A Conversation with Matthew Woodring Stover
Matthew Woodring Stover lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as a bartender at a private club in the United Center, home of the Bulls and the Blackhawks. In previous incarnations he’s been an actor, a theatrical producer, a playwright, a waiter, a barista (okay, what the heck is a barista?), a short-order cook, a telemarketer of fine wines, and a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. With his partner, noted painter and up-and-coming fantasy author Robyn Fielder, he was cofounder and codirector of the Iff Theater. In addition to being a recreational marathon runner and amateur kickboxer, Stover has studied a variety of martial arts, including the Degerberg Blend, tae kwon do, aikido, English boxing, English quarterstaff, the Filipino sword arts (kali/escrima/arnis), savate, and muay thai (reviewers, take note!). Somehow amid all this exhausting activity he finds time to write fantasy novels—three to date—with more on the way.
Q: Tell us a little about how you became a writer . . . and why an SF writer.
A: Two words: Robert Heinlein. I read Have Space Suit—Will Travel when I was about twelve, then got ahold of Glory Road, and my fate was sealed. From Heinlein to early Zelazny to Fritz Leiber to Evangeline Walton; they got me started, and I’ve never stopped. Much of my life has been an obsessive inquiry into philosophy, mythology, magic, religion, and the concept of the Hero (in the Joseph Campbell sense). SF—fantasy—is the only branch of literature that lets you look at all of those at once. As to “how I became a writer,” I did it on the Ray Bradbury plan: a thousand words a day, six days a week, rain or shine, even if you have to throw it out because it’s so bad that burning it would violate the Clean Air Act. He claims that by the time you’ve written a million words, you start to have some idea what you’re doing. He’s right.
Q: Your first novel, Iron Dawn, was published in 1997. Its sequel, Jericho Moon, in 1998—which is also when Heroes Die was published. Three novels in two years—all of exceptional quality. Are you an incredibly quick and prolific writer? Do you work on different projects simultaneously, or do you have a lot of material stockpiled from over the years? In other words, should I just slit my wrists now?
A: Save your wrists: it was pure stockpile. May the gods witness my wish that I really could write that fast. I wrote Iron Dawn in 1993 and early ’94. I sent it off unsolicited and unagented, straight to the slush pile. While I was waiting for a response, I wrote Heroes Die (which is actually a massive revision of an earlier, vastly longer, completely unpublishable book). In late ’95—through the kind intervention of a perceptive editor—I finally got a great agent, and he had Iron Dawn sold at auction within about a month. By that time, Heroes Die was finished—but my editor at Roc Books offered a contract for a sequel, at which I promptly jumped; Jericho Moon was a story I’d been wanting to write for a long time. So Heroes Die had to wait for Jericho Moon, which I finished in early ’97 . . . and then there was a long round of revision on Heroes Die. So, actually, these three books took me five years to write—eight years, if you count the three I spent working on the early version of Heroes Die. The “three books in two years” is entirely an optical illusion.
Q: Whew! It just wouldn’t be fair for you to be so good and so fast! Your answer will be of special interest to aspiring writers, I think, because (if I’ve understood correctly) Iron Dawn was discovered in the slush pile by an editor who then pointed you toward an agent. What advice would you give to writers looking to break into the field in terms of agents, editors, and submissions?
A: I think the ideal way to get an agent is exactly the way I did it: a recommendation from an editor who’d like to buy your script. Agents tend to be vastly interested in projects where a sale is more-or-less guaranteed. In my case, the wise and perceptive editor provided me with a list of agents she knew represented my kind of fiction. The best advice I can offer to aspiring fiction writers in any field is to read two books: Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury, and Writing to Sell, by Scott Meredith. Between the two, they’ll tell you just about everything you need to know. As far as advice specific to the fantasy field goes, well, that’s obvious: the easiest way to break into fantasy fiction is to write a novel about an Innocent Adolescent Who Suddenly Develops Powers and Now Is Destined to Defeat the Dark Lord, Save the World, Cure Dandruff, and Wipe Out the Scourge of Acne.
Q: Iron Dawn received an unusually strong response for a first novel. What sets that book and its sequel apart?
