Ten Minute Guide to Flash Gordon

Ah, Death Ray, how fruitful plundering your corpse is for my blog… This article originally appeared in Death Ray 08, back in 2007, as part of our insanely crammed “Ten Minute Guide…” series. These were among my favourite articles to write; packed full of detail, and no transcribing involved. I’ve put this one up as my review of the Flash Gordon TV series of 2007/2008 is one of the most viewed articles on this site by a long, long way. General searches for “Flash Gordon” take people there, so curiosity about this primal member of the modern SF heroic pantheon still abounds.

Flash Gordon: Perennially popular cosmic adventurer

The original, and the best. Click the pic for more on the comic.

Golden-haired saviour of Earth, Flash has been protecting us from the art-deco hell of Ming the Merciless’s Planet Mongo for 70 years, often in a pair of tight trunks. In a word: Pulp.

Flash’s adventures are ones of swash-buckling, over the top, Prisoner of Zenda style derring-do in space. The stories are simple stuff, simply told, their enduring popularity down to the sumptuousness of Alex Raymond’s art and the on-screen extravagance it inspired. If scantily clad slave girls, finned rocket ships, weird alien kingdoms and decadently luxuriant palaces are your thing, step this way…

Ray Bradbury: Farewell to a giant

I’m going to be one of a bazillion bloggers writing about Ray Bradbury today, and I probably won’t be saying much new, but he was an important writer to me and I want to say something.

I’m not much moved by the cult of fame. Like a lot of modern life, it really, really annoys me. Many celebrities don’t do much by way of justifying their exalted status. Authors in general do more to deserve approbation than some of our planet’s famed sons and daughters, toiling away on their own, but even they can be less talented than they believe, and can let their success, should the fickle vagaries of fate bestow it upon them, go to their heads. You’ll not see many posts like this from me.

Ray Bradbury was one of those who thoroughly deserved the plaudits heaped upon him, and more besides. He was one of the loose handful of SF writers whose work transcended their favoured genre and can genuinely, whole-heartedly be described as art.

Bradbury apparently had a great love of life, but what always stays with me from his work is the sense of melancholy at life passing that it evokes. Long summer nights giving way to autumn days, the bittersweet exchange of childhood for adulthood, of youth for middle-age; the thrilling slip of experience as it runs through our hands, inevitably dragging time and, ultimately, the cessation of experience behind it. Naturally, the brassy light of apple days is predominant in works he wrote later in his life, but it was always evident. Something Wicked This Way Comes epitomises these feelings for me, whose teenage hero literally sees his childhood end, as does the Martian Chronicles, where the venerable Martian civilisation has to make way for something new, as do all things in their due time.

This was a powerful message for my teenage self. I read many of his short stories and novels in the late ’80s as my own boyhood ticked closer to its conclusion. They infused my own utterly indulgent and somewhat risible sense of adolescent sorrow with a touch of nobility.

Bradbury was one of the great prose stylists of 20th Century American fiction. He had a knack for phrases that stick long in the mind, and a powerful way with imagery. There are moments from his work aplenty that have taken up permanent residence in my head – A man planting trees on Mars and an automated house’s valiant attempts to survive post-apocalyptic Earth in The Martian Chronicles. Alien guns that fire bees (bees!) from the same. Calliopes, a carousel of wishes and the balloon-borne Dust Witch sniffing her way over town in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the warped writing and chemical tang on the air encountered by returning chrononauts in “A Sound of Thunder”, Guy Montag discovering reading in Fahrenheit 451. And of course that golden sunlight.

Bradbury died yesterday, on my 39th birthday. I never met him, but I did speak to him on the phone. I tried to arrange an interview with him while on a US trip, from the LA offices of Alliance Atlantis who had produced Ray Bradbury Theater. This was in 1999, and he had not long before suffered a stroke. If I recall correctly, it was my foolish insistence on a picture (magazine policy, but a more experienced me would have known to disregard it) that prevented our meeting. Such a wasted opportunity, and one I will forever regret. Still, I feel privileged to have spoken to him at all.

My book Champion of Mars was very much inspired by Bradbury, although my talent (I’m cringing inside even using that word in relation to my own work) is like a molehill to his mountain. He’s one of the writers that opened my eyes to the fact that books could be far more than just entertainment, and how truly magical writing can be. If it weren’t for him and others like him I wouldn’t be a writer at all, and I’ll always be thankful for that.

I don’t have any reviews or pieces about Bradbury’s work directly, but here is a review of the 1980 TV mini-series The Martian Chronicles. I loved it as a child and loved it again recently, although Bradbury himself famously called it “boring”.

Wicked witches

This is an interview with the author Gregory Maguire who wrote the novel Wicked, which was turned into a wildly successful musical of the same name. From Death Ray 05, published in 2007.

Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire is an American writer with a passionate interest in children’s literature, being co-founder of a charity dedicated to furthering reading among the young.

He is primarily known for penning revisionist fantasies, often based upon well-known fairy tales. However, his most famous works take their inspiration from a more recent source. Maguire has taken L Frank Baum’s famed series of novels, borrowed his world and put his own stamp firmly upon it, often adding his own characters into crucial points of the stories, or looking at Baum’s own characters from alternative points of view. The first book, Wicked, centres on Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and portrays her as a passionate rebel rather than as a hook-nosed harridan with a nasty allergy to water. It has been adapted into a musical that has enjoyed great success both Stateside and in London town.

Guy Haley: You are very passionate about literature for children. Why do you think that is important that children read?

Gregory Maguire:  I heard a report this week that said at the age of 10, only 43% of American kids read for pleasure. At the age of 15, that has dropped to 19%. When I hear statistics like these, I fear for the loss of certain skills that imaginative reading enhances; apprehension of subtlety, ambiguity, tolerance for differences, willingness to suspend judgment until the last page (or even beyond). I think reading for children, even more than reading for adults, is central to the survival of a literate citizenry. That is why I still write for children, even though my income is much richer and stronger when I publish for adults.

GM: Tell us a bit about your organisation, the CLNE.

GH:I helped found an educational charity called “Children’s Literature New England” 21 years ago. For two decades we met (four times in the UK) and considered topics of literary interest as they are dealt with in books for children: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”; “Swords and ploughshares”; and “The Fairytale belongs to the poor.” Writers and artists such as Philip Pullman, Quentin Blake, Maurice Sendak, Ursula K Le Guin, Philippa Pearce,  Jill Paton Walsh, Penelope Lively, Peter Dickinson, Susan Cooper, Russell Hoban, John Rowe Townsend, Alan Garner, and many others collaborated with us to consider these literary themes as expressed in books for the young. This is built on the notion that children’s literature is no less an art form than novels for older readers.

GH: Why do you choose to use the “toolbox of the fantastical” to tell your tales? Do you think that fantasy is more effective at bringing messages to children (and adults) than stories with a contemporary setting?

GM: I am afraid that as a Luddite, someone who doesn’t have an iPod, a cellphone, a play station, or a digital camera, I cannot convincingly portray our increasingly technological contemporary world with any verisimilitude. So writing stories that take place in the past or in a fantastical setting makes me much more comfortable.

That said, I also think that the kind of relaxation that once must go through in order to tolerate a “magic” story might just make one more tolerant of larger themes, too, and I care deeply about the themes of my stories – more than about the plots, characters, settings, or the mechanics of magic.

GH: Some of your greatest successes have been with stories set in Oz. Why have you chosen to use L Frank Baum’s world?

GM:  Oz – unlike Middle-earth or Wonderland – is an imperfectly realized magic land. I admire much of what L Frank Baum did, but it is what he failed to do, or did less well, that allows me license to parachute into his magic kingdom and see if I can make any more sense of its history or politics than he did. Basically, I took a land of fabulous incongruity and I tried to superimpose an orderly civilisation upon it, with its own history, religions, cultural conflicts, etc – to be an anthropologist of Oz.

GH: Do you ever feel awkward, playing in the sandbox of such a renowned man?

GM: He is conveniently dead, so I am seldom embarrassed at dinner parties.

GH: You also use fairytale a lot, especially in revisionist fantasies for adults. This seems quite popular in film and literature at the moment. Why do you think that is?

GM: As we become something of a post-literate society – or perhaps I should say that as our shared literacy becomes more audiovisual and less textual – the fairy tales, like the parables, remain conveniently portable and functional vessels of story that, because we get them young – and frequently – may in fact be the final shared narrative that most people in the west can agree that they share in common.

GH: How do you feel about the success of the musical Wicked? Are musicals as valid an art form as literature in your mind?

GM: I love the musical Wicked and am buying tickets today to see it for the 26th time. It is a different art form than the novel and as such made some changes to the plot, which do not bother me. The basic theme of the story is the same as in the novel I wrote – which is that we should beware demonising our enemies, or seeing the world in absolute moral tones of black and white.

GH: You say that you enjoy English novels. Why is that?

GM: I believe the English write more delicious prose, by and large. I also grew up in a time when English writers for children were very easy to find in the libraries in the US I loved CS Lewis at the age of 10, also the books about Mary Poppins, Paddington Bear, and Tom’s Midnight Garden.

