Tor.com Interview

Big new interview by Lou Anders on Tor.com about Sasha, female characters and how Lian Hearn helped get Sasha published in Australia.

A Brief History of Tanusha

Following on from my world-building piece about ‘Sasha’, I thought I’d do something similar for the ‘Cassandra Kresnov Series’.

Obviously there’s a fair few scientific improbabilities in Cassandra’s world, starting with Earthlike planets of roughly similar gravity, atmosphere, etc. My technical excuse is that the primary scientific improbability (faster than light travel) gives humanity such a wide range that even if such worlds are a million to one, humanity now has access to tens of millions of stars, so logically there are quite a few million-to-one shots inside that range. But the real point of a story like Cassandra’s is not to ponder scientific accuracy, it’s to tell a good story. So long as it’s vaguely plausible, science shouldn’t get in the way. Besides which, no one has any real idea how many Earthlike planets there are... maybe there’s plenty, just waiting for us to figure a way to reach and colonise.

Tanusha is one such planet. We never really see the planet because we’re concentrated where most of the people are, in the city of Tanusha. Tanusha has 57 million people at the time of ‘Crossover’, though even by ‘Killswitch’ it’s gone up a million or so. It’s a boomtown, and was planned that way from inception. For one thing, environmentalists have it wrong when they oppose large cities, putting people into big cities keeps them out of the countryside, so all environmentalists should be fans of skyscrapers -- cities that aren’t allowed to grow upward will grow outward instead, eating natural land as they go. Dense cities are also more economically productive, which is not to say farmers are unnecessary (though with futuristic hydroponics, synthetic food replication etc, who knows?) only to say that the more we move into the future, the less significant farming becomes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product in any economy. That still leaves us with mining, but again with nano-tech and replication technologies, who knows where minerals will be coming from?

There’s no doubt Tanusha is inspired by my experience with certain emerging Asian megalopolises, though it is completely unlike any single one of them. For a start, most of the Asian cities I’ve been to are relatively poor, save for Tokyo and Singapore. Tanusha is phenomenally wealthy, it would be hard to survive there on a budget. It’s also a fairly utopian vision of the future in that it’s the end product of huge advances in urban planning and associated technologies, and functions like digital clockwork. There are no slums, no garbage in the streets, no ‘bad neighbourhoods’. Even the rich/poor divide, a feature of all cities today, is mitigated by planning that mixes all income levels together and gives everyone access to services, transport, etc.

Is any of this possible? There are urban planners today who believe that it probably is, and given how much better our cities have become in the past few hundred years, it would be silly to dismiss them. On the other hand, this kind of planning does smell suspiciously like socialism, and will be opposed by all those who dislike the association. My personal dislike of socialism stems from the fact that it usually doesn’t work. Those bits that do work, I tend to support. In Tanusha, we have a functioning form of socialism in urban planning, that works amazingly well. And of course, as a new settlement that literally descended from the heavens onto virgin land, its planners had the option of telling anyone who didn’t like it that they didn’t have to come. Plenty of other settlements in the galaxy, go find something else that suits you better.

Tanusha is built across a huge river delta as it sprawls through thick forest on its way to the ocean. I’m assuming they have hugely effective water management systems in place for when the river floods. As a result, Tanusha is very green, somewhat sticky and humid in summer, and has water everywhere in the form of river tributaries, and rain. This is definitely a South East Asian influence, my best memories of Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bandar Seri Begawan are of thick greenery, city waterfronts, and amazing thunderstorms. Tanusha has waterfront property everywhere thanks to all the tributaries -- live high enough and you’ll have a water view.

Structurally though, Tanusha is possibly more like Tokyo than anywhere else I’ve been. It doesn’t LOOK at all like Tokyo, Tanusha residents visiting Tokyo would sniff and stick their noses up at that lowrise concrete slum (in the daytime at least, nights in Shibuya’s neon glare would be far more familiar). But Tokyo is organised around a series of decentralised neighbourhoods, each one like a little highrise center in its own right. At the center of each is a transport node, an intersection of subway lines, suburban trains and bus routes, bringing a flood of people through every day. In between these centers, however, things are more lowrise, sedate and suburban.

