Q: How would you describe Heroes Die?
A: It’s a piece of violent entertainment that is a meditation on violent entertainment—as a concept in itself, and as a cultural obsession. It’s a love story: romantic love, paternal love, repressed homoerotic love, love of money, of power, of country, love betrayed and love employed as both carrot and stick. It’s a book about all different kinds of heroes, and all the different ways they die. It’s a pop-top can of Grade-A one-hundred percent pure whip-ass.
Q: Yee-hah! Makes me want to read it all over again! How much of your experiences as an actor and playwright, as well as a martial artist, informed the events and characters of Heroes?
A: There is a kind of creative tension between Hari Michaelson, the actor, and Caine, the character he plays, that I touch upon in this novel. I was a stage actor; when you play a character night after night, it begins to infect your offstage personality. Not in the cliché sense of the actor who gets “lost in the role” but in a subtler way. You entrain your reflexes with the character’s mannerisms, for example, and you might find yourself standing like the character, gesturing like him, even using his voice without really thinking about it. When a character you are playing also reflects something fundamentally true about yourself, you can find yourself reacting instinctively from that character’s point of view—thinking like the character. This is what has happened to Hari; part of his struggle in the novel is to find a way to break out of Caine’s self-destructive patterns without losing the positive parts of that persona. One of the lessons actors learn is how incredibly powerful “make-believe” can be. That’s what acting is, after all. As a playwright, you find that there is no feeling in the world worse than to be sitting in the house at one of your own plays and discovering that you’ve lost the audience. You can always tell—when people start to get bored the theater is suddenly filled with subtle creaks of people shifting in their seat, coughs, sniffles, the crackle of after-dinner-mint wrappers . . . That’s why the book is structured as an adventure novel. Heroes Die has been described in print as “energetic,” “vigorous,” “hard-hitting adventure,” even a “furious, gory hack-em-up.” All true. If you want to keep your audience’s butts nailed to their seats, the story has to move.
I’ve been studying various martial arts intermittently for almost twenty years; I’ve done dozens of styles without ever becoming really proficient in any of them. In the process, I’ve accumulated a vast theoretical knowledge of personal combat—and I’ve done a little fighting, in the ring and out of it. I know what it feels like to get my ass soundly kicked; I also know what it’s like to fight someone who’s a lot better than I am and beat him anyway. Part of what I wanted to achieve with Caine is to get across that feeling; Caine is a long way from the Bruce Lee/Remo Williams/Sir Lancelot myth of the invincible martial arts superman. Everything Caine does in Heroes Die is real-world fighting; every move he makes can be duplicated by a reasonably skilled fighter. He’s not the best fighter in the world—he’s not even the best fighter in the book. But there’s a lot more to combat than skill.
Q: Is the caste-ridden capitalistic society of actor Hari Michael-son’s world something you see as possible in our own?
A: In a word, yes. Hari Michaelson’s Earth is the triumph of American capitalism, stripped of its egalitarian pretense. Don’t get me wrong; I like capitalism. But any social system becomes pernicious when taken to unchecked extremes, and Americans are extremists by nature. We have to push the envelope. The novel postulates a catastrophic event a couple of hundred years in the past (that is, in our near future) that essentially frees the multinational corporations from even the shadow of governmental control. The resulting society is caste-based because that reflects the curious psychological phenomenon of the industrial age: You Are What You Do. Caste systems are by far the most stable form of social organization—the members of each individual caste have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The upper castes can depend upon the lower to participate in their own oppression. This particular system also holds out the old capitalist dream of self-improvement: it is possible to buy one’s way upcaste. No one wants to rock the boat and screw up their chance of someday joining the ruling classes. Of course, these days it looks like the catastrophic event might have been superfluous. All you really need to bring about this future is a few more years of the Republican Congress.
Q: Perhaps the Republican Congress is the catastrophic event.
A: Hey, what are you trying to do, get us both audited?
Q: The Overworld—Caine’s world—is a wonderfully realized creation. There’s a complexity and sophistication to your portrayal of Ankhana’s inhabitants, their cultural practices and beliefs, their private fears and desires, that, once again, reminded me of Moorcock and Leiber. Even magic is treated with the same gritty realism as, say, Caine’s fight scenes. In fact, in many ways the Overworld seems more real than the “underworld” that is home to Caine and the other Aktiri.
A: Overworld is a step closer to the fundamental reality of existence; the whole concept of Acting, in the book, is to give the audience the feeling of having been to a place more raw and exciting than their everyday reality. I’m hoping to give the reader an analogous experience. And yes, Ankhana—especially the Warrens—owes a lot of its feel to Leiber’s Lankhmar.
Q: How exact are the parallels between Overworld and underworld? When I first looked at a map of the city, a nagging familiarity convinced me that I was looking at the Overworld equivalent of Paris. Are there analogues of places, of people? Could Caine, for example, meet an aspect of himself?