There are exceptions. Among my favorite US writers living and working today are Jess Walters, Ron Hansen, and Daniel Handler.

GH:Who are your major influences?

GM: As to the Wicked cycle, I would say TH White’s The Once and Future King, Grahame Greene as to a spooky tone and sinister atmosphere, and perhaps Ursula Le Guin as to someone who took and takes fantasy writing with utmost seriousness.

Did you know?

Gregory Maguire is married to painter Andy Newman.

A chat with Red Dwarf co-creator, Rob Grant

A profile on another top creative guy I’ve interviewed a few times now. Meeting Rob was a very rare fanboy squee moment for me, as I try hard to maintain a shell of supercilious indifference towards celebrity, but I grew up on Red Dwarf, and was very excited. I’m glad to say we hit it off, and it’s always a pleasure to see him.

This interview was conducted on the publication of his novel, Fat, in 2006, for SFX 151. Read my review of it here.

www.sfx.co.uk

Rob Grant Profile

Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant is feeling bullish, and there’s little that will get in the way of his iconoclastic ire. Right now his target is scientific orthodoxy, in his path the vast China shop of obesity and diet. His latest book, Fat, is a hilarious attack on the fatuous nature of statistics and how most of us swallow them whole. According to the near-future Fat, the only diet that works is the poor-quality brain food we scoff down every day, and the only thing it slims is the intellect.

Despite the tightly written nature of this eye-opening novel, its conception has the entertaining smack of low-grade charlatanry. Mr Grant made up this one on the spur of the moment, he confided in us.

It was while enjoying the fruits of his last book, the hit Incompetence, that he was called up by his agent. Grant takes up the story. “‘Let’s have a discussion about your next book. You have a two book deal and your publishers are chomping at the bit,’ my agent said, which I forget immediately, as you do. I remembered a couple of days before we met, so I went out for a drink, and thought, ‘Fat’. And literally, that’s all I had, three letters. When I went to see him and said, ‘The book – it’s fat,’ his eyes lit up. Of course I had no idea what it was going to be about, so I was doing some bullshitting and serious back-peddling, saying ‘Well, it’s very early days yet, very early days.’ Besides this, I also said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone’. I mean, I needed time! So the next day I got a phone call from my editor, ‘Hey, we love ‘Fat’, we’ve got the cover people working, and marketing are going crazy’. And I’m thinking about my agent ‘You bastard, you’re fired for a start’. The next day it was on Amazon. I was stuck with it, so I got all these books out and started researching the subject.”

Grant found himself astonished. Not only was there a book in the idea (he was relieved) but that, “Almost everything we know about diet, obesity and body image and its relationship to disease and the heart is crapulous!”

Fat seeks to set the record straight, demolishing received wisdom and lampooning the way Cartesian method has been put off the straight and narrow track.

“Take salt. There is a lack of evidence in salt’s case that it’s harmful for you in any way,” he cites. “Any substance is poisonous if taken to absolute excess,” he counters, “even water will kill you. But that six grams a day stuff is nonsense. It annoys me when the same old opinions are trotted out and aren’t backed up by any kind of scientific evidence whatsoever. For the book, I had to learn how to read statistics, which was a lot of fun, let me tell you. Now when I see some kind of nonsensical health story on the BBC website like ‘Tea causes cancer’, I am sceptical. You never get the figures, you never get the important, salient details, and you rarely get pointed to the source report. I blame journalists. I think in journalism you can either thoroughly research every story and check it out or you can write down what somebody tells you. The pay’s the same.” [Note from 2012: I am afraid he is bang on the money there. And the pay's awful].

None taken, Mr G. We can also just make it up, by the way.

“And there are whole government policies based on some ineptly conducted survey. And I mean, some of the more controversial stuff I didn’t dare put in, but I’m sure I’m going to get a backlash anyway.”

If all this is making Grant sound angry, he is not. He is as considered as ever, though he is incredulous as to how some of the rubbish he has uncovered as rubbish gets accepted as fact. He is, however, developing an intolerance for morons as he ages, of which he seems to encounter more than his share. Still, they provide fuel for his books, which seem to be leaning towards his Spitting Image days; more satire than SF.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Satire is a dirty word. In show business they say ‘Satire is what closes on Saturdays’, but I suppose there’s an element of satire in all my stuff. I am getting more real worldy, the thing is I don’t try and write to order, I write what occurs to me and hope that some bugger buys it.”

Is that his ‘You’re not pigeonholing me, I’m an artist’ statement?

“Ha, no! The whole nanny state thing drives me to distraction, We’re all grown up, let us decide if we want to have 13 year olds in carseats for ourselves. It doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight, the opposition’s embracing it too. That’s what I’m looking at in ‘Fat’.”

And now the cycle has begun again. Fat is long written, this is Grant’s first interview, and his agent hangs on the bell again, waiting for the next precious three-letter pitch. So, what sacred cows are in the firing line?

“I’ve got a queue.” He almost growls, which turns to a chuckle. “But I’ll say that climatologists better watch out…”

Joe Ahearne’s Ultraviolet

Here’s an interview with Joe Ahearne about his great UK vampire TV series, Ultraviolet, which was about the only decent home-grown genre thing Britain produced in the 90s. When I did this interview in 2005, it was already old news and Ahearne had move on to Doctor Who, so this was, and still is, a retrospective. I’d actually interviewed him about it twice or so beforehand, and visited the set way back when I was a young cub-nerd reporter with even worse hair than I have now. But at least I had some, I suppose.

Originally published in SFX Special Edition 22.

www.sfx.co.uk

The drought had lasted for a long, long time. We’d been holding our heads up for a promising cloud drifted over, only for it to deliver a feeble spattering of drops. The TV landscape was as dry of good genre programming as the Sahara is of Pimms.

Cast your mind back to 1998. We were nearing the end of the decade, a decade that had furnished us with the unambitious Goodnight Sweetheart, the cheap and cheerful BUGS, and the diabolical Crime Traveller. Doctor Who was long dead, the BBC refusing to bring it back. Producers who dared poke their heads above the parapets to tout SF fare shirked from calling it such, it was the genre that dared not speak its name. “We don’t do big-budget fantastical television very well, best leave it to the Americans,” many programme makers said. The BBC’s hugely expensive Invasion Earth had just aired. At £1 million an episode, and with less than stellar ratings, it seemed they were right. The flop of the Doctor Who pilot two years earlier hadn’t helped. It was the time of the cosy, clichéd Sunday night drama with vets, cops, nurses and farmers falling over each other in 1950s Yorkshire. That time looked set to last forever.

But then came a show that proved you could do decent telefantasy on a British budget and not have it look like it was made of milk bottle tops. It took a perennial horror theme, that of vampires, and put a new spin on it, a spin that would soon be echoed by the likes of Buffy and Blade. That show was Ultraviolet.

“I wrote it because I am very interested in television with a strong visual element,” says writer-director Joe Ahearne, arguably one of the hottest properties on the now revived UK genre scene. “I was always more interested in being a director than a writer, but I wrote it simply because there was nothing like that out there at the time. It was the kind of thing I wanted to direct.”

Ahearne, a softly spoken chap who often breaks into a gentle laugh as he speaks, had been working on a short film with actors Siobhan Redmond and Neil Pearson, then stars of cop drama Between the Lines. They put him in touch with John Heyman and Tony Garnette of World Productions, producers of the series. He submitted a draft of a vampire show of about four pages, and they were interested. Rather than make his show right off, they offered him a gig working on the second series of This Life. The lad who’d wanted to be a director had so impressed them with his writing that he found himself penning two episodes, and he got his wish, flexing his directorial muscles, being behind the camera on three. Once he’d proven himself on that though, the greenlight was ignited, and Ultraviolet moved into production for Channel 4.

“That was my big break rather, than Ultraviolet. Even though I wrote and directed the whole of Ultraviolet. This life was bigger, it was more in the public conscience,” he says.

This Life star Jack Davenport, who played the slightly priggish Miles, was paired with Susannah Harker as part of a secret government department tasked with hunting down the undead (interestingly, in real life  Harker is  descended from the man who inspired Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula). In the show Davenport’s character, Detective Sergeant Michael Colefield, is pitched from normal life of blissful ignorance into a terrifying world where vampires are real when his best friend, Jack Beresford, disappears on the night before his wedding. These bloodsuckers weren’t the languid fops we were used to, quaffing blood like absinthe, but predators in snappy suits who had coexisted with humanity for centuries, only, as the show slowly, terrifyingly revealed, we were making so much of a balls-up of the planet that they’d decided to and boot Homo Sapiens from the driving seat.

The series’ great innovation came in taking it all terribly, terribly seriously. The guys hunting the vampires were  grim-faced pros who had severed all ties with their previous lives to hunt down the creatures who had, naturally, done them some wrong. The vampires themselves were dangerous businessmen pursuing a hostile corporate takeover of Planet Earth Inc. The board was set, but it wasn’t the vampires that Ahearne focussed on, but their pawns.

