You seem to want to write your own Wheel of Time with The Way of Kings , first book of The Stormlight Archive—a series which should consist of ten books. Could you tell us more about it?
I can. You don’t grow up reading Robert Jordan and Melanie Rawn and all of these people who’ve done large epic series without wanting to do one yourself. I started planning a large epic of my own many years ago, and finding a publisher and convincing them to take a chance on me is very difficult: the longer your book is, the more ambitious, the more hesitant they are—and rightly so, because that can fail. You know, the high opportunity for success also generally means great opportunity for failure. And so this was a book I actually sent to Tor, and they said: “This isn’t the right time for this, it’s not the right time in your career for this”, which was okay. So it’s been brewing for a long time; it’s dealing with a lot of themes and concepts that I wanted to deal with for a long time.
And again it comes back to me trying to look at where fantasy can go, not where it’s been. A lot of fantasy seems to be very static: the technology doesn’t change, the world doesn’t change. It’s been thousands of years in these fantasy worlds, and there’s been no evolution of culture, or technology or anything like this: it’s always been that way, and it will always remain that way—which bothers me a lot. It’s not realistic, but it also does not give a lot of opportunity for conflict and change and the exploration of that sort of thing.
The Way of Kings is many things: it’s about the dawning of essentially an era of Renaissance, a magical Renaissance, exploration of what magic can do, and the conflicts of magic and technology. But that is actually kind of the background of the series, and in the first book it’s much more personal. It’s about a young man who was trained as a surgeon by his father, who gets recruited against his will, essentially, into a terrible war. And it’s about the conflict between having been taught to heal and then being trained to kill. And what does that do to a person? How do you protect, who can you protect, and who can you heal, when your entire life is about fighting for your life or killing other people? And that really drives him. It’s also a story about a young woman who is based a little bit on a mix between Darwin and Pliny the Elder, a natural historian who’s kind of at the advent of this Renaissance, this beginning of a magical technology revolution, and her life and experience. It’s both of those characters: it’s about the characters.
It’s so hard to explain a book this large, because if I start talking about the large-scale concepts, those don’t even appear in the first book; they’re just hinted at.
But one of the other things about The Way of Kings that I like to talk about is that I want to see, again, where the genre can go, and I’ve been pushing for a lot more art. Scott Westerfeld did a very interesting book that included a lot of art recently; it’s kind of a half-graphic novel. I wanted, with Way of Kings , to do something like that. If you read Tolkien: Tolkien had a map, and this map had a purpose. If you looked in the book it was a map that the characters actually carried; it was part of the world. And the map has actually, for a fantasy novel, become something of a cliché: you open it up, there’s a map, okay. But I don’t like that because it’s just there: where did this map come from, what does it represent? I want everything to be a piece of the story.
So I wanted to include a lot of art that was pieces of the story: sketchbooks from one of the characters’ notebooks, illuminated manuscript pages from a manuscript they’re reading—these sorts of things, so when you read you can see their culture in the art. I’ve been very excited about it.
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