Richard Morgan Biography and Interview

Richard Morgan. He almost needs no introduction, however, I think that all self-respecting journalists know that an interview is incomplete without one.

Richard’s early life was a relatively solitary one, like many authors, he buried himself in books and studied hard to ensure that he made the most of the education that “[his] parents crucified themselves to put [him] through.” Of course, then he reached the 18(ish) years and began to enjoy the drinking and girls that we’ve all experienced, right? He then “managed to totally screw up [his] first year at Queens’ College, Cambridge University.”

Doesn’t sound good so far…

However, when his grades came back and his first love dwindled, he had time to reflect, shift his studies from modern languages to history with a political/philosophical slant and make some new friends. The drinking and the girls were still there of course, but now he knew that things wouldn’t come easy and with a subject that he was rather enjoying, Richard was back on track. Upon completion of his degree, he decided that he wanted to travel, oh, and be a writer too.

The idea of writing set him apart in Norfolk and Cambridge where he had lived and been educated, however, when he arrived in London he realised that he wasn’t the only person in the country with their sights set on being a novelist. As Richard tells us, in London, writing a book “isn’t big, it isn’t clever and it certainly won’t get you laid.” So, he had to scrape a living doing things other than writing and it wasn’t until he finally decided to give his second lifestyle choice, travelling, a go that he began to make a living from his abilities with language. It still wasn’t writing though, it was English Language Teaching (ELT), but that was OK because he accidentally ended up travelling and working within it for fourteen years. Not a bad accident, right?

Richard was happy, but he still wanted to be a writer and behind the scenes was writing (on and off). Everything from short stories to screenplays to articles, letters to magazines, a novel even! Nothing got published though, until Altered Carbon.

With Altered Carbon everything changed. Not only was the book remarkably well received, but the film rights were snapped up for a figure that is reported to be rather substantial. How much they were purchased for is irrelevant however, Richard Morgan was now able to step away from teaching and pursue that dream he had at university all those years ago; being a professional full-time writer.

Now, if there is one thing you understand about Richard, it is that he gets and does what he wants (eventually). And, you see within his books that his attitudes and values really come at us from within those pages. His stories, whether fantasy or sci-fi take place in some kind of dystopia and we see Richard’s protagonists standing up against a society that has wronged/shunned them in some way. The regular guy will always be the character that we connect with and the society will always be the oppressive, ridiculous, ignorant form that we recognise and compare to what is occurring in the world today.

In addition to the deep messages within Richard’s books are unforgettable characters, a charismatic whit and a darkness that makes the books feel very, very real. I think the reason Richard Morgan has done so well is the fluidness of the text, the ease that readers can connect, the realistic fight scenes and sex scenes and the un-compromised issues within his novels that can be likened to modern events.

The following interview was conducted between myself in Richard about a month ago, on the release of his new novel The Cold Commands. In addition to interviewing Richard, I was lucky enough to speak with him about his love of literature, rock climbing and of course his life at home. I have to say that Richard Morgan is one of the nicest, most interesting guys you can hope to meet and I have taken a lot of inspiration from his life story. I think that for writers, Richard’s story tells you that if you want to become a writer and are willing to work at it and keep writing, even when Mr X, Y and Z are ignoring your letters and calls or sending you rejection letters – it is doable. Keep writing, keep getting better and whatever you have to do in the meantime to get yourself by, don’t forget your dreams of writing.

To me, it isn’t luck as Richard suggests that enabled him to achieve his dream of becoming a professional writer, it was a burning desire to achieve a dream he had years before and a strong belief in himself to pursue it, when, in in all honesty, he could quite easily have taken a comfortable teaching position and said, as so many of us often do, “it was just a dream.”

1. The Steel Remains was a hugely popular book when it was released in 2008. It seems word of mouth has propelled it to an even wider audience. The thing is though, you are a science fiction writer! What tempted you to give fantasy a try and why do you think that the novel that you did it with has proven so popular?

Well, I think hugely popular is probably a bit generous – Steel sold, and continues to sell, around the same as my SF novels, but it certainly hasn’t hit the kind of numbers the real fantasy heavyweights’ shift. I did gain some new readers from the step across into the fantasy field, but equally I seem to have alienated some of my existing readership with the move as well, so – swings and roundabouts, really.