“We found that once you’ve worked out how these people hunt vampires, there isn’t much mileage figuring out who is a vampire and who isn’t, they can find out with their gadgets. As we developed the stories from episode one we decided it was much more interesting to look at the contested characters; the humans helping the vampires.”

These ranged from folk who didn’t want to age – like the man whose mother had Alzheimer’s ­– to members of the team itself. In a great twist, it transpired Michael’s new boss, Father Pearse Harman (Philip Quast) was dying, and he is offered the vampire’s kiss. In this way Ahearne tackled several fairly weighty issues – from global warming to paedophilia – without ever over-relying on the vampires themselves. In fact, the word “vampire” is never once uttered throughout the show, the creatures of the night simply being referred to as “Code 5’s”. V for vampire, V for five in Roman numerals. The show is littered with similar clevernesses.

Ultraviolet’s use of intermediary human characters foreshadowed the later Blade film series, as it also did in its use of hi-tech vampire bashing gadgets. The members of Ultraviolet used carbon dum-dum bullets (wood, with little crosses on the tips) and alicin spray (derived from garlic). Even better, Ahearne took the idea that vampires couldn’t be seen in mirrors and extended it to modern technology – the vampire hunters carried video detectors on their guns which enabled them to determine who was a vampire and who was not. The vampires also could not be heard over electronic devices. It was so original, and the show had a substantial impact on the way vampires were represented on film and television.

“I don’t know if it really was that big an influence,” says Ahearne. “It came out here before Buffy and Blade, so it was before people had seen that kind of thing, seen vampires treated in that kind of way, though David Goyer did cite the show as an influence, which was very gratifying to hear!”

The show parts company with these American imports there. Whereas Blade and Buffy both rely on special effects, Ultraviolet deliberately avoided the use of them, having just a few in each episode.

“The trouble is, they cost so much,” says Ahearne. “Even something as seemingly straightforward as car chase takes time and money to do. When you’re shooting six hours of TV on a short timescale, you just can’t do it, even though Ultraviolet was an expensive series. I think that’s one of the big advantages of writing my own stuff, though I sometimes prefer to film someone else’s, it lets you know exactly what you can achieve from the outset. You’re not going to sit there and write ‘insert action sequence’ if you know from directing that it won’t be possible under the constraints of a TV schedule. And I think it’s the same with CG. Obviously now you can do a lot more than you could even seven years ago, but that takes time. If you give people weeks and loads of cash then they’ll come up with something really amazing, but often they don’t have that luxury so you end up with something that, well, still looks like a rubber monster!”

It may have been done for purely pragmatic reasons, but Ahearne’s reluctance to go the route of the big bang means that Ultraviolet has not become dated, something Ahearne points out happen to many older shows (he once said Blake’s 7, respected at the time, now looks like “A joke”, for example). In fact Ultraviolet still looks fresh, primarily due to Ahearne’s directorial style and his clever use of dusk and dawn light. However, this was something that made it all a little bit difficult.

“Shooting TV is not like making a film. You can’t go back and do it again if the light’s not right, and that’s another thing we had to take into account when writing the episodes. Originally the show was going to be about a vampire detective, but then I realised that it would all have to be night shoots, and that is hard. Even Ultraviolet, which we shot large parts of during the day, was logistically complicated. It was very hard work, especially directing all six episodes. That’s not something you usually do on a series like that, so it was very tiring.”

Nevertheless, as the series’ placing here demonstrates, it was all worth it. Sadly, despite its success, Channel 4 did not commission a sequel to the story. “I don’t know why,” says Ahearne, “it was one of the most successful dramas in its timeslot. Maybe they just weren’t interested. But I’m just very happy it came in the top ten here. I wasn’t aware that it had much of a life after it was shown. I mean, it’s not like Doctor Who, so I’m glad it’s still got a following.”

Its success was noted on the other side of the Atlantic. Following a route that was to become all-too familiar in following years, Ultraviolet was snapped up by the Americans to be turned into a slick, fast-paced vampire show.

“I think there was only a pilot,” he says. “I wasn’t involved in it at all. What happened was the company, World Productions, who made it sold the rights. They took Idris Elba [who played Vaughn Rice, one of Michael’s colleagues] from the British version, so there was a presence there, and I think they used quite a lot of my material for the first couple of scripts. But the problem is that I wrote Ultraviolet as a series – actually, I prefer miniseries, because if it were a series, with only six episodes, it wouldn’t have been regarded as very successful!” he laughs. “But I’d done what I wanted to do with it. If you make a series in America, it has to be able to run for five or six years, you’ve got to come up with something that can really run and run and run, because it is only when it gets into syndication that it makes its money. The thing I did wasn’t designed to do that, so I think the American version was designed as a sexy vampire soap. No criticism there,” he says, honestly meaning it, “because you have to make something that will run, and there wasn’t enough story material in mine for that. I don’t know why it didn’t work, but it didn’t.”

With no sequel forthcoming, Ahearne later went on to direct another genre treat, the sophisticated and quite scary Strange. Starring the curly headed (and surprisingly non-Welsh, after his turn in BBC2’s Coupling) Richard Coyle as a sort of ex-priestly demon-hunting Doctor Who, Strange, written by Andrew Marshall, ripped up the carpets of reality to show us all the paranormal nasties lurking beneath. Ahearne, with his dual-stranded career as writer/ director now ell-established, brought a lot to the six episodes as director.

“Because I write, when I’m directing someone else’s work, I don’t mess around with it. Although many TV companies like to put writer/directors to work on scripts that they haven’t written, I always try and respect what someone else has written, I think if they wrote something then that’s what they meant, they don’t want you to go and change it.” The show marked a bit of a departure for him, as he had been primarily a comedy writer, working on a string of BBC hits, from bizarre 1980’s laugh-fest The Kenny Everett Television Show to the wryly amusing 2point4 Children.  “He is a really funny guy,” says Ahearne. Somehow, it’s hard to imagine the creator of the George Cole vehicle Dad penning a show about demons, but pen it he did and it worked well. There was to be no second season for this series either.

“Strange was different to Ultraviolet,” says Ahearne. “Again it was a very expensive show, but I don’t think it was quite as successful. It was a bit more exposed than Ultraviolet, the BBC put it out at 9.00 – prime time, so it had more to prove. Ultraviolet was always going to be a bit culty going out when it did. But it’s very difficult to decide where to pitch your show, what slot it fits into.” Indeed, perhaps this lack of an easy pigeonhole may explain why there was a lengthy gap between the initial pilot and the series.

Right now Ahearne is prepping for his next big project ­- Double Life, a film starring Christopher Eccleston, late of Doctor Who fame. Produced by Sophie Belhetchet, who got Ultraviolet on screen, it is a story of obsessive love with an SF twist.

“It’s difficult to describe what it is without giving too much of the plot away,” says Ahearne. “And I don’t want to do that. We’re at too early a stage. But it does have SF elements to it. It’s more about love and relationships really, but I think I will probably look at it and describe it as a genre piece,” he says, explaining his caginess, but Ahearne is not being trying to divert us, nor is he trying to cast wide the net of appeal. It’s not a case of “It’s post-apocalyptic fiction, not science-fiction”, as the producer of The Last Train said to SFX. This is not a man who is afraid of genre labels. “It’s just that it’s one of those dramas where the SF doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the story so you don’t really want to describe it as such. We will, be able to talk about it in more detail in a few weeks, but not right now.”

The film starts shooting in Budapest later this year, set for a theatrical release in 2006. We’ll just have to see how SF the flick will be, but if one thing is certain, Joe Ahearne ­– the man who helped end the genre drought on British television – will not disappoint us.

Ahearne on Doctor Who

“I was really happy to get the job on Doctor Who,” Ahearne says. Something everyone who worked on it felt, no doubt, as rumour has it people were very keen to be involved. “I don’t know what to say about it without saying the same old thing, there’s only so much you can say about working on a TV show where everyone’s happy to be there and working hard. It was a bit of a reunion for me, actually, as the production designer on Ultraviolet, John Bellington, worked on Doctor Who. I had a similar problem with him too! He made such a good job of the incarceration chamber on Ultraviolet that I was always disappointed I’d not set more scenes in there, but by the time I saw it it was too late to change the script. It was the same with the TARDIS, the set was amazing, and huge, and I thought it a shame there weren’t more bits in my episodes in it. But you can’t dictate to the characters where they’re going to go, they go where the story needs them to be,” he says. He is full of praise for the cast and crew. “Russell T Davies got a great team together, and Christopher Eccleston is such a great actor, that I don’t think they could have done it any better than they did.”

But it wasn’t all roses, at first, Ahearne was only booked for a couple of episodes, but in the end did six – “Bad Wolf”, “Boom Town”, “Dalek”, “Father’s Day”, and “The Parting of the Ways”. All the really cool ones, you might think, but Ahearne points out a problem with it. “When you do that many episodes, it takes a lot of time. They did all of it in Cardiff, pre-production, post-production, everything. It took nine months, which meant I had to move there, basically, so it was hard being away from home so long. But,” he says, and you can hear the smile in his voice, “I don’t think for a man like me, who’s interested in visual spectacle, you could have better job than directing episodes of Doctor Who where he’s fighting the Daleks.”

