INTERVIEW | Peter Higgins author of Wolfhound Century

Every once in a great while a new author bursts on to the scene that is so different from everything else being published I have to sit up and notice and shout a bit about it. This year that author is Peter Higgins with his debut Wolfhound Century. It is a strange novel to be sure, but that is its greatest strength. Think China Mieville with more of a Slavic Folklore bent, but with the speed of a LeCarre novel. If that sounds like a heady mix it is yet a good one and making it feel startlingly original. Higgins has published short fiction in such places as Asimov's Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, but his novel was my first exposure to his work. It certainly won't be the last.

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MH: Wolfhound Century is a dark, fast paced visage of a Russia that never was. But it is so much more than that. What is your barroom description of Wolfhound Century?

HIGGINS: If I’d just arrived in the bar, I’d say that Wolfhound Century is an SF-fantasy-thriller set in an immense totalitarian state, the kind that spies on and murders its own citizens, but it's also a world of giants and golems and sentient rain, with an alien presence deep in the endless forest. There are elements of Russian and central/northern European history, art and literature lurking beneath the surface, if you want to look for them.

If I’d been in the bar for a while, I’d say it was inspired by books like Gorky Park, but written by someone who’d read a lot of Gene Wolfe and John Crowley and the folklore of the endless Slavic forests, and had grown up in the Cold War, with a life-long attachment to the dark, extraordinary history of Soviet Russia. Someone who’d read Nabokov’s memoirs and random pages from the 1914 edition of Baedeker’s Russia. I might add that one of the root ideas is that painters like Chagall and Malevich weren’t painting abstract or fantastical parables, they were simply recording what they saw.

And if I was still there at closing time, I’d be talking about the archetypal 20th century struggle between, on the one hand, the totalitarian idea of the individual as an atom of the state, subjected and reduced by the overwhelming forces of history, party and state, and on the other hand, the conception of each and every human being as a huge and partly unconscious world of emotion, perception, imaginative potential and creative imagination. Then I’d have to get my coat and go home.

MH: What came first? The world, the angels, or Vissarion?

HIGGINS: The world came first, definitely, or rather, two worlds: a northern and central European world of slow rivers, birch forests, wintry Baltic shores, and that 20th century world of revolution and war, marching crowds and gulags and state police, writers and artists and composers and dissident intellectuals.

But it was when the detective, Vissarion Lom, came on the scene that the story really began to come together. A door opening. I saw that the book could be – needed to be – a thriller. And Lom, the decent policeman who realizes he’s working for an indecent regime, would have to confront the cruel realities of that regime. He meets a woman who works in a factory and wants to change the world, he’s opened up (quite literally), and he begins to explore the wilder, stranger extremes of his world. There’s potentially more in Lom’s future than being a detective. In some ways he’s like Severian, the wandering exile from the torturer’s guild in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun. (The near-anagrammatical relationship between Severian and Vissarion isn’t accidental.)

The ‘angels’ are immense beings that fall out of the sky, dying or already dead, and their mined, abraded torsos litter the continent. The regime appropriates them as a justification for its mythology of itself: in a sense, it’s a parallel with the way totalitarian dictators claim to embody wider, universal forces, the inevitability of history. When one angel survives the fall and starts to reach out, to speak, to influence, some people want to listen. They want to subject themselves to the greater, more certain power. And the really dangerous ones think they might be able to use it …

MH: One of the themes I was struck by was the land fighting back for its very survival and you've given them avatars of a sort with the palubas. Which gives it a very Robert Holdstock vibe.

HIGGINS: I’m glad you mentioned Robert Holdstock! I’m a huge fan of Mythago Wood, and even more of the sequels like Lavyondyss and The Hollowing, where the things in the wood get wilder and more extreme. It’s astonishingly vivid and free and unconstrained writing. I find Holdstock’s imagination massively inspiring. The idea in Wolfhound Century that the world – not just the forest but the rain, the air, the mud, the rivers – are watchful, active and potentially dangerous, owes a huge amount to him.