As to the move itself, it’s something I’d always had in mind. I grew up reading a lot of fantasy, mostly at the darker sword-and-sorcery end of the genre, and the first full-length novel I ever tried to write was a fantasy epic. And in the years since I got published, I’ve always talked a good fight in genre circles about importing a genuine noir sensibility into the fantasy landscape. So it just seemed like time to put my keyboard where my mouth was, and get on and do it.

But really, I tend to feel it’s been less of a big change than the genre border patrol would have you believe. To me, it feels like swapping out an instrument rather than a change in the music itself – piano instead of guitar for a change, tenor sax instead of trumpet, something like that. If you look at what I’m doing in Steel, you’ll see that my enduring concerns and themes have all transferred across pretty much intact. And I think perceptive readers picked up on that, so what they’d enjoyed about, say, the Kovacs books was still there for them in Ringil and his pals. At the same time, hopefully, I was providing a fresh riff on some old standbys of the genre for all those fantasy fans who’d never heard of me before – and with a few grumbling exceptions, that does seem to have been the way the book was received.

2. Ringil is one of the most unique characters I have come across in recent years. He is both gay and masculine. Now, I know that you get both gay and masculine people in real life, yet up until now, they have rarely been seen in literature. Could you give us some details on how you came up with the character of Ringil and how you chose him as protagonist?

Thank you for that – I like to feel he’s fairly unusual in literary terms as well, but I took a bit of a kicking from parts of the fantasy establishment on the subject; there was a lot of very defensive seen-it-all-before well-that’s-nothing-new recoil at the time. So it’s good to hear someone who thinks otherwise. *Big grin!*

As to how exactly it happened, that’s hard to say; again, contrary to some of the rather sulky oh-he’s-just-trying-to-shock critique the book got, the truth is that creating Ringil was a completely organic process. He cropped up in a short story I wrote back before I got published, which I called simply Hero (and which, with a few tweaks, ended up becoming the first chapter of The Steel Remains). I was interested (as I still am) in the huge disconnect between the imagery of war heroes in our popular fiction, and the reality of what usually happens to these men. So here I had this slowly softening no-longer-quite-young man with the big sword and the glorious past, living in dissolute and rather tawdry obscurity, and the line about shagging the stable-boys just kind of wrote itself (spurred on, perhaps by teenage memories of Rod Stewart’s The Killing of Georgie or maybe M. John Harrison’s (second version of) The Lamia and Lord Cromis).

The way I saw it, there had to be something unacceptable about Gil for him to have been driven to the margins this way, and in any pre-modern context, shagging the serving wenches just wouldn’t cut it – I mean, wenches are there to be used, right? It’s the sort of thing any real man would do, and get cheered on for. But swap the polarity on that, and suddenly you’ve got something; you’ve got reasons for alienation despite any nobility of birth, any prowess on the battlefield; you’ve got the outsider status you need for a noir take on the world. And once I had that vein exposed, I just went ahead and mined it for all it was worth.

2b. Within The Steel Remains, there are both deep expressions of lust towards males from males and male on male sex scenes. Without trying to be crude: As a heterosexual man; was it difficult to write the homosexual aspects of Ringil?

Well, it was work, certainly – the sex scenes in particular were a challenge; my books are known for their explicit approach to sex and I knew if I soft-pedalled here, now that I was dealing with gay instead of straight sex, I’d never hear the end of it (not least from my own writerly conscience). But in the end this is what I get paid for – using my imagination. So I just extrapolated from some fairly obvious shared factors, got it down on the page, revised, agonized, revised again, then sent the results to a gay friend and asked him for a response. His response was that this was quote pretty horny stuff unquote and a lot of people were going to wonder where in my psyche this was coming from! Result!!

3. Personally, I loved the Dwenda. Certainly, I get the feeling that there is more to them than we have seen so far. They seem to be a real mix of various fantasy type species with a little bit of science-fiction added in for good measure. We then have the Kiriath, who we do not yet know a huge amount about – but they seem pretty unique too. Could you share with us the reason you brought these races to your world? Additionally, do you think the fantasy genre has got too used to elves, dwarves and orcs?