Stephen Baxter interview

Stephen Baxter wrote a very nice review for SFX magazine of my latest book, Champion of Mars, so I thought I’d put up this interview I did with him for Death Ray 07 in late 2007. The interview was conducted to publicise his book, H-Bomb Girl, and was published before the death Arthur C Clarke, who Baxter talks about below.

Q&A Stephen Baxter

The Scouse author’s latest book takes him tumbling back in time to 1960′s Liverpool and the palm-sweating height of the Cuban missile crisis. Only it’s just that little bit different. Yep, the bone fide scientist (he has three degrees) and scribe of fantastical far futures is exploring his other favourite subject, alternate histories, once more.

Guy Haley: Unlike a lot of authors, who tend to write in one world or on one theme,  you often change subject matter between hard SF and alternative history. Why is this?

Stephen Baxter: I think that’s true, and it doesn’t always do me the best of favours. Changing your strategy isn’t very good for your publishers. It goes back to right at the beginning of my career, my first couple of novels were hard SF, and I think that that’s my basic brand, but my third novel was Anti-Ice, which was an alternate history, of the kind that H-Bomb Girl is. I think it’s better to have a wider range of inetrests and I like to keep myself fresh by finding new ways of telling stories, and new avenues to explore.

GH: Do you get bored then, with one creation?

SB: I wouldn’t say bored, each book is the best book I’ve got in me at the time if, but I have to rip myself out of one particular thing after a while, when I’ve mined the seam, and move onto something entirely different. In fact I’ve been prolific the last few years, a couple of books a year, and that’s partly by alternating – I have a hard SF series on the go and then young adult like H-Bomb Girl or the Mammoth books.

GH: You’re working very hard. The third Time’s Tapestry book has just come out, and now this. That’s a lot of writing.

SB: I’ve always had a work ethic. I didn’t give up my day job until after The Timeships was published. I was working full-time up to that point, I was commuting to London as well, so I was working in the evenings and the weekends. I’ve always tried to keep to the habit of using time well.

GH: What attracts you to alternate history?

SB: I’ve always been interested in history for as long as I have been interested in science, and then alternate history is the different possibilities and the contingency of everything. I mean, you look back in your own life and see how things could have been different if you’d made a different choice – like meeting your wife for the first time, if you’d stayed at home that day things would have been entirely different. The present is as contingent as the future.

And the notion of the past as well is very interesting. I mean, trying to write my way into Liverpool of 1962, it’s like an alien planet, everything’s different. I think the mobile phone especially is a huge disjunction between the present and the past, I expect 1985 was a lot more like 1962 than now, just because the phones and other communication technologies have changed everything about the way we live.

One of my impulses behind H-Bomb Girl is that in each age we have an apocalypse, the moment it’s the green apocalypse isn’t it, where we’ll be fighting over the last scraps of water in 100 years’ time, but when I was growing up it was the Cold War. We weren’t going to grow old because the computers were going to unleash a nuclear holocaust that was going to just end everything. Absolutely terrifying. And I think looking back to the previous generation, for them it was the Second World War. The pre-war generation were terrified of the coming war. Well, it was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Each generation has a horror show ahead. So I thought it might be interesting to write for a modern generation of teenagers about the fears of a previous generation of teenagers. I wouldn’t want to diminish the challenges of climate change, but I suspect we’re going to muddle through somehow.

GH: Will you be working with Arthur C Clarke again?

SB: Yes, in fact we’ve been working on another new book, the Time Odyssey Series. It’s called First Born and it’s going to be out next year from Gollancz.

GH: How do these collaborations work?

SB: They generally start with a four or five-page outline from Clarke, but they’re really open-ended, you’ll have what becomes the kind of first chapter and plot threads, but generally without a resolution, so then we bounce that backwards and forwards by email until we’ve got an outline that we agree with and then off we go.

He was ninety this year. I’ll be happy if I’m as mentally active as he is when I’m that age.

GH: You are from Liverpool. What was it like going back in time?

SB: Well, I wasn’t even five when the Cuban Missile Crisis kicked off, so in a way it was looking back to a time just before I can remember really. So it was interesting. It’s not autobiographical but it’s like that. It’s looking at a place I know well bu through different eyes and describing it from an outsider’s point of view.

The great thing that I turned up in research from my point of view was that the Beatles played in my old school! In 1961, in one of their many sort of cavern era mini-gigs. It was a Christian brothers school and they got thrown out apparently. All the teddy boys rioted. I didn’t see my school in the same way after that, I’d stood on the same stage where the Beatles played. That era’s become a bit mummified in a way, sentimentalised, but it was like a punk explosion really, all radical, very unpopular with the grown-ups.

GH: Everyone always blames the kids! Teddy boys, Mods, Punks, now hoodies…

SB: I think it’s just jealousy, everyone wants to be young again. Youth is wasted on the young, they say. But again we muddle through. It’s as if we think we’re the last sane generation and they’re all mad and dissolute behind us. But they’re not, people mature and grow up.

 

An Audience with Mr Rankin

I wrote this piece for SFX 134, (I think). By 2005, I had known Robert for several years. I first met him at Euroctocon in Dublin in October, 1997. He and I got on very well and have remained good friends ever since. Rankin is one of life’s singular gentlemen. I have never met anyone quite like him. He is, if anything, even more bizarre than his characters., while the stories he tells in person are all the more astounding for being (mostly) true. I treasure the rare occasions we get to sit down, drink beer and, as he puts it in his Londony way, “talk toot”.

Robert Rankin

Rankin is a teller of tall tales who comes from a long line of tall tale tellers. Few could be taller than his latest book, The Brightonomicon. It takes a cue from New Age movements who saw a zodiac engraved into the earth about Glastonbury and applies the idea to a streetmap of Brighton. Not just any old Zodiac has the author discovered, but one of truly Rankin-esque proportions. Armed with a felt tip Rankin set to, tracing out his new cosmology on B-roads; no Gemini or Taurus here, but the Nazca-like lines of the Hound of the Hangletons and the Woodingdeane Chameleon. There are twelve in all, and each has a story, a case, attached to it which must be solved by old favourite Hugo Rune and his new teenage sidekick, Rizla.

“I wanted a reason for each of them to be there, you also wonder where these names come from – why is Hangletons called Hangletons? We have these dangerous areas, like Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb. So, in the book, Moulsecoomb is inhabited by a pirate captain called Moulsecoomb, who stills comes out and attack the pier from time to time.”

Of course, these dangers of the genteel town, jewel of the south coast and home of the exotic pavilion are imagined…

“Er, no,” interrupts  Rankin, “You don’t want to go to those areas with anything less than a tank.”

And that is his power. Rankin so effortlessly mocks our world that it’s difficult to see which parts are pure fiction and which are not. Indeed, sometimes you suspect he makes none of it up, and is privy to a portal to some alternate reality where backchat is the highest of arts. You get the feeling of reverse dramatic irony – here it is not we the audience who know more, but that his character Hugo Rune knows everything.

Rankin is fascinated by magic, so it is no surprise that Rune owes much to that infamous wizard, Aleister Crowley, whose self-portrait hangs in Rankin’s hall. But, when you look closer, there’s a lot of Rankin in there too. Rune is the master of the scam, a man who pronounces, “I offer the world my genius, all I expect is that it cover my expenses.” Rankin himself is as much raconteur as writer. We could discuss some of his escapades here, would it not bring certain agencies of the crown upon his head. His true, if no less astounding, tales include that of the Blue Peter badge, or the strange case of the cash machines, a story he regaled many an audience with until a kindly policeman took him to one side and asked, gently, that he desist.

“Rune’s not based on me,” counters Rankin. “He is a mix of my father and Crowley. He knew Crowley, actually,” he says. “He met him in the war. My father didn’t fight – using the famed Rankin common sense he thought to himself: ‘I’ll get myself a nice reserved occupation – fireman should do it.’ Which meant standing in the middle of the blitz holding a hosepipe!” he laughs. “Anyway, he met Crowley in a pub in 1943 or ’44. My father didn’t believe in the magic, but he did think Crowley was the greatest poet of the 20^th century. So he cultivated him by buying him lots of drinks. I remember my dad pointing out Crowley on the Sergeant Pepper’s album cover and saying ‘I know him.’ Then he told me he had a couple of first editions signed by the man himself. I was amazed. Of course, my mum, the fundamentalist Christian, had burnt them as Crowley was, after all, the Great Beast. I was gutted.”

Maybe there is more of Rankin Jnr in Rune than he suspects. Or perhaps there have been a long line of Rankins behaving like Runes. He is the fourth Robert Fleming Rankin – a connection to Alexander Fleming now lost to history and, like his father, his life has been full of cameos of unusual people (he went to art college with Freddie Mercury, for example). He’s done many bizarre things, such as convincing the inhabitants of Brentford a Griffin lived there, but he seems as oblivious to how unusual this track is as he is of the genuine reverence with which his fans hold him, fans whose numbers are growing. Rankin was ecstatic to see his previous book, The Witches of Chiswick, advertised in a railway station and, and has begun to force open the American market. Full of tall tales he may be, but you could never accuse him of boastfulness, however, you don’t get posters in Paddington if you’re small fry, old chap.

