Wednesday Author Interview: Hal Duncan

For this Wednesday Author Interview, I'm pleased to present you with Hal Duncan, one of the most exciting new writers of fantasy out there today. Yesterday saw the US release of Ink, the second and concluding volume of the epic "Book of All Hours," which began with the release of Vellum last year. Vellum was nominated for the prestigious World Fantasy Award for Best Novel -- a huge accolade for a debut novel -- and the reviews for Ink have been ecstatic: "Full of riffs on myths from throughout human history as well as allusions to Euripides' Bacchae, this enormous, stinging, poignant hymn engenders a terrible beauty all its own," said Publishers Weekly, and that's a review pretty much any writer would want.

In this interview, Hal delves into how he built his complex and fascinating world, why the UK seems to be a hotspot for new fantasy, and why, on his popular blog, he rarely says in a hundred words what he can say in a thousand. This is fun, meaty interview, folks. I hope you love it as much as I do.

1. Quick! Tell us a little about yourself and about Ink.

I'm a pretty open and shut case, one of those kids who saw Star Wars in the cinema and fell in love with the imagination itself. Flash Gordon or King of the Rocketmen, Ben Hur or The Ten Commandments -- I couldn't get enough of all those old pulp serials and matinee epics when they came on TV. You can see a lot of those influences in Ink, with exploding airships on the one hand, retellings of Biblical and classical mythology on the other. In fact, the whole idea at the heart of it is a book -- the Book of All Hours -- which contains every story ever written and every story never written.

But if you want to dig a little deeper under the skin of both of us, there's also a little more going on there. I mean, I was the classic weird kid, with all the adolescent angst that comes with being bottom of the high school pecking order -- and queer to boot. So while my peers were out playing football, I was using my whole family's library tickets to borrow armfuls of books, writing stories that got darker and wilder the more alienated I became. Columbine didn't shock me in the slightest, to be brutally frank; every high school has a dead soul or two walking about with little left to hold on to but their hate. At sixteen years old, I was dreaming of killing sprees. Then one summer day my brother got knocked down crossing the road, and he died, and none of that narcissistic nonsense mattered any more.

The writer Philip K Dick had a crazy period he called a "redemptive psychosis", and I think that phrase sums up the process of destruction and reconstruction that I wanted to talk about in Vellum and Ink, not in an autobiographical way but as an exploration of grief, of the shattering of identity and of, most importantly, how death can and should heighten our appreciation of life, become in the end a reason to relish every moment with a fiercely passionate humanism. So while the book has gods and angels, heroes and rogues, those pulse-pounding Romantic styles of narrative are fragmented, recombined with Realist techniques into a sort of pulp modernism that's very much focused on the emotional and psychological. I wanted to create something that uses the archetypes to give something more than just wish-fulfilment by challenging the whole idea of heroes and villains, Good and Evil.

2. In Ink and its predecessor Vellum you’ve constructed a fabulously convoluted cosmology and teleology that both explains the world and gives the characters a reason to be in it. Talk a little about how you began to build out this world, and what some of the surprises and challenges were along the way.

The big metaphysical idea that everything is based on is that time could be seen as three dimensional. Just as a story has a beginning and an end, but also has variants from region to region and historical versions that have evolved through retellings, time in what I call the Vellum is "not that simple". There's not just the forward-and-back dimension we know, but also a "side-to-side" dimension of parallel worlds and an "up-down" dimension of more primitive realities like archaeological strata. Dig into the dust under your feet and you find worlds with gods and angels.

The basic idea of the Book of All Hours -- a Book containing every possible story, true or false, Lovecraft's Necronomicon meets Borges's Book of Sand -- planted the seed of that multiverse over a decade ago, but in the fiction I wrote at the time I didn't really follow that idea through into the metaphysical implications, where the Book is actually the blueprint of the multiverse of all realities. Instead it was a more purely metafictional device, with any story about the Book, of course, being an excerpt from the Book itself. The setting I had in mind for it was a city at the end of time, as much dream as reality, where everything had been torn apart and put back together by "bitmites", a strange black dust which could be seen as nanotech or magic. Everything was in flux right from the start, with the reader being thrown in at the deep end, into a consensual reality already in metaphysical collapse. Everything was written in full-on Joycean wordplay, in line with the chaos I was trying to write about, with the city as a sort of symbol of the sleeping soul. The sheer confusion of it all was asking too much of any reader and asking too much of myself as a writer. So eventually I shelved the Grand Plan and looked for a different approach.