Well – too used to the simplistic moral tones they represent, maybe. In fact, that mythical race dynamic is one of the things I’ve always liked about fantasy – it seems to draw on something very deep rooted in us; most cultures have these stories of a time when we shared the Earth with other human-like races, and I very much wanted to include something like that in my take on the genre. But at the same time I wanted a cocktail shaker re-mix of those more traditional elements. So sure, the dwenda pass more or less for elves – the name is taken from the Spanish for elf, duende – they’re full of unearthly light and magic. But they’re also very much hostile to human interests and rather than fading from the world in Tolkienesque melancholy, they had to be driven out in a war full of atrocity and betrayal, and are now intent on making a violent comeback. To the extent that there are any bad guys in these books, they’re it.

By the same token, the Kiriath are – sort of – the good guys, the elder race taking humanity under its more advanced wing, but rather than being old and wise and magically connected to the world, they’re a rag-tag bunch of engineers from someplace else, they’re a bit fucked up by the fallout from their own technology, and they’re marooned in this world more or less by accident. And even their avowed support for the human race is pretty Machiavellian – they’re a bit like some bunch of scumbag military advisers or mercenaries playing kingmaker in some third world backwater. And meantime there’s a kind of savage purity to the dwenda, an innocence almost, when faced with the grubby machinations of human beings. So pick the moral bones out of all that if you can!

4. The Cold Commands is being released in the UK and the US in October 2011. It’s been two years since The Steel Remains was first released, could you tell us a bit about the writing process of this book?

(Note: In regards to how much you already had planned, any difficulties, deadlines, touring, etc., etc.)

It’s been three years, in fact! Now, some of that delay can be laid at the door of my moonlighting in videogame territory; back in late 2008 I was invited by Electronic Arts to get involved with a number of game properties they were developing and that was too good an opportunity to pass up. I was lead writer for two titles (Crysis 2 and Syndicate), and a consultant on a couple more, and all of that ate into my writing time pretty savagely. But really that was a secondary issue.

The main problem for me was that when I wrapped up The Steel Remains, I’d barely given any thought to what was coming next. The original deal I had with Gollancz was that I would alternate fantasy and SF, so I already had the basis for an SF novel up on the blocks and didn’t expect to come back to Ringil, Egar and Archeth for at least another year. As a result, Steel was very much a standalone effort and the characters all ended up with their narrative arcs pretty solidly resolved. Then, when my editor asked me to do the whole fantasy trilogy in a straight run, I suddenly had to get those characters out of the pockets I’d knocked them so solidly into and back into play. And that took a bloody long time!

4b. I loved Crysis 2! I’m interested to know, how did the experience of writing for a video game differ to that of writing a novel? I would imagine it to be fairly different to the usual solitary writing experience?

Very much so, yes. As the story guy for a game, you’re just one part of a whole team of creatives so the whole thing is endlessly collaborative. And since game-building is an iterative process, there’s constant modification of content to add into the mix as well. But the work is also neatly chunked in a way that writing a novel isn’t. Writing tasks are small and specific – a twenty second cut scene in which x happens, five lines of in-game dialogue for marines under attack, a newscast covering some aspect of backstory; these needs arise and you deal with them and send them on down the line, usually in a couple of hours. There’s a brushed-hands job-done feel to that kind of work that you don’t get with something as monolithic as a novel.

5. What do we have to look forward to in The Cold Commands? Will it have a different feeling to book one? Certainly the magical aspect of the story began to pick up rapidly towards the end of the first novel.

Well, magic was always in the mix – for me, it’s part of the fun of writing fantasy. My enthusiasms are very much at the sword-and-sorcery end of the genre. So yeah, there’ll be plenty of that, though probably no more than was in Steel. Commands is about half again as long as Steel was, is perhaps more resolutely urban in setting, and ends with more narrative threads unresolved – I learnt my lesson last time around! – so is definitely less standalone; but aside from that, I think you’re getting pretty much the same kind of ride as last time.

6. A number of people in the blogosphere are wondering whether you are going to play about with us a bit and cross back and forth a bit between science fiction and fantasy throughout the series. I guess you will have to be careful what you say, so not to spoil things – but, do you think science fiction and fantasy can work in harmony? Should it be done more often?

In general terms, I can see absolutely no reason why not. A lot of the – nominally – fantasy novels I grew up reading were a mash up of elements from what is, for me, a pretty much illusory divide – and those books were in my opinion the stronger for that mingling. Think of Michael Moorcock’s High History of the Runestaff, or M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence.

