Interview with Richard Morgan . . . Posted 30 September, 2008

Richard Morgan is one of Britain's leading speculative fiction writers. He's penned five volumes of futuristic, razor-sharp, character-driven SF thrillers - Black Man, Market Forces, and the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies - and has in the process collected the Philip K. Dick and the Arthur C. Clarke awards. With a reputation firmly established in SF, he's now turned his attention to fantasy, with the recent release of The Steel Remains, the first volume of a trilogy centring around some rather atypical sword-and-sorcery protagonists. In early September, I spoke to Richard about his work, his worldview, and what we can expect to see from him next.

Your fantasy debut, The Steel Remains has been out for a month now. What's the reaction been so far?
Pretty good, really. I mean it's selling very well, though the only way I check on this stuff is to look at the Amazon listings and things like that. I think it's sold certainly as well or better than anything else I've written so far. And the reviews have been very positive, largely. There's been a little bit of queasiness about the gay sex, but generally speaking most people are taking that in their stride. And even a lot of the ones who haven't taken it in their stride are working very hard to pretend that they have. I guess we should be thankful for small mercies. It's not acceptable to be homophobic, and so even those people who are disquieted by the gay sex thing are looking for a way to cover for that. And so, for example, the word 'gratuitous' has been thrown around an awful lot. Which is kind of ironic, given that every book I've ever written has had explicit sex in it, it's just this is the first time it's been male-on-male.
I'm very happy. It's out there, it's selling well, most people seem to like it, and even the people who don't, it seems to have upset, and I would count that as a result.

I think it certainly provokes reactions, one way or the other.
That's what it's about. When you get the one-star rating review on Amazon, with someone spitting teeth, then you know you've done your job, you know you've hit them. It's when you get two-star reviews, or three-star reviews, they're the ones that really hurt.

How far along are you with the followup, The Cold Commands?
Not very far, to be honest. I'm working on it; it's coming along, it's taking shape, but ...
One of the things that's quite interesting from a personal point of view, and also from the point of view of someone observing its history, is the way in which everyone just assumes it's the first in a trilogy. (Which clearly it is, because I've contracted to write two more.) But also the sense in which it's the first in a trilogy and therefore all the loose ends that are not tied up in this book will get tied up in the other two books. And I don't work like that. That's very much not the way I put books together. The Kovacs books are a case in point there. They are effectively some kind of trilogy in the sense that they follow on from each other, and there is reference back and forth, but each book is a standalone. You would be able to pick up Broken Angels, say, and read it without ever having read Altered Carbon first. And that is really what I'm trying to do here as well. I hope that each of these books will work as a standalone novel. The problem is that the end of The Steel Remains was a wrap. I wasn't teasing things, you know, wait for Volume Two. I got the ending I wanted, and I got to the point where I thought, right, that's closure, that's where we leave these people. And now I have to crank back up, and find a new angle of entry and a whole new story. Which is proving tougher than I'd expected. So it's coming along, but slowly.

I was very impressed with The Steel Remains, but there was one abiding disappointment for me: that having hinted at a dragonslaying within Ringil's backstory, you don't actually deliver such an event within the book itself. Are readers going to get the Morgan treatment of this confrontation somewhere within the remaining two books of the trilogy? Or would that come under the heading of spoilers?
Ah, that would be telling. The thing is, I kind of threw it in the end. I find - not just with fantasy, it applies to everything I write - I find that very often you get much more impact from something being left slightly ambiguous than if you just go ahead and lock it in place. And I think that's especially true with backstory. I think that hints very often work better than facts because the reader's imagination then can take off in whatever direction suits them. I have had people come up to me, at conventions and book signings, and tell me something that they've gleaned from some detail I've left lying around about a character. Which can come as a complete surprise to me, but you can see how they got there. So you look at it, and you think, 'well, yeah, I never really thought about that. OK, fair point.'
The problem with the dragon was that I wanted the sense that, yeah, this happened, but it's kind of hazy what happened, because it appears that Egar and Ringil offed this dragon between them - that's what seems to have happened - but Egar comes out of it garlanded as the Dragonbane and Ringil, you know, is not. And you don't know whether that's because it's the old story of, well, you fuck one sheep, you know that one?