Tanusha takes this decentralisation to a new level. If it had one central hub, at fifty seven million strong, the city would be unmanagable. Imagine one central CBD for that many people, it would be ten times the size of Manhattan, and the sprawl beyond would be immense. Such a sprawl would have endless blindspots that urban planning couldn’t fix, bad neighbourhoods, bad transport because it’s simply a long way from anywhere productive.

So Tanusha has no center. Rather it has about fifty or sixty centers, roughly one for every million people. Each one is a transport intersection, as in Tokyo, and is zoned for highrise. In between are the suburbs, leafy green and sedate, with stand alone houses and low rise apartment blocks, parks, amenities, etc. You can live in there and barely realise the scale of the city, your view blocked by trees. But get up higher and you’ll see clusters of towers, each one a city in its own right, stretching away across the horizon in all directions, the furthest ones all dim and hazy in the humid air (that’s not pollution with Tanusha’s zero-emission technology, but I do like that Asian-haze effect in the sunsets. I just don’t like breathing it).

For transport Tanusha has everything. For long trips across the city, there are big above-ground maglev trains that only stop at each major transport hub. Connecting them for middle distance trips are subway lines like we know today, stopping more frequently and connecting up each seperate district. Linking those, light rail, like trams, for that last-meter connectivity. Cars drive themselves on the central grid, they form up in large peletons on the big highways like nascar races, automated systems meaning they can be a few centimeters apart with no danger, no wind resistance and very high speeds, so you can get across town pretty easily that way too.... but as everywhere, parking can be a hassle, so public transport’s easier. Or if you’re wealthy and important, there are cruisers -- flying cars to you and me, which I just had to include because they’re so damn cool, and allowed characters the personal mobility I really wanted. They aren’t cheap, maybe five percent of the population can afford them... though knowing Tanusha, a lot of that might be the government just inflating the cost of parking and liscencing to keep the numbers managable.

If Sandy’s adventures in Tanusha were more serialised, here are some questions I’d get into the SF nitty gritty of if I had the chance.

How does a city have no poor people? Good question. And here’s where Tanusha gets really interesting -- it may be utopian on the surface, but if you dig a little, things get more messy. A planned city like Tanusha has a vested interest in not having any poverty, because it’s simply not an affordable city on a low income, and no ‘bad neighbourhoods’ means no ‘cheap neighbourhoods’. Is there social security? Another good question, connected to other answers.

Tanusha tries to solve all its issues with technology. Education has now evolved to the point where knowledge can be directly fed into a person’s brain. Lack of skills is no longer an excuse not to have a job, and there’s no such thing as low skill labour any longer because robotics/automation takes care of that. High level education is thus 100 percent. But economics, in my opinion, can never be planned to the kind of precision that can guarentee all of them jobs, there’s always unemployed because the only economies that have 100 percent employment are planned economies, and planned economies always fail. Tanusha is a planned CITY. That’s different, that’s about where you put buildings and roads and swimming pools and why. In economics, Tanusha is an advanced capitalist economy, the exact mechanisms I’d be nuts to try and invent because economic systems have changed enormously just in the past few years (or the past few months if you’ve been paying attention) and will be unrecognisable again in another fifty, let alone five hundred plus. But suffice to say it has flexibility and slack built into it, and there’s always going to be unemployed, though hopefully not long term.

The great thing about tape teach education (directly into the brain) is that you can retrain real fast. Imagine today, getting laid off from your job as an accountant. Some analyst at the unemployment center looks at some figures, and says ‘well, we seem to have a surplus of accountants right now, but a shortage mid-level business managers. How’d you like to do an MBA?’ Which I imagine would cost you, but could be completed in six months or less (none of this Matrix-style ‘lean the entire encyclopedia in three seconds, let’s be a little more realistic).