Problem is, we seem to have become a bit OCD about genre in recent years, determined to nail down exactly which little box each novel or short story belongs in – almost as if we’re unable to enjoy a piece of fiction until we can be sure we’ve categorized it. But it seems to me this is anathema to what fantasy is about. What I’m enjoying about writing these books is the way I can put pretty much whatever I like on the page, and I don’t have to justify or explain it one way or the other. Are the Helmsmen really artificial intelligences or demons imprisoned in iron? I genuinely don’t know. I wrote them without worrying about such specifics; for me the main thing is that they’re a cool concept, fun to write, hopefully fun to read, and the frisson of maybe-maybe-not familiarity that travels up your spine is its own reward.

7. I believe it is seven published novels you stand at now? Two graphic novels and as you’ve also mentioned earlier, you have also worked on two video games. Having read your story and seen that you worked damned hard to get where you are – is the pressure off now or is it still there and perhaps even stronger now that you have a contract and stable of loyal fans? Is it the life you imagined?

The funny thing is that I never had a very clear sense of what life as a full time author would actually be like. I mean, as a teenager you have a sort of pipe dream image of it, I guess – the fame, the fortune, the hookers and coke. But once it becomes an actual goal, you tend to subsume any imagined life beyond in the sheer bloody-minded determination to attain the goal itself. Or at least I do.

As to whether the pressure is still on, I suppose it is in some ways. Each book is a fresh challenge, and I try to break new ground often enough that I don’t get stale. But if the question is whether life is still the fight it was when I was struggling to get published – well, clearly not! The life of a full time author is several orders of magnitude more relaxed and fulfilling than anything else I’ve ever done for work. Don’t let anyone sell you that line of shit about the tortured artist – that’s a disgusting depth of self-centred whingeing for anyone who makes a decent living from their writing; guys like me are lucky beyond reckoning – we work when and where we like, on projects of our own choosing, and in most cases under the very lightest of editorial constraint. We are free in a way that almost nobody working can be. Any author who doesn’t appreciate that needs to be parachuted right back into some kind of real world job so they can reacquaint themselves with the realities most people live with.

8. Everyone seems to be writing a novel these days. Generally the advice is ‘practice makes perfect’, but I’d like you to take us a little bit further than that general response if you could. If someone is doing the quantity aspect of writing, what piece of advice would you give them in order to enhance the quality aspect of their work?

I try not to give advice where writing is concerned – it took me fourteen years of trying before I got published and even then I was incredibly lucky; I’m certainly no kind of professional example to follow. I guess basically it’s just a case of paying attention – read widely, and not just in the areas of literature that most interest you; try to branch out. Look around at other writing and see what tricks are being used, what technique impresses you. Try to incorporate those into your evolving “voice”. The broader your intake, the better chance you’ve got of that voice being a distinctive one.

9. With The Cold Commands having literally just been released – what are you working on next?

The next Ringil book is already up on the blocks – working title The Dark Defiles. And I think anyone who’s read The Cold Commands will probably have a pretty clear idea of what to expect!

10. Judging by the amount of Richard Morgan fans we have on Fantasy-Faction, we can safely say that most people reading this interview have read The Steel Remains. Judging by the forums and Goodreads, a fair amount have also read or are reading The Cold Commands. So, I am going to ask you to help us fill up our reading lists a bit until The Dark Defiles. Can you give us six novels that we should read if we haven’t already? Two from each category if you please?

2 That have been released in the last two years:

Louise Welch – Naming the Bones: a dark academic detective story, steeped in horror and gloom and regret, and prose like red and black silk; quintessentially Glaswegian, and her best novel since The Cutting Room in 2003.

Ian Macdonald – The Dervish House: a brilliant evocation of next decade Istanbul (and I lived in that city for a year, so I can tell you he nailed the place absolutely), mingling ancient myth with future tech, and high speed political intrigue with finely etched characters worthy of a Booker prize. If there’s been any finer SF written in the last two years, I haven’t heard about it.

2 That are classics that fantasy/sci-fi fans should have read, but probably haven’t:

Thomas Pynchon – Vineland: never mind the carping criterati – this is Pynchon’s tightest, brightest work, and its SF pedigree shines through; this is what our genre should be aspiring to.

Poul Anderson – The Broken Sword: first published in 1954, the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring, and as far as I’m concerned the definitive Sword and Sorcery novel – Anderons’s vision is bleak and brutal and traces a direct line back to the Norse heritage he’s mining. Forget Tolkien, this is how elves were always meant to be.

