Great Article. Thank you for sharing it with the list. ~ST Steve Hubbell <usagigoya at hotmail.com> wrote: UNDERCUTTING THE CONVENTIONS OF FANTASY “I write stuff that I think is cool.” “I think everyone who stops changing is evil” “Vlad was my alter ego, who you didn’t necessarily like, but had to respect” Steven Brust’s work ranges from the strange and evocative The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars to the daring epic To Reign in Hell, and from his science fiction adventure Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille to the moody vampire novel Agyar. Among gamers, Brust is most famous for his Vlad Taltos novels, including Jhereg, Yendi, Taltos, Teckla, Phoenix, Athyra, and the upcoming Orca. (See DRAGON Magazine issue #219 for Vlad’s AD&D game statistics.) More recently, he has written about the history of Vlad’s world in the novels The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After, written in homage of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. We met Steven Brust at the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, where we hoped he could start off by answering a common rumor about his most popular books. ***************************************************************** DRAGON: Are the Vlad books based on your gaming experiences? STEVEN BRUST: Yeah, definitely. Adrian Charles Morgan created a world called Piara, and a whole lot of what become Dragaera was simply lifted from that. Adrian did a really good job. A lot of what he did involved turning us loose in an undeveloped world and saying, “Here’s your piece of it. Go make it up.” DRAGON: What sort of character did you play? STEVEN BRUST: I was Vlad. DRAGON: Were there Dragaerans and the rest in Piara? STEVEN BRUST: No, it was different. It was a game, and games don’t translate to fiction. DRAGON: Why not? STEVEN BRUST: Because games are built around plot, and fiction around characters. DRAGON: Why do you like immortal characters, like the long-lived Dragaerans? STEVEN BRUST: I hadn’t actually noticed. I’d noticed it about Roger [Zelazny], but never about me. I remember somebody asked Roger that, and he said, “Well, because then the guys have hung around long enough to be interesting.” I thought that was kind of coo’. For me I’d never thought about it. But I don’t know that I do that. Vlad certainly isn’t immortal. He’s surrounded by long-lived people, and even they’re not immortal. And that’s just because it’s fun to play with, the psychology of someone who’s going to do whatever he’s going to do in his life in a big hurry compared to everyone around him. I think the difference between being long-lived and being immortal is actually really huge. You’re going to die at a certain point. I mean, you know that. But then psychologically I don’t think there’s that much difference unless you have something to compare it to. As far as the Dragaerans are concerned, they are immortal. DRAGON: Is that why you introduced Morganti daggers, to give your near-immortals something to fear? STEVEN BRUST: No, that wasn’t it. .A lot of what I’m doing is playing off of and undercutting fantasy conventions. So what you’ve got is Moorcock obviously, with Stormbringer, and it goes further back than that, with Norse mythology you have the sword that drinks souls. It’s become kind of a cliché of fantasy. So I said, “Okay, if they’ve become generic, well make a generic term for them.” It was a kind of playing [the fantasy convention]. Take the line in Jhereg, in which Vlad has to cast a spell. He says, “I pulled out an enchanted dagger. It was a cheap, over-the-counter enchanted dagger.” It’s that same kind of taking the fantasy convention and undercutting it. DRAGON: During a panel this afternoon you said you’d like sometime to start a novel by pandering to the audience and then switching gears to tell an important story, when someone in the audience said that’s exactly what you’ve already done. STEVEN BRUST: I hadn’t realized that I done that, but it’s true. It didn’t start as pandering. [Jhereg] started out as straight wish-fulfillment fantasy, and that’s okay. But it got old real fast, so it developed. It became more intense. I was keeping myself interested, because I liked the character. I’ve been fascinated with the character all along. DRAGON: Some think that Vlad has more than a little of Steven Brust in him. STEVEN BRUST: How do I put this? Most people are either liked or respected by their peers. Not that many achieve both. Most people get at least one. At a certain formative period of my life, I was liked but not respected. Therefore, what was important to me, of course, was to be respected. Who cares about being liked? The one you want is always the one you don’t have. So Vlad was my alter ego, who you didn’t necessarily like, but had to respect. He inspired respect. He inspired fear. He was tough. He was all of the things I’m not. That’s a good way to start, but you can’t just leave a character there or he’s going to get boring fast. DRAGON: Do you think Vlad started out as an evil character? STEVEN BRUST: I think he would have been evil if he hadn’t charged. In a certain sense I think he’s still evil if he doesn’t change, because I think everyone who stops changing is evil. You have to keep growing. Stasis is bad. Degeneration is bad. Only progress is good. What’s important is your ability to do something, to make something that makes the world better. Vlad began to change at the first Fourth Street convention, nine years ago. I put the convention together in order to answer my own questions about writing. So I got all these people together to get my questions answered. Among the things I thought about coming out of that convention was what I was doing with that character. I had a character who was a hit man. I had a friend who was killed by a hit man long before I wrote Jhereg. But I never really connected it until that time. I said, “Whoa, time to take a look at what you’re doing, Bucko.” And that was when Vlad started to change. He would have changed anyway, though how he would have changed I can’t say. He would have either changed or stopped. I couldn’t have written him past Yendi if he hadn’t changed. In a lot of ways, I never should have written Yendi. There’s no growth in it. It’s a repetition of Jhereg. It’s got a slightly different plot and hints of interesting things, but it doesn’t go anywhere, like Jhereg did. I think it’s my weakest book. DRAGON: What’s your strongest? STEVEN BRUST: The new one, Orca. I’m very pleased with Phoenix. There are a lot of things about it that I