2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

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2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

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http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/news/r ... n-20120904


Interview: Kevin J. Anderson

By Phil Freeman · 09/02/2012 17:04 PM





Kevin J. Anderson is a well-known, best-selling science fiction, fantasy
and horror author who's published over 50 books, including novels set in
the Star Wars, Dune and X-Files universes, as well as numerous original
works. A lifelong Rush fan, he and drummer Neil Peart have been friends
for over two decades; they collaborated a few years ago on a short story,
"Drumbeats." So naturally, when it became apparent that the band's latest
album, Clockwork Angels, would not only be a concept album but would also
be adapted into a novel, Anderson was the author Peart chose.

We got Kevin J. Anderson on the phone from his home in Colorado to discuss
his friendship and collaboration with Neil on the book; how Rush's music has
inspired and impacted his fiction; and much more.




How much input did Neil Peart have into the Clockwork Angels novel? Did
you mail him chapters back and forth, or did you two come up with an
outline together and then you did everything else yourself?


Well, Neil approached me when he was just starting the concept for the
whole album. He was interested in steampunk and he had some scenes in
mind for things that later became songs. And I’ve written some of the
stuff—in fact, he had read some of my steampunk stuff way back in the
late '80s—and we were just talking about what the genre was like and
about some of his characters. He had made up the villain, and he had a
couple of great scenes. So we talked about some of the pieces of the
story, but this was just me chatting with him about a project he was
working on. And as the story developed more and more with him, he
started realizing how big it was. And he started thinking about putting
the whole story together and started imagining Broadway musicals and
ice skating shows and all kinds of things, and then he suggested a novel.

We were having lunch together in a café in Santa Monica, and he was
telling my wife and I all these plans that he had and he mentioned the novel
and my wife [author Rebecca Moesta] immediately said, “Well, who’s going
to write the novel?” and Neil stopped and looked at us and said, “Well,
Kevin, of course.” I was kind of hoping he would think of that as he was
putting the story together, but he was just developing the framework of
it. So from that point on, I was actively involved in working with him about
how the pieces of the story would come together, that the character had
to go through this and then the next thing and things had to get worse
before they could get better and how the story would resolve. So we were
plotting this from the very beginning. And one time—I live in Colorado, in
the Rocky Mountains—he came out and stayed with us for a day, in between
two Rush shows on the Time Machine tour. And we climbed a mountain that
day, a 14,000 foot peak near Denver, and the whole climb, we brainstormed
the character and the stories and how—'cause he had certain songs that he
had come up with, and the songs are like pieces in a slideshow, but without
the connecting stuff between. So we were thinking about motivations and
some themes to the novel, which all sounds like boring English-professor
stuff, but it really was talking about the story and the plot and what could
happen and who the bad guy was and whether the bad guy’s opponent was
actually the good guy or not. We’re talking about the Watchmaker and the
Anarchist, and I was not particularly convinced that the Watchmaker was
the good guy, either. I thought they were two extremes, and neither
extreme was the right way to go.




That’s the impression I came away with as well. If Owen Hardy is the hero,
he’s sort of being bounced around. Which brings me to something—there’s
a quote toward the end of the book, “the two men had caught him in their
own trap, played a tug of war with him. Because he was so innocent and
optimistic, they had fought over him, broken and humiliated him—all to
prove a point.” And that struck me as straight out of the Book of Job.


Exactly. Well, as we were developing this, Neil and I, all through this
process, were up to a dozen emails a day, just back and forth with ideas.
And Neil went off doing research into alchemical processes and symbols
and he’d come up with some really cool thing that he would send back to
me and I’d find a way to integrate it in. And as this was developing, the
caught between two forces aspect, I said “This guy is sounding like Job,
with God and Satan fighting over him,” and Neil I guess was only vaguely
familiar with the story, so he spent one Sunday reading the Book of Job,
and he wrote back and said, “God, that’s a terrible book!” I mean, I’ve got
a whole letter from him where he goes on and on about how awful this
thing is and the terrible stuff they do to some guy that they’re trying to
win over. Neil’s not the most fundamentalist religious person in the first
place, so it was me coming in with it. We both had [Voltaire's] Candide
[as inspiration] in the first place, in that we thought it was a picaresque
with this very optimistic young man sailing through adventures and being
tugged all over the place by forces. I have not read the John Barth stuff
[The Sot-Weed Factor], and Neil had not read the Job stuff, and so that’s
what a good collaboration is all about, that you’re both supposed to bring
new ingredients to the table. So we really interacted and mapped this story
together very well. But I’m the novelist, and I write from a detailed outline,
so I put together the detailed breakdown of the chapters.