So the forest in Wolfhound Century – its endlessness, the avatars that come out of it – is proudly Holdstock-ish. But Holdstock’s wood is very English: superficially, on the outside, it’s small, only a couple of miles across, and in a specific, almost-mappable English location. Only when you go in and get lost there do you learn how immense it is on the inside. It draws you in, dilates time. And nothing escapes from it: the mythagos that cross its borders soon fade. The forest in Wolfhound Century, on the other hand (like the forests of Russia and central Europe) really is huge. It dominates the psychic terrain. The regime tries to close the forest off and blind the people to it, but their cities are full of forest things. Forest presences. Forest influence. Several of the principal characters themselves have forest roots, which they grow more aware of and try to understand. And the forest asserts itself: it reaches out and participates. As you say, it fights back. Fangorn and the ents are in there somewhere.

That idea, that everything is alive, has other roots too. It’s central to shamanism, for example. It runs deep in the Russian, Nordic and central European forests and Siberia, and comes through in the folklore from there. That world view was still influential in 20th century Russia, and not just as a primitive relic. There’s a fantastic quote from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Cosmist who drove early Soviet thinking about the human colonisation of space and transhumanism:
‘There is no substance which cannot take the form of a living being. The simplest being is the atom. Therefore the whole universe is alive and there is nothing in it but life.’

This concept – panpsychism, sentient matter – shaped my thinking about the Wolfhound Century forest, and also about the angels: where they come from, what they’re made of, how they do what they do. And what unfettered or assisted human perception can tap into.

MH: With Wolfhound Century you've subverted Stalinist Russia as well as Slavic mythology, but this is clearly not the Russia we know. Possibly a deep past alternative history, but this world appears very much separated for ours. Are you worried that people will feel you've appropriated a culture? Have you had any feedback from Russian natives?

HIGGINS: No, I really don't feel like I've appropriated another culture.

As you say, in Wolfhound Century I’ve drawn on Russian history and culture. I haven’t taken them straight, I’ve re-imagined them and mixed them up with other things that aren't Russian. I’ve felt a responsibility to my sources and I’ve tried to write as well as I can. I'm very much aware that the history which my book stands sideways to was real – millions died and millions more had their lives ruined – and I've tried to let that awareness show through in Wolfhound Century. How far I've succeeded, whether I've always got it right, that's something for readers to make their own minds up about. It's not for me to say. But I’ve never worried that this book, the way I've written it, was trespassing across some kind of frontier into another culture's territory, and personally I don’t think the artists whose work I’ve drawn on – including writers like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak and Nabokov, and painters like Chagall – would recognize that idea of their cultural separateness – those barriers of difference – either.

If I can give you one example of what I mean, Mandelstam was Russian but he wrote about Charles Dickens, Beethoven, Rome, the ancient Scottish poet Ossian, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and Notre Dame in Paris. He saw continuity between ancient Greece and Russia: he said they met on the shores of the Black Sea. And he specifically denied the relevance of personal background to his work: of himself he wrote, 'it is enough to speak of the books he has read, and his biography is done'.

Other writers and artists I've drawn on maybe wouldn't use such stark terms as Mandelstam, but they all have the same deep involvement with a culture that goes way beyond Russia. They're part of a shared, complex, three-thousand-year old, wide-ranging, multi-linguistic, allusive tradition. It's one culture, modernist and frontierless, that may take account of local and national differences and inheritances but isn’t limited by them. And the precarious existence of that culture in a totalitarian state is part of the story Wolfhound Century is trying to tell, and it’s part of its way of trying to tell it.

I’m sitting at home at the moment, about 1300 miles from St Petersburg. The idea that, somewhere between here and there, there might exist a line of separation, a cultural and historical boundary drawn across Europe, doesn't feel right. That’s one of the reasons the Cold War was so cruel and why we celebrated when the wall came down. But even when the Cold War was at its height, we read books and listened to music and watched films from the territories of the Eastern Bloc.

