Ambrose,is the latest writer to guest-blog at Stargate writer/producer Joseph Mallozzi’s wonderful book club blog. Last night, Mallozzi posted the results of his readers Q&A with Enge. The answers (and the questions) are well worth checking out, as always.

Here’s a sample:

Q: I liked the fact that you chose to reveal back-story for these characters and their world throughout the book rather than write a prologue to explain these things at the beginning. What went into this decision?”

A: About prologues… the more of them I read, the less I like them. I think some writers confuse the process they go through (in creating the world, the characters, the backstory) with the process the reader goes through. If the reader feels like he or she is reading “Report on Planet X” or “Fodor’s Guide to Middle Earth” then the writer has blown it somehow. A successful beginning is more like introducing two people. If you want Bob to meet Shlomo, you don’t start by reciting Shlomo’s educational background, vocational aptitudes and credit history. You say, “Bob: meet Shlomo. Which one of you is buying the next round?” (Or something like that. I’m still working on that whole social skills thing.)

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James Enge Interview up at Fantasy Book Critic

James Enge, author of Blood of Ambrose,is interviewed by Mihir Wanchoo at Fantasy Book Critic. The whole interview is well worth checking out, but here’s one of my favorite bits:

I believe that the greatest danger to genre fiction nowadays is not the denial of respect from some notional group of literary tastemakers but the very real likelihood that sf/f may become respectable. Those who thirst for the foamy gray poison of respectability should consider the fate of jazz, once a popular medium, now respectable, ossified and ignored.

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The Politics of Fantasy and Books You Read Twice

Author James Enge, whose Blood of Ambrosecomes out from Pyr this coming Spring, guest-blogs at Deep Genre.

Here’s a sample:

Fantasy is most effective when it acts through symbols that rest pretty deep in the awareness (or beneath the awareness, if you buy into the whole subconscious thing). At the center of every adult’s emotional life is a struggle for autonomy that occurs in adolescence. One may be struggling against well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) caregivers who are reluctant to surrender their authority. One may be raised in perfect environment that encourages autonomy and self-responsibility, but one still has to go out and face the world, make one’s place in it. Somehow, this is part of everyone’s story.

Why do so many fantasies involve young sons of widows who grow up to kill the monster, defeat the king, marry the princess and rule the kingdom happily ever after? Some point out that these stories are very old; this is true, but it’s just begging the question. A story appeals to audiences because it speaks to them emotionally. Why does this story appeal to modern audiences or ancient ones?

It appeals to them because it’s a symbolic representation of the struggle for autonomy that everybody engages in. The kingdom isn’t necessarily a kingdom; it’s just a life where you get to decide what happens. The princess isn’t a princess; she’s the hot checkout lady at the grocery store or maybe the likeable mechanic at the gas station, depending on how you roll. In fact, the hero may be a daughter, more like Atalanta or Camilla, nowadays: the dynamic of the story is essentially unchanged. The story has a wide appeal because its symbols are wired into emotional hot-buttons that are part of everybody’s life.

Meanwhile, Yours Truly is one of several authors to partake of SFSignal’s latest Mind Meld. This one asks, “Which speculative fiction books are worth reading twice? Why?” Answers are from Louise Marley, Cheryl Morgan, James E. Gunn, Gardner Dozois, Sarah Langan, Abigail Nussbaum, Anna Genoese, Scott Edelman, Jo Graham, and Dominic Green. Not surprisingly Dune, Lord of the Rings, and Mists of Avalon appear several times across everyone’s lists. And Cheryl Morgan sums up the problems of rereading nicely:

I have too many books. Probably more books that I will be able to read in the rest of my allotted span as a living human (though I entertain hopes of being uploaded in some way or another). In order to read a book for a second time, therefore, I have to make a conscious decision not to read a book that I haven’t yet read. That’s a hard thing to do.

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Today: a Shifting Balance of Power on a Global Level

No, I’m not talking about the election (though I’m off to vote just as soon as I blog this). What I am on about – over on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, there’s a great interview with Tom Lloyd, author of the just-released-and-kickin’-butt The Stormcaller: Book One of the Twilight Reignseries.

Tom says:

“Stormcaller is, at its heart, a story about a shifting balance of power on a global level. For various reasons, the object intended to engineer this change is a young man called Isak, who is thrown into events and expected to sink or swim. All the plans that have been building over the past years and centuries are about to bear fruit and Isak is going to find all of this being played out around him. In plot terms, each of the Seven Tribes of Man are ruled by white-eyes, divinely blessed warriors with bulging muscles and a nasty temper. Isak is raised from poverty to the post of heir-elect of one of the most powerful tribes and soon realises that this isn’t even the most dramatic or terrifying of the changes planned for his life.”

