Interviewing Gareth Hanrahan

Hellooo!

I recently reviewed the great and unusual epic fantasy novel The Sword Defiant by Gareth Hanrahan see https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2023/5/19/the-sword-defiant-by-gareth-hanrahan for more details. But it’s an inventive tale exploring what happens after the epic fantasy saga is over. I’m very keen to see how this series evolves but Gareth gave me some time to answer a few questions on the book and more.

Hey! Thanks for letting me do this.

This feels both a look at the past and the future of epic fantasy. What led you to the idea of exploring what happens after the epic ends?

Partly, it sort of fell out of the Tolkien line that inspired the book, talking about how if The Lord of the Rings was really an allegory for the war, then Barad-Dur would have been occupied instead of destroyed. I’ve always thought that was a fascinating setup – what’s it like to try to live an ordinary life in a haunted, monstrous fortress of doom?

But once you go past the obvious ending of ‘they did what they had set out to do and came home’ – the full circle of the hero’s journey – then you see that endings are really weird. They’re artificial, they’re editorial decisions. Real history rarely does endings – when did the Roman Empire, for example, actually end? You can pick a bunch of possible candidates, but even then, the notion of the Empire meant different things and survived in different ways.

Or, to take a more recent example that also played into the book – the infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner they hung on the USS Abraham Lincoln after the invasion of Iraq. Winning a war might not be easy, but it’s simpler and clearer than what comes after.

I’ve always felt that happily ever after is either a cheat or a curse. It either elides over complexity, saying “oh yeah, everything worked out fine there were no challenges don’t worry about it even though you’ve just read a whole epic story about how people overcome a different set of problems” or it’s a rather damning “and then they sat around waiting to die”.

So – what happens after the epic fantasy ends?

It’s not an original question by any means. The easiest answer – and one I flirt with, but tried to stay away from entirely going with – is the cynical grimdark one where things fall apart and the heroes are exposed as just as corrupt and self-serving as everyone else. (One of my writing rules was the original Nine heroes had to stay heroic in their own particular, uh, idioms sir? Yes, idioms.) And I also wanted to avoid doing a straight sequel where the same evil comes back again and they build another Death Star.

So, I ended up trying to build an epic fantasy out of the butchered carcass of Extruded Fantasy Product. I wanted to take all the generic-fantasy D&D-ish bits I loved as a teenage and look at them again from the perspective of a forty-something alleged grownup. (For another take on the whole thing, Kieron Gillen’s DIE).

What drew you to Alf and Olva as the two core characters?

Alf was the original main character (the original pitch, somewhat hilariously, was: “a shortish standalone, Agatha Christie in Barad-Dur). I’d already written a comedic short bit about a weary warrior who tries to go home and discovers he doesn’t fit there any more, so I took that sort of workaday adventurer and made him my protagonist. Alf’s sort of what you get when you’re 14 and you write “BOB THE FIGHTER” at the top of your character sheet and roll up a 1stlevel D&D character for a dungeon crawl – only the campaign takes off, it’s twenty years and twenty levels later, the campaign world has turned into this intricate tapestry of factions and cultures and histories and intrigues and wonders. And Bob – despite being laden down with treasures and titles, despite being a veritable giant who bestrides mountains and shapes the fate of empires – is still this sort of hollow cypher, this mostly-blank page compared to everyone around him.Everyone’s heard of him but he doesn’t know who he is.

Anyway, Orbit looked at the original short pitch and went “we like it, but can it be a trilogy and can you have another point of view character”. My first thought was to do a young farmboy, do the full circle thing – you’ve one idealistic young hero at the start of the adventure, and one burnt-out veteran at the end of the road. But it quickly became clear that it wasn’t working, and trying to change her into a girl didn’t work either. Then I thought about the people who don’t go on the quest, the people who stay behind, who don’t want to be heroes. Olva’s this overly protective mother whose son gets caught up in the quest, and she goes after him with the intention of fetching him home. Only it doesn’t quite end up the way she planned.

My thinking runs world-first; characters rarely exist for me without context.

Was creating an epic almost fantasy series length backstory for the world an interesting challenge?

Not creating an epic fantasy backstory was the challenge. I didn’t want the reader to feel like they had to know the historical adventures of the Nine to make sense of the story; I wanted them to feel like a dog-eared fat fantasy trilogy from the 80s that you read decades ago and only vaguely remember. Like, there was a cool bit with dragons, and this dungeon with loads of skeletons, and the sad bit where that knight dies. So, a lot of the work was filing details down, making things less important to the present-day plot.

Now, one of the themes is that things don’t end neatly, that stories might come to a conclusion but the world doesn’t, but I still had to resist the urge to make too much of that backstory relevant.

What three words would you use to describe the next book?

Oh. Hmm. That’s tricky. Rebellion, Regicide, Rhetoric?

What are some of your favourite fantasy series?

Lord of the Rings, obviously. The Ambergris & Bas-Lag books. Books of Babel. Mythago Wood Cycle. Death Gate. I’m sure I’m forgetting some.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

First on my plate is finishing off book three of LANDS OF THE FIRSTBORN (book two’s all done). I’m also still working on Book 4 of the BLACK IRON LEGACY, although I still don’t have publication details for that. On the roleplaying side of things, TALES FROM THE LONE-LANDS just came out for the One Ring roleplaying game, and there’s a bunch of stuff in the pipeline – DAGGER IN THE HEART for the Heart RPG, THE BORELLUSCONNECTION for Fall of Delta Green, THE PARAGON BLADE for Pelgrane’s One-2-One line (more sentient swords!).

Garhanrahan.com is the best starting point – I’ve got a newsletter and a twitter, but they’re both linked off there.

If there was one book, not your own that you wish you could get everyone else to read, what would it be and why?

Foucault’s Pendulum. Not only does it have things to say about belief, truth, history and writing, but if everyone read it I could make way more jokes about the Knights Templar and get fewer blank stares.