Yeah. (Unspoken: of course I've heard that one, I'm from New Zealand.)

So you don't know if it's the case of whether basically Egar got garlanded because he's the right shape for a dragonslayer, like, 'Oh, yeah, I can see this guy,' whereas Ringil disgraced himself in various other ways and therefore just wasn't up for the title. Or the fact that he wasn't interested, and that Egar took the title because that's the kind of man he is, and Ringil just couldn't give a shit. Or possibly that Ringil's part in the slaying was rather minor, and that Egar did the work. Or even the reverse, that actually it was Ringil who played the major part in it, and Egar was kind of helping out, and for whatever reasons Ringil said, 'you have it, it's yours.' All of that stuff is lying around out there, and the reader can interpret it as they see fit. And for me, that works much better than to say, OK, here's a flashback, here's the dragon, this is what happened. There's a certain amount of fun in writing the scene, maybe, but it doesn't have the matrix of potential impacts that come from just leaving the hints there.
That said, it's an area I will go back to, I will go and have a look at it in the other two books to some extent. But I'm really not sure myself what I'm going to do with that, because as I say it is very powerful as it stands and I don't want to spoil that. So whether we'll eventually get that flashback, whether we'll just get it talked about in conversations, or whether we'll have another dragonslaying, maybe with reference back, those are all possibilities. And to be quite honest at the moment, it's still up in the air.

Your books suggest that you value an upfront approach, and you don't exactly shy away from controversy; you went so far as to call your fifth book Black Man, which had to be toned down to Thirteen for American release.
Indeed.

How do you think US readers will cope with the graphic gay sexual component of The Steel Remains? And has that been the most talked-about aspect of the book, so far?
I think, generally people seem to have coped OK. Most people seem to have understood what I'm doing. In effect the reaction has generally been 'this is gritty and in-your-face, but there's a reason for that.' So I think in that sense the reaction has been strong but positive, if you like. People haven't failed to notice it, it's not something that gets passed by the way the heterosexual sex has tended it in my other books. It's very much been noted. But I think mostly it's been noted, if not in a positive fashion exactly, then at least in an accepted fashion. Whether that will be the case when we hit the US, I don't know. US culture famously has a much much bigger problem with homosexuality than European culture. So I don't know whether there's going to be more of a backlash, I honestly don't know. Again, looking at Amazon listings, it's been selling very well already, six months before release: it's bouncing up into the tens-of-thousands rankings. Which is something that my other books haven't done. I don't think these people can be unaware of the fact that there's a gay protagonist, because it's certainly been talked about enough.

And I think they'd certainly get that pretty quickly from reading it.
Yes, of course. Anyone who's read the first page. It's very clear.

By the way, what is it with British authors and middle initials? Richard Morgan, Richard K. Morgan - it's like Iain Banks all over again.
Or Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, Vonda M. McIntyre, Ursula K. LeGuin ... it's something about science fiction, I think.

Which version is the pseudonym?
It really was a pure accident. What happened was: I don't like my middle name very much, but I do quite like the initial K. And when I was picked up for publication I asked the publishers, said 'would it be OK if I'm Richard K. Morgan?' And they said yeah, no problem, in fact strong precedent. They were going to do it, and then what happened was the books were going to come out with this very strong logo-type cover. And they said 'the problem is that the K gets in the way, we can't fill up the cover of the book with Richard K. Morgan and the title, we can't have the floating K. So do you mind if we lose it?' And I said 'yeah, whatever, if you think it works better that way then let's dump it.' But in the meantime the Americans had not been apprised of that. They had taken on board my original request, and then ran with that. So the books came out in the US as Richard K. Morgan, and that's where I'm still known as Richard K. Morgan, whereas in the UK everybody knows me as Richard Morgan. And it's just set in stone now, nothing I can do about it.
Interestingly, in the US it's been quite handy because I think there are a couple of other Richard Morgans, one of whom I think is quite a senior politician and I've noticed that he's been getting a lot of press recently, so I think the 'K' maybe helps to differentiate from other people. Whereas in the UK as far as I know there isn't anyone else with the name, of note. But as I said, it's really a pure accident, and if either the British wanted to bring the K back in or the Americans wanted to scrub the K out, either way it wouldn't really bother me.

