While sci-fi fans know him as one half of James S.A. Corey, the name on the cover of The Expanse novels, Daniel Abraham is best known to fans of fantasy for the four books in The Long Price Quintet, the five in The Dagger And The Coin series, and, soon, for The Kithamar Trilogy, which he’s launching with the new novel, Age Of Ash (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook). In the following email interview about this epic fantasy series and this first step, Abraham discusses its inspirations and influences, and why he wrote this both on his own and under his own name.
Photo Credit: Kyle Zimmerman
To begin, what is Age Of Ash about, and what kind of a world does it take place in?
All the Kithamar books take place in a fantasy city-state that’s been independent for centuries. It has a lot of history in it that shapes the city and the architecture and the customs and the people. There’s magic, and most of it is the sidewalk fortuneteller kind of thing. But some of it’s deeper and more dangerous. The city’s at a critical point, and things have been shaping it for generations are shifting — maybe for good, maybe not. And that’s the background. The foreground is the stories I’m telling there.
Where did you get the idea for Age Of Ash?
Hal Duncan said I should always answer the “where do ideas come from” questions by saying “semiotic autopoiesis.” I don’t know. I don’t know where ideas come from. There was a point when it looked like I was going to have some free time because another project I was doing was coming to an end, and I was thinking about things that would be fun. That’s always the trick, isn’t it? Finding projects that seem fun. I’d been away from epic fantasy for a while, and honestly I wasn’t sure what else I had to say in that space, but something hit me — a way to combine a couple of things I liked and turn them into something new. I got excited about it.
As you alluded to, Age Of Ash is an epic fantasy story. But are there any other genres at work in this story?
It is an epic fantasy novel, but the thing we lose of track, I think with all genre novels, it that it’s a novel, too. Age Of Ash is about death and magic and gods walking in the shadows and magic blades. All the kinds of things we come to fantasy adventure for. It’s also a book about losing someone. Grief. Ghosts. Not getting to have the life you thought you were going to have. Hopefully the adventure and derring-do give it some joy and the other part give it some depth.
So, are there any writers, or maybe stories, that had a particularly big influence on Age Of Ash but not on anything else you’ve written?
Inside the genre, I think this project probably owes a lot to Robert Asprin’s Thieves’ World books. I read them just a lot when I was growing up, and that sense of a city as its own rich, complex, living thing almost certainly has roots there. There were so many amazing voices in those books. Joe Haldeman. Vonda MacIntyre. C.J. Cherryh. John Brunner. And they were messy and complicated, and a character from one story could show up in the background of another one. It was complicated. And then there are some other things — movies and books — that also sort of added ideas about structure and character. Bits and pieces. It’s always like that.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Did any of those things have a big influence on Age Of Ash?
The movies that I was thinking about the most when I was looking at the Kithamar books as a project were Kieslowski’s Three Colors films: Blue, White, and Red. And especially there’s a moment at the end of Red where a character is watching a news story, and we see the protagonist of the movie, but we also see the protagonists of Blue and White. These people you spent time with just happened to be at the same place at the same time, not because their stories are the same, but because they all live in the same world. Their lives intersected in this absolutely normal, everyday, trivial way, but because we’re the audience and we know all these people deeply, there’s this frission for us that none of them feel. It’s a grace note by Kieslowski, but it’s a really interesting moment for me.
You’ve already announced that Age Of Ash is the first book of The Kithamar Trilogy. But as I understand it, this isn’t one epic story broken up into three parts, each book is telling the same story from the perspective of three different characters.
That’s not exactly right. The Kithamar Trilogy is three different stories that all happen while the others are going on that hopefully come together to give you something more as a result. Age Of Ash is the first book in a trilogy, but it’s also a complete story. It has a start and a finish. Closure. The characters you follow here, you’ll glimpse again in the later books, and maybe you’ll remember what they were up to and where their story was carrying them. But telling all three stories at the same time wouldn’t do what I want it to do. It would just be another big tapestry. You wouldn’t have your attention drawn to the threads. I want to appreciate the threads.
