by Tim Lebbon
You’ve now written two fantasy novels for Orbit. How does Echo City compare to The Heretic Land, and do they address similar themes?
The theme that runs through both novels is how religions and beliefs affect society, sometimes for good, sometimes bad. Both involve societies in decline. Both follow groups of people who might be able to save the day. But there are also big differences …
In Echo City, most of the action takes place in or below the city of the title. It’s a very, very big place, but still I wanted the sense of confinement to be claustrophobic and unsettling. The idea that a civilisation could believe that their city was the whole world I found fascinating – similar to flat-earthers, or even people who believe we are a unique, inhabited island in a dead universe (I don’t believe that at all …). Of course, most of my characters suspected that there was more beyond the toxic desert surrounding the city, even though recorded history denied this. And it is these people who confront the unknown with courage and open-mindedness. Oh, and there’s also a big monster approaching the city from way, way down, where its oldest histories lie …
In The Heretic Land, it’s a very big world in which events unfold, with wide tracts of virtually uninhabited land, all of it ringing with a sad history. There’s not that sense of physical enclosure, although there are still blinkered beliefs and unwillingness to entertain wider, more startling possibilities … but not within my heroes, of course. They’re the ones who see the light, and who struggle to keep it shining.
Although I’m perhaps better known as a horror writer, The Heretic Land is actually my sixth fantasy novel. They’re all dark and grim, and I think my fantasy writing will always be informed by my horror-writing background. Fairies? Unicorns? If I do ever use them, they’ll definitely have their dark sides.
Did the idea for The Heretic Land come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
Very few of my books come to me fully realised. That’s a huge part of the enjoyment of writing for me – if I knew the whole story before I’d even written the first sentence, I wouldn’t get nearly as much enjoyment out of writing. Often at the end of the book my writing speeds up, because I’m keen to get to the end to see what happens! That was the case with The Heretic Land as much as anything I’d written. I’ve always been interested in the idea of sleeping and/or fallen gods (an idea I explored before in my novel Fallen). And I’m fascinated with the perception of gods, and the idea – so beautifully articulated by Arthur C. Clarke – that a being sufficiently advanced might be viewed as a god. I wanted to explore that idea, and the world of The Heretic Land built up around that. But it’s as much about humanity’s use and misuse of religion, as it is about the subjects of such beliefs.
What advantages and disadvantages do you see in using fantasy as the vehicle for your stories?
The main reason I love fantasy could be viewed as both – because I get to create whole new worlds! Some might find this daunting, and often it is. But it’s also one of the most enjoyable elements of writing a fantasy novel for me. I have, quite literally, a blank canvas. And although I also know that my novel is going to feature very human characters, and landscapes that are at least partially recognisable, I also know that I’ll be able to create whole new races, flora, fauna, societies, religions, politics … while at the same time commenting on our own.
And the thing is, I think the fantasy world is always so integral to the story I’m trying to tell that it would be impossible to tell it in any other way.
Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?
There are many, and I’m sure any writer would tell you the same. But when asked this question, I always mention three particular writers from different parts of my life.
When I was pre-teen I read all the Adventure books by Willard Price, and I guess these gave me my love of adventure stories.
In my teens (and still to a large extent now), Stephen King was the main man. I sometimes go through difficult phases with my reading (maybe it’s a middle-age thing), where I find it very hard to get into a book. But with King, I always know that once I pick up one of his novels, I’ll be hooked.
In my mid-twenties I started reading Arthur Machen. Machen was a turn-of-the-century writer of esoteric, supernatural fiction who told some wonderful, chilling tales of wonder and terror.
Do you have a set writing routine and, if so, what is it?
My writing is built around my busy family life. My wife and I have two young children, so there’s school, football, hockey, rugby, scouts, cubs, ballet. I tend to follow a normal working day – when my wife’s in work and the kids are in school – but I do often work in the evenings, or sometimes at weekends if the deadlines are pressing. I’m also currently in training for a marathon and, more distant, triathlons, so there’s all that to squeeze in. Anyway … a writer’s always working.
