Tad and the Shadow
06/12/2004 . Source: Ben Sharpe 

Fantasy author Tad Williams on the immersive nature of epic fantasy, the fact that what most of us who keep coming back to fantasy fiction love about it is that “sinking-in” feeling, that thrill of sliding into a new and convincing world that exists side-by-side with our own ...

Shadowmarch marks the beginning of your first epic fantasy since Memory, Sorrow And Thorn, a decade ago; does it feel good to be back?

Shadowmarch is being advertised as my return to epic fantasy, but to honest with you, I don’t think I ever left. (Readers of Otherland and The War Of The Flowers can make their own judgments.) However, what Shadowmarch does represent is my very happy return to a type of fantasy that is often called “epic” or “traditional”, but which my wife has named “Deep Fantasy”.

Presumably referring to the depth of background that characterizes epic fantasy at its best?

Yes, she’s referring to the immersive nature of the stuff, the fact that what most of us who keep coming back to fantasy fiction love about it is that “sinking-in” feeling, that thrill of sliding into a new and convincing world that exists side-by-side with our own.

Getting the world right is obviously very important when writing epic fantasy.

Absolutely. And worldbuilding is probably the most satisfying part of writing fantasy – the chance to play God (or at least a very fallible god who eats cookies and makes sarcastic remarks to his pets while creating) and make something new, a what-if world that will eventually become complex enough to generate its own surprises. And they do, of course. Surprise their creators, that is.

I can’t tell you how many times I labored for weeks or months to solve some problem of imaginary history, only to have the solution rise almost spontaneously from the created world itself. Complexity breeds its own unseen order – that is, if you make something complicated enough, and respect its reality, it will begin to suggest its own consistencies, and its own inconsistencies, in a way that is sometimes a bit nervewracking.

Care to give us an example?

Sure. When I first, long ago, drew the map of the continents for Shadowmarch, I put the northern continent, Eion, and the southern continent, Xand, quite close together. This was mainly because I wanted to get them both on the same map, while having Eion dominate the map (since most of the planned action took place there.)

However, as time went by and I began to sketch in the history of the world, deciding (among other things) that civilization first arose on the southern continent, since I wanted a sort of isolation for the fairy-folk of the northern continent, the Qar, before men came in contact with them, I also realized that it didn’t make any sense that if the two continents were so close that there would be so little settlement of Eion by the Xandians, and so little intercourse between humans and Qar.

After consideration, I decided that there would have to be high mountains and thick forest between the southernmost part of Eion and the rest of the continent, providing a real impediment to easy travel. So I was forced to decide that the colonization of the southern end of Eion, which quickly grew into that continent’s first city-states, would have lasted a long time before any major settlements happened beyond it. Similarly, in my final version, most of the biggest human cities are along the coasts. Only recently, in the last half a millennium, have humans civilized Eion’s interior.

Right there, of course, is a huge historical and geographic theme that didn’t exist when I first started. And because of it, I’ve had to rework and deepen the history of the peoples and places of Eion and Xand.

And once you’ve started this process, the book seems to almost take on a momentum of its own?

That’s how worldbuilding goes, one idea feeding on another, or else running into another with the shock of a well-laden ship going onto hidden rocks, to sink and never be seen again. You keep what works, you look to your own earlier ideas to inform your new ones, you strive for consistency, and after a while what begins to arise is something resembling a real world, ready to be peopled with characters.

A natural question for a reader unfamiliar with epic fantasy might be, ‘So what’s the purpose of all this worldbuilding? Why not just write a story set in the real world, in some strange and almost fabulous empire of the past?’

Good question. One of the obvious reasons to invent a world is that you not only get to create the geography and history, you can (within reason, subject to over-stretching the sympathies of your readers) invent the physics as well. In short, you can use things like magic without irritating sticklers for reality too much by inserting dragons into medieval France or making wizards the ruling class of Moorish Spain. I love magic, as long as its doled out in small, precious quantities. Too much magic is like too much salt – it hides everything else, and spoils its own appeal.

There’s also the fairly obvious fact that with an invented world, you can make anything you want happen. It’s hard to scare readers with the thought of a cataclysmic war, for instance, no matter the consequences for the characters, if the reader knows that seven hundred years later those battle-sites are going to be covered with car-parks and Starbucks. (What IS the plural - Starbuckses? Starbucksae?) Historical distance can soften the worst events, but if the world you’re immersed in HAS no future – that you know of, anyway – the reader is immersed in the now. Anything can happen. And probably will.

So, essentially, you like to make the rules, not just follow them!

Yes. In fact, that’s probably what I like best about this sort of thing. I can do whatever I want. As long as people will still want to read it - which is, of course, the ultimate decider: I have no urge whatsoever to write books that no one but me will ever finish, let alone enjoy.

I’m odd that way, I guess.

Tad Williams, thank you for your time.

Thanks to Orbit Books (and Ben Sharpe) for permission to post this interview. For more details of their SFF authors and books, visit Orbit at www.orbitbooks.co.uk