I don’t know if maybe someone 1300 miles away from me in St Petersburg is writing an SF fantasy about a weird version of London during World War II, with a Prime Minister who’s a bit like Churchill and with writing that draws on Dickens or Virginia Woolf or Dylan Thomas. But I hope someone is. That would be awesome. And it would be fantastic if Wolfhound Century finds Russian readers. I'd love to know what they make of it. Of course, they’ll see that it’s not written in the same way that someone who lives in Russia would have written it. The imagined elements in it are my response to, my engagement with, Russia and what happened there, but it’s written from my perspective and it couldn’t be anything else.

MH: Do you have a favorite Russian folk tale? And if so did you integrate it into the Wolfhound Century in some form?

HIGGINS: Well, there’s a fantastic tradition of Russian folk tales. Sadko. Prince Ivan. Baba Yaga. The Fire Bird. The Snow Maiden. They’re part of the background to Wolfhound Century, certainly, they’re in the air: but in terms of integration into the story, they’re not really primary sources, as far as I’m consciously aware.

More specific sources were Siberian shamanism and the Slavic folklore of the wild forest. The palubas that come out of the forest and the wind-walker in the White Marshes are based on Slavic conceptions of wood spirits. I found a lot of material for the forest in a collection from 1918: The Mythology of All the Races, edited by Louis H Gray, particularly the Slavic and Finno-Ugric volumes. And the Pollandore and the mythology that surrounds its creation owe a fair amount to the story of the Sampo and other parts of the Kalevala from Finland.

MH: Wolfhound Century ended a bit abruptly. What made that a good breaking place and what can we look forward to with the sequel Truth and Fear?

HIGGINS: I thought you might ask me about the ending! There is a longer story arc and I wanted to leave Wolfhound Century with a sense of doors opening rather than closing, and - for the characters - a return to battle with a greater sense of who the enemies are and what's at stake. Not an ending, but a moment to take breath. Like Gene Wolfe, "Here I pause, having carried you, reader, from gate to gate......"
Truth and Fear, which is coming out early in 2014, widens the story out. I'm not going to say too much, but you'll see a lot more of the bad guys and what they're up to, and more about some of the things that were off-stage rumblings in Wolfhound Century, as well as other quarters of the city of Mirgorod and some new places on the continent.

And some new characters. And some big surprises. And a finish that'll knock your socks off and leave you wanting more ...

MH: What is the greatest advice you've even been given as a writer?

HIGGINS: "If someone tells you you’re doing too much of something in your work, then do it more, because that's your true voice."
A friend who's an artist told me that.

MH: Now on to the important issues. What is your favorite hat?

HIGGINS: For winter, a pull-on woolen cap: the acme is a Kangol Squad with a cuff. For rain and sun, a crushable bush hat in buffalo hide, easy to shove into a backpack. And for all seasons and all purposes except looking natty, there was my white canvas Tilley “Endurable” T3 Traditional, in many ways the finest of them all, which alas I seem to have lost.

MH: Sorry about the hatloss. Always remember a lost hat is never forgotten. I feel your pain having lost one of my old standbys last year. I also have a different hat for each season. Well, multiple hats for each season. Another important, life directing question: Scotch or beer?

HIGGINS: If I've just tramped twenty miles across Scottish moorland through mist and rain, then Scotch, but otherwise definitely beer.

MH: What books are you reading at the moment?

HIGGINS: Not for the first time, I'm making a determined attempt on the lower slopes of Gravity's Rainbow.

MH: That's a heavy one. I appreciate all your time. Is there anything you'd like to say to close us out?

HIGGINS: Just to say, thanks for inviting me to do this. It's been a lot of fun. I'll be lurking somewhere at World Fantasy Con 2013 in October if anyone wants to say hello.

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REVIEW | The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman

REVIEW | The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman (Tor)

There are some books you enter knowing exactly what to expect, which can be good. Sort of like sitting in your favorite chair. Nice and cozy. Than there are those books that immediately jar you into realizing how different they are, which are few and far between. The Half-Made World is decidedly in the second camp evoking a sense of isolation while exploring a world so big that its western regions are still forming into existence yet has a history of thousands of years.