Do you have a favourite character in The Heretic Land? If so, why?
I really like Lechmy Borle (Leki to her friends). She’s strong, determined, complex, and she has dark depths which only become apparent as the book progresses. It’s strange that I’d choose her because she’s not actually a POV character … maybe that makes her that much more mysterious.
Some authors talk of their characters ‘surprising’ them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you?
I think for me it’s usually the story surprising me more than the characters. My characters are carried along by the story, and as story isn’t something I plot out to the nth degree, I think often they’re as surprised as I am by a particular turn of events. I think that’s a really good sign that the story has taken over, and it’s important to give ideas their full range of scope and possibilities. Otherwise it’s easy to hamper yourself – or blinker your creativity, if you like – if you try to restrain a growing, living, breathing story to previously conceived ideas. A few pages of notes cannot amount to the three-dimensional, complex world you create when the actual writing begins. I listen to the story, and sometimes it takes me in directions I hadn’t anticipated. And I love it, because, as I’ve said before, I’m often keen to get to the end of writing a book to see what happens.
Do you chat about your books with other authors as you’re writing them, or do you prefer to keep the story in your own head until the first draft is complete?
I suffer what many close writing friends of mine suffer from – insecurity about my work. So if someone asks me what my new book is about and I throw a couple of sentences their way (‘It’s about a sleeping god who wakes, and the people who have an interest in why it’s woken up’), I instantly go into panic mode. Is that it? What else is it about? Where’s the story in that? Is it original enough? Haven’t I read that novel before? What if it’s rubbish? For this reason, I tend not to talk much about work in progress. There’s partly that insecurity thing … and also the fact that I hate telling a story verbally before I’ve written and told it on the page. For the same reason, writing synopses doesn’t fill me with glee, though I understand the need for them in business terms.
If you have to live for one month as a character in a novel, which novel and which character would you choose?
Well, as it would all be made up … I think I’d have to go for someone really, really bad. Randall Flagg from Stephen King’s The Stand. That’s one novel that really fed my desire to be a writer, and Flagg has always been one of my favourite bad guys, both charismatic and brutal. And let’s face it, he’s pretty cool too. Cowboy boots, denims … the bad guys are always the cool ones. And I’ve never been cool. So yes, just for one month I’d be the Walkin’ Dude.
What would you do if you weren’t a writer?
I did have a day job for twenty years, but that feels like the hazy past now … almost another life. I think because writing has always been a part of me, I really can’t think far beyond it. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing, and nothing else I’d really want to do. B
ut if realities shifted and I found myself in another version of my world, maybe I’d have learned an instrument when I was younger and I’d be in a band. A rock band, of course. Although the lack of hair might be a problem. Can’t head bang when you’re a baldy, see.
if you enjoyed
THE HERETIC LAND
look out for
VENGEANCE
book one of the Tainted Realm series
by
Ian Irvine
He’s coming for me. There’s no way out. He’s going to take me to the cellar and they’re going to hack my head open like Mama’s and there’s no way out. He’s coming for me.
Round and round it cycled, as it had ever since Tali had read her father’s horrifying letter this morning. To survive, she had to escape, though in a thousand years no Pale slave ever had. There was only one way to gain your freedom here – the way Tali’s mother had been given hers.
‘Your eyes are really red,’ said Mia, arms folded over her pregnant belly. ‘Something the matter?’
They were in the sweltering toadstool grottoes where they worked twelve hours a day, every day of the month, every month of the year. At times the drifting spore clouds were thick enough to clog the eyes.
‘Stupid spores,’ Tali lied. ‘They gunk everything up.’
‘You look terrible. Have a break; I’ll do this row for you.’
‘Thanks, Mia.’