In true generous style, Rankin has one last thing to say. “That’s the best picture of me that I have ever had taken” he says of his portrait to the left [not included here, sorry folks]. “And I’d like to say thank you to the man who let us use his carousel. Beautiful it was, built in 1888. He even stopped it for us, whereas the pier wanted to charge us £150 to take our shot there. So thank you, and sod the pier.”

The Early History of D&D

I wrote this piece in 2006. It appeared in SFX 146‘s Time Machine. Like most people of my rapidly aging generation, I began my gaming career playing D&D.

I interviewed Gygax once. Like a lot of Americans involved in fantasy, Gygax was bearded, large and voluble, but possessed a level of interest in others that made his bluffness charming rather than irksome. A very nice man.

Time Machine – Dungeons & Dragons

You enter a rough stone corridor. It looks unsafe, and the wall runs with moisture. Ahead of you is poorly made, if stout, wooden door. Approaching warily, you hear a series of muffled scraping noises and a low growl. What do you do?

If you’re one those who has played Dungeons & Dragons then this kind of statement will be familiar to you. If it isn’t then that’s exactly the kind of dilemma those odd spods with the funny shaped dice used to face, usually weekly, while you were off partying.

Actually, the perception of RPG’s as the domain of the uber-nerd is just one of several misconceptions about the game ­– in reality D&D is no special interest, saddo passtime, but the vanguard of a great gaming revolution that ushered in an age of mass-market wargames, collectible card games and computer gaming – all of which are now multi-million pound industries. Not so nerdy now, eh?

But despite this legacy, D&D the game has had a rocky history. At the height of its popularity, every school had a D&D group (as did many other institutions. “At one time every nuclear submarine had a D&D group,” co-creator David Arneson said in one interview), but then it virtually disappeared off the cultural map. Lawsuits and debt litter its history, and it came to find itself almost destroyed by the industry it created. The story of D&D is almost as hair-raising as an encounter with a Level 19 Gold Dragon in a bad mood.

Dungeons & Dragons was the brainchild of gaming buddies Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax had long been associated with various groups and magazines, including Guidon, a wargames mail-order company. Gygax published various games through Guidon, including 1969’s Chainmail. Written in concert with Jeff Perren, Chainmail allowed players to stage small-scale battles in the Dark Ages. It was not an RPG, but a traditional wargame. However, when Gygax started to add magic and monsters, and Arneson ran a Chainmail game involving a castle sewer (underground adventures are a D&D signature) Dungeons & Dragons slowly began to come to life…

In 1971, Arneson and Gygax completed the first true incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. But they had difficulty finding a distributor – their earlier publishers thought that the game’s referee or “Dungeon Master” would be so busy running the game he would never have any fun, so it wouldn’t work. Gygax, however, had more faith in their creation, and he and set up Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), with childhood gaming chum Don Kaye. In 1974, with funding from Brian Blume, another old-gaming buddy, they launched D&D’s first edition. The 1000 hand-assembled copies sold out in under a year.

The game was a curious grab bag of ideas. Chainmail and its child were heavily influenced by the models that were available to Gygax and his friends. Back then, there were no large firms making fantasy models, so Gygax and co relied on plastic historical figures. Fine for one’s warriors, but for the monsters the gamers turned to cheap Chinese toys – poly-bagged selections of badly executed dinosaurs and weird flights of fancy. This magpie nature had serious repercussions, as the eager proto-roleplayers also included rules for monsters and creatures from the likes of Michael Moorcock, HP Lovecraft and JRR Tolkien’s works. Lawsuits and quiet words inevitably followed, with the result that various beasties, deities and demons were struck from later editions of the game.

Kaye passed away in 1975, leading to the dissolution of TSR. Gygax then set up TSR Hobbies, Inc, to continue the publication of the game. This was initially on his own, but by the mid-seventies Brian Blume and his son Kevin had a two-thirds controlling interest, something that was to eventually lead to Gygax losing control over his creation…

But for the next few years, D&D was to go from strength to strengh. A more complicated version of the game, named Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, was released in 1978. This was a huge hit, and became the model for the many copycat games that were to follow. But it was not without its problems. It was beast of a gaming system, requiring multiple books and a maths degree to play. It also unwisely split D&D into two streams, upping production costs and dividing its audience, a problem that was not to be rectified until years later. Finally, AD&D also precipitated a falling out between Gygax and Arneson in 1979. The two went to court over who owned what of their joint creation. Though the dispute was settled by 1981, it was but the first of many business disputes to hit TSR.

And if arguments over Mammon weren’t bad enough, God soon got in on the act. A series of suicides, murders and a missing persons case were all erroneously blamed on the game, and the powerful Christian far tight roundly condemned it as, well, here’s what Christian Life Ministries had to say about Dungeons & Dragons: “Instead of a game [it] is a teaching on demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan worship, gambling, Jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and many more teachings, brought to you in living colour direct from the pit of hell!!!” Hallelujah.

Gygax appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the charges, only to have his answers edited and rearranged, or so he maintains. His complaints to the show after his interview was aired went unanswered.

“There here wasn’t a shred of evidence or veracity in any of those claims,” Gygax said recently. “One of the mothers of the children who had committed suicide said the only reason that her son didn’t kill himself sooner was because he enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons and that this was all just a cock-and-bull story.”

D&D was demonised. At the height of the hysteria, the TV movie Mazes and Monsters (1982) came out. This told the story of one youth (played by a very young Tom Hanks) driven mad by gaming. The game in the film may have been called Mazes and Monsters, but everyone knew what they were really talking about. The controversy rumbled on for years, leading TSR to excise references to many of the more dread powers of hell from the second edition of the game, published in 1989.

Despite all this, nothing seemed to dent TSR’s armour, and it began to explore other opportunities for D&D, with Gygax heading off to Hollywood to tout the property. It was a hard slog. Mineral-water quaffing entertainment execs were not easily won over by the mid-western hobbyist. But he persevered, and in 1983 the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons was broadcast on CBS. The Dragonlance novels followed in 1984. These too, were a massive success and transformed TSR into a major player in the booming fantasy publishing market.

However, back at base trouble was brewing. TSR had accrued debts in excess of $15 million, and Gygax discovered his partners had tried to put the firm up for sale. He forced one partner, Kevin Blume, from office, but the problems didn’t stop there. Another court battle ensued as Gygax struggled to retain control, but the law found against him, and he sold his controlling interest in 1985.

After Gygax’s departure, a number of proprietory worlds were developed, and licenses acquired – Marvel Superheroes, Conan and Indiana Jones amongst them; and new gaming avenues, such as card-based play, explored.

But the company’s fortunes could not last. As the decade began to wind down, dozens of games jostled for custom in a crowded market. Worse, RPGs were getting more and more complicated, fewer kids were getting involved, and the average age of gamers increased. With no new blood coming in, revenues dropped, and many companies went under or sold off their RPG properties.

TSR survived, albeit with a smaller, increasingly niche audience, soldiering on through the 90s, until, stuck deep in debt, it was bought out by Magic: The Gathering creators Wizards of the Coast in 1997. WoC was in turn purchased by Hasbro, who consolidated it with other gaming properties to create a gaming division operating under the Wizards tradename.

This marked something of a new start for D&D. A new edition – version 3 – of the rules was created in 2000. This scrapped the division between AD&D and D&D, creating one game. It dispensed with many the different dice the game used, settling upon the 20-sided variety. Gygax, who has undergone a change in thinking over the years, maintains the system is too complicated and damages group co-operation by focussing too much on power-play. Nevertheless, it has proven to be popular, and Wizards have wisely decided to make the system free for all games publishers to use, breaking down walls in the RPG community and generating fat loads of advertising for D&D.

Now, though the game will never be as big as it once was, Wizards estimate that around three million people a month play the game in the US alone. It appears the adventure of D&D will run for some time to come…

A D12 of D&D

Roll your twelve-sided dice to generate a random Wandering D&D Fact!

1. The game was penned under the uninspiring title of “The Fantasy Game”.
2. Gary’s surname (his parents were German) is pronounced “Guy-gax”, not “Guy-jax”, as many a poorly informed wannabe wizard would have it.
3. The name “Dungeons & Dragons” was, according to popular legend, suggested by Gygax’s wife.
4. Gary Gygax also created GenCon, now the world’s largest gaming convention, and launched Dragon magazine.
5. Fantasy movie  Krull (1983) went under the name Dungeons & Dragons for part of its developmental cycle, despite having nothing to do with the game.
6. Though Gygax originally started to put fantasy elements into Chainmail, it was D&D co-creator David Arneson who first restricted players to one model each in his games, establishing the link between player and character.
7. The game has a magic system where the wizard must memorise spells. Once he has spoken them and set them off, he forgets them. This was directly inspired by the Dying Earth novels of Jack Vance.
8. Although the term “Hobbit” was removed from the game to stop infringing on JRR Tolkien’s rights, the term “Halfling” remains.
9. D&D had no setting when originally launched, instead it provided gamers with hundreds of monsters, demons and beasts with which one could create one’s own world. Many of these were drawn from mythology. Tiamat, the multi-headed dragon in the cartoon and game, for example, is a Babylonian deity which represented the salt ocean, symbolic of chaos.
10. D&D has sold more than 20 million copies, and generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
11. Many potential RPGers now play online Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games. The biggest, World of Warcraft, has six million gamers. A D&D MMPORG was launched last year.
12. Gygax is not a big fan of Tolkien, finding his books dull. The works of Jack Vance, Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber have had far more influence on the game.