So did you write all three books at the same time? Or at least a first draft of all three before you locked anything in, just in case, while writing one book, you realized you needed to change something in one of the others?
Writing for me is always a process of balancing the thinking it through with the discovery on the day. I wrote Age Of Ash first, but with the understanding of what the other books were going to be, and I outlined the other stories as I went so that that pieces would all fit. In a perfect world, I might have held off publishing them until they were all complete, but honestly, that way has a little madness to it, too. This is the kind of thing it’s better to get through and not have it to polish and fiddle with forever. You get too deep into the clockwork of it, and you lose the beauty of the stories. It becomes an intellectual exercise. I’m not writing it as an intellectual exercise. I’m trying to make a point.
So, do you know what the other books will be called and when they’ll be out?
I don’t know anything about titles. My publisher always hates my titles. I very rarely get to use the ones I bring. Age Of Ash wasn’t the title of the first book when I was writing it. It was A Champion Of Ashes. It wasn’t The Kithamar Trilogy, either. When I pitched the idea, it was The Aspects Of Kithamar. But publishers have a different view of all this than writers do. They don’t like my titles, and I’m not an expert on what’s going to sell or not sell. My editor told me that A Champion Of Ashes was going to be too much like some other books that were coming out and people would get confused. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. But no. I can tell you that I’m writing The Blade Of Dreams and Judge Of The Fallen World, but what the titles will be when they actually come out? The publisher’s going to have to tell me. I don’t know these things. We’re looking to have them out one each year until the project’s done, though. That’s the plan.
Upon learning that Age Of Ash is the first book of a trilogy, some people will decide to wait until they’re all out so they can read them back-to-back. But is there a reason why you think people shouldn’t wait?
I don’t think there’s a wrong way to do it. If people want to wait and grab them all at once, I won’t object. I’ll say, though, that there’s a lot less reason to do that with these books than with a more traditionally structured trilogy. The story that I’m telling in Age Of Ash, you don’t have to remember the details of for the next book. It’s not like one of those fantasy epics where you need a notebook to keep track of where each other characters is and how they’re connected to each other. It’s not that kind of epic. It’s a different kind. A lot of epic fantasy trilogies are one big book that gets cut into pieces that are short enough to publish. I did one of those. The Dagger And The Coin. I also did one where it wasn’t that. The Long Price Quartet was an epic that got epic by being spread out over a lifetime. The Kithamar Trilogy gets its epic quality by being a palimpsest. Of everything I’ve ever written, this is the one that it’s least important to remember what happened in the last book.
Speaking of books in a series, along with your own novels, you’ve also written The Expanse series with your friend Ty Franck under the name S.A. Corey. How did you come to write Age Of Ash on your own?
Ty has never had any particular interest in epic fantasy, and we built the James S.A. Corey pseudonym to fit its own project. James S.A. Corey writes space opera. Even when we do other work under that name, you’re going to know what kind of book you’re picking up just from the name of the author. Daniel Abraham writes epic fantasy. When I was MLN Hanover, I was writing urban fantasy. The name of the author is important. Not to me, but to the reader. It tells you something you need to know so that you know how you’re supposed to read the book. The story isn’t the same if you’ve got the wrong author. If you pick up a Stephen King book, you want a Stephen King book. John Irving did some great work, but if you try selling The World According To Garp by Stephen King, you’re just going to get a bunch of confused, disappointed readers.
You and Ty recently published the ninth and final novel in The Expanse series, Leviathan Falls. For people unfamiliar with this, what, real briefly is The Expanse all about?
The Expanse is a vast space opera. Nine novels and a collection of short stories that we built to go from a kind of late Apollo 13 story space to more early Buck Rogers. Space opera spends a lot of time in vast, galactic empires, but you usually skip over the part about how you got to that. We wanted to tell a story in that part of the history.
