The Big 4 Interviews - Richard Harland
The Big 4 for Richard Harland
1. We love your latest brilliant offering, the steampunk novel Worldshaker! How did you first get into steampunk and what drew you to that genre?
I didn’t plan to write a steampunk novel, that’s for sure! When I had the ideas for Worldshaker, over 15 years ago, steampunk was only a small and little-noticed sub-genre of SF. My first idea was for a great gothic castle, but – since I couldn’t just imitate Mervyn Peake – I built my ‘castle’ out of metal and put it on rollers. From then on, the mechanical side got more and more important as I kept on developing the world and narrative. I couldn’t see any chance of getting the story published for a very long while, since no Australian publisher was looking at that kind of fantasy at the time. So I bided my time and kept on developing – and in the end, steampunk/Victorian fiction started to catch on. I started the actual writing of the novel 5 years ago, and now it’s come out right in the middle of a huge steampunk wave in the US, and an ever-spreading wave in Australia. I think it was the novel I always had in me to write. When I look back, steampunky elements keep creeping into many of my previous novels. The Vicar of Morbing Vyle and The Black Crusade are both set in Victorian-type worlds. There’s a metal world in The Dark Edge, industrial scenery in the Humen Camp episodes of the Ferren trilogy, and quirky bits of machinery in (again) the Ferren books and The Black Crusade.I’m just lucky that the world finally wanted to read what I most wanted to write.
By the by, I’m just one day off finishing Liberator, and I’m sure it’s even bigger and better than Worldshaker!
2. I’ve read that you have a fascination with maps. Can you tell us about your interest and how central maps are to your writing?
I draw up elaborate maps for my novels, but they often don’t make it into the printed book. They’re more for my own satisfaction. I like my worlds to be geographically correct and rich with detail, but the details often run off the page and outside the story.
3. If you could live in one of the imaginary realms you’ve created, for a day, which would you choose and why?
A lot of my worlds are great to inhabit in imagination, but I wouldn’t want to inhabit them in real life. There’s a fair bit of darkness in my novels, and the settings are often gloomy, oppressive, and claustrophobic. As in the case ofWorldshaker – I find the Below area fascinating because it is such an incredible hellhole, infinitely threatening and dangerous. I think the most attractive scenery I ever created was for Heaven in Ferren and the Angel. The imagery came from medieval paintings, where Heaven is shown as a walled city, kind of dreamy in the sunlight. Warm creamy-gold stones and pavings – I think the marble ballroom-floor look of Dubrovnik in Croatia came into it too. Not grandly magnificent, quite simple and homely, yet very very calm and peaceful.
4. You’ve written a lot of novels and short stories in your career. Which of your many characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?
Whoo! That’s a hard one! If I have to pick just one, I’ll say Mr Gibber, the mad schoolteacher in Worldshaker. Based on a real schoolteacher I used to know, he’s so extreme and bizarre, but not a caricature. Cringing yet bumptious, always performing, buttonholing people, grovelling and big-noting himself at the same time … I’ve said in my writing tips (atwww.writingtips.com.au) that a character needs to burn with an inner fire, and Mr Gibber lives up to that. He’s continued to grow and evolve in the sequel to Worldshaker, titled Liberator, and I suspect he’s inexhaustible. He’s certainly irrepressible!
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