A: I can’t really say what sets those books apart. All I can tell you is what I like about them—and that would begin with the characters. That’s how I start a book: I get interested in a character, and I try to pull together a story that will show that character to his/her advantage. In the case of Iron Dawn, I became fascinated with a character that my partner, Robyn Fielder, had developed, this female Pictish mercenary named Barra. I had been developing an idea for a historical fantasy based on the premise that Homer’s Iliad was history, rather than fiction, and when Robyn started telling me about Barra, I just fell in love. She became the axis of the book. All three of the heroes are outsiders, expatriates in a foreign culture, and Barra is the most alien—a female warrior from the far side of the world, a land so distant that most people think it mythical—but she is also the most at home. She’s the inside-outsider, the link between the various cultures that interpenetrate the story. She speaks the language, she knows the city, she has an adoptive family that lives there; it’s her fierce passion to defend her adopted city that drives the plot. I’m really only interested in people who have that kind of passion, that fierceness; there are plenty of others who write about pure-hearted knights and Innocent Adolescents Who Are Destined, et cetera. Which brings me to the other thing that I like about my first two books: they’re not about the conflict of Light Against Darkness, or Good versus Evil. They’re about people trying to protect their homes, their families—and they’re about Barra, who has an unfortunate tendency to get emotionally involved in the jobs she takes on. The whole concept of Good and Evil as an abstract moral dichotomy doesn’t appear in historical thought until Zoroaster, five or six hundred years after these books are set. Barra herself puts it this way: “One of the things I’ve learned in all these years is that just because someone’s your enemy, he’s not automatically a bad man.”
Q: That was one of the things I liked most about Heroes Die: your focus on characters and situations of a certain, shall we say, moral complexity all too rare in fantasy. Is this your strength as a writer?
A: I don’t really know what my strengths as a writer might be; judging from my mail and the reviews I get, the things I think I’m good at are often not what people like in my work. So let’s just say this: I’m thorough, I love my characters, and for me, evil is entirely a matter of perspective. Everyone’s a good guy, in his or her own mind; even serial killers, Nazi concentration camp commanders, and “ethnic cleansers” the world over don’t think of themselves as evil.
Q: Well, unless of course they get a big kick out of defining themselves that way! Hitler never thought of himself as evil for a second; on the contrary. But there are men and women, I believe, who consciously set out to embrace and embody an idea of evil: ‘It’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,’ as someone once said . . .
A: But now you’re shifting into aberrant psychology, as opposed to metaphysics. You quote from Paradise Lost—in that work, Lucifer is a tragic hero, a magnificently flawed character. And what’s his flaw? Basically, he refuses to Do What He’s Told—which, to a more modern sensibility than Milton’s, is hardly a flaw at all. In fact, given the history of the twentieth century (i.e., the Nuremberg trials: “I was only following orders”), it’s a positive virtue. What I’m trying to get at with that element of my work is this: reality has no moral dimension.
Morality is an arbitrary human creation that supports culture-specific social orders. Not to say it’s not useful, even necessary, but to pretend that it derives from supernatural authority is childish: “This is wrong because Daddy (God, Jesus, Mohammed, pick one or make up your own) says it is.” Similarly, to pretend that behavior we don’t like in others (or desires and drives we’ve been taught are bad in ourselves) is the result of some supernatural force of evil is just a way to shift the blame: “The Devil made me do it.”
Outside of the wackos who use evil as an excuse to justify their actions, those embracing “evil” are usually defining evil as opposition to a specific social code; it’s an act of rebellion—and they’re actually rebelling not against God, or Truth, or Justice, or whatever but against society’s restrictive view of what these things have to be. Chat with a Satanist sometime; most of them are really nice folks.
Q: What writers have influenced you most? You’ve already mentioned Heinlein and Leiber; Heroes Die put me in mind of Michael Moorcock as well. Not just the sword and sorcery aspect of it, but the science fictional idea—well, more science factional now thanks to quantum theory—of a multitude of realities harmonically related to varying degrees.
A: Michael Moorcock is one of my heroes, naturally; the decadence and moral ambiguity that runs through the Elric stories . . . Kierendal (and her brothel) in Heroes Die is pretty much a direct nod to Moorcock. Fritz Leiber—it’s no coincidence that my first novel, Iron Dawn, is set in Tyre, which was the setting of “Adept’s Gambit,” the only Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story (as far as I remember) to be set on Earth rather than Nehwon. Roger Zelazny—the original version of Heroes Die, all those years ago, was inspired by Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead. . . and, of course, Nine Princes in Amber. Stephen Donaldson’s Covenant books were a powerful influence; I read them back in college, and they were my first look at the possibilities of really adult fantasy. He showed me how a fantasy hero can be a long way from conventionally heroic but still capture the imagination and emotion, so long as he or she cares. Outside the genre, I guess my greatest influence would be Joseph Conrad. He convinced me that you don’t really find out what you’re made of until you discover that there are no rules; my characters usually find themselves, at one point or another, in situations where the boundaries they’ve set for themselves break down. They have to act—and usually, act fast—without recourse to the structure of behavior that they have relied upon to carry them through their lives. The characters who win are the ones who are flexible enough thinkers to find right action in a moral vacuum.