Initially the plan was for one chapter to be one song, so that it would
nicely fit together, but it turned out that was a little too constraining, and
it turned out that some of the songs were relevant throughout the book
rather than just to one chapter, so I think we made the right compromise
in that we told the story that needed to be told, and it really follows the
arc of the album, but there’s a lot more in the novel, because there are
major parts in the album, like the song “Carnies,” where Owen gets the
detonator and the crowd’s rushing toward him and he’s trying to get away,
and then the next song is about the Seven Cities of Gold, so there’s this
giant connecting part of the story that doesn’t have any songs with it.
So we plotted it out, and then I went to town.

It was just flat out—I couldn’t stop writing it. It was just coming out of
me, and I was so in tune with it, and by this point Neil had sent me the
lyrics of all the songs back in January, but I hadn’t heard any of the music,
but I got rough tracks in February, and it wasn’t until then—I knew the story,
'cause we’d been talking about it, and I knew the lyrics, but it wasn’t until
I actually heard the songs themselves, with lyrics and music together, that
it was like a catalyst, a way to inject it into my brain, and I really got it, I
really understood all the details of it. So I wrote the novel really fast, and
was firing off chapters to Neil sometimes hours after I wrote them. I would
read it quickly, give it a very quick polish, and then shoot it off to Neil and
he’d be reacting to things and suggesting things all the way through. And
then we edited it together when it was done, and he would say things like
“I really feel we need to emphasize this part more,” or “We need to come
up with something else.” For example, it was rather late in the game when
Neil decided he wanted Owen to spend more time in Poseidon City, trying to
survive in the streets. So he came up with the character of Guerrero, the
Artful Dodger-type kid he falls in with, who’s stealing things…




And who has no counterpart in the album.

Right. And my reaction initially was “No, I don’t want to write a whole new
chapter and a whole new character,” and I whined a little bit, but then I
realized that really was a good addition, and I wrote all that stuff in like half
a day and sent it back to him. And he was amazed, having read it before and
after, how easily it fit right in. But to me, the best little suggestion, and this
shows you how we worked back and forth, is we had finished the second
draft, Owen was off doing his stuff, and Neil raised a question. He said, “So
Owen’s imagining that his mother didn’t really die in the fever, that she’s off
exploring things, but he really knows that she died.” And Neil wondered if we
should do a little more with that, resolve it somehow. And I wrote back, “Well,
she really is dead; I don’t want to make her magically appear somewhere.”
But then I thought, Wait, we’re talking about multiple parallel universes and
what’s to say she doesn’t exist and didn’t do that stuff in another universe.
And then I had the idea that he finds the story of her adventures in Pangloss’s
little library, where he buys books from other dimensions. And I think that’s one
of the coolest little jabs in the heart in the book, when he finds the book that
his “other mother” wrote. And after I’d written that scene and we went back
and forth, I thought, I love the opening line of the book, “The best place to
start an adventure is with a quiet, perfect life...and someone who realizes
that it can't possibly be enough.” So how about if Owen’s mother’s book opens
with that line as well? And we just did it back and forth and round robin, and
there are some bits in there that Neil wrote the text of—obviously, he wrote
the Watchmaker stuff, and the mechanical “percussor” robot that’s drumming,
that’s Neil’s stuff, because he knows the drums and I don’t. But to emphasize,
he really was fully involved in this. It wasn’t “Hi, I’m the famous drummer, you
write a book and I’ll put my name on it.” It was fully interactive from the beginning.





There are a bunch of nods to Rush in the book, whether it’s names of
things, or lines of dialogue, or just phrases in the text. I noticed a lot,
but do you remember exactly how many there are?


