This interview originally appeared at Black Gate Online.
The great thing about interviewing Howard Andrew Jones is that it is impossible to run out of interesting things to talk about. That’s because Howard has been busy. Busy writing stories, busy preserving the legacy of an unsung founder of historical adventure, busy editing Black Gate Magazine. And, oh yeah, busy writing and selling novels — his first two, the Dabir and Asim origin story The Desert of Souls, and Plague of Shadows for Paizo’s new Pathfinder fiction line, are both out now!
A Conversation with Howard Andrew Jones
Your Dabir and Asim stories are some of the most popular to be featured in Black Gate Magazine. For those readers perhaps still unfamiliar with them, what can one expect from a Dabir and Asim tale? More specifically, what is in store for readers that pick up Dabir’s and Asim’s first novel-length adventure, The Desert of Souls?
Mystery, adventure, swashbuckling swordplay, two brave friends standing against things man was not meant to know… to further sound like a radio announcer, there’s all this and more! I think my two favorite descriptions about their exploits come from John O’Neill and Kevin J. Anderson. O’Neill described their tales as “something like Sherlock Holmes crossed with the Arabian Nights, except Watson has a sword,” and Kevin J. Anderson wrote that the novel read “like a cross between Sindbad and Indiana Jones.” There’s a strong sense of the exotic, because I like to take readers to strange and colorful places, be it a haunted tower in the Baghdad night, or ancient ruins. I had a lot more room to spread out in the novel, so the readers are introduced to more figures from Dabir and Asim’s world, including the brilliant Sabirah, Dabir’s one true love, and the caliph himself.
What were origins of Dabir and Asim? Would you say developing them first as short story characters was an asset when it came time for the novel? Did you at all find yourself having to unlearn certain approaches to storytelling or characterization when it came to adapting them to a longer form?
I don’t know exactly where they came from, but I’m pretty sure they developed because I’d immersed myself in the historical fiction of Harold