D&D on the screen

Not so well done, cavalier

 D&D has had many brushes with the silver and small screens. Not all of them positive. There of course was the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon show, which ran for three years and 27 episodes, but we had to wait until 2000 for a real Dungeons & Dragons movie, and then wished we hadn’t. A diabolical mess that featured a bored looking Jeremy Irons (paying for renovations of his Irish castle), that forgettable dude who played Jimmy Olsen in Lois and Clark, Thora Birch, Richard O’Brien and hod-loads of crap CGI, it was closer to the game but further from quality than the cartoon. This is a crying shame, as it was director Courtney Solomon’s life-long ambition to make a D&D movie. He acquired the rights to make the film in 1990 aged just 19 and spent 10 years putting together the money. All for nothing, because it really is awful.

There was a sequel in 2005. Don’t ever see it if you have even one iota of self-respect.

Champions, and knees

Today Champion of Mars is out in the US! Hooray! Americans can buy it here. We Brits and other assorted Euro-types have to wait until May 10th. Oh well. Whet your appetites with the free sample, or head over to Solaris Books for more information.

There are two interviews with me online about it now, one at the Solaris Editor’s Blog, the other at SFX. They’re about the same book, so I do repeat myself a little, but about halfway through they diverge and I talk about Richards and Klein, writing spin-off fiction and other highly captivating subjects. Really, you’ll be captivated.

I’m not doing much at the moment. I had a flappy piece of cartilage removed from my knee last week and so will be out of action for some time. I can’t walk or move about at all. It’s very frustrating, and it’s made me think on how people with real mobility problems must feel. Worst of all, I have had to send Doctor Magnus away to the kennels until I recover enough to walk him. He’s a teenage pain in the backside at the moment, but I was welling up as I booked him in.

So, to take my mind off it, I submitted a short story today (expect to see it here when it is inevitably rejected) and  I’ve put a whole load of reviews up, including one of Lavie Tidhar’s early novella, An Occupation of Angels, where I make some comments on the perils of reviewing books of colleagues and friends. There are many others too, head on up to the drop down menus at the top. All these reviews date from my slightly angrier period (I’m always frigging angry, but I used to be more angry), so you may notice a change in tone to the later ones.

Until later.

Feeling Feisty

Greetings. It’s been a while, because I’ve been pigging ill! Laid low by a pernicious rhinovirus. That’s a cold, to the non-medically informed, not a disease that will turn you into a giant, ninja were-rhino. That sounds awesome, but would be very unfortunate and annoying. How would one get through the door for a start? Then there would be all those “feeling horny” jokes. I can live without that.

I must clear my head of such nonsense. In order to do so, I’ve put up this interview I did with Raymond E Feist back in 2008 for Death Ray. It’s the second or third time I’ve interviewed Feist, who remains one of the most successful writers of fantasy on the planet. In common with a lot of American fantasy authors I’ve met, the man is a giant force of natural confidence – with a beard. Like a tornado with a solid sense of self-esteem. Or something. Nice, anyway. I get the feeling he likes ribs.

Mr Feist missed out on the “Death Ray Interview” slot in issue 11 as we had Gerry Anderson in for that. Here’s a little insight into magazine production; I gave a selection of headlines for this piece (it not being “The Death Ray Interview”), ranging from the dire to the actually quite good. “A Kind of Magic” was applied instead of any of my suggestions, a title that is overused, and campy. I feel compelled to tell you this, as I’ve reused it below in the interests of faithfulness to the original.  But there you are. The perils of collaborative effort. Hang on, I like collaborative effort, and so does Feist, and he’s very rich. What have I done? I work alone! I can sit here and write what I like and hate the world on my own, can’t I? Serves me right.

A Kind of Magic

He’s one of the top-selling fantasy authors on the planet, a powerhouse of prose whose 24-book (and growing) Riftwar cycle dwarfs those of even the most prolific author. A real magician of words, He’s Raymond E Feist, and he likes to talk.

At twenty-four books long, the Riftwar saga is one of the most extensive of all the grand fantasy epics. Written by Californian Raymond E. Feist over a period of more than 30 years, Riftwar began with the smash hit Magician, first published in 1982. Magician is typical of the genre, a huge fat wedge of a book. Beginning with the story of an orphaned boy, Pug, before opening up to cover a decade of interplanetary war. Feist’s books are not art with a capital ‘A’ (his own words), they’re derived from a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting he and his friends created while they were at university in San Diego, and contain the full Tolkien menagerie of Elves, Dwarves and so forth. So far, so familiar.

Where they are not typical is in their expert artifice. Feist is a master of fast-paced epic storytelling, his characters are heroic but mortal, struggling through massive wars with enemies both human and monstrous who gain access to his the world of Midkemia via magical ‘rifts’ (we’re talking a wizardly stargate here). Magician is a masterclass in storytelling, a sweeping epic which sees Midkemia plunged into chaos as men from the world of Kelewan invade without warning. Caught up in the decade-long conflict are the boy Pug and his adopted brother Tomas, both of whom, by different paths, become powerful men. Feist’s books are set against an intricate backdrop which, though drawn from the usual catalogue of fantasylands, is a superior example of the type. On the cover of his latest Wrath of a Mad God, a quote describes his work as ‘A guilty pleasure’. That this grudging praise comes from The Guardian newspaper says it all – this guy is good at what he does.

Feist’s own quest began while he was at college, and he overheard someone say: “I’m going to hit him from behind with my sword.” Naturally intrigued, he went to investigate and discovered a friend of his involved in a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

“I joined in after a little while, and found it very addictive for a variety of reasons,” says the author. He’s moved literally just that week, and is talking to us from his new home, his voice echoing in an empty room. “It’s a nice fantasy tour de force, you can imagine and actively portray what would be pretty anti-social behaviour in the real world and not be condemned for it. It was an inexpensive way to socialise. We were all starving college students, and you could buy a half case of beer for ten bucks and spend the evening having a lot of fun.”

A big part of the D&D experience is creating adventures for your buddies to play through, and Feist started to do this, adding to their shared world the continent of Novindus, which he was later to use, years later, as the setting of his Serpentwar trilogy. Later, the gaming group opened Midkemia press, and it in writing modules for the company Feist got his first experience of authorship. Midkemia Press was ostensibly producing generic supplements for all RPGs, though really they were trying to avoid avoid paying license fees to TSR for D&D, which lacked a coherent gaming setting, Feist admits.

“I was pretty active with those guys throughout college, it was the underpinning of my social life. And so when I got the writing bug, I thought, why am I inventing this whole new world of Crydee when there’s this huge world that I’ve been playing games in for four years? I asked the guys about writing a story set in the world, and they said it sounded cool. So I dropped the Duchy of Crydee out on the west coast of the Kingdom of the Isles.

I’m writing historical novels about a place that doesn’t exist.

“Midkemia was always somebody else’s objective world, it wasn’t something that I had created for my own convenience, I was confronted with story issues arising from somebody else’s geography,  it was real estate that I didn’t have a part in building. All the politics, all the social conventions, all the background infrastructure were created for me. So in a lot of ways, and I’ve said this many times, I’m writing historical novels about a place that doesn’t exist.”

But despite Midkemia’s detailed history, Feist initially struggled with what to write about. Feist’s friend Steve Abrams suggested he tell the story of how the more powerful Greater Path of magic came to Midkemia, that which came to be practised by Pug, the eponymous Magician. Feist set Magician 500 years before the games he and his friends were playing, creating the world of Kelewan, whose mysterious Tsurani inhabitants were hellbent on adding Midkemia to their empire.

“Kelewan was predicated on three other gaming systems that were out there, and there were a couple that were very classically non-western European. One I liked a great deal was Bushido, but the problem with Bushido was that it was clearly historically Japanese, so I decided to make a pastiche world where I borrowed from Aztec, a little bit from Zulu and fair amount from Chinese history. And a little bit from Korean, though the Korean influence became much more pronounced later when I hooked up with Janny Wurts to do the Empire series because Janny had actually spent some time in Korea. Kelewan is a movie-set world. I only created what I needed. But Midkemia’s pretty vast, we put a lot of time and energy in to creating it. There are parts of Midkemia that the reader never even heard about, in fact there’s some stuff hapenning in the next book in an area of Great Kesh called the Peaks of the Quor, and that’s been around since 1974, but I’ve never written written about it before. Midkemia’s been a gold mine for me, in terms of story ideas.”

