New Interview with Steven

Hey All,
I was lucky enough to catch up with Steven in Manchester earlier in the month. Well the interview is now up so thought that I'd best let people know. However its in my Ezine, Falcata Times and its a biggie. (117 pages) Its a pdf, its free and you can save it to your computer to enjoy as and when you feel like it. Likewise if you want to print it you can but remember, save trees kill electrons.
LOL
Likewise we'd be grateful if you let your friends know as well.

Other Interviews in this issue are:
Laurell K Hamilton
Charlaine Harris
Marianne De Pierres
Vicki Pettersson
Mike Carey
Sam Barone
Carrie Vaughn
CE Murphy
Yasmine Galenorn
Suzanne McLeod
Ann Aguirre
Talia Gryphon
Jo Graham

Also featuring the artists:
Dan Dos Santos
Lorenzo Sperlonga

Loads of Reviews and other features can also be seen in Issue 7 http://members. lycos. co. uk/falcatatimes

Thanks

Gareth

I typed out the interview. Unfortunately, I can't include the pictures and I've left all of the mistakes uncorrected. Here it is, as done by Gareth in Falcata Times:

Quote

Having been a fan of Steven Erikson's Malazan series for a number of years, I jumped at the chance to meet him when he finally got to Manchester as part of his UK tour. What struck me most about him when I arrived at the interview venue was the way he sat there quite quietly reading through the latest release, Toll the Hounds, making notes and preparing himself for the signing later that night.

Quite unassuming many people may make the mistake of thinking him a fan himself as opposed to the event however when he talked he really came alive and animated as he talked about everything from Archaeology through to the fantasy world to which his characters inhabit. Yet it was from humble beginnings that the series arrived as Steven himself explains:

"I think we started really early on with the AD&D system but swiftly moved away to Steve Jackson's Gurps series." Steven stated during our first interview question. "Once that came in we found so much more free will and it was fitting the game style that we were writing so much better than AD&D and then the magic system as it developed it just seemed to make so much more sense."

Although Steven admits with a touch of humour that his first foray into roleplaying was a bit of a disaster as he recounts when Ian C Esslemont (Co-World Builder and also Author to his own series of Malazan books) introduced him and four others of the archaeological team to their first game. Yet what it did however was demonstrate that he and Ian were interested in the same sort of things. What made the two of them different from their version of the roleplay system was the fact that they built the world from an archaeological as well anthropological point of view which allowed a richness of history to eek out demonstrating that the world existed before th events and would continue to exist long after the current events played out.

When asked about upon whom the Malazan Culture had been based was "was late roman empire for technology although we did add munitions at some point..." with the inspiration for the other cultures coming from those who were in conflict with them at that particular point in history for example the Celts with the combats figured out from documented cases of the wars fought.

However as fan's will attest, the series is not something that will be contained within one simple explanation or can even attest to an easy way to describe it as there are many individual plotlines and the high body count. When asked to sell the series to new readers Steven sat for quietly for a moment thoughtfully sipping his Chocolate Beer and said "As a Hollywood Mogul I say: This is somewhere between Dune and Thomas Convanent." Although not taking anything too seriously he laughed at the end and admitted that even he had trouble trying to find a way to sum it up.

Yet when you examine the series in detail you do notice that principle characters have stepped in and out of histories either through their own plotlines or due to the high body count where Steven must have by now spilt an ocean of blood mainly due to the sheer stubborness of the Malazan war engine where heroic combat is out and the all act as "... a machine that just has to get the job done."

However after 8 books and with 8149 pages it must be very tricky for an authro to keep an eye on whats happening and who's doing what yet Steven has loyal fans who set up some websites and keep an eye on things so much so that when asked about the Encyclopedia Malazanica he said "William Hunter who's one of the people on the site (malazanempire.com) has done an amazing amount of work already and I'd like to see him on an editor position for the encyclopaedia and it's something I would push for."

What people do tend to notice however is the difference between the first book (Gardens of the Moon) and the second (Deadhouse Gates) why was this? "Deadhouse Gates was rather extraordinary as it took eight years to get the first, Gardens of the Moon published so there's eight years between the writing of Gardens of the moon and Deadhouse Gates." Which he was writing on a Psion 5 whilst working at Toyota. Yet he felt that he'd finally been "... given permission to finally write fantasy and that was going to go for what I really want in fantasy."