As far as the quantum mechanical part of it goes, well . . . let me put it this way: a few years ago, when I was first reading Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace, I looked up at Robyn and said, “Holy crap! You won’t believe this: Overworld is theoretically possible!”
Q: How would you describe Heroes Die?
A: It’s a piece of violent entertainment that is a meditation on violent entertainment—as a concept in itself, and as a cultural obsession. It’s a love story: romantic love, paternal love, repressed homoerotic love, love of money, of power, of country, love betrayed and love employed as both carrot and stick. It’s a book about all different kinds of heroes, and all the different ways they die. It’s a pop-top can of Grade-A one-hundred percent pure whip-ass.
Q: Yee-hah! Makes me want to read it all over again! How much of your experiences as an actor and playwright, as well as a martial artist, informed the events and characters of Heroes?
A: There is a kind of creative tension between Hari Michaelson, the actor, and Caine, the character he plays, that I touch upon in this novel. I was a stage actor; when you play a character night after night, it begins to infect your offstage personality. Not in the cliché sense of the actor who gets “lost in the role” but in a subtler way. You entrain your reflexes with the character’s mannerisms, for example, and you might find yourself standing like the character, gesturing like him, even using his voice without really thinking about it. When a character you are playing also reflects something fundamentally true about yourself, you can find yourself reacting instinctively from that character’s point of view—thinking like the character. This is what has happened to Hari; part of his struggle in the novel is to find a way to break out of Caine’s self-destructive patterns without losing the positive parts of that persona. One of the lessons actors learn is how incredibly powerful “make-believe” can be. That’s what acting is, after all. As a playwright, you find that there is no feeling in the world worse than to be sitting in the house at one of your own plays and discovering that you’ve lost the audience. You can always tell—when people start to get bored the theater is suddenly filled with subtle creaks of people shifting in their seat, coughs, sniffles, the crackle of after-dinner-mint wrappers . . . That’s why the book is structured as an adventure novel. Heroes Die has been described in print as “energetic,” “vigorous,” “hard-hitting adventure,” even a “furious, gory hack-em-up.” All true. If you want to keep your audience’s butts nailed to their seats, the story has to move.
I’ve been studying various martial arts intermittently for almost twenty years; I’ve done dozens of styles without ever becoming really proficient in any of them. In the process, I’ve accumulated a vast theoretical knowledge of personal combat—and I’ve done a little fighting, in the ring and out of it. I know what it feels like to get my ass soundly kicked; I also know what it’s like to fight someone who’s a lot better than I am and beat him anyway. Part of what I wanted to achieve with Caine is to get across that feeling; Caine is a long way from the Bruce Lee/Remo Williams/Sir Lancelot myth of the invincible martial arts superman. Everything Caine does in Heroes Die is real-world fighting; every move he makes can be duplicated by a reasonably skilled fighter. He’s not the best fighter in the world—he’s not even the best fighter in the book. But there’s a lot more to combat than skill.
Q: Is the caste-ridden capitalistic society of actor Hari Michael-son’s world something you see as possible in our own?
A: In a word, yes. Hari Michaelson’s Earth is the triumph of American capitalism, stripped of its egalitarian pretense. Don’t get me wrong; I like capitalism. But any social system becomes pernicious when taken to unchecked extremes, and Americans are extremists by nature. We have to push the envelope. The novel postulates a catastrophic event a couple of hundred years in the past (that is, in our near future) that essentially frees the multinational corporations from even the shadow of governmental control. The resulting society is caste-based because that reflects the curious psychological phenomenon of the industrial age: You Are What You Do. Caste systems are by far the most stable form of social organization—the members of each individual caste have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The upper castes can depend upon the lower to participate in their own oppression. This particular system also holds out the old capitalist dream of self-improvement: it is possible to buy one’s way upcaste. No one wants to rock the boat and screw up their chance of someday joining the ruling classes. Of course, these days it looks like the catastrophic event might have been superfluous. All you really need to bring about this future is a few more years of the Republican Congress.
Q: Perhaps the Republican Congress is the catastrophic event.
A: Hey, what are you trying to do, get us both audited?
