Issue 20

THE SOUL OF A POET part II ................................by Cherry Wilder

A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION......................by Steve Dean

THE MURDER OF AELFWYNN..............................by Chris Paul

TOM ARDEN............................................................talks to Mary O`Keefe (SCROLL DOWN TO VIEW)

THE COMPANY OF FOUR......................................by Elizabeth Bear

A GIFT FROM THE MERLEE..................................by Katherine Roberts

THE MAN IN THE VELVET MASK..........................by Alexander Glass

 

This issue of Scheherazade is available for
£2.50 (£3.50 overseas) from 14 Queens Park Rise, Brighton, BN2 9ZF

MARY O'KEEFE TALKS TO TOM ARDEN

Tom Arden started his writing career with a bang - selling a five volume fantasy sequence on the strength of a brilliant proposal and a fifty page sample. Unfortunately the fifty pages were all he had written, so the rest of the first volume was finished in six weeks of the summer vacation from his then job as a university lecturer.
During this intense period of writing the universe he was creating become totally real to him. Following each day's session he would return to real world "completely spaced out", as he says. That book was, he adds ruefully, the only one of the series to be completed on time so far.
He was born in Mount Gambier in South Australia but came to UK in his late twenties. Although his father was Australian his mother was English and he "felt a bit of a hybrid".
"One of the problems I had with fiction was that I don't have a natural place to write about.
"I grew up in Australia but all the books I read as a child were English books. I was probably the last generation of children to be brought up in a colonial manner. I read books about English public schools and children having holiday adventures in the Lake District. So I was always imagining places far away. Books were always about places that were not where I was.
"When I was trying to write 'serious fiction' I had this idea that you were supposed to write about your own reality, things that were outside your door. So when I was quite young and still living in Australia I was trying to write quite painfully Australian stories - Australian dialect and lots of Australian incidents happening.
"Didn't get anywhere with that.
"Then I tried to write painfully English things. I was obsessed with the novels of Iris Murdoch."

After graduating in English Literature, he naturally gravitated towards the British Isles, accepting a lectureship at Queen's University of Belfast.
Surprisingly, after eight years in the job, he has no trace of Irish in his accent, although he still retains a slight Australian twang. He was not personally affected by the Troubles, but found the experience of living in Northern Ireland both fascinating and unsettling.

What made a lecturer in eighteenth century literature want to write fantasy?

"I think I fell into fantasy by default. For a very long time I was trying to write realistic novels and not succeeding. One reason was that all of my realistic novels started to get these fantastical elements in them. I never perceived myself as a genre writer. I had fallen out of reading science fiction and fantasy in my late teens. I spent so many years studying English Literature and thinking there was only one kind of thing that was 'serious'. I had all those prejudices drummed in good and proper. I never even recognised the weird things I was writing as genre elements, I was so cut off from it.
"I had written two unpublished novels, the second of which was almost science fiction. At that stage I was prepared to give up trying. At about the same time, the early nineties, I started to pick up on sf and fantasy. It was actually through reading Interzone. The first one I got was a special fantasy edition (#60) And I thought - hey I could do this!
"I started to venture into the parts of the bookshops where they sold sf and fantasy. I hadn't been there for a long time because I could still remember being at university and having this lecturer who would deliberately make sneering remarks about writers like Tolkein, utterly disparaging anyone who would descend to such trash. I had got the idea into my head that all of this stuff was absolute garbage, even though I now recognise, of course, that a huge amount of classic English literature is just fantasy, but not called it.
"There was a particular moment that finally decided me. It was when I first went to the Czech Republic in 1994. On the first night I was there I had this sense of being in an alternative reality, because it was like where we come from, but there were all these things that were different. And I thought of doing a story that would be kind of like our world but not."

I asked about the fantasy elements that kept interjecting themselves into the "serious" work.

"Well, I wrote this rather Daphne Du Maurier thing, about this young girl who goes to a gothic mansion in Cornwall, and all these increasingly bizarre things started to happen. There's a godlike figure who turns up and started rearranging the destinies of all the characters. It started out realistic and
just got stranger.
"I spent ages on various versions of this novel and could never get it published. Fortunately I've since revised it quite extensively, and I'm finally pleased with the result. I'd call it a dark comic fantasy. It's called Shadow Black and it's coming out next year. It's very weird and I
think it contains some of the best characters I've created, so I'll be keen to see what people make of it.
"But the original version just couldn't get published at the time - not satisfactory to people who wanted mainstream novels, nor to people who wanted genre fiction.
"I suppose I gradually realised, after very long time, that whatever interest and talent I had was fantasy rather than anything else. That was when I decided to focus on writing a full-on fantasy.
" I suppose I chose the most obvious thing you could possibly do - a multi-volume sequence about people going on a quest.
"It was pure ignorance, from one point of view. I had only just discovered this stuff myself. I've realised since that some people go, oh not another fantasy quest with a map. But it was all quite new to me, believe it or not, and I was excited by it.
"But I would like to think that, having started out with what is admittedly a cliché, I've given it an original twist."

What was the initial idea for this series?