Around the same time, I had an idea for fusing all mythologies from around the world in the mythos of the "unkin" -- humans who've been changed, become the gods, angels and demons of legend in a process that involves the "graving" of their identity into their flesh. I wanted to look at the War in Heaven through a series of stories focusing on the human level, characters struggling to survive; so the "draft-dodger" Finnan came into existence along with Phreedom and Metatron. The bitmites crossed over into this mythos, the whole idea of the Evenfall gradually taking shape as the apocalypse that tears reality apart. Certain images hinted at a wider cosmology, realities beyond our own, and there were links to the Book through Metatron in his role as God's Scribe, but generally this mythos was grounded in our world, much more accessible, much less abstract.

Still, that Grand Plan also stalled as other stories set in other worlds commanded more attention. The same ideas kept popping up though -- mysterious books, writing on skin, languages that control reality, even recurrent characters like Jack Carter, showing up as an anarcho-terrorist in a steampunk Glasgow, or as an archaeological adventurer in the 1920s Caucasus. Even works in wildly disparate styles seemed to be reaching out to each other; I'd set out to write a simple stand-alone story, but again and again when I stepped back afterwards I'd see that these were pieces of a bigger jigsaw puzzle.

I started to think that with all these shared tropes and themes, there was a larger story I was trying to get at, as much in the congruities between different narratives as in the plots themselves, in the shifting relationships between recurring characters, in the way that the Jack and Puck who're faeries in an alternative America, in a narrative based on the murder of Matthew Shepard, are also the Jack and Puck who're rebels in a fascist Britain of orgone-powered airships and chi-pistols, and also the Jack and Puck who're students in the present-day Glasgow of "The Road of All Dust", the section that was to become the prologue of Vellum.

That last story was the real turning point. It nailed the theme I'd been circling around for years, took me right back to the core idea of the Book of All Hours, and opened up the mythos by pretty much laying out the whole conceit of the "Vellum" as the tabula rasa of potential realities. In some respects it actually overthrows the whole idea of worldbuilding. It sets up the Vellum as the sum of all possible worlds. It symbolically burns the maps you get at the start of traditional fantasy novels. It's saying that the territory we're setting out into is not a particular pseudo-historical and pseudo-geographical artifice -- like Tolkien's Middle-Earth -- but rather the hyper-reality of all that could be artificed. In many ways I'm less interested in building one big consistent world than I am in building bridges between utterly contradictory fragments of worlds, unifying them, integrating them into a meta-reality on a scale so vast it would be insane to think we explore more than a few tiny corners of it.

3. One of the things I enjoy about your work is that it’s a kick in the gut to the standard-issue image of what a fantasy novel is. Moreover, in recent years there are a number of UK-based writers – you, China Mieville, Steph Swainston – who seem to be reinventing what the fantasy genre is or could be. Is it something in the water over there? Are there writers in the US doing similar things?

The UK does seem more fertile with that kind of original writing... at first sight anyway. The whole situation reminds me of the 80s and 90s in comics, when British writers likeAlan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and so on played a huge part in redefining the genre. I sort of wonder if those comics writers have also laid a foundation for those of us who grew up reading things like Sandman or Hellblazer, if part of what we're seeing is a cross-over of ideas from that field into non-graphic literature. Why so focused in Britain? Maybe because a Brit is more likely to identify with those writers, take them as models; they serve as proof that It Can Be Done, that being British isn't a handicap. And maybe here there's less fear of a reactionary backlash against political or religious ideas that the Christian Right in the US would consider offensive. "Liberal" and "atheist" aren't bad words in the UK. We also have the heritage of magazines like Interzone, which was pretty anti-conventional in the late 80s, or The Third Alternative, which carried the slipstream torch through the 90s, neither of which were exactly mass-market. The whole field has been, perhaps, less commercially-driven and so more open to diversity for the last few decades.

But I don't think the US is really lagging behind here, not by a long shot. There are the Jeff VanderMeers, the Jeffrey Fords, the Kelly Links, and more -- too many to list. The real difference, I think, is just that much of the most refreshing work in the US has emerged from the large and thriving indie press scene. The bigger publishing houses may have been wary of such works as commercial risks -- editors in any publishing house have to convince the Powers-That-Be that it'll sell, and in the US those Powers-That-Be are pretty powerful -- but it could simply be that the indie presses are more geared towards a niche market that's seeking "something different" rather than "more of the same".