Feist is not the only author currently writing to have become engrossed in fantasy through roleplaying games. RPGs were very much part and parcel in of the fantasy boom that began in the late 70s. But today the gaming landscape has changed beyond recognition. Pen and paper RPGs have dwindled to a minority interest, and though online RPGs have become even more popular than their analogue precursors, they present a very different kind of gaming experience. They do not offer the possibility for collective storytelling that D&D and their ilk did. With this sort of narrative pre-school for writers gone, will it affect the future of the genre? Feist, who has played many of these online games, does not think so.

“No matter what the foundation of your own personal experience, once you step across the line into the theatre of literature, to mix a metaphor, you are subject to the same requirements as every writer – you have to tell an entertaining story that other people want to read.”

For Feist, who’s a big fan of Bernard Cornwell and Clive Cussler, this means pacey prose.

“There are writers out there who do wonderful jobs with description, but one person’s colourful is another person’s tedious. I don’t need someone who thinks their job in life is channeling James Fenimore Cooper. I don’t need a 30 page description of a four-wall cabin. I don’t need to know the history of that rifle hanging over the fireplace back to when the grandfather of the character, who’s not in the cabin right now, by the way, bought it. But that was different writing for a different time for a different audience. I’m reading Sir Walter Scott’s Castle Dangerous, which I haven’t read since I was about 14, and while the story is still as I remember it, I’m sitting here 48 years later going ‘My god this is ponderous prose!’ But the guy wrote it in 1830, his readership really expected very detailed images because they had never been on the borderlands between Scotland and England at the time of William Wallace and Edward Longshanks. People even in fairly cosmopolitan times such as early Victorian England, didn’t travel that much. For most people, the writer was their cable television. It’s an entirely different set of tasks to what we do today. Reader expectation differs, though we all have the same job to do. Ask any writer who’s out there with the public you’ll hear the same thing ‘I have this really great idea for a story, if I could just somehow find somebody to help write it down.’ And the answer is, it’s the help me write it down part which is the reason I get paid, because everybody’s got an idea, ideas are absolutely, absolutely cheap and easy.”

If ideas are so easy to come by, why do fantasy authors tend to stick to the same universe? Feist, to date, has only written one novel set outside the Riftwar series, the contemporary fantasy Faerie Tale (1988).

“I think it is an appetite for the familiar on the part of the reader, but I think it’s an odd question. No-one ever asks Stephen King why he’s written 40 books set on Earth, or more to the point why he’s written 40 books set in New England. But the setting’s not the point, the writer’s working on the essence of the human experience. The Shawshank Redemption could have been set in South Carolina, it didn’t have to be a prison in Maine, but Stephen lives in Maine and he know the environment like the back of his hand. You don’t have to struggle with settings. John Grisham is writing mostly about the south, it’s the reason why Hogwarts is a British public school rather than an eastern American prep school.”

Fantasy also tends to revisit a lineage of characters, like Feist does, picking up the story with the descendants of his characters, but he points out that this is not the sole preserve of fantasy, either.

“I remember reading science fiction as a kid. Heinlein certainly did a lot of that with Methusalah’s children, and when he got into the Lazarus Long stuff, he brought that character back several times. I think part of it is simply is what a storyteller feels best serves his needs.”

Unlike some writers, however, Feist doesn’t shy away from killing off popular characters. Something he insists is necessary in telling stories.

“I don’t like killing off fun characters any more than the next guy, but if you’re dealing with human frailty and human vulnerability, there has to be a price attached to certain choices, also people get old. The only writer I knew who had a cavalier disregard for that was Marion Zimmer Bradley. In her Darkover series she would have a character who was the grandson of character A and character A’s best buddy is character B, who is now the grandson’s best buddy, and he hasn’t aged significantly. When Marianne was asked about that once she basically said ‘I just don’t care, and if it’s a good character and a good story you really shouldn’t care either’. Marianne would occasionally bring up a kind of damn your eyes arrogance to her choices, and her readership loved it.

“It was very very clear to me that if it was going to annoy the hell out of me, it was going to annoy the hell out of my reader. My first task in making those decisions was not to do things to annoy myself. Because If I’m annoyed, god help my reader.”

Though Feist is obviously assured of his own ability and status as one of the world’s best-selling fantasists, he is remarkably unegotistical. His collaborative instincts are still in evidence to this day, and he does a lot of co-authoring. It’s only a select band of authors who are willing to come out of their garrets and share.

“I get a couple of things out of it,” he says. “First of all, Midkemia’s other voices, I didn’t create the world so it’s always been in my mind to a very large degree a collaborative undertaking in terms of the creative side of things; the storytelling side of things is mine, I’m sitting alone there most of the time. What collaboration does for me is that it allows me to look inside the creative processes of another a writer. This has been different with every writer I’ve collaborated with. I’ll be going, ‘I never would have thought of that, that’s cool.’”

So far he’s collaborated with four other writers. The first was Janny Wurts, with whom he wrote the Empire series, an entire trilogy. “The most work, because we did three together and they were big concept books, but it was also the richest experience because it was adding weight and heft to Kelewan, which had been a two dimensional pocket universe,” he says.

He proceeds to be charmingly frank about the other three authors he’s worked with. These were more guest writers, who lent a hand on one book each in his Legends of the Riftwar series – Steve Stirling, who worked on Jimmy the Hand, about Feist’s popular boy thief. “He was the most annoying because he went off on a tangent and did nothing that we’d agreed on, handed me a book that wasn’t the one we’d talked about but it had its interesting stuff in it, and created some challenges for me.” Joel Rosenburg co-wrote Murder in Lamut “When I asked him to clone three characters I didn’t think that he was going to literally yank them out of his book and drop them in my universe, but I’m kind of glad he did.” And William Forstchen, who helped on Honoured Enemy, where a Midkemian patrol are forced to team up with a band of Tsurani when they are attacked by Dark Elves. “The most fun. I wanted to do Sharpe’s rifles, and he wanted to do Xenophon, so we did.”

As you might have gathered, most of Feist’s work is rooted in war, another core concept of fantasy. It is arguable that if SF is the literature of ideas, that fantasy is that of emotion. Bitter partings, treacherous friends, heroic deaths, hidden pasts, trials of character, these are the engines of fantasy.

“In one way or another, the essence of drama is conflict and suffering,” says Feist. “It’s sort of hard to write a story about a bunch of well-adjusted people who are having a great time. It’s like The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet, one of the great iconic television shows of my childhood, it’s a comedy for a reason, the biggest conflict is which girl Ricky is asking to the prom. We should all be blessed with lives that uneventful. War’s a great lush background, and it provides you with the opportunity to deal with choices that have very direct one-to-one consequences. If Doctor Who,” Feist is a fan of the Doctor, by the way, “warps into a battlefield, it’s a completely different story experience if he drops the TARDIS in Picadilly and Queen Victoria’s riding by.”

Is he, then then a cruel god to his creations? Having them constantly in a state of armed turmoil?

“Well, I have to be. There’s a line in the last book, where Pug is talking to one of the gods and the god is being an asshole, absolutely just being arbritary and capricious, and then does something that is comparatively speaking, relatively nice. He says to Pug, ‘I’m a force of nature, but nature sometimes is clement.’ If my people always were bulletproof, if I was 24 books later still writing about Arutha, and Jimmy, and Pug and Liam and Jimmy, and Martin, okay fine, but we’re doing James Bond now.”

It’s this talent for creating compelling characters, and knowing what to pit them against and, crucially, when to let the axe fall that make Feist’s books so compelling. Past the D&D roots and trappings of the world of Midkemia, which are very evident, there’s a mastery of characterisation that puts his work right at the forefront of modern fantasy.

“For my purposes, I think that if I’m to try to break down my own stuff, which is a really risky thing to do, because I believe that you write intuitively. But I give my reader different characters, the big expansive powerful guys like Tomas, and the really insanely gifted people like Jimmy and Arutha. But I get interesting letters about the smaller characters, people like Nakor, and Roo. Roo was a profoundly flawed character who was eventually redeemed, but he was very clever. He may be the most clever character I created, in fact I got a letter from a guy who was a broker on the Chicago board of trade. He said at last somebody’s written a fantasy for commodities brokers, because he just loved the way I had described Roo’s little plots with the wheat futures, and moving cargo around and things like that.

“I asked Julie Schwarz once, the long time editor at DC comics,” Feist is also well connected, we should add here, “who his favourite character to edit was, and he said Batman. Bruce Wayne is a very driven, dark character, with a lot of flaws, who strives to overcome those flaws through rigour and discipline. His least favourite was the Justice League. He said the problem with Justice League is that Superman had to be weaker and dumber in the Justice League than he was in his own book, because if he wasn’t, you’d be watching Batman and Wonder Woman and Flash and the Green Lantern and Aquaman stand around watching Superman solve the problem.”

Feist ran into the same issues early on with Pug. The criminal gangs and bands of marauding goblins some of the other characters have to deal with would present a very small problem to this Feistian Superman, for Pug is awesomely powerful. Despite his affection for the magician, he’s often absent from the events of the later books, or his powers are in some way curtailed.