And while we’re on the subject of (ahem) changes, you can see the US version of the cover of book two, The Twilight Herald, (ahem) changed from the UK, on Amazon now. Both US covers are from the amazing Todd Lockwood, whose company I just enjoyed in Calgary this past weekend, where he was Artist Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention. As nice a fellow as he is good a painter.

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Justina Robson on Keeping It Real

As I reported earlier, writer/co-executive producer of Stargate: Atlantis Joseph Mallozzi featured Justina Robson’s Keeping It Realon his blog’s book club discussion. I’m a few days late on gettting the link up, but Justina has now answered, indepthly, all his readers questions. The full interview is up here. And here’s one of my favorite bits:

The demons and devils were really refreshing to work on for me. I’ve been a Christian fundamentalist of a kind in my youth, and an occult student, and a devotee of all things theological and then I discarded formal approaches and religions altogether for a kind of atheism and went on a more personal kind of spiritual quest, which I am still on. But I used to have very fixed ideas and literal notions of all kinds of things and being able to finally sift through all that and find my version of what the truth is was just tremendously exciting and liberating. Of course it’s just my version and although I’m passionate about writing this stuff and feeling it’s true I know it’s only a way of seeing things. Hence the book’s title.

And, of course, the third book in the Quantum Gravity series, Going Under,was just recently released. You can read a substantial excerpt on our new sample pages site here.

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Darkness is Overrated

Paul Cornell is interviewed at io9.com today. He talks about writing for Doctor Who (in the book, webisode and television mediums), Marvel comics (Wisdom, Captain Britain and MI-13, Fantastic Four: True Story), and radio (he’s adapting Iain Banks’ “The State of the Art” for BBC Radio 4).

And he even gets a nice plug in for a few SF anthologies:

So what are you working on now that you’re most excited by?

At the moment, I’m most excited by the fact that I’ve got a story in all three continuing original SF short story anthologies (non-themed, that is). It’s a complicated boast, but I like it. Two of the stories are in a series, the “Jonathan Hamilton” stories, which are in the style of Ian Fleming (the books, not the movies) and are vicious espionage tales set in a world where… well, I know what the difference to history is, but I haven’t told the audience entirely yet. At any rate, the ‘great game’ of political balance in Europe continues, and the great European nations have colonised the solar system, while continuing a delicate cold war against each other.

Those two stories, ‘Catherine Drewe’ and ‘One of our Bastards is Missing’ are in Fast Forward 2from Pyr and the Solaris Book of New SF 3, respectively. The other story, ‘Michael Laurits is: DROWNING’ is in the second Eclipse collection, which is I think is going to be launched at Calgary this year. I love SF short stories, and I’m hoping to get into doing more.

And yeah, “Catherine Drewe” is going to blow you away.

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Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist Interviews David Louis Edelman

Patrick St-Denis has just posted an interview with me on his popular Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist blog. Subjects covered include Infoquake, MultiReal, Lou Anders and Pyr, my strengths as a storyteller, the John W. Campbell Award, cover art, websites and interactivity with readers, the trend of high-quality British SF, and whether SF will ever get proper literary recognition by snooty academics cowering up in their white towers.

I Want You to Read 'Infoquake' and 'MultiReal'But the best part of the whole thing is that Pat has seen fit, unprompted, to post this neat little Photoshopped poster that puts the full force and weight of Uncle Sam behind getting you to read Infoquake and MultiReal. And really, ain’t that how it should be?

Brief excerpt from the interview:

What do you feel is your strength as a writer/storyteller?
I feel like I’m very good at the worldbuilding aspect of things. Really, structure in general. The trilogy has layers and layers of metaphor in it, and I’m really quite proud of the way it all works together as an organic whole. My tendency is to wander off into history and background and structure, and sometimes I have to curb that impulse. If I had written The Lord of the Rings, it would have been three whole books of the Council of Elrond, and nobody would have read it.

Were there any perceived conventions of the science fiction genre which you wanted to twist or break when you set out to write Infoquake and its sequel?
Yes, I wanted to avoid the typical mindless action set-pieces that you find in a lot of bad SF, and bad novels in general. I really wanted to write an exciting novel about business. A lot of authors just use the business aspect as window dressing, and then quickly throw their characters into the same car chases and murder mysteries and gunfights. I wanted to write books that really are about the workplace, where the excitement revolves around product demos and marketing meetings and government hearings and that kind of thing. So that’s what I’ve tried to do.

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