From the very first chapter the tone is set for a vivid adventure involving a general of a dead republic lost in his own mind, a psychologist out of her depth, and a man who has done evil things for decades. The Half-Made World is filled with magical realism, magical people, and the warring factions of possessed guns and thinking engines of destruction both on control. There are even religious groups such as the Smilers who just want you to be happy. The Half-Made World takes you on a journey so strange and wondrous that you will be left spellbound by the world in a literary surreal dream of another plane.

The story is being marketed as a Steam Western, but it is all New Weird in a Western-like setting. Images of the Australian outback often came to mind in this story of Progress versus Chaos; Anarchy versus Order; and Technology versus Faith. There is a large machine/industrial element, but done so it appears to be more magic. This is not a light read by any stretch. It is challenging, but worth it as the tapestry Gilman created comes together. The Half-Made World left me feeling a bit grimy. Like the dirt from the roads the characters trod upon infects your own skin and under your nails.

The Half-Made World is a very complex story. The characters aren't good or bad and it would be a stretch to call them grey. They just are what they are making their way through life. The dialogue between the two main characters is perfect and each have distinctive voices that make them.  Each goes through so much as their journey progresses and many have untold layers, which are slowly peeled back as Gilman gives us a peek into their soul. Gilman drips out the world-building at a languid pace never giving you more than needed to understand the scenery and current happenings. At times I found this frustrating, but as everything progressed I admired this approach instead of long descriptive paragraphs that would have only slowed down the pace of action. There is a section that tends to drag on too long, but once through things pickup dramatically.

The Half-Made World will stay with you long after you close the cover. The Half-Made World has more in common with other New Weird books such as Nights of Villjamur or The Last Page than most of the Steampunk that is out there. But if you like your books weird, wild, well nuanced The Half-Made World will fill you as full as a good hearty chicken soup on a cold day. It is nothing like you've seen before filled with original elements that will leave your mind gasping. I give The Half-Made World 8.5 out of 10 hats. Be sure to go back and read the prologue again after a hundred pages or so as it will make a lot more sense.

The Half-Made World is the first in a duology. The story stands decently on its own so I don't hesitate recommending to check it out sooner than later, but a lot of work has been laid for plenty more.  Many things are left vague such as the origin of the different factions, which I hope are revealed in the future.  No word on the sequel yet except it will probably be finished sometime in 2011 so don't expect it before 2012.

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The Old West Brings the Steam by Felix Gilman

The Old West Brings the Steam

by Felix Gilman

author of The Half-Made World

A couple of months ago I was on a panel at BEA, talking about steampunk with Cherie Priest and Cat Valente, to an audience of what I think were mostly publishers and booksellers and miscellaneous book-business riff-raff (e.g. writers). The official theme was something like “what is steampunk?” but of course the real theme was: “is there money in it?”

Anyway we got talking about American steampunk versus British steampunk, and I was surprised to learn that a lot of people think of steampunk as fundamentally British -- Victorian London, fog, Big Ben, Jack-the-ripper, all that. Apparently some people question whether you can really have steampunk set in America. I didn't even know that was a thing, but apparently it is.

It's nonsense, of course. Some of the very first proto-steampunk works are westerns. I give you Edward Ellis's 1865 “The Huge Hunter, Or The Steam Man Of The Prairies,” which opens like this:

'HOWLY vargin! what is that?' exclaimed Mickey McSquizzle, with something like horrified amazement.

'By the Jumping Jehosiphat, naow if that don't, beat all natur'!'

'It's the divil, broke loose, wid full steam on!'

There was good cause for these exclamations upon the part of the Yankee and Irishman, as they stood on the margin of Wolf Ravine, and gazed off over the prairie. Several miles to the north, something like a gigantic man could be seen approaching, apparently at a rapid gait for a few seconds, when it slackened its speed, until it scarcely moved.

Occasionally it changed its course, so that it went nearly at right angles. At such times, its colossal proportions were brought out in full relief, looking like some Titan as it took its giant strides over the prairie.