But what does the future hold for Steven? Currently a quarter of the way through book nine (Dust of Dreams), he mentioned that he'd just signed a new contract with Bantam for another six books, although these were set to be trilogies. "The first one I intend to tackle is going way back ot early cosmology and Mother Dark so in a sense I'm creating a kind of new world but everything that's played out at that time has all the repercussion's and some of the same characters like Anomander Rake." As to the other Steven wouldn't say anymore but the final two books have presented a bit of a bugbear for Steven as he leaned forwards to whisper that "The ninth and tenth books are basically one giant novel so the ninth one for the first time in the series will actually be a cliff hanger."

Which, to be honest, is quite ironic really as he also mentioned that he used to hate cliff hangers as a reader when had to wait anything from a year to 18 months to see what happened. " I don't see any other way around doing this as two distinct novels because we've got this far with a ten book series." He acknowledged as with each book having its own pay off for having read it he wanted the series to finish with the mother of all rewards to thank the fans for their time over the years.

Yet with each death in the series leaving the fans wondering who's going to make through Steven felt that he had to apologise for a reading he did a few nights before when he'd mentioned a spoiler for the previous novel (Reaper's gale) and felt "absolutely awful" when one of them came up to him to get her books signed and mentioned that she only had a hundred pages to go and hadn't read tha tpart yet. "Is it alright for spoilers here?" Steven enquired. After I nodded in the affirmative he continued "Trull Sengar is the death that took most people by surprise although in a sense I don't know if it should as everything dramatically gearing towards that particular end because of his growing relationship with the woman Seren Pedac who has a history of losing loves, everything just fell into place but I think it upset a lot of people."

But surely if there's one character people love there has to be one that everyone has really come to hate? "Felisin the Younger." Steven answered without missing a beat however she was a character for which was immensely proud as "...she was an amazing character to write because I got it into my head that this was a character who had gone through horrible things and in a sense had been betrayed by her family and as far as she was concerned abandoned and learns how to survive the best way she can. of course having done that she wasn't going to be a character that would accessible to anyone and every gesture that caring people would make her instinctive response would be wound that person to negate any emotional connection and as the story went on her dialogue got more obscure and in some ways more vicious than I anticipated."

Yet ask Steven who his own favourites are and he has to think for a few moments until he comes up with "Kalam, Pella and the Mott irregulars." Although he stresses, "Because I change diction levels, sentence pattern based on the character that we're travelling with I have to be fully engaged with each character so each entertains me in their own way."

Writing has always been something that has brought Steven pleasure however whilst all nice and demur most of the time it's when he isn't writing that problems happen. "I get really cranky if I don't." He admitted. Unlike most authors though he writes for just four hours a day starting at one in the afternoon, five days a week (although the number of days does change if he's closing in on the end of a book.) "It doesn't matter if I get two paragraphs one day as on the next I may get 12 pages." But for Steven writing is "...my addiction on a personal level." Expounding upon this he went onto explain that "It doesn't have to be the power to change the world in any respect whatsoever, and that can be kind of depressing but at the same time it's what I seem to be best at so I keep plugging away." After years of being what he termed as dirt poor writing is a "...a dream come true and to be able now to write full time is fantastic."

But what does Steven do when he's not writing? As all good Canadians should, he admits that he is an Ice Hockey fan, mentioning that whilst he was at the hotel he couldn't remember the last five internet sites that hit but the odds were that one of them was an Ice Hockey one. "I support the Edmonton Oilers out of Alberta, which hasn't been a good thing lately," he admitted "but I've always enjoyed their approach to the game." Yet he also enjoys a good story such as The Engineer Trilogy by KJ Parker. "The third one hadn't come out in Canada when I left so when I found it here I grabbed it." Generally he doesn't tend to read fantasy when he's writing it though but tends to read Science Fiction or Non-Fiction although he also recently "...enjoyed Richard Morgans Steel Remains."

From here we wanted to take a different tack and wanted to know what being an archaeologist had taught him about mankind. "We never seem to learn," he started out with "as we tend to repeat our mistakes and it does seem to be a proclivity of human nature to do that. As an Archaeologist you look and realise that civilisations have a lifespan yet in the modern age we have this notion that ours is unique and different from all the other civilisations that prceeded it and unless we get off the planet its no different at all. My sense of history is that we have a notion of immortality for our civilisations and I'm sure that the Mayan high priest thought that in 1400 AD. That being said I'm not being pessimistic because I actually have a lot of optimism for the planet recovering from our species."

On a side note, this is the one interview done like this. All the others in the same issue hold to a more readable, though less personally involving, format.

Malazan Empire: New Interview with Steven - Malazan Empire