The exact psychology of overlaying complex skill sets like this could lead to complications, however. And that’s the kind of thing that becomes entertaining in SF stories -- Philip K Dick loved this stuff, complications from technological solutions to social problems, things so obscure they’re five or six degrees separated from the source and no one else would think of.

So Tanusha’s a nice place to live. It’s spectacular on the grand scale, pretty on the small scale, aesthetically pleasing to most people from most angles, you just have to look and you’ll find something that suits your tastes somewhere. But, as often comes out in the novels, it’s something of a bubble, because when every whim is catered to, and life is so comfortable, its easy to forget about less pleasant stuff that goes on elsewhere. Which is what makes life so interesting for the Callayan Security Agency when the shit hits the fan, because they’re looked down upon as the rough and uncivilised agency in a city that no longer believes in such things as violence to maintain peace, and is painfully forced to change its mind, at least a little bit.

And of course there’s plenty of crime in Tanusha, some quite nasty, just very well hidden under 57 million people. There’s a lot of network freedom, meaning a whole class of folks very good at manipulation of that network inevitably begin to form their own counter culture, and feel they can cheat a living from it. Which in turn provides cover for the really nasty minority within that minority, the organised criminal rackets, which trade largely in technologies deemed illegal by the Federation or Tanushan nanny-state, and are prepared to play dirty to maintain their cashflow. There’s lots of those, and always lots of demand for their services, as the current war-on-drugs illustrates. So a small, elite paramilitary unit like CSA SWAT gets plenty of work... and from the rest of the Tanushan public, general disdain.

Especially when the galaxy’s most ass kicking manifestation of all this peaceful utopia’s worst fears suddenly joins their ranks.

Common Theme

Pyr publisher Lou Anders has identified a common theme through many of the reviews for Sasha.

A Brief History of Lenayin

Regular readers of fantasy may notice that the land of Lenayin is a little more complicated than many fantasy lands. This is because the real world is complicated, and I think a lot of fantasy novels don’t make much effort to do this justice. This is the age of monocultures. In the past, in most nations, things were more fractured.

Lenayin has eleven provinces, divided mostly along linguistic lines. It’s a rugged place, entirely mountainous but not like the Alps, with its neat divides between ranges and valleys. It’s probably more like Afghanistan, though with a kinder climate -- some areas are just very inaccessible, and it makes traveling around difficult. As a result, regional differences have become quite large, though the people all retain enough similarities to identify themselves as Lenay.

There’s some geographical inspiration for that -- Papua New Guinea for example, has hundreds of valleys and hundreds of languages, remote tribes in the jungle who have been isolated from each other for so long even though they’re quite close together, that their languages have split in all kinds of directions. Lenayin’s also had quite a few invasions over the centuries, new groups moving in, making lots of diversity.

Structurally, my ideas for Lenayin’s demographics were probably most inspired by India. The people themselves are nothing like Indians, of course, but the idea of a land divided between many language groups, a lot of whom don’t even speak the so-called primary tongue, appealed to me. Also like India, Lenayin is a nation of animist and ‘pagan’ beliefs whose ruling classes were dominated by a foreign religion. Of course, the Verenthanes would be considered by Muslims ‘pagans’ too, as they’re polytheists, but they’re both very structured and disciplined religions, well suited for the purposes of ruling classes.

But like I said, as a people, Lenays are completely different from Indians. Indians have always tended to be basically peaceful and hierarchical -- India has tended toward a worldview that some people are placed above other people, who are placed above other people, and so on up the line. That plus the sheer fertility of the land makes for a stable and long lasting civilisation. But Lenays are militant individualists, inspired I think by some mix of American or Australian liberalism. Or maybe the Scots, certainly William Wallace would have been right at home in Lenayin. Probably the militant bit comes from their origins from before any of them can remember, of invading hordes who won these lands by force. But also, the fertile lands in Lenayin are limited, resources sometimes scarce, and regions got into the habit of fighting to get what they needed.