The distance was too great to scrutinize the phenomenon closely; but they could see that a black volume of smoke issued either from its mouth or the top of its head, while it was drawing behind it a sort of carriage, in which a single man was seated, who appeared to control the movements of the extraordinary being in front of him.

No wonder that something like superstitious have filled the breasts of the two men who had ceased hunting for gold, for a few minutes, to view the singular apparition; for such a thing had scarcely been dreamed of at that day, by the most imaginative philosophers; much less had it ever entered the head of these two men on the western prairies.

'Begorrah, but it's the ould divil, hitched to his throttin 'waging, wid his ould wife howlding the reins!' exclaimed Mickey.

It's not the devil, of course. It's a ten-foot steam-powered robot. That is literally the most steampunk anything can be. Nor was this the only steam-powered robot patrolling the imaginary 19th century frontier. John Clute coined the term “Edisonades” for this sort of thing - the adventures of a lone scientific genius and his trusty robot - but what they also are is proto-steampunk.

The American-frontier proto-steampunk differs from the more commonly cited Euro-proto-steampunk of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne mainly in that (a) it's terrible - you can quite obviously tell that Ellis was being paid by the word -- and (b) it doesn't make the slightest effort to pretend that it has anything to do with actual science, the way Wells and Verne usually did, it just steams ahead with mad nonsensical enthusiasm, as if having pushed out past civilization and onto the wild frontier it can do whatever the hell it wants, and if what it wants is a steam-powered robot it's gonna have a steam-powered robot and there ain't no damn man from no gubmint can tell it steam-powered robots don't make no sense, dag nab it.

I digress. The point is that steampunk, at least in its more pulpy, fantastical or surrealist forms, owes as much to proto-steampunk writers like Ellis and his fellows as it does to anyone.

I say proto because steampunk is (it seems to me) inherently retro, inherently meta-. Steampunk is about recapturing old and obsolete notions of The Future (sometimes criticizing them, sometimes wallowing nostalgically in them, often a little of both). It borrows tropes from 19th-century authors of Edisonades or scientific romance or whatever you want to call it, but it's not the same thing. The 19th century guys were playing it straight, looking to a Future that was still potential for them. They wouldn't have got the joke.

Of course if what you're interested in is digging up and reanimating old-time notions of The Future, the western frontier is the place to be. There are dozens of utopian communities buried beneath it. The thing itself is the biggest and boldest metaphor for the Boundless Potential Of The Future one can imagine.

On the other hand, if what you're interested in is criticizing the ugly underside of Progress, the frontier also represents not only the betrayal of its own promise, but also one of the ugliest and grisliest crimes of human history. And that, I've always thought, is the animating principle behind the weird west sub-sub-subgenre, which has sort of sloped along beside steampunk for half a century or so, like an ugly mad cousin. Or at least that's what's animates what's interesting in it: that notion of American history as something deeply violent, weird, and haunted.

Whenever I say “weird west” someone mentions that godawful Will Smith movie. I don't want to talk about that awful movie. I won't. I just won't. No.

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Felix Gilman has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award and the Crawford Award for best new writer and the Locus Award for best first novel. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Thunderer and Gears of the City. His new novel the first half in a duology The Half-Made World is now out from Tor books.  He lives with his wife in New York City. You can follow him on his blog.

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REVIEW | The Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers

REVIEW | The Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers (Pyr)

Eva Forge is the last Paladin of the God of War Morgan. The problem is he is long dead from his brother's hands Amon. This leaves only the last brother immortal Alexander as the last living god in charge of the city of Ash and its surrounding areas. As Paladin Eva is entrusted with the security and protection of the Cult of Morgan and its followers. Not an easy thing for just one person, but with sword and magicked gun she soldiers on with loose lips and a hothead attitude. While on a mission to take the leader of her order somewhere and back some craziness with zombies of a sort goes down and she must track down one of her own.