So what provoked you to start writing, and what keeps you going?
What provoked me to do it? I don't know.
It's one of those things, I've been doing it all my life. I can remember if I think back to being 10, 11 years old, I was quite interested in stories even then.
J. K. Rowling has this nice ... I saw her interviewed on TV a couple of years ago and they asked her a similar question, and she said 'I've wanted to be a writer ever since I've known there were such things as writers.' And I think that covers it for me. I think from the moment I knew that theoretically you could make a living from doing this, that was the only living I really wanted to make. I can remember a conversation with my school friends, when I'd say I couldn't have been older than 11, saying I'm going to write books when I'm older. So the software for that has always been in place, it just kept me going. And I'm very stubborn, so once I decide something, that's it. And fortunately, because it took me - if you allow that I started writing seriously around the time I was 18 or 19 - it took me a decade and a half to actually get published, and there were times when it seemed like maybe I was beating on the wrong door. But I think you've just got to stick with it.
As to what keeps me going? There's always now the added element that, obviously, this is how I pay the rent, so you've got to keep going. But also, it just is as long as you can stay fresh, as long as there's something interesting to explore, then you're fine, you just keep rolling.
I don't have any interest in turning into a series hack, it's one of the reasons I've abandoned the Kovacs books after the three volumes. I really didn't want to turn into this guy who's just basically churning out a Kovacs book every year, like Kovacs 9 which bears a striking resemblance to Kovacs 4. I don't know how those people manage, unless they have a very cold calculus of 'this is how I pay the rent, and this is what people like, so go to work, do the template.' Like Ikea furniture. It's like picking up another one of those.
For me that wouldn't work. If I wanted to take that approach to it, then I might as well go to work in a bank, or an insurance company, or get any kind of job that paid well.
So for me it's about reinvention, it's about constantly trying to do something a little bit fresh. Each of the Kovacs books is a little bit different from the previous one, Market Forces is obviously a departure from the whole Kovacs dynamic, Black Man again was an attempt to do something different. And now I'm thinking OK, let's go and play around in the fantasy field for a little while, see how that works. And again, trying to bring a personal flavour to the fantasy, try and bring something to it that I haven't seen an awful lot of lying around in other writers.

It's at this point where real-world considerations decide to cruelly interrupt the course of the interview. The cordless phone I've been using suddenly loses sufficient power to operate in speakerphone mode, and the connection drops out. It takes a couple of minutes to switch handsets, reconnect, and re-establish our place in the interview.

Where I start to fade I think is where I think shit, I'm going through the same old same old. I have a very low boredom threshold.