A: The parallels are more metaphoric than actual; even the geography has only rough similarities. For reasons that will eventually become apparent, Caine won’t be meeting aspects of himself. He is unique. Ankhana’s resemblance to Paris is pretty much a matter of story mechanics (the island enclave of human rulers, the river that separates the wealthy from the ghettoes that hold the poor and the nonhumans being the central spine of the city, et cetera). It also came about because I originally conceived the plan of the city while reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame; you might also have noticed a certain similarity between the Night of the Miracle in Heroes Die and Hugo’s Heart of Miracles . . . Hey, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.
Q: Can you talk a bit about actors and Aktiri? There are similar mirror images all through the book—ideas of reflection, reversal, opposition, splitting in two . . .
A: Let’s just say that a lot depends on your point of view. Ever wonder how Han Solo must look to, say, the wives and mothers of those Imperial Troopers he so casually slaughters? As far as the imagery goes, I’m really not comfortable talking about my use of literary devices and stuff like that. Some things are harmed by exposure. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain . . .
Q: Will there be a sequel? If so, what can you tell us about it? I’m hoping we’ll see more of Ma’elKoth . . .
A: Yes, not much, and you will. All I can say is that the sequel will be an entirely different animal from Heroes Die; I’m using many of the same characters to look at a very, very different group of interconnected themes, from the clash of individualism versus social responsibility to the essentially chaotic (in the sense of chaos theory) nature of reality. But there will still be a fair amount of serious butt-kicking, and several brutal murders . . .
Q: You mentioned earlier that your stories begin with characters. Do your characters, as you come to know them, suggest the themes of your books, or do you consciously set out to examine certain themes?
A: Some of both. It’s a little difficult to describe. They feed off each other: Characters suggest themes—in fact, most of the viewpoint characters in Heroes Die carry their own individual themes—but themes also alter characters. As I play around inside the characters’ heads, whatever I happen to be obsessing about that week tends to be reflected somehow in their personalities or their histories, but each character is also a kind of perceptual filter; I
could never use Caine, for example, to address a theme of overcoming timidity and self-doubt, or dealing with shyness or any of that kind of thing. Those emotions are too alien to him.
Q: I was fascinated by the magical force of Flow and its relationship to the wave functions of quantum physics; i.e., a link between the science of one world and the magic of the other. Is that something else you plan to explore?
A: Flow is a fantasy expression of the Earthly concept of the Tao—which can be interpreted in many ways, as a metaphoric representation of the force described as the GUTE: the Grand Unified Theory of Everything. It is the fundamental force, of which electromagnetism, gravity, et al., are the differentiated expressions. It is also—in the Teilhard de Chardin sense—the consciousness of the universe. On Overworld, “energy” is equivalent to “mind”; since matter is a form of energy, everything in the Overworld universe partakes to some degree in the Universal Mind. If you read much Eastern philosophy—or much in the Western mystical tradition—you will have recognized this idea already. So, yes, there is a direct relationship between the way the physical laws operate in the two universes. This becomes a crucial element of the sequel, as we discover that there are some forms of magic that will operate even on Earth, and some forms of technology that work perfectly well on Overworld . . .
Q: Any chance we’ll go further afield than Earth and Overworld? There must be an infinite number of alternate Earths reachable by means of the technology that sends Hari to Overworld, or by other (perhaps even magical) means.
A: There must be . . . and not only other alternate Earths. The Winston transfer technology seems to be able to transfer a person to any spatial coordinate on Overworld . . . and Einstein contended long ago (and Hawking confirms) that duration—Time—is only another spatial dimension . . .
Q: And who’s to say that Hari’s Earth isn’t itself the unwitting stage upon which otherworldly actors are performing?
A: Who’s to say our Earth isn’t?
By Matthew Woodring Stover
Published by The Random House Publishing Group:
HEROES DIE
BLADE OF TYSHALLE
STAR WARS: THE NEWJEDI ORDER: TRAITOR
STAR WARS: SHATTERPOINT
STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH
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ALL ACTORS HAVE A PRECISELY DEFINED ROLE—
to risk their lives on Overworld in interesting ways. It's not personal; it's just market share.
Caine has long been the best of the best. A generation grew up watching the superstar's every adventure. Now he's chairman of the world's largest studio and he's making changes.
Higher powers of Overworld and Earth don't approve. It's just business.
But for Caine, it's his wife, their daughter, his invalid father, his status, his home.
And it's always personal.
BLADE OF TYSHALLE
by Matthew Woodring Stover
Published by Del Rey Books.
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A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1998 by Matthew Woodring Stover
Map copyright © 1998 by Matthew Woodring Stover
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eISBN: 978-0-345-51640-4
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