The Horns of Ruin is very different tonally from Heart of Veridon so don't expect more of the same. It has an almost animalistic and visceral feel with loads of fights and colorful language that may be more at home in a Fantasy novel. Eva Forge is one tough lady who doesn't have much of a feminine side, but that is what you get when you train a person from childhood how to kill. I was immediately taken in by Eva's brusque disposition, which is best shown in her dialogue where she verbally combats people just as much as physically. Yet outside of Eva most characters aren't given much depth or detail that would connect you better with them.

The system of magic is based off of chanting and belief of past events, which was a nice way of mixing religion and magic given the nature of their gods. There is sometimes an over abundance of the chanting magic as Eva stretches herself to keep going. The Horns of Ruin often blends magic and science that comes off very blurred at times, which made my mind want to rebel not knowing which aspect was intended. Finally I just decided to go with it and not try to read too much into how something in particular was possible. The followers of Amon's abilities are particularly intriguing being that have a mastery over technology, but can also affect power through chanting including an impressive unmaking type spell. There are some Steampunk elements to be sure such as some jet packs and monorails, but this feels like a post Steampunk world with a healthy dash of magic and gods thrown in.

You'd be hard pressed to name a faster paced book. Akers barely gives you time to contemplate all the happenings as Eva bounces from one fight to the next. The relationships between the brother/gods are left very vague for quite a longtime, but as pieces are unfurled a new mystery takes shape. I particularly enjoyed the way Akers handles his gods and how their powers originate and the deep history that is alluded to.

If anything I'd call The Horns of Ruin Swords & Science. Fans of hack and slash Fantasy just may have found the steampunky read they've been looking for. The Horns of Ruin is an energetic rollercoaster ride in a well accentuated world that needs to be further explored. I give The Horns of Ruin 7.5 out 10 hats. The ending while satisfying does leave much left open. There has been no word yet on another Eva Forge book, but the second Jacob Burn book Dead of Veridon is schedule for June 2011 from Solaris.

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INTERVIEW | Anthony Huso author of The Last Page

Last month I was quite blown away by Anthony Huso's spectacularly weird The Last Page. Soon after finishing I had no doubts that I'd ask Anthony for an interview as I wanted to learn about his motivations for writing and the creation of this world. I found him to be open and frank, which usually portends an entertaining interview. Read on.

MH: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

HUSO: No problem. I'm flattered anytime anyone wants to talk to me, even in the street.

MH: Firstly, I've already gushed a bit about The Last Page, but it is a bit difficult to describe. To one friend I called it a Dark Fantasy with a love story where the lovers are hooked on each other like crack tinged with Lovecraft monsters and airships? How do you describe it?

HUSO: Frankly it's probably just as hard for me to describe. Not the plot, but the nature of the book. I think you're right in calling it a dark fantasy. It could also be called new weird or whatever. The important part, for me, is that it *is* weird.

I attribute this to several things. First of all, I like to play with the expectations associated with labels. A love story is essentially a label, and you're right, there is a love story here, and it's central to the plot. But it's also a dysfunctional love story. It doesn't follow what I would expect from a love story's path. And it doesn't pretend to be the most important thing going on. Nevertheless, underneath the monsters and spies and esoteric books, the love story is the backbone of the, er...story.

We like labels because they make it easy for us to talk about things. We say a label and the person listening understands instantly what we mean. But in The Last Page, that is (by design) harder to do because of the way I like to play with those expectations. Sena is a witch, but she's not a witch-archetype and when you call her a witch, at best you're only communicating a fraction of the truth. At worst, you're actually leading your listener astray. Caliph likewise is a prince, but I'd argue that label terribly mis-contextualizes who he really is. Many things in the book are like this: on their head so-to-speak. You get into trouble even saying something as simple as "Sena and Caliph rode a horse up to the Howl estate," because is it really a horse?

The downside of this, is that selling the idea of buying the book to a friend in the elevator is a bit of a chore since the labels you're tempted to used don't exactly fit the experience generated by the text.