In the UK, on the other hand, everything is on a much smaller scale, so the indie press and the larger publishers are covering more of the same ground. We've had Peter Lavery at Macmillan championing those sort of unconventional writers for years; he's the man who picked up Mieville, as well as VanderMeer, Ford and myself, not to mention K. J. Bishop. I think a lot of the perceived Britishness here is partly just a snowballing of success, that the overthrowing of the "standard-issue image" here is as much to do with editors like Peter giving those less conservative works more opportunity to catch on in a smaller and more integrated market where they can make more of an impact. One such success makes it easier to persuade the marketing department to back the next unconventional fantasy, and so on.

I think in the next few years, as editors at the major US publishers manage to persuade the moneymen of the viability of less conventional fantasy, the richness of the US scene will become more widely apparent. Truth is, you only have to look to magazines like Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet or anthologies like Polyphony to see that the stuff is out there.

4. Share a piece of writing advice you’ve been given.

Re-read what you've written out loud. That's one of the earliest pieces of advice I remember from the workshop group I'm a long-standing member of, the Glasgow SF Writer's Circle, and I think it's a useful method of highlighting bad prose when you're starting out. I'd modify it slightly in so far as I don't think a sentence really needs to be readable out loud; it's a written form, not a spoken one, and a long sentence can be a powerful thing even if it's far too long to actually read out loud in a single breath.

The point is not to destroy complexity, to reduce the potent intricacies of written prose to the simplicity of speech (given that we can, as readers, handle digressive and convoluted sentences that we might lose ourselves in if we were listening to them being spoken). Rather it's to run through the sentence so as to gain a sense of how it flows, whether the rhythm is elegant or clumsy, whether the structure is balanced or imbalanced, whether the point of the sentence is being articulated at the right point in the sentence or simply... splurged out in a bundle of words that are put together in a sentence which strictly speaking works because the words construct something intelligible but doesn't really work -- the sentence, that is -- very well in getting over that point because it hasn't been thought through enough, so that you end up losing the focus on the point in a maze of clauses that lead you round in a circle through that bundle of words. If you see what I mean.

5. Both Ink and Vellum have been critically very well received, and you’ve found yourself nominated for major awards for your books straight out of the gate. As a writer, is that validation that what you’re doing is working, or does it make you feel pressure so that whatever you do next lives up to your billing? Is it a little of both? At the end of the day, does any of it matter?

I wish I could say it doesn't matter at all, but I'm too shallow and attention-seeking not to revel in the idea of being nominated for things like the World Fantasy Award for my very first book. That's just plain cool. And I'm passionate enough about the writing that it's not entirely about me. Like many writers I have a strong personal aesthetic, an idea of what writing can do, how you can push the envelope, theories of how this strange fiction that we write actually works under the surface; those opinions feed into the writing itself, make every story or novel a little bit of a manifesto, a repository of one's faith in certain methods. And my ideas on the potential of this fiction to fuse the ponciest of modernist techniques with the pulpiest of genre techniques are idiosyncratic enough that I wasn't expecting anything like the reception the books have got. I wasn't expecting publication never mind acclaim. So there's definitely that theorising part of me which feels validated by those nominations, as implicit agreements that you can do X and Y and Z in a book, and make it work... and work well.

At the same time though, yes, being thrust into the limelight with your first book means higher expectations, not just for subsequent works but for the debut itself. Being touted as the Next Big Thing can rouse suspicions of hype, lead readers to approach the book with a distrust that could close them off when otherwise, coming to it without such distrust, they might have connected with it more. The higher profile also means you're going to get a lot of readers looking for a commercial type of fiction and being alienated by confounded expectations. So there's that backlash to worry about, where such readers react against the acclaim, actively decrying the book as unworthy of its hype, a false idol to be torn down. That's of more immediate import to me than "second album syndrome"; since Ink is such a direct follow-up to Vellum I'm less concerned about fans of the first book being disappointed than I am about the whole build-them-up, knock-them-down society of the spectacle.

Ultimately, though, I don't write to have my theories about writing validated and I'm thick-skinned when it comes to bad Amazon reviews. I don't write for myself or for readers; I write the book I think wants to be written, if that makes sense. As an example, the novella I'm working on now is a much simpler, more immediate work than either Vellum or Ink. The style is pared-back and it's heavily action-oriented; it's enough of a departure that I can imagine some readers who loved the complexity of Vellum and Ink wondering what on earth has gotten into me. But that's the way this story wants to be told; that's the style that fits it, and I'm not going to turn the thing into an experimentalist metafictional opus just for the sake of it.