2 That are unique in either their style, theme or plot:

James Ellroy – White Jazz: written as if by a man with only ten minutes left to live – headlong, staccato, utterly amoral, if there’s a prose equivalent of methamphetamine, then this is it. Welcome to a joyous, no-holds-barred demolition of all that old right wing bullshit about how the 50s in America were a golden age of prelapsarian innocence. Uh-uh, people. Although Ellroy went on to extend the same style to greater length in what is arguably his greatest work, American Tabloid, White Jazz was the testing bed and is altogether tighter and meaner. You have quite simply never read anything like it – it will blow you away.

Junot Diaz – The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: curious other-side-of-the-partition-wall experience for anyone who reads genre fiction; the story of a comics and SF geek and how his passions insulate him – for a time – from the burden of being a fat, shy Dominican immigrant in New Jersey; doubles also as a savage political critique of both Dominican history (and US intervention therein) and culture; a brave and passionate book out of deep literary leftfield (it won the Pulitzer prize), giving off the faint fireside glow of a genuine love for genre fiction.

11. I know that you are not a huge fan of the word genre. But, in regards to its future (that is how they stack it on the shelves). How do you think that fantasy will develop? I’d like to hear your thoughts on where you think the genre is going in the more distant future. How do you see fantasy changing over the next twenty-five years for example?

I’d hate to try and prophesy that far ahead, to be honest – the chances of being totally wrong are just too huge. But generally, I think what you’re going to see in the future is an ever increasing level of sub-categorization – epic fantasy, historical fantasy, dragon fiction, dark fantasy, paranormal romance, urban fantasy, literary weird etc. That on its own wouldn’t be such a bad thing – it does at least guarantee a healthy output for the genre – but with that is going to come, inevitably, that good old infantilizing principle of modern capitalism, where people are discouraged from making any kind of effort or stretching themselves in any way; and so instead of reading widely and exploratively, people will be encouraged to stay within the boundaries of the sub-genre they know and consume more and more of the same old thing – to gorge on it, in fact, and end up with their appetites blunted for anything different. And that’s a tendency we already have way too much of in SF and fantasy as it is.

On the plus side, I think the tumbling cost of CGI is going to mean that increasing numbers of previously impossible-to-film fantasy novels will make it onto our screens – expect to see a lot more along the lines of Game of Thrones and Solomon Kane (you’ll get the good with the bad?), and I suppose that ought to provide a much needed cross-media boost for prose fantasy. Above all, the huge growth of fantasy in other media like games, movies and TV is going to force a critical reconsideration of the genre as a whole – initial responses from the criterati to Game of Thrones on HBO have been a bit snide, but this is very much a last-stand dynamic. After all, a New York Times critic can get away with acting disdainful about one high production value fantasy TV series, but when they continue to act that way with every one of a growing flood of the type, they will end up of necessity reduced to a petulant little voice whingeing but I don’t LIKE this kind of thing, at which point the whole anti-genre knee jerk is revealed for what it truly is – basic unthinking chauvinism. And that’ll be a good thing!

12. Let us move forward to 50 years into the future. Richard Morgan is probably pretty tired now. He’s written a load of books, a ton of video games, climbed the highest mountains and is ready to put his pen down, sit back and reflect upon everything that he has done within the genre (and perhaps beyond it). What kind of things do you think/would you like to think people will be saying about you and your work by then?

Fifty years in the future, I suspect Richard Morgan is probably pretty dead, never mind tired! Somehow, I’ve never imagined myself as one of those spry, old ninety-somethings that go for a three mile walk at dawn every morning. But I suppose you never know, miracles of modern medical science and so forth.

As to how I’d like to be remembered, I think iconoclastic would be my top pick (closely followed by obscenely bestselling and wealthy?). I’d like to feel that my fiction always gave the malcontents among us somewhere to stand, and that it steadfastly refused to get with the post-Lucas bullshit mono-myth tendency that dominates so much of genre these days. I’d like it said that I wrote stories that faced and rubbed your nose in the unpalatable particulars of the human condition, rather than sprinting flat out away from said condition into some cosy wish fulfilment state of denial about how life is. I mean, look, I have no problem with Escapism per se – we all need to escape sometimes – but like any recreational drug, it requires judicious dilution and quality control. And I’d just like to feel that I was dealing a memorable, quality product that gave you the high without choking your system with shit.

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