like. I’m really happy with Taltos in a lot of ways, because structurally it did some cool things and got away with them. 0rca is the book I wanted Yendi to be. It’s a really plot-driven book with a neat story and some interesting character development and some revelations. It’s just a straight-up, kick- your-heels-back, good time yarn. I don’t mind those. I like those. I approve of doing them. And I was trying to with Yendi, and I failed. Because there just wasn’t enough to it. DRAGON: What of the fans who love Yendi? STEVEN BRUST: I’m glad [they like it]. I know what I had in mind, what I wanted to do. They only know what I did. The goal of getting better, the reason you keep working on your craft is so that when you’re having an off day and you’re not turning out your best work and things aren’t coming together, you’re still good enough to pull it off. If they like it, it means that when I wasn’t doing my best work, it was still good enough to please people. That’s excellent. That’s what I want. DRAGON: You do most of your experimenting outside of the Taltos books. STEVEN BRUST: Except for Taltos. Taltos and Yendi a certain way. Yendi was an experiment. I was trying to learn how to draw characters quickly. That’s one of the reasons there are too many characters in it. I was trying to train myself to be able to just quickly and precisely sketch different people and make them distinctive and memorable. I didn’t completely succeed in that book, but I learned a lot. If I have new character, he’s going to say something. What he says tells me who he is, and I won’t know until that point. I’m very heavily influenced by dialogue. To me, that’s what drives a book. DRAGON: Are you more influenced by dialogue in the Phoenix Guards books than in the Vlad series? STEVEN BRUST: No. Because there, and in the Vlad books, too, the narration is part of the dialogue. So maybe the answer is yes. Voice is important both in the Vlad books and the Phoenix Guards books, the Khaavren Romances. That’s maybe a question of definition. If you include voice as a part of dialogue, then yes. DRAGON: Isn’t there a big difference between Vlad as a narrator, since he’s also the protagonist, and Parfi of Roundwood, who doesn’t actually appear in the story he narrates? STEVEN BRUST: But Parfi is still a major character in the books. That’s whose eyes you’re seeing it through. That’s whose interpretation you’re getting. He’s the one lying to you about all the history. DRAGON: Vlad and Khaavren are both distinctive characters. How are they different? STEVEN BRUST: To me they are more different than similar. Khaavren is nicer. DRAGON: Yet he regularly kills people for what we’d consider trivial reasons. STEVEN BRUST: Hmm. Okay. Khaavren does not go out looking for people to kill, if you know what I mean. He isn’t cold about it. Vlad is cold about it. Khaavren’s a young brash kid, at least in the first book. He’s very much d’Artagnan. Consciously. Deliberately. With malice of forethought - that’s who he is. Through the strainer of my imagination. In fact, he came from friends who’d sit around with me and we’d talk about mutual acquaintances. Among ourselves, we’d assign people to Dragaeran houses based on their personalities. At one point someone said, “So-and-so is a Lyorn.” At this point, I knew very well what the Lyorns were, but none of the others did, because I’d deliberately misrepresented them so I could come back later and smack ‘em. The Vlad books are from Vlad’s ideal, and Vlad has a very distorted view. He’s said things in these books which are just dead wrong because he just doesn’t know any better. Other things he’s said are wrong because he’s seen them from his viewpoint, and that’s skewed. So when I explained the houses to my friends, I said, “The perfect example of a Lyorn is Athos, from The Three Musketeers. Come to think of it, Porthos is a Dzur. Aramis is the classic Yendi. And d’Artagnan is a Tiassa” And then I thought, “Hey, that’s kinda cool.” I’ve always adored Dumas’ style and have been sorry that people don’t write that way anymore. So I thought, “I can write that way. I can do my own Three Musketeers.” I didn’t expect it [Phoenix Guards] to sell. That was a book written to entertain myself. DRAGON: You once said you liked to write about cloaks and swords because they are cool. Is that why you write fantasy adventure? STEVEN BRUST: What I do is write stuff that I think is cool, which is what every good writer does. A hack will write what he thinks will sell. A good writer will write stuff that he thinks is cool, to the best of his ability. There are a lot of things I think are cool. And cloaks and swords - rapiers in particular - are definitely on the list. That doesn’t mean every book has them, but that’s what I gravitate toward. Also really clever word play is cool. An elegantly turned metaphor is cool. A neat form, a shape to the novel, where things wrap in on themselves in just the right way, is cool. It’s a lot of different things. DRAGON: Other than your two series, your novels are all very different from each other. What are your favorites? And are there any you consider not to be successes? STEVEN BRUST: I mentioned Yendi. The other failure is Cowboy Feng. My favorite book is probably Phoenix Guards or Five Hundred Years After, probably the latter. My best book is Aygar. I was attempting something difficult and pulled it off to my satisfaction. It came out the way I wanted it to, and it wasn’t easy. DRAGON: But you made it look easy. STEVEN BRUST: That was part of the goal. If it looks forced, it fails. That was one of the problems with Cowboy Feng. It doesn’t look easy enough. There are a lot of problems with Cowboy Feng. If you’re going to shoot for a surprise ending, there are two things you want to accomplish. One, you don’t want people to have seen it all along. Two, you want people to think, when it hits, “Oh yeah, he did plant the clues for that.” The reaction I got was that people saw it coming all along and yet I hadn’t set it up right, it wasn’t justified. That was one problem. The main problem is that I was trying to explore some things that are important to me, some serious things, and simultaneously tell a light, flip, and amusing tale and make it seamless. And I didn’t. Those things clashed. And the goal of the book was to make those things happen as part of the same movement. It’s another one that a lot of people like anyway, and I’m delighted, If I do something that isn’t up to what I want it to be and it still pleases people, that’s all you can ask for. (Dragon Magazine #222 - October 1995)