“I had to resolve that question. So, I don’t care how powerful he is, in a real world, and let’s say for the moment Midkemia is a real world populated by several million people, there is a ripple effect, and like a ripple in a pond, the further away you get from him the less impact his presence has on the environment. He could walk in maybe and take over a country, because he is the big bad magician, he could fry the king and all that, assuming that was his wont, but the reality is beyond a certain point he has to have an army that listens to him and does what he wants them to do. At the end of the day he can only be in so many places at one time.’

Pug, Feist’s first character, comes up a lot as we talk. Though many of Pug’s contemporaries from the earlier books are dead, Pug lives on. And there’s a good reason for this, he was Feist’s first creation and there are undeniable parallels between author and character. Like Feist, Pug was adopted. A lot of the same ethical issues dog Pug that dog Feist, for despite Feist’s avowed laissez faire attitude, love of much younger women and let-the-good-times-roll rhetoric, he is a deeply ethical man. His characters strive to do the right thing, most of them are in happy relationships, most are devoted to their children. Self-sacrifice is high on the agenda for the heroes of Midkemia. Nevertheless Feist insists that Pug is not him.

“I think there’s a common fallacy that there’s a character in the book that represents the writer if you just go look hard enough, though it maybe true in some cases,” he says. “I think that there elements of my life experience expressed in every character – the interaction when Jimmy meets Gamina is directly related to when I met my wife. And there’s a lot of aspiration, you know, I wish I was as talented as Pug, I wish I was as competent as Arutha, I wish I was as steadfast as Martin, I wish as gifted and as much fun as Jimmy. So in the sense that I can look into an aspect of my own personality and then extend it, and use it as a jumping off point. Pug reflects my own life the most directly, in which I will still observe as being really indirectly, but only because he’s my first character, he’s still with me, and a lot of what I’ve gone through I’ve reflected in his life experience.

“In my own life, you know I’m 62 now, I find myself facing some interesting questions when I was 62 that had I faced them at 30 I would have thought you were absolutely mad. I’m divorced, I’m dating a much younger woman, so suddenly at 62, look, most guys my age are thinking about retirement and playing a lot of golf, and I’m standing here looking at the possiblilty of maybe starting a second family. Do I want to? I’m confronting questions that I didn’t anticipate. So I’m taking my own life experience to the fictional realm. Pug and Miranda are over 100 years old now, but they’re still figuring out a lot of stuff, like me. Actually, I was joking wth somebody, saying I have to believe in reincarnation because I hate to the idea that I finally learn this crap and I can’t get to use it!”

It’s a tough question to ask, but the last 12 months have not been a happy time in the world of fantasy. James Rigney [Robert Jordan] passed away, Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the publication of Gemmell’s final book, finished by his widow, reminds us he is no longer with us. Feist, as he said, is 62. Gemmell was 57, Rigney 58, Pratchett is 60. As with Gemmell, Rigney’s final book will be finished by someone else, Brandon Sanderson. But there’s been a trend over the last few years for authors to pick up the torch of other writers and really run with it. We asked Feist “would you be happy for Midkemia and Kelewan to continue on into the future in 30 or 40 years time without you behind it?”

“Nah,” he says dismissively. “I look at this way, it’s not where the books are set, or not even where the characters are, it’s my voice that is the thing. Yeah, I realise people still buy VC Andrews books, you know, silly as that is. And like many people I mourn Jim’s passing. And I am glad Harriet found someone she’s comfortable with to finish the book, and you know, I feel two ways about that. I realise that Jim probably had enough of the story down and enough of the original writing in place, it’s basically someone going in and fleshing out some things and wrapping it up, so it’s basically Jim’s project. If Harriet decides she wants to franchise out that world, then more power to her, it’s her legacy and it’s her estate. For me, if my son  became a writer and he wanted to play in the same sandbox  that I did, then I wouldn’t have any objection to that. Brian Herbert was smart enough to recognise his own shortcomings as a writer and hook up with Kevin Anderson, who’s a very good writer, and that close collaboration has been very successful, because Kevin’s got a huge opportunity and branding, and Brian gets a really good writer to work with, it’s a really good combination.”

But would Feist be comfortable becoming Raymond E Feist™?

“Probably not. I don’t know. There’s so many variables involved. For one thing I’m making a decent living now, and I’m able to afford most of the things in life that I enjoy, and yeah it would be fun to have the executive jet waiting on the tarmac to fly me to Vegas at whim where the Venetian has the highroller suite set aside for me and I’ve got Hugh Hefner’s rejects flocking around me to accompany me to the best restaurants and all that. Yeah, you can go chase stuff, but why? Look, I got my season tickets to my football team, I got a good wine collection, I got a pretty girlfriend, I live in a very nice place with great weather, I got two amazing kids who I adore even when I want to kill them. Life is good. So you know, I have no ambitions about creating any legacy beyond whatever legacy arises from some kid a hundred years from now wandering into a library someplace and finding a musty old volume of Magician and being captivated by it. If the opportunity arises where Spielberg or Lucas want to create a franchise, and there’s a theme park out there someplace, where next to the Indiana Jones ride is the Ride of the Dragon Lords, fine, I’m always open to business, but you know my business decisions tend to be not ego-driven. I, and say this with all humility. I don’t like the idea that I’m going to end up being the number one fantasy writer in the world because Jim died and Terry’s got Alzheimers. I would be very happy to be number three or number five or number whatever, provided these guys are still around. I liked Jim, Robert Jordan was a character he played, and he played it very well, he was full of bombast and he looked like he was channeling Victor Bruno from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I mean he got fussy about silly shit on the road all the time, but that’s not Jim, that was the character. Jim was a nice guy, a good guy, and Jesus the guy loved history. Terry can be a bite in the ass, anyone who’s partied with him knows, but he can also be the most delightful and charming person around, he’s a bit of a madman, but for that brain… you know my mum is 91 years old, and I’m dealing with that. I kind of expect it in someone who’s 91, I don’t expect it in someone who’s two years younger than me. I love Terry’s optimism, I love it that he’s approaching it with the ‘parties not over yet, and don’t cry for me Argentina’ attitude, but I still hate the thought of losing that madman to the ‘long goodbye’…”

Feist intends to write five more books set in Midkemia, after that, who knows? No even he’s sure.

“That’s going to be the end of the entire Riftwar cycle. I sat down to write the damn thing in 1977, so I’ve been working on this stuff for 31 years now. There’ll be thirty books in the cycle. Not to sound immodest, but that’s a heroic undertaking. If you’d told me 30 at the beginning I would have said ‘Are you daft?’ That covers the five Riftwars, and tells the entire cycle that I wanted to tell. And after that I’ll figure it out. I’ve already talked to talk to Jane Johnson over at HarperCollins about what I might do on the next series, and I thought it might be fun to dabble for a little while in alternate history.”

At this juncture it’s possibly wise to point out that Feist is garrulous, in fact, he’s a talking machine, his conversation unstoppable and damn near unsteerable. We were on the phone for over an hour, during which time he did most of the talking. These little old paragraphs here, that’s just me making sure we’re all aboard the Ray express and know where it’s going. In reality, he just keeps going, seguing from topic to topic, and he’s keen to share concepts as yet unpenned.

“It will be alternate history where magic works, so I might write a story about Elizabethan colonisation of America, and have one of the protagonists be a puritan witch hunter, and there are real witches out there, so the entire experience is different. The Spanish don’t get over because Montezuma has better magicians. I had a idea that there was this kind of situation where we would arrive at around 1810, where the British have enclaves in places like Manhattan and Pittsburgh, that are on lease deals, like Clive did in India or China did with Macau and Hong Kong. But it’s like the only reason the Kiowa put up with the Europeans is that the Comanches are kicking their ass and they want white allies. That sort of thing. What one has to do first is to set out and delineate the political infrastructure at that time and place, and to do that you’ve got to go back and start saying ‘Okay, how different do I want the world?’ If you go back to Babylon or Sumeria, and say magic works, well at that point, Earth would not be recognisable in 2008. You have to make certain arbitary decisions about what kind of flavour you want, and part of that is just how powerful is magic? Just how important is magic in terms of its change on the ebb and flow of history? One example that springs to mind is that when the soothsayer warns Caesar, ‘Beware of the Ides of March’, Caesar pays attention, because that guy’s got a 90% betting average. Or, he wouldn’t have been so cryptic – ’There are 31 guys waiting to kill you!’. A big part of that will find itself, but I’ve got five other books to write before I get to that decision.”

There’s a big spoiler coming up in this final paragraph, by the way.

“And I might go in a different direction. I may hear a clamouring, as much as fans clamour, for post-apocalyptic Midkemia – what happened next? After everything we knew for 30 books went ‘pouff!’ I don’t know, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

Did you know?

Midkemia has appeared in both comic and computer game formats. Two adventure games were released by Sierra On-Line, the critically acclaimed Betrayal at Krondor in 1993, and Return to Krondor, in 1998. Feist wrote three books based on these games, two further books were never published due to copyright wrangles. There’s an old-style text MUD under development from Iron Realms too, and Feist says he’s had a few conversations over the years about a MMORPG. A comic version of the first part of Magician has also been released by Dabel Brothers Publishing in co-operation with Marvel. However, the two companies have since ceased working together.