The other reason I think the book is "weird" is that this isn't medieval European fantasy. Nor is it urban fantasy. Nor is it steam punk. I set out to write something rooted in my American heritage. I wanted it to feel American...but not to the point of losing ecumenical sensibilities. I've lived in Europe and Asia and I wanted to draw from those experiences too, in order to make the world feel real. But deep down, under the clashing tech and magic, below the misappropriated labels, I wanted this story to echo clearly with things I had experienced growing up in America. I wanted it to feel startlingly familiar despite all the strangeness going on in the text.

That's what I wanted. Whether I succeeded in any of this is really up to the reader.

MH: I think you succeed on most of those fronts. I'm glad you mentioned New Weird. That appears to be one of those genres that no one can quite agree what it is exactly. So to you what makes a story a New Weird story?

HUSO: Ha, right. So we're back to thrashing out labels that will let us know what we're talking about. /me grins. I don't know. I feel like some people think new weird is either some kind of priggish re-branding of nothing-different-than-fantasy, or that it's just a fad term that's already come and gone. For me, I don't really care what the thing is called as long as it's fantastic. I mean, for me the issue is with quality and creativity rather than genre or label. Let's assume there is no new weird. The phrase isn't coined. So it's all just fantasy literature, in one big pile. You could still sort it out into stacks of stories that use dragons and elves and giants and fairies (the list goes on and on) as magic beans in a bag. Some fantasy writers toss this bag over their shoulder and expect the "magic" of the beans to grow them a great big fantastic story. Maybe they nurture the beans by sprinkling them with an epic purpose. Good wins vs evil. Whatever. What they get instead is the weakness you'd expect from leaning on a crutch instead of walking on your own two feet. The labels are to blame. Example: Thomas rounded the corner and there, before him, was a unicorn, its horn shining in the sun. The label is telling everything, to the point that even if the author actually tried to describe the creature's head, or the fine hairs around its muzzle, the point is moot. The reader would, end the end, ask: why didn't you just tell me it was a unicorn? And there you have it. Fantasy without the fantastic. Things that are fantastic are generally fantastic because they are new. And new is almost synonymous with strange. I'm more comfortable calling a story cool than I am trying to foist the label of new weird on it. It's new if it surprises me with its novelty. It's weird if it conjures up emotions that I cannot easily define. It's kind of obvious when you think about it. Why don't we just rename to genre to "Fantastic" and then let readers decide whether a given story meets the bar.

MH: You've mentioned your work in video games and background as a MOD gamer before. If you could write a story for any media tie-in (Star Wars, Halo, etc) what would it be and what would you do with it? Even properties that haven't gone the book route apply. We're dreaming here. Or does the whole idea abhor you?

HUSO: I'm not utterly repelled by the notion, but it doesn't excite me when we talk about it in abstract terms. Star Wars and Halo, being concrete examples, excite me even less. (I'm a huge fan of the latter by the way and I liked Star Wars a lot before George Lucas went insane) but those settings and dramas are known entities. For me, this is the difference between fan fiction and the real deal. The real deal is when I played Halo for the first time and I came around the corner and found myself toe to toe with a "hunter". The grunts it produced, the difficulty I initially had in understanding its body-shape, the overwhelming size of it, not to mention that it killed me almost instantly and that my bullets bounced off its metal "skin"...that was fantastic. I was afraid of this thing. It was a terrific and terrifying moment. When I met the Flood for the first time, it happened again. Halo did a great job of revealing its new creatures and environments in startling and dramatic ways. But anyone who reads a Halo book is going to know what a hunter is; what the Flood are. In this case, a hunter becomes just like a unicorn. It's a predefined and labeled thing when I'd rather be wowed by something new. I guess I'd have to really, really, really love the fiction in order to want to try to bring something new to someone else's world and most importantly to someone else's fans...who by the way are going to bring something more important than whatever is in the writer's head: a very heavy set of expectations.

MH: Has your work in video games played into your writing at all?

HUSO: All the creative stuff I do is probably linked in at least tangential ways. Clearly, video games are very visual (duh) and designing them requires an eye that's trained to see details. If my descriptions are particularly vivid, it might stem from that kind of predisposition.