"That's a good question. Various things - the trip to the Czech Republic, where I got the idea of the alternative reality. Seeing some Czech soldiers in military uniform, and having the image of soldiers in strange uniforms. Another thing I got from the Czech Republic was that somebody drew for me this symbol which I use in the book. I call it the arc sword and it's used throughout the series. The person who drew it claimed it was some kind of mystic symbol - I don't know if it is or not. It hasn't actually featured in the story yet, but it will at the end.
"So I had this idea of an alternative military force, an alternative religion and so forth. At first it seemed a bit daunting and overwhelming, how to go about it.
"I looked at some successful fantasy novels like David Eddings. I got the idea of doing a five volume series from him. So I decided to have five gods who can each figure in some different way, then have five mystic crystals, one of which has to be discovered in each book. That was inspired by the Doctor Who season The Key To Time, where each story over a year was about the search for a different segment of the key.
. "It got easier after I'd set up the basic structure. The characters had got to go on a quest to find the five crystals of the Orokon, which had been lost, so they would find one in each book.
"So then I said, okay, there's got to be a hero; there's got to be a heroine. They have to have this tempestuous love affair - start in volume one - part them in volume two - come together again in volume three, parted again , come together again, who knows? I found when I got down to write it, it just burgeoned.
" I will admit that at first I was thinking in very pragmatic terms. I have got to get a book published. I've written all these novels. They've been complete failures. I want to be a writer. what am I going to do?
" So I wanted to write a publishable book, and perhaps I shouldn't say this, the most commercial book that I could possibly write. But once I started to write it my attitude towards it became different, and I started to see that I was really expressing myself through this story. So instead of starting from the position I always did when starting a literary novel - 'I'm going to express my inner self'; I just said to myself, 'I'm going to write a genre book. I'm going to choose the type of story and I'm going to write that.'
"The expression sort of comes around the edges and somehow you find, when you work to a structure, you can do all the things that you wanted to do in a better way than you could before. So I began to get really involved in the lives of these characters and they became real to me."

How did the series come to be published??

"What happened was, on the basis of the earlier unpublished novels, I had got an agent. She had liked my first novel. She kept sending it round and round, and the kind of comments I got were - we don't know how to categorise this. - Is it a comic novel? - Dark gothic? ( I always get that).
"So when I got the fantasy idea, I produced a couple of chapters and synopsis of volume one - quite an elaborate proposal document, about 100 pages long including about 50 pages of the beginning of the novel, which was all I had written. In fact what is now the beginning was virtually the same as my original proposal. And there was a synopsis of the rest of volume one (which I didn't stick to) and a general blurb about what the Orokon universe was all about; plus my crude version of the map of the countries. I spent several months doing that ( the whole proposal, not the map!).
"My agent wasn't quite sure what to do with it because she didn't handle fantasies. She sent it to two publishers one of whom hated it. The other editor was Jo Fletcher at Gollancz who loved it and wanted to publish it.. My agent got both letters the same day!
"So suddenly I had a publishing contract and they wanted it delivered in six months. At the time I had a really demanding full time job So that's why the whole of the first volume was bashed out in only six weeks. I got it done on time and, better yet, they actually liked it.
"I've since heard from Jo Fletcher that it was very unusual to buy on a proposal particularly from an unknown . One of the things she liked was that I was doing a fantasy novel set on a world ostensibly based on the eighteenth century. When she found I was a lecturer in eighteenth century literature she thought I could probably do it really well. If I'd given her another medieval fantasy she probably wouldn't have taken it."

The first volume of the series, The Harlequin's Dance, contains a number of entertaining digs at the foibles of eighteenth century life and letters. Did Tom originally intend putting in all those joke references to period literature?

"When I started to look at the fantasy genre I found so many of these books, following the example of Tolkein, were based in a medieval setting. I knew nothing about medieval life, and I've never liked medieval literature, Chaucer and Beowulf - that sort of thing (no doubt a terrible confession for someone who's meant to be a fantasy writer).
"Then I thought - hold on - Tolkein wrote about a medieval-type world because he was a lecturer in medieval literature. I am a lecturer in eighteenth century literature, so I will write about a an eighteenth century world, because I can imagine it. I'm not interested in broadswords and chain mail and I don't know anything about them.
" It was also a matter of economy and what to save on research. I was going in every week to do these lectures on Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe and Jane Austen, so I could just reel them off. It was natural to me. And I could make jokes about it."

The language didn't strike me as eighteenth century - the invented words like Orokon and the names of the gods; and some of the inserted mythological stories.

"They were out of my head. It's a hotch potch - not all out of the eighteenth century. I'm saying, here is a world where they happen to have this mythology of these five gods and everything, and they've now reached a level which is something like our eighteenth century. I was interested in having one of these invented universes with all these invented gods, and taking it forward - not having it set in ancient times - having the technological and political level much higher."

What about the twin kings, one good , one evil? Was Tom conscious of the mythological background for that - the dark twin idea?

"It came from the image of an eighteenth century army battling, the two sides in different coloured costumes. I think the battle sequence in Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" was how I saw it. The idea of the two kings was generated from that."

I was interested by Tom's idea that the ostensibly "good" god is worshipped by the most obnoxious puritans, whereas the "bad" god is worshipped by the gypsy-like Vagas, who seem to be the good guys in the story.

"I was trying to show the way in which people interpret religious ideas. The mythological section at the beginning [of volume one] can be read ironically. We don't have to take it on trust that the ones it says are good actually are good. You eventually get to realise that Orok, the father god is the most appalling old patriarch. The Vaga god, Koros, is actually incredibly PC and liberal! The supposedly good ones are terribly snobbish and exclusivist.
"I also meant the prologue to be really irritating - for example the female gods are created as mere subordinates. I hope people will realise as the books go on that I meant all this ironically. I even wonder, if there was ever a revised version, whether I might keep these details for later in the book, rather than making them the prologue. As the series progresses we will get to meet the gods and perhaps get a better idea of how to judge them. I like the idea of setting up this rigid system - these people are good - these people are bad - and then as the book goes on it becomes much less clear."

Since leaving his university post, Tom is now a full-time writer. So what was his next project? Would he go back to "serious" writing?

"No - or rather, I think that what I'm doing now is serious writing. I will certainly stay in fantasy or science fiction, or have very strong links with the genre.
" I've found what I can do - now I want to do it better. I don't want to say much about my next project yet, but I'm very excited about it and I hope my readers will be too.."