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R. Scott Bakker Interview
01/07/2005 . Source: Orbit Books Team 
He's an author and a student of history, philosophy, literature and ancient languages. He's unfeasibly clever and he's written one of the great fantasy debuts of recent years. He's R. Scott Bakker and he's talking. Without giving too much away, can you tell us a little bit about the background to The Prince of Nothing trilogy?
The Prince of Nothing is basically the story of a mysterious outlander coming to an ancient world on the brink of holy war and apocalypse, and the barbarian, the sorcerer, the waif and the prostitute who find themselves in the thrall of his godlike intellect.
It seems to us that The Darkness That Comes Before follows the broad path of the post-Tolkien fantasy but many of the familiar tropes are turned on their heads. Was it hard to achieve this balance between the formulaic and the groundbreaking? Was this always an aim of the books or did it just turn out that way?
Sticking to the rules was easy enough, since the epic fantasy form was stamped into my psyche when I read The Lord of the Rings as a ten year old. The differences simply arose from my original goal, which was to write the most realistic, most thoroughly detailed, epic fantasy possible. I wanted to fill the archetypes with real human beings, which is to say, people who responded to sustained stress in pathological ways (that which does not kill makes one stranger, not stronger). I wanted the world to be as layered and multifaceted as our own, with multiple strata of history, with competing faiths, philosophies, and literatures. I also wanted the world to be realistically pre-modern, which is to say, afflicted with the same bigotries and cruelties that characterized our own pre-modern history.
In other words, I wanted to write a fantasy that was as epic as it was unsentimental, and since I never thought about publication, I had some twenty years to work on it! I think whatever stands out as unique in the books is largely the result of this combination: strict goals and lots and lots of time.
Is there one particular element of The Prince of Nothing from which everything else grew or did the story come together more randomly?
It's been so long that I actually have difficulty remembering how it all grew in the very beginning. It started with the world, I know that much. Back in my D&D days I was always the Dungeonmaster, and since I hated all the pre-made 'adventure modules,' I used to plough hours and hours into making my own. I became an obsessive world builder. I can remember wanting to 'make good' on all that time (the preparation to play time ratio was quite dismal). I remember reading about 'memes' - the notion that belief systems evolve and reproduce like organisms - in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and coming up with the idea of a 'meme-master' - what would become the character of Kellhus. The story slowly grew from there.
Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?
Tolkien and Herbert are the two great wells from which The Prince of Nothing is drawn. When I first started writing, my mantra was to write something that would 'awe and intrigue.' Since I worked on it as a hobby for so long, however, it ended up growing into so much more - and owing so much more as a result. For years - decades - I found myself jotting down book-related titbits inspired by whatever I was reading at the time: history, the classics, Shakespeare, and lots of philosophy - especially Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Aristotle.
Do have a personal theory on why Fantasy is so popular these days?
It's no accident, I think, that epic fantasy worlds tend to be pre-scientific worlds. Before we adopted science, there was nothing short of traditional authority that might constrain what we could believe about the world. As a result we succumbed to our hardwired tendency to anthropomorphize; we fabricated worlds that reflected ourselves, which is to say, worlds that engaged us the way other humans engaged us. No matter what the culture, pre-scientific worlds listen, judge, demand, reward and punish - they do all the things human beings do, and they are anything but indifferent. The fact that science has since rendered these worlds 'fantastic' hasn't diminished our need for them. Fantasy provides us with these worlds in their 'fallen' form, as something entertained but known to be false, whereas traditional religion provides them in their 'original' form, as something requiring faith.
Do you find it frustrating that so much excellent work is currently being produced in SF & Fantasy but that, by and large, it is still ignored by the literati?
I used to wail and gnash my teeth about this all the time, but now I'm more fatalistic than anything else. Unfortunately we humans socially define ourselves as much by what we exclude as by what we accept - this is why you see versions of this problem in literally every sphere of culture. And to save time, we use generic categories to do our excluding for us. I've been told, for instance, that my chances of winning any awards within the SF&F community are likely nil simply because I'm writing epic fantasy, 'instead of something interesting.' That's how it goes.
Personally, I think genre fiction is the next great frontier of literary exploration, and I believe there's ample signs that this exploration has already begun. Socially, I think this is a very good thing, since it signals a reintegration of the artist in popular culture. But it'll take time.
Back to the books, how extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them?
Did you plot all of The Prince of Nothing trilogy before you started writing or did you prefer to let the story roam where it would? I'm an obsessive plotter, and an even more obsessive rewriter. Add to this the fact that I don't write in a linear fashion, but hop from place to place, beginning to end to middle to beginning again... My stories grow more like mould on bread than anything else. But, you know, the good mould. Very antibiotic.
You obviously have a great feel for the sweep of history; why not write an historical novel?
Is there something that fantasy brings to the table that allows you to do more than you could in an historical novel? As participants in a largely common culture, we have access to a huge reservoir of shared associations. Any time we mention something like, say, 'Rome,' we draw on an entire system of associations, which we could map with words like empire, grandeur, hubris, legions, domination, and so on. These shared associations are essentially the writer's palette.
When writing a historical, you're really painting by the numbers, drawing on these associations in ways constrained by what's actually happened. What I love about epic fantasy is that you start with an entirely blank canvas. Using these self-same associations, you can paint the shared, the familiar, in utterly different ways. As a result, you can say things in a manner and with a profundity which I think no other genre can match. And as my wife is constantly complaining, I have lots and lots to say!
And, finally, how does it feel to see your first novel in print?
It's kind of like bringing your favourite toy to school and standing there while the 'cool kids' pass it from hand to hand. Everyone's smiling, saying nice things - because it really is a cool toy - but all the while you keep thinking, Any second now...
Thank you very much, R. Scott Bakker!
Thanks to Orbit Books for permission to post this interview. For more details of their SFF authors and books, visit Orbit at www.orbitbooks.co.uk 
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