One of the things that strikes me about your writing is the background detail which you take care to build around your characters - they all seem to have a quite tangible, three-dimensional history, which gets teased out as the story progresses. Is this level of detail the reason why you focus on novels, rather than short fiction?
Very possibly. The truth of the matter is - and I'm not sure why it's the truth - I'm just a shit short story writer, I mean I'm really not good at it. That might be because my work tends to be character-driven. It might not, it might be that I'm a shit short story writer for some other reason, and by definition the long form tends to give me space to play with characters. I don't honestly know. It's not a conscious choice, I am just not very good at the short form.
As soon as I start writing anything, it sort of balloons out of control, and goes off into all sorts of directions I hadn't thought of before. I'm not very good at planning ahead of time.
As far as the characters are concerned, for me the characters are the lifeblood. If your characters work, then you can get away with absolutely anything, you really can. For me it's far more important the characters should be engaging than that there should be a strong narrative drive or a very clear three-act plot. And again it's been interesting, the reaction in the fantasy community to The Steel Remains, because it's not structured that much like your average fantasy novel in the sense that, well, in Hollywood parlance, it has a very, very short third act. It's the characters wandering about, really, and that's what it's about. And it's quite interesting that a portion of the readership and the review readership have seen this and have felt, or said, 'there's something missing here, because this bit isn't long enough.' Again, this idea that this is just a throat-clearing exercise before I really get on and write a really beefy volume two. And that's not the case. The book is built around the characters and the characters are what interests me. I designed the characters, and then you just follow the characters about. I had a vague sense of where we were going with the story, but it's only a very vague one, and it's really the characters defined what happened in that story.
It's a fun way to write, because in terms of creativity it does give you a lot of space. But also, I think, if you don't have anything with any kind of thematic content (and again I wouldn't know how to write something that doesn't have thematic content), if you've tied yourself to a very defined plot, and everything has to fit that, including the characters, then I think you lose the opportunity to explore. And if you on the other hand have just got the characters and you're trundling around with them, then you have much more opportunity to chase the things that interest you, to explore the dynamics and the things that have occurred to you, the variants within the book. And very often those arise as you're writing. There are parts with all of the books that I've written, elements that crop up, that weren't initially intended necessarily to have much significance, and just because of the way that the narrative develops they end up being more and more important. And again that for me is what does it, that's the kick, that creativity, the sense that you're growing something, rather than just hammering it out like an Ikea table. It is all about the characters for me, and looking back at my previous work I think that's probably always been true.

And where to you get this detail from? How do you research a society that doesn't exist yet?
That's a good question, isn't it?
I think that, as with most genres, I'm kind of lucky in that I've stood on the shoulders of, if not giants, then very large numbers of people also standing on each others' shoulders. The fantasy template, the sword-and-sorcery template, is tried and tested, it's lying around there. So in a sense all you've got to do is hotwire it and drive it away.
What occurred to me (and this had occurred to me before I wrote the book as well, when I was thinking about doing a fantasy novel), what occurred to me was the way in which an awful lot of fantasy - and I don't want to make one of these sweeping generalisations, but still - an awful lot of fantasy does set up what is very clearly a mediaeval or sometimes even pre-mediaeval society, and then makes these ridiculous leaps into 21st-century sensibility. So for me it was a case of taking the assumptions of your average sword and sorcery, or fantasy novel, and saying 'let's just be honest with ourselves about what these imply.' If you have a rigid stratified society, peasants and princes, it's going to be a shit-hole for 90% of its inhabitants. It'd be a horrible place to live. And by definition, the more rigid a society's stratification, the more opportunity there is for corruption, for abuse of power, for oppression. All this stuff, which again you could be forgiven, with a lot of fantasy novels, for thinking that there's no correlation there. The standard template for these novels is that the evils of oppression, the naughtiness comes from outside, the society itself is fine, it's ticking over nicely, everybody's happy, until the cloud appears on the horizon, and then something has to be done about it. And that, for me, is anathema. I think, if we've learnt anything in the 20th century, it's that we are our own enemy.
I came across an American humorist, paraphrasing I think General Macarthur - or one of the big American generals - who sent back a telegram from some battle saying 'We have seen the enemy, and he is ours'. An American humorist paraphrased this later, and said 'We have seen the enemy, and it is us.' Never truer words. I think if the 20th century has taught us anything, it's that. By and large we are our own worst enemies. Most of the evil that's done, we do ourselves rather than finding it out on the outside, and then fighting it.
I mean, look around globally at the moment, that is exactly the problem of the Bush era, you have the most powerful nation on Earth being run as if it were a little stockade somewhere, in a mediaeval setting. The evil is out there beyond the campfile and we have to go out there and fight it; rather than understanding that it's something intrinsic to the way human societies work.