Q: The Overworld—Caine’s world—is a wonderfully realized creation. There’s a complexity and sophistication to your portrayal of Ankhana’s inhabitants, their cultural practices and beliefs, their private fears and desires, that, once again, reminded me of Moorcock and Leiber. Even magic is treated with the same gritty realism as, say, Caine’s fight scenes. In fact, in many ways the Overworld seems more real than the “underworld” that is home to Caine and the other Aktiri.
A: Overworld is a step closer to the fundamental reality of existence; the whole concept of Acting, in the book, is to give the audience the feeling of having been to a place more raw and exciting than their everyday reality. I’m hoping to give the reader an analogous experience. And yes, Ankhana—especially the Warrens—owes a lot of its feel to Leiber’s Lankhmar.
Q: How exact are the parallels between Overworld and underworld? When I first looked at a map of the city, a nagging familiarity convinced me that I was looking at the Overworld equivalent of Paris. Are there analogues of places, of people? Could Caine, for example, meet an aspect of himself?
A: The parallels are more metaphoric than actual; even the geography has only rough similarities. For reasons that will eventually become apparent, Caine won’t be meeting aspects of himself. He is unique. Ankhana’s resemblance to Paris is pretty much a matter of story mechanics (the island enclave of human rulers, the river that separates the wealthy from the ghettoes that hold the poor and the nonhumans being the central spine of the city, et cetera). It also came about because I originally conceived the plan of the city while reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame; you might also have noticed a certain similarity between the Night of the Miracle in Heroes Die and Hugo’s Heart of Miracles . . . Hey, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.
Q: Can you talk a bit about actors and Aktiri? There are similar mirror images all through the book—ideas of reflection, reversal, opposition, splitting in two . . .
A: Let’s just say that a lot depends on your point of view. Ever wonder how Han Solo must look to, say, the wives and mothers of those Imperial Troopers he so casually slaughters? As far as the imagery goes, I’m really not comfortable talking about my use of literary devices and stuff like that. Some things are harmed by exposure. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain . . .
Q: Will there be a sequel? If so, what can you tell us about it? I’m hoping we’ll see more of Ma’elKoth . . .
A: Yes, not much, and you will. All I can say is that the sequel will be an entirely different animal from Heroes Die; I’m using many of the same characters to look at a very, very different group of interconnected themes, from the clash of individualism versus social responsibility to the essentially chaotic (in the sense of chaos theory) nature of reality. But there will still be a fair amount of serious butt-kicking, and several brutal murders . . .
Q: You mentioned earlier that your stories begin with characters. Do your characters, as you come to know them, suggest the themes of your books, or do you consciously set out to examine certain themes?
A: Some of both. It’s a little difficult to describe. They feed off each other: Characters suggest themes—in fact, most of the viewpoint characters in Heroes Die carry their own individual themes—but themes also alter characters. As I play around inside the characters’ heads, whatever I happen to be obsessing about that week tends to be reflected somehow in their personalities or their histories, but each character is also a kind of perceptual filter; I could never use Caine, for example, to address a theme of overcoming timidity and self-doubt, or dealing with shyness or any of that kind of thing. Those emotions are too alien to him.
Q: I was fascinated by the magical force of Flow and its relationship to the wave functions of quantum physics; i.e., a link between the science of one world and the magic of the other. Is that something else you plan to explore?
A: Flow is a fantasy expression of the Earthly concept of the Tao—which can be interpreted in many ways, as a metaphoric representation of the force described as the GUTE: the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. It is the fundamental force, of which electromagnetism, gravity, et al., are the differentiated expressions. It is also—in the Teilhard de Chardin sense—the consciousness of the universe. On Overworld, “energy” is equivalent to “mind”; since matter is a form of energy, everything in the Overworld universe partakes to some degree in the Universal Mind. If you read much Eastern philosophy—or much in the Western mystical tradition—you will have recognized this idea already. So, yes, there is a direct relationship between the way the physical laws operate in the two universes. This becomes a crucial element of the sequel, as we discover that there are some forms of magic that will operate even on Earth, and some forms of technology that work perfectly well on Overworld . . .
Q: Any chance we’ll go further afield than Earth and Overworld? There must be an infinite number of alternate Earths reachable by means of the technology that sends Hari to Overworld, or by other (perhaps even magical) means.
A: There must be . . . and not only other alternate Earths. The Winston transfer technology seems to be able to transfer a person to any spatial coordinate on Overworld . . . and Einstein contended long ago (and Hawking confirms) that duration—Time—is only another spatial dimension . . .
Q: And who’s to say that Hari’s Earth isn’t itself the unwitting stage upon which otherworldly actors are performing?