Some might claim they’ve taken it a bit too far, with the result that Lenayin is basically a warrior society. Most of the population live in small towns as the landscape doesn’t really lend itself to big cities, and small towns don’t lend themselves easily to hierarchical society, there just isn’t the scale of population. Also, Lenays are individualists because it can be a rough place to live, and people need to be tough and resourceful (think Alaska, with similar landscape, though not quite so cold in winter). Combined with frequent fighting and in their earlier years no real central governance, this can lead to anarchy real fast, and in various periods of their history has done so.

So to stop the place falling apart completely, there are codes. Societies with very little functioning governance need codes of behaviour, especially when everyone is armed and potentially violent. And so Lenayin has evolved over many hundreds of years an honour code of warriors. They worship violence, but only in certain forms. Honourable killings, where two opponents or two sides are equally matched, are respected. Dishonourable killings, where one person or side never had a realistic chance of victory, are not. Of course, if a weaker person insults a stronger person, the stronger person is not bound to limitless patience, so weaker people learn to tread carefully, and strong people tend to swagger, as in all societies. People who violate the code are dealt with harshly.

This puts the brakes on the violence and makes a lot of Lenays (though by no means all) quite decent and respectable even by real world standards -- these basic tenets of morality are central to every Lenay’s life, especially the men (and all men are warriors, at least in theory). Insulting a Lenay is very risky business, but on the other hand a Lenay will run into a burning building to save a total stranger. No Lenay man can live with being called a coward, and they love the idea of heroism so much, they’d probably be fighting each other to be first in the door. Kind of like the ancient Greeks, I suppose.

Of course, these are the ideals of the code. In reality, children are killed in wars, men are murdered in cold blood, and the victors turn a blind eye and pretend not to notice. Some Lenays are cowards (and live in terror of discovery), and surely some cheat, steal and rape too. But not many, and not often, because these ideals are powerful, and are perhaps the single most important unifying concept that binds all the disparate people of the nation together, and makes them identify themselves as Lenays -- more important than ethnicity (which is all over the place), and language (ditto) or even religion (which is split in two, if you can even consider the Goeren-yai paganism a ‘religion’). They are a people bound together by common ideas... which I’ve always contended are far stronger than any of those other possible bonds. However, it is important to recall, much of that binding is done with blood, mostly each others’, and its constant spilling.

All of this also makes for an interesting dynamic with my main character, Sasha, in that she is a woman in a very patriarchal society, who comes to be respected as a warrior. It works in Lenayin where it would not in many other patriarchal societies, because of the Lenay value structure. Firstly, they value warriors, and skill at war. Sasha is trained by the best, Kessligh Cronenverdt, a legend in Lenayin and rightly known as the greatest swordman in the land. Now for a Lenay, that’s no guarantee of respect -- people have to earn their own respect, not just have it conferred upon them by a relationship with others, and they have bad names for people who assume a sense of entitlement by family, marriage or the like. But with Kessligh, they figure correctly that he wouldn’t waste his time if she weren’t good, and enough people have actually seen her fight that they can confirm it.

Kessligh’s skills are Nasi-Keth, which is a foreign importation from the serrin peoples of Saalshen, but Lenays don’t mind that either because foreign things don’t scare them (Lenayin is so diverse that everything seems foreign), and it’s hard to argue with results in something like sword fighting. The fact that Sasha is former royalty is cause for as much suspicion as anything else, but Lenays have great affection for crazy individualists, and it’s pretty obvious that a Lenay princess would have to be completely crazy to give up that life to become a Nasi-Keth trainee in the wilds, so she gains big bonus points right there. In most such patriarchal societies, people would just say she’s crazy, and condemn her. In Lenayin they agree that she’s crazy, but love her for it. That’s what makes Lenayin different.