MH: How did Sena evolve as a character? She certainly has two very different sides from her as a seductress/manipulator and also a scholar plus there is the whole mad lovey side of her towards the end.

HUSO: Despite the many things Sena does in the story, she evolved primarily out of a need for a villain in the plot. Not an evil hooded figure, but a subtle thorn, and an obvious Achilles heel for Caliph. She's terribly self-serving and her acts of charity are debatable and few. Having said that, Sena is still meant to be a character that provides the reader with a supportable preference in either hating or loving her and I think, despite her capriciousness, there's a sincerity to almost everything she does. I wanted her to be a character that readers could argue about.

MH: What played into the decision to use airships in the World of The Last Page? Nowadays when anyone hears about that they immediately think of Steampunk and The Last Page is a lot of things, but it isn't Steampunk.

HUSO: Yeah, but this book is, as noted earlier sort of disrespecting some boundaries in what I think is a good way. Zeppelin's are cool. I like them. Plus the Duchy of Stonehold is described as a backwards country, far behind the technology of the south. Zeppelins help evoke that setting because they are associated with steampunk. Thanks steampunk! Besides, zeppelins are lovely majestic giant things sliding quietly through the sky. I love me some zeppelins.

MH: Zeppelins are most definitely a helluva a lot of fun. After the amazing events of The Last Page what can we expect out of Black Bottle? Will we get to see more of the south? And is there a confirmed release date?

HUSO: In fact, a huge chunk of Black Bottle does, in fact, take place in the south. As for what you can expect, it's really just the other half of the story. You could lump both books together in a significantly fatter volume and have one novel. At least, that's the idea. No confirmed release date yet. I need to get my revisions in before that get's nailed down.

MH: Were there any books in particular that turned you into a Sci-Fi/Fantasy fan? Or any authors who influenced your own style?

HUSO: Well, I always talk about Gatsby and how it really turned me on to fantasy in an indirect way. It felt like fantasy to me, but it had nothing to do with elves. So I loved it. But if we're talking about contemporary in-genre stuff, I have a huge amount of respect for folks like Kelly Link, Laird Barron (who's actually horror) and of course China Miéville. I remember finding The Scar in a bookstore and, never having heard of it, I opened it up and read the first page and nearly leapt up right there in the middle of the book store and started shouting, "Yes! Yes! You see? It can be done! Fantasy can be fantastic! You see? You see?!" As an aside to that, I did a simple Google search and found an email address for China back in 2005; I wrote him a horribly embarrassing piece of fan mail in which I fawned all over his books. He was nice enough to write back, and then I think he pulled the plug on that email account. :)

Really, if you haven't read these folks, you should. All three of them are amazing.

MH: Have you thought about what you'll be working on after Black Bottle? Is there any short story work in your future?

HUSO: Well, I don't know if I'm any good at short stories. They're a different sort of animal. I did submit a short to a place on line that functions as a tie-in with both The Last Page and Black Bottle. Essentially it bridges the gap between the two books. Hopefully it gets picked up. If not, I'll probably post it on my site.

As for what comes after Black Bottle, I do have a novel in mind and I've done some work on it. A few chapters is all. Once my revisions are done, I hope to move back to it. For the moment, though, that's all I'm saying.

MH: To go along with my other obsession what is your favorite type of hat?

HUSO: Being from Minnesota, I must say that there is *nothing* in the world better than a real life mad bomber hat lined with rabbit fur. So, so toasty warm.

MH: I'll have to track one down to add to my collections.  What are two things most people don't know about you? Do you keep a monkey sequestered in your backyard?

HUSO: I have a tattoo on my right shoulder that caused me to pass out like a total wuss when I got it. The tattoo guy brought me around with smelling salts. He then hurriedly finished up, which might explain why it looks so bad -- more like a donkey than a jackal with teeth. Factoid number two? I'm terrified of needles. I think there's a relationship there between fact one and fact two...

MH: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

HUSO: Thanks so much for the interview. Feel free to visit my pseudo-blog.


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