Kevin J. Anderson: An Impolite Interview
01/08/2004 . Source: Gregory Benford 

Kevin J. Anderson on why he can't get enough of sprawling, multiple storyline books, on making characters grow, live and die, and why science fiction is the only genre with the entire universe as its canvas.

Gregory Benford: So, a new "epic science fiction series" — after Asimov's Foundation series, Frank Herbert's Dune chronicles, Brin's Uplift, and even that Benford guy's Galactic Center series, what can you add that's different?

Kevin J. Anderson: I suppose I can't hide my familiarity with the DUNE books! But I like those sprawling, multiple storyline books—just can't get enough of them. And you left some big shoes to fill after your own million-word Galactic Center series which spans 35,000 years. No lack of ambition there.

G: And it will be reissued in six volumes next year—by Time-Warner no less. Took me a quarter of a century to write, too. I gather you're faster than that?

K: Impatient, maybe.

G: Ambitious, certainly. Young upstart, too.

K: Think of it as me doing the New Testament and you the Old Testament.

G: Who gets to be Jehovah?

K: And who the burning bush? Actually, I start out the first volume by lighting a whole planet on fire . . . a bit larger scope than just torching a bush!

G: Are we sf writers maybe being over-ambitious?

K: Science fiction is the only genre with the entire universe as its canvas. As writers, we should take advantage of that. In THE SAGA OF SEVEN SUNS, I wanted to tell a sprawling epic that covers a "War and Peace" storyline on the scale of the whole cosmos, filled with alien races, court intrigues, romance and sense-of-wonder.

It's not about gadgets or equations, but rather follows the family adventures, the loves and tragedies, pomp and pageantry among several competing races in an expanding stellar empire. I tried to pull together all the things I love best about science fiction.

G: So many of the bestselling series are all Big Fat Fantasies — Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks. Readers seem to like unending stories. I've always kinda liked the closure of narrative, the arc, a finish that adds meaning to all that came before.

K: Beginning, middle, end? — how old fashioned!

G: Today, it's spelled "muddle" and there is no end. Bad for our character.

K: Bad for building a sense of characters, too. People change when they go through dramatic events. They can't stay stoically heroic for five volumes, not really.

G: Stoically inert, yes—that describes several heroes of some fantasy I've read—though I shan't give authors' names, since some are old friends! Cynical, maybe, but friends.

K: That's why I found it important to put such a large cast of characters into THE SAGA OF SEVEN SUNS. The players change, grow, live and die, and are replaced by new characters. My stories aren't about one or two guys plodding through an endless progression of impossible problems.

G: Not to detract from the successful fantasy series, of course. The authors are honestly trying to build big stories suffused in vivid imagination—all quite laudable.

K: Yes, and I wanted to do the same thing only with science fiction. Many of the elements are the same, though with a different rationale. I use technology instead of magic, alien races instead of elves and dwarves, planets instead of exotic lands, weird life forms instead of mythical creatures.

G: But sf plays on a different court, and with the net up.

K: Ah yes, your tennis analogy.

G: Stole it from Robert Frost, actually. I'm not proud! And I did play on my high school tennis team. Enough about our bronzed, athletic bodies. How do you contain your enormous literary energies in a mere few-book series?

K: Instead of just squeezing out an unnecessary sequel after completing one book, I planned this as a big series from the initial planning stages, and as such I built it on a foundation with a big enough story to require multiple volumes.

I do have an overall plan for the start-to-finish, six or seven books to tell the whole epic. It won't just keep going like the Energizer Bunny.

G: Until you begin the next series...

K: Always planning ahead, unlike some ... slackers. You once said you were perfectly satisfied with writing one novel a year, while you did your other research.

G: Yes, since I actually am a professor at the University of California at Irvine, have a day job and do research—writing is necessarily a hobby. All the genuine science in my life leads to many virtues, including keeping me from being, ahem, ridiculously prolific...

K: Do I detect envy here?

G: Grudging, yes.

K: Especially when it comes to writing a lengthy series of hefty novels, my writing speed turns out to be quite an advantage. Before HIDDEN EMPIRE comes out in paperback, before A FOREST OF STARS is published in hardcover, I have already completed the ms. for Book 3, HORIZON STORMS, a draft of Book 4, AN OCEAN OF WORLDS, and a full-color graphic novel prequel, VEILED ALLIANCES (which will be published by Wildstorm/DC Comics this December).

G: Think of all the trees cut down...

K: But in the name of a subtle environmental message. Hey, think of it as charity!

G: Oh, you donate the proceeds to the Sierra Club?

K: Not exactly. Readers hate to get hooked on a series and then have the author leave them hanging for years and years. I'm staking my reputation on the fact that I will deliver each installment on time so that the novels can be published according to schedule.

G: Kevin Anderson, philanthropist! The scope! The power! The income!...And say—A FOREST OF STARS, HIDDEN EMPIRE, HORIZON STORMS—some pretty sweeping titles there.

K: I thought you'd like them, as they are intentionally "Benford-esque". I defer to the master of titles. Your books convey the scope and majesty of the universe better than any other: ACROSS THE SEA OF SUNS, SAILING BRIGHT ETERNITY, FURIOUS GULF, IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT. I suppose I could have titled one of mine, REVENGE OF THE KILLER ROBOTS...but that doesn't have the same flair.

G: It would lack a certain something, yes. But look, you open up HIDDEN EMPIRE by blowing up an entire gas giant planet — any other destructive tendencies we should watch out for?

K: Well, I had help in that. I wouldn't want to collapse a dwarf star all by myself. In order to make the implosion of a gas supergiant as plausible as possible, I had to haul in the big guns—you.

We sat on a hotel terrace in LA for a few hours, sharing a nice bottle of Chilean red wine, and designed the Klikiss Torch, an alien device for collapsing planets into suns.  Even though THE SAGA OF SEVEN SUNS isn't rigorous hard-SF, I still wanted it to feel believable.  

While I'm not a practicing scientist, I do have a degree with honors in physics and astronomy and worked for more than a decade as a technical writer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — where you and I crossed paths several times, and where I met one of my frequent coauthors, Doug Beason.

G: Yes, Livermore has a lot to answer for. Just like UCSD, which produced four PhDs who went on to cause the demise of a lot of trees — me, much the lesser, then Vernor Vinge, David Brin, and finally Stan Robinson. And we've all written series novels! So, how about a brief summary of your series? (For those of the audience who want to be ahead of the curve, Hip & Aware?)

K: A few years ago when Brian Herbert and I were on a book-signing tour, a man in the audience asked us to summarize DUNE in a sentence or two.

G: How about, "Jihad with sandworms?"

K: That works. Anytime someone tries to boil down a huge complex series into a few sentences, it ends up sounding either confusing or silly — and I wouldn't want that.

G: Touche!

K: My aim with this series is to tell a long, epic story that fits on the shelf between DUNE and STAR WARS (both of which I've practiced quite a lot) — the series has politics and consequences and subtle schemes . . . as well as colorful planets, exotic alien races, glorious space battles. I like to leverage the fact that I have an unlimited special effects budget.

G: Indeed, since it is provided mostly by the reader's interior imagination. Quite thrifty.

K: Especially since Time Warner, to fuel this first installment of our Q&A — don't worry folks, more to come, as soon as one of us writes another book! — has undertaken to provide the Chilean wine.

G: [Doesn't answer—is drinking.]

K: And no trees were cut down to produce this web-page interview...

Thanks to out chums at TWB for allowing the 'Nest to repost this article.

Used with permission from Time Warner Bookmark

Copyright © 2003 by Time Warner Bookmark