Along with Leviathan Falls, you also have a collection of Expanse novellas and short stories coming out March 15th called Memory’s Legion. Will this be the end of the Expanse series, or are you and Ty thinking you might one day return to that fictional universe for a prequel series, a sequel, or maybe something only tangentially related?
No, we’re not going back. I don’t believe in telling stories once they’ve been told. I’m never going to write another Long Price Quartet story, or another Dagger And Coin story. And we’re never going to write another Expanse story either. We did what we came to do, and now we’re done. Nothing kills the magic of a story like saying that the ending doesn’t matter. Endings are what give things meaning. There’s that old phrase: Call no man happy until he’s dead. The Expanse wouldn’t be a happy story or a sad one or the story we wrote if we kept writing it. It would turn into just another subgenre of its own bumbling along until it got boring and everyone lost interest.
One of the defining characteristics of The Expanse series is that the novels have been effortlessly readable. I’ve torn through all of them like I tear through a bag of Oreos. Does Age Of Ash share this quality?
I hope it’s the same kind of read, but I don’t know. I don’t get to say that. There are techniques that I’ve learned for writing stories that are accessible and engaging. And I think that’s what you’re describing, something that’s accessible and engaging. But stories also have their own needs. There’s a book by Russell Hoban that I love called Riddley Walker. It’s incredibly hard to read, but if he’d made it any easier, the story wouldn’t have worked. I don’t have any patience with people who write obscure, difficult stories just to be obscure and difficult. They’re bad writers. The trick is to make your story as accessible to the reader as it can possibly be, but not more than it can possibly be. And the project dictates that, not the writer. Another thing Russell Hoban wrote were new reader books about Frances The Badger for four-year-olds. The man understood how to be understood. And he understood when the story needed you to work for it. He was an artist.
Aside from possibly being effortlessly readable, are there any other reasons why you think fans of The Expanse will enjoy Age Of Ash and The Kithamar Trilogy, and vice versa?
Well, they’re both the kind of thing I like. I’d recommend the Age Of Ash to Expanse readers the same way I’d recommend other books I like to Expanse readers. I really enjoyed the Expanse books, and if you did too, here’s something else that lit my head up. Maybe it’ll light your head up, too.
Earlier I asked if Age Of Ash had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But I’d like to flip things around and ask if you think Ash and The Kithamar Trilogy could work as a series of movies, a show, or a game?
I think it would be hard to film for really pedestrian reasons. The actor contracts would be a bear, and the continuity would have the potential to really drain all the fun out of it for the directors and the poor script supervisor. You could do Age Of Ash if you stopped there, and that might be pretty good. But when you start layering in the other books, it’s not really suited. I think there’s something very interesting you could do as a video game, though.
And if someone wanted to turn Age Of Ash and The Kithamar Trilogy into a game, what kind of game should it be?
There’s some interesting things going on with video games and storytelling these days that I think the Kithamar books could touch on, especially with the three stories in the same setting and time. Imagine a game you played three times, from three different perspectives. The choices you make the first time through determine the constraints that you have to work with on the second pass, and by the third time though, you’ve made a set of choices that really shape what that last story will be. Like a timeloop story that’s not exactly a timeloop. Done right, it could be both richly story-driven and replayable in some really interesting ways. Of course, that’s easy for me to say. Concepts are always easy. It’s the execution that gets you. Give me a few hundred million dollars and a staff that actually knows how to put a triple-A game together, and we’ll see if it’s actually as cool as I think it could be.
So, is there anything else you think people should know about Age Of Ash and The Kithamar Trilogy?
No, I think I’d like people to go in with the actual story part of the story unspoiled.
Finally, if someone enjoys Age Of Ash, which of your other fantasy novels would you suggest they read next and why that one?
It depends. If you like the fantasy setting and the tone of the thing, I’d recommend The Dagger And The Coin. If you like the way it’s a little different than the usual structure, The Long Price Quintet. I mean, I like them all. I may not be the best judge.