Something intrinsic to the way in which telephone interviews work, at least for me, is that if technical problems occur, then they will most definitely be back. It's at this point that Handset Number Two drops out of speakerphone viability, and once reconnected with Richard, with no speakerphone capability, I'm reduced to conducting the remainder of the interview frantically scrawling down an extemporaneous précis of his answers to the final three questions. So the following responses are not truly Richard's words, although I have done my best, through checking with him, to ensure that they represent the essence of his answers.

I've read in an interview that Altered Carbon, your first novel, was informed by Blade Runner. And you obviously do have a keen visual sense, which comes across in your books. So how do you feel about Altered Carbon's translation to the big screen? And what involvement, if any, have you had with the film's development?
Blade Runner was certainly a massive influence. And I'd love to see Altered Carbon on the big screen, that would be so cool. This is mingled with trepidation about what it'd look like, but them's the breaks - you can't put 400 pages onscreen in two hours without cutting something, so by definition it'd be different. As long as they preserve the essence, I'd be happy.
There's several ways to look at it, as an author. Obviously there's the thrill of seeing your work onscreen. More cynically, there's the idea that the film would likely drive book sales. There's obviously a downside in the sense that the movie might be disappointing, but even that has its compensations - you'd hopefully have people discovering the book through the movie, then reading the book and saying 'this is so much better.'
Having said all that, it's still not a done deal. We're still waiting to see. It's been optioned, but whether that gets exercised is another matter. But if it does happen, I'm looking forward to it.

Your books are a real synthesis of intelligent worldbuilding and high-end action. There's obviously a lot of scope for this kind of mixture in SF and in fantasy, and in fact you've shown with your forays into comics and into fantasy that you're certainly not limited to the hard-edged SF category of the Takeshi Kovacs novels and Black Man. But are you drawn towards other styles of writing, other genres at all? I'm guessing probably not romance, but I could see you handling a classic noir detective story or two - sort of Altered Carbon without the SF content. Is this ever likely to happen?
I do sometimes think I'd like to one day write a genuine noir crime novel, something nailed down to now, something contemporary. In part, it'd be a useful move - crime is a larger pond than SF, and slightly larger too than fantasy I think - so the potential to sell more books would be there. But the thing is I'm not really feeling constricted by what I'm doing right now, I'm really enjoying it. There's a huge degree of freedom in SF and fantasy, whereas writing crime could be quite a constraining experience. I get turned off by the idea of having to do a lot of background research, maybe shadowing a Strathclyde police officer for six months or something - but I would feel obliged to do it, nonetheless, to get the detail right. SF and fantasy don't make those demands, they give you the chance to set up your own parameters, and then live or die by them, which suits my temperament much more. Yes, a contemporary crime novel is a certainly thought for the future that I've had, but the truth is I'm happy enough with what I'm doing right now, so the thought is vague at best.

Do you have a sense, yet, for the direction you'll take once you've finished the fantasy trilogy?
I think it'll be back to SF after the trilogy, probably in the same universe as Black Man. I've got a few ideas for that, it might end up being set on Mars. But the fantasy novels will currently take another couple of years, so what happens after that is not nailed down.
What I write tends to be influenced by where I've been, for example a lot of Black Man came out of a trip I did to Peru, to the altiplano. So, since I'm coming next year to Swancon, and spending I think it's six weeks in Australia, I might well get some inspiration from there.
But whatever I end up doing, it's good to be able to keep my options open. I really want to avoid the series hack thing.

Richard. Thanks very much for answering these questions, and especially for being understanding with the technical shortcomings on this end.
You're welcome. Thanks.

'The Steel Remains' (ISBN 978-057-507950-2), as well as all of Richard Morgan's SF books, are currently available from Gollancz. Three of his books (Altered Carbon, Black Man, and The Steel Remains) are reviewed on this site.