Oh, they’re all over in there. And it’s not just the earlier work—there should
be something from every album. I’ve lived with Rush for most of my life.
In a way, my entire career has been focused around Rush, because my
very first novel, Resurrection, Inc., was inspired by Grace Under Pressure.
And that’s how I got to know Neil. I can’t even count how many stories or
chapters or scenes in other novels have been inspired by Rush songs or Rush
albums. So I know these lyrics like they’re part of me, and as I was writing
they just kept popping into my mind, obvious places to slide things that I
knew from albums. But they were natural. I hope they don’t stick out like a
sore thumb. If you’re not super-familiar with Rush, you won’t notice that this
was an awkwardly inserted phrase to add a nod to a Rush lyric. So there’s
constant ones in there, even subtle ones that I don’t think people will spot,
like when the Watchmaker is fixing one of the mechanical parts of the Clockwork
Angels and he says “Animate,” there’s a Rush song called “Animate.” It’s just
a word, but I know I used that word because it was from Rush. This is a project
that I’ve been either unconsciously practicing for all my life, and just came out
in the right place. I’m not some writer who came in, listened to a couple of Rush
albums and wrote the book.





...
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
Omphalos
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Re: 2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

Post by Omphalos »

What steampunk stuff did Anderson write in the 80's? That's when the subgenre was developing. Is he trying to say he was in the wave front?
Something is about to happen, Hal. Something wonderful!

-James C. Harwood, Science Fiction Writer, Straight (March 5, 1956 - May 25, 2010)



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D Pope
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Re: 2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

Post by D Pope »

According to our bibliography d'KJA, he'd done nothing before 1988.
(Just a quick scan)
As an aside, I didn't know that steampunk existed until after The Difference Engine in 1990.

I guess it's possible he could refer to unpublished scribblings but more likely you're right.


.

Anthologies containing stories by Kevin J Anderson;

Full Spectrum (1988)
New Destinies, Vol. VIII (1989)


Short stories;
Reflections in a Magnetic Mirror (1988) (with Doug Beason)
Rest in Peace (1989)


Awards
Bram Stoker First Novel nominee (1989) : Resurrection, Inc.

Series
Game
1. Gamearth (1989)
2. Gameplay (1989)
3. Game's End (1990)

(I don't have any idea what this is)
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
Serkanner
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Re: 2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

Post by Serkanner »

In a letter to science fiction magazine Locus, printed in the April 1987 issue, Jeter wrote:

Dear Locus,

Enclosed is a copy of my 1979 novel Morlock Night; I'd appreciate your being so good as to route it Faren Miller, as it's a prime piece of evidence in the great debate as to who in "the Powers/Blaylock/Jeter fantasy triumvirate" was writing in the "gonzo-historical manner" first. Though of course, I did find her review in the March Locus to be quite flattering.
Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like 'steam-punks', perhaps.
—K.W. Jeter


source: Sheidlower, Jesse (March 9, 2005). "Science Fiction Citations". Retrieved May 10, 2008

PS: I have read the novel "Noir" by Jeter ... a brilliant novel in my opinion.
D Pope
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Re: 2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

Post by D Pope »

Omphalos wrote:What steampunk stuff did Anderson write in the 80's? That's when the subgenre was developing. Is he trying to say he was in the wave front?
14evin wrote:In Clockwork Angels and some of your books you've touched upon a steampunk motif. Can you explain that and why are you attracted to it?

I even had a steam-powered atomic bomb in my first fantasy trilogy. Of course, back in 1989 nobody called it "steampunk," I just thought it was cool.

and later;

I think if I only wrote one specific type of novel, I'd be easier to label and the publishers and booksellers might feel more comfortable, but fortunately I have a diverse and dedicated fan base that follows whatever I write.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-simo ... 08594.html
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
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D Pope
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Re: 2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

Post by D Pope »

But wait! There's More!
My steampunk historical novel, THE MARTIAN WAR, was just released by Titan Books.
http://kjablog.com/
When a brand knew urinal puck showed up in the bathroom of my studio, I knew what I had to do.
-AToE
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Re: 2Sept12 Roadrunner Records kja on Clockwork Angels

Post by Omphalos »

D Pope wrote:But wait! There's More!
My steampunk historical novel, THE MARTIAN WAR, was just released by Titan Books.
http://kjablog.com/
Pretty sure that book was published after I took up the jihad, sometime after 2005. I don't want to look though, because in the end, I care not.

IIRC his first "fantasy trilogy" was nothing other than a narrative report of some D&D campaign he did with his buddies.
Something is about to happen, Hal. Something wonderful!

-James C. Harwood, Science Fiction Writer, Straight (March 5, 1956 - May 25, 2010)



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