This brings us to the last and perhaps most significant point about Lenayin -- unlike so many peoples in so many fantasy novels, Lenays couldn’t give a pile of horse manure about nobility, rank, status, or any of the sort. Lenays achieve status amongst their peers by being upstanding individuals. Which for Lenays, means that you have to be a respected warrior, but you also have to be a ‘good guy’, the kind of person people don’t mind taking advice from. Never ‘orders’, though. Lenays don’t do ‘orders’, except in crisies or wars, where village headmen and respected elders may be empowered to give them. But even there, any Lenay man who feels his personal honour violated by an order, is under no obligation to follow them.

Leading people of Lenayin, as the new class of rulers has discovered, is no easy thing. In fact, it can be rather like herding cats -- again, Afghanistan comes to mind. But then, a lot of lands possess a diversity of viewpoints, and a dislike of central authority, that has made them difficult to govern. The French, the British and the Americans to name just three.

I was interested as I wrote ‘Sasha’ that there weren’t many fantasy novels I could think of featuring a people who embraced what we political science types would call liberalism, roughly meaning the preeminence of the individual in society. I guess a lot of that is because there wasn’t all that much liberalism in the ancient societies that seem to inspire most fantasy novels. But there have been some -- Athens most notably, though with limits. The Romans too, amongst whom liberalism always existed as an idea, just never particularly well practised.

In ‘The Lord of the Rings’, Rohan and Gondor were fighting for freedom, yet lived within fairly rigid hierarchies and derived all honour from service to their respective kings or leaders. Better that, obviously, than Sauron. But if the King of Rhohan had ruled Lenayin instead, and Lenayin had been located next to Mordor, and the King was telling his people not to worry about all these armies of orcs pouring forth, the Lenays would have told him to shove it and gone off to war without him.

I can’t think of many fantasy novels where the people live beneath the rule of a king, but are ambivalent toward him and his authority. Because fantasy novels tend to be in love with the power of kings, and in love with the feudal system that sustains it... and sure, there is a lot of romance surrounding a position of such extreme authority. But the reality of such systems, of course, is that much of what we perceive as romance from that period of European history (picture glamorous king in crimson cloak on prancing white steed), was in fact propaganda by those kings who wanted to make themselves look good, and semi-divine, for obvious reasons.

Though power itself can be glamorous, much of the romance surrounding that power was in reality bullshit, and much of the manner in which kings actually ruled was cruel, arbitrary and unenlightened, to put it mildly. A good king could certainly be better than a bad king, but the system itself doesn’t allow much of what we would consider today ‘liberal open mindedness’ -- you’re either loyal, or you’re dead, and that applies to those living beneath good kings and bad kings alike. George RR Martin is one fantasy author who grasps this extremely well in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. But a lot of fantasy, sadly I think, tends to swallow the propaganda whole, because the propaganda is pretty. Perhaps this just goes to illustrate that there is a statue of limitations on the offense caused by nasty political systems. Fantasy writers glorifying Nazism would get into trouble. Feudalism, not so much.

And yes, I am just stirring.

I wanted the land of my primary characters to be unique in this way, in that they regard authority with suspicion, and will only accept leadership from people whose merits have been proven -- and even then, that leader has to tread lightly. If a king wants a war in Lenayin, he just needs to raise taxes. Though mind you, that’s been true in most lands through much of human history.

Whether this would make Lenayin a better place to live in than a traditional feudal European society, is a matter individuals can debate. On the one hand, in Lenayin you’d be relatively free. You could say what you wanted, and insult whom you chose, so long as you were prepared to fight to the death if they were sufficiently offended by it. (Most Lenays actually prefer to be polite, most of the time). You could work your own land, control your own business, and improve your own life however you chose. If you’re a woman, Lenayin would certainly be FAR better, because you’d have a lot of the freedoms without any of the violence (unless you were Isfayen, but that’s another story). It’s patriarchal, but not oppressively so, and Lenay men tell all the familiar jokes about how their women boss them around at home.