Tali had woken in the middle of the night feeling as if a stone heart was grinding against her skull with every beat. And with each beat, brilliant reds and yellows swirled madly in her inner eye, like beams trying to find the way out of a sealed lighthouse until, with a spike of pain, they burst forth and she collapsed into sleep.
When the work gong had dragged her into wakefulness this morning, the inside of her skull felt bruised. She desperately needed to think, to plan, but now the colours were back, spinning like clay on a potter’s wheel, and fits of irrational anger kept flaring. She had to restrain herself from smashing the toadstool trays against the bench.
He’s coming for me and there’s no way out. They’re going to cut a hole in my head, just like Mama. No way out, no way out!
Tali pressed her cheek against the wet wall and after a minute the colours faded, the headache died to a dull throb. Take deep breaths and stay calm. Don’t do anything silly. You’ve got time. He might not come for months, even years. Mama had been twenty-six, after all.
Her racing heartbeat steadied and Tali wiped her face. ‘I’m all right now.’
‘Be careful. The Cythonians are really agitated today.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Keep your head down and don’t attract attention.’
Tali managed a smile. ‘When did I ever do that?’
‘I’m always getting you out of trouble.’ Shaking her head fondly, Mia turned away to her work.
The grottoes were a series of broad, low-ceilinged tunnels linked by arched doorways. Cages filled with fat-bellied fireflies provided a bluish light that barely illuminated the walls, which were sculpted to resemble a forest by moonlight – a humid glen whose every surface was covered in fungi, like the grottoes themselves. The air was so heavy with their mixed earthy, fishy, foetid and garlicky odours that it made Tali heave.
The floor shook, grinding the stone trays against the benches. It had been shaking all day. What was the enemy up to in the secret lower levels? Was that why they were so touchy?
‘Tali, try to look like you’re working.’
‘Sorry.’
Today’s job, one of the worst of her slave duties, was de-grubbing the harvest. Tiered stone benches running the length of each grotto were stacked with trays of edible toadstools and mushrooms, dozens of kinds, plus leathery cloud ear fungi and giant red puffballs as big as Tali’s head. The puffballs had to be cut and bagged carefully lest they gush clouds of stinging flame-spores everywhere. In the darkest corners, tiny toadstools sprouted in clusters like luminous white velvet, though Tali wasn’t fool enough to stroke them. They were delicious when properly cooked, but deadly to touch in their natural state.
Reaching between the brown toadstools in front of her, she found a red-and-yellow girr-grub by feel and crushed it, wincing as the sharp bristles pricked her fingers. After dropping the muck into her compost bucket she rinsed her hands under a wall spring. Last year she had sucked a sore finger covered in girr slime and spent the next three days throwing up the lining of her stomach.
Mia was humming as she worked. At least she could still dream. Tali’s vow to hunt down her mother’s killers had never faltered, but in ten years she had learned nothing more about them and this morning’s revelation had extinguished all hope. This morning, her eighteenth birthday and coming-of-age day, Little Nan had given Tali the letter her father had written her mother only days before his own tragic death. The letter that made it clear Tali would be next to die.
Her hand clenched on the stone tray. ‘It’s not right!’ she hissed.
‘What?’ said Mia.
‘Our servitude! Living in terror every day of our lives. Sleeping on stone beds. Being flogged for a scowl or a sideways look. Torn apart from our loved ones—’
‘Don’t say such things,’ Mia whispered. ‘What if the guards hear?’
Tali’s voice rose. ‘Worked to death in the heatstone mines, killed for no reason at all.’ The blood was pounding in her head. ‘We’ve got to throw off our chains and cast the enemy down.’
‘Shh!’ Mia slapped her hand over Tali’s mouth. ‘They’ll condemn you to the acidulators.’
Tali yanked the hand away. ‘If they try,’ she said recklessly, ‘I’ll smash—’
Mia shook her head and backed away, her eyes wide and frightened.
A ululating whistle sounded behind Tali and she sprang aside, too late. The chymical chuck-lash wrapped around her left shoulder and went off, crack-crack-crack.
She staggered several steps, clutching her blistered, bloody shoulder, and through a drift of brown smoke saw Orlyk, the bandy-legged guard, scowling at her. A fringe of chuck-lashes swung from Orlyk’s belt like red bootlaces and she was raising another, ready to throw. Most of the guards were decent enough, but Orlyk was an embittered brute and she had been in a foul temper all day. And if she’d actually heard what Tali had said—
‘Lazy, Pale swine,’ Orlyk grunted, her blue-tattooed throat rising and falling like a calling toad. ‘Come the day when Khirrikai leads us to take back our land and we don’t need your kind any more. Oh, soon come the day!’
Tali’s head gave another throb. She fantasised about tearing the chuck-lashes from Orlyk’s belt, driving her to the nearest effluxor with them and dumping her head-first into the filth.
‘Tali!’ Mia hissed.
Lower your eyes and say, ‘Yes. Master.’
Tali shivered at the hatred in Orlyk’s bulging eyes, then managed to regain control and forced out the sickening words, ‘Thank you for correcting me, Master.’
She bowed lower than necessary. One day, Orlyk, one day! Tali knew how to defend herself, for she had practised the bare-handed art with Nurse Bet every week since her mother’s murder, but raising a hand against a guard was fatal.
Orlyk snapped the tip of a chuck-lash at Tali’s left ear, crack-crack, grunted, ‘Work, slave,’ and headed after another victim.
The pain was like a chisel hammered through Tali’s ear. She lost sight for a few seconds, the colours in her head swirled and danced, then her returning sight revealed Orlyk’s broad back as she approached the archway. Scalding blood was dripping from Tali’s ear onto her bare shoulder, and blood-drenched memory roused such fury that she snatched up a chunk of rock.
‘Tali, no!’ Mia hissed.
As the guard passed the puffball trays, Tali hurled her rock twenty yards and struck a giant puffball at its base. It disgorged an orange torrent of flame-spores, but then the shockwave set off a hundred other puffballs and she watched in horror as the guard disappeared behind
churning spore clouds. When they settled, Orlyk was convulsing on the floor, choking, her face and throat swelling monstrously.
‘Are you insane?’ hissed Mia. ‘If she dies …’
‘I didn’t mean that to happen,’ Tali whispered.
‘You never do.’
‘Sorry, Mia. I’m really sorry.’
Mia ran down the far side of the bench, picked the rock out of the puffball tray and tossed it out of sight. Reaching up to the clangours beside the archway, she struck the square healer’s bell with the ring-rod. The bell’s chime was picked up by trumpet-mouthed bell-pipes running across the ceiling, and shortly Tali made out an echo from outside. Mia came back, glaring at her.
‘I’m not taking it any longer,’ Tali said defensively. ‘If I have to die, I’m not going quietly.’
‘Leave me out of it,’ Mia snapped.
Shortly a lean, austere Cythonian, the red, linked-oval cheek tattoos of a healer standing out on his grey skin, ran in. ‘What happened?’
‘Puffballs went off spontaneously,’ Mia lied.
He inspected the tray of burst puffballs and the thick layer of orange spores surrounding Orlyk, then stared at Tali. She kept working, watching him from the corner of an eye. Her cheeks grew hot.
‘I tried really hard,’ Tali said under her breath once he had turned to Orlyk. ‘But when she hit me with the second chucklash—’
‘I told you not to draw attention to yourself.’
‘Mama died because I didn’t act quickly enough, and I’m never—’
‘Shh!’ said Mia.
Several slaves appeared on the other side of the archway, pretending to work while looking in sideways.
‘You!’ called the healer to the nearest slave, a thin girl with stringy yellow hair and eyes that must have seen a nightmare. ‘Run to the spagyrium. Get a sachet of blast-balm and a large head bag, quick!’ He handed her a rectangular healer’s token made from shiny tin.