6. In science fiction and fantasy circles online, you are famous (or infamous) for your blog, the entries in which are dense and intricate explorations of whatever topic you’re expounding on – many if not most going on for thousands of words (one your most recent entries, “The Latest Teacup Tempest,” clocks in at over 6,200 words). One dares say it is the anti-blog, and you, sir, are the anti-blogger. Do you intend to write epics when you blog? Or does it just end up that way?

I'm just a mouthy git when it comes down to it. As often as not those blog posts are in response to discussions on other blogs or forums, where I've missed the discussion and come to the debate days late. By that time you've had a lot of back and forth, a lot of points raised and disputed, and I realise that to say what I want to say would take up way more space than is normal on a forum post. Even coming in at the ground level on a thread on a forum or in comments on another's blog, if you have some simple discussion kicking off about, say, the relationship of "science fiction" to "fantasy", well, I have a whole theory of genre that riffs off of Delany's notion of subjunctivity, but it's not the sort of thing you can sum up in a few hundred words. So if I'm going to witter on at great length I tend to think it's good form for me to at least do so in my own backyard.

I don't usually intend to go quite so deeply into a topic but it often seems like those blog and forum discussions suffer from a false economy of shorthands and assumptions. A quick post skims the surface of the topic, making a point with a host of terms we all think we agree on the meaning of, when the truth is that any number of readers actually mean something else entirely. One person's "science fiction" is entirelydifferent from another's. What you mean when you say "fantasy" may not be at all what I mean by the term. So arguments based in semantic differences blow up and turn hostile, positions becoming entrenched, before the foundations on which those arguments are being made are even remotely clear to all parties involved. By the time you get down to the level of what exactly this person means by that term, and just why this other person is so riled by their use of it, the actual thread of the discussion has often become derailed by all the surrounding brouhaha, with pertinent points being lost and forgotten along the way.

So, the essayist comes out in me, and I tend to want to strip the discussion down to first principles and build it up from there, following through the ramifications and implications. In many ways I use the blog as a means to formulate my own ideas. I don't quite have an academic's or a critic's mindset, so I normally wouldn't think of writing non-fiction with an aim to publication -- I don't think of these entries as proper essays -- but the informality of the blog lets me satisfy that essayist impulse, to throw ideas out there and kick them around. I can be as analytic as I want -- and once I've got my teeth into a topic I will try and tear it to bits -- but the blog means you're not bound to formal language and structures. You're not even bound to consistency; you can treat a blog more as a notebook, something to chuck your ideas into as much to articulate them as to advocate them.

Then, of course, there's also the plain old-fashioned ranting where a good half of it is colourful metaphor and cuss-words for rhythm and emphasis. Every so often I'll just let the behemoth of cant and rhetoric cut loose for the sake of good old-fashioned heresy and humour. I'll believe what I'm saying and I'll stand by it, but -- especially when it comes to religion and politics -- if I think there's a big fat elephant in the living room, and tact and diplomacy are to blame for that big fat elephant not being acknowledged, I do have a tendency to get a bit bolshie with the rhetorical word-bombs. There can be a certain amount of overkill. But some of the most deliberately incendiary posts have ended up in the most civilised debates. A blog post where I railed against monotheism (in the wake of the Islamic reaction to the Dutch cartoons of Mohammed) led into a long-running discussion with Ben Rosenbaum among others that was a joy to participate in because the sturm und drang was quickly put to one side and we got down to the matter of serious debate. I think I'm just one of those pub philosophers who can't turn their back on a good barney.

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If you'd like a sample of Ink, here's an excerpt from the first chapter.

Tags: Author Interview, Hal Duncan, Ink, Vellum

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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)

#2 Comment from monponsett
3/1/07 11:36 AM | Permalink

If he can play basketball even a little bit, his nickname should be "Slam" Duncan. I suppose it would also work on the Poetry Slam circuit, which Hal might be better suited for.
#1 Comment from monponsett
2/28/07 10:44 PM | Permalink

If writing ever falls through, it's nice to know he has a future as a swishbuckler model.

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Wednesday Author Interview: Hal Duncan