On the other hand, you could be a feudal peasant, working hard labour on land you don’t own, donating most of your crop to your local lord, and scraping by on whatever’s left. Periodically you’d be recruited into an army, have something big and sharp shoved into your hands and be told to kill people with it, for reasons that your lord deems suitable. If you protest... well, better that you don’t. On the upside, wars don’t come all that often, and most peasants (and most people in such lands ARE peasants) die in bed. At the age of about forty.

You can see which I’d prefer. But for Lenayin, the price of freedom is elevated levels of violence. So does that mean that Lenayin’s state of affairs is in some ways an argument for America’s Second Amendment and NRA membership? I’m slightly astonished at that myself, but I can’t deny the possibility. On the other hand, we’re in a more evolved age today, and comparisons with pre-technological ages can be very misleading. What do you think?

Cassandra Kresnov in Mass Market

The Cassandra Kresnov Trilogy is now being released by Pyr in a mass market format. (that's a 'regular' paperback for all you non-publishing lingo types). This is Pyr's first foray into mass market, which is very cool for them, because it shows it's possible for a smaller publisher to enter the market, and grow larger. Where they'll be in another few years, who can tell?

Buncha Stuff

Here's some reviews I haven't got around to posting up yet.

Firstly, at SF Signal, a nice review continuing theme that Cassandra Kresnov should be a movie. Been hearing that a bit lately. Incidently (or maybe not) I'm currently working on the screenplay.

Bookgasm ties Breakaway and Killswitch in the top five books of 2007.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist also lists Killswitch in the 'year's best'.

There's also two interviews, firstly with Scifi Wire, and secondly with The World's Biggest Bookstore

There's also the BookSwede, who reviews Crossover... always nice to see people going back to the first book.

Life

In the interest of supporting the cool TV shows that deserve the support, I'll put in my vote for Life as the best new TV show I've seen this year, easily. Anyone who likes NCIS should like it because the emphasis on likeable, quirky characters is similar... but Life craps all over NCIS (though I'll always have a soft spot for it, just for the characters).

'Life' has my kind of characters -- outsiders who've been through hard times and see the world from another perspective. It doesn't hit the mark all the time, but when it does, the writing manages to be funny, poignant and philosophically intriguing, all without ever once overstepping the line and showing off. It's got the brains and style of the great literary novel, but it's still proud to show the world that at heart, it's a fun paperback thriller. That's not an easy combination to pull off.

It's not Law and Order, which is good -- 'Law and Order' was always too procedural for me, pays scant attention to its characters, and dramatically is all tip and no iceberg. 'Life', if it doesn't sound too much like the cliche, is all about the journey (and I'm sure that line made it into the show's pitch to the network execs). Charlie Crews is quite possibly the oddest major character I've seen on a prime time show. Newly out of prison, he gazes at the world with childlike wonder, plays games with things that most people don't find funny, and asks rhetorical questions no one else can answer. I love that he got a huge multi-million dollar compensation payout, and still wants to be a cop, and not just because he's searching for whoever framed him. I love that he finds mundane things so fascinating. And I love Damian Lewis's slightly amazed deadpan delivery. I think Charlie Crews might just be the least boring man on TV.

The other characters are cool too, especially his partner Dani... watch it, and see.

Killswitch on Monsters and Critics

Here's a review of Killswitch on Monsters and Critics.

'Definitely a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy with enough wiggle room for more to come from this series that serves up social commentary with military action in equal doses.'

Fantasy Book Critic Interview

Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic asks me a bunch of questions about a bunch of stuff. I reckon this is probably the best bunch of questions I've been asked before, and I had fun answering, so check it out.

Cassandra Kresnov Giveaway

Rob at Fantasy Book Critic is giving away the wonderful prize of the full set of Cassandra Kresnov novels. And all you need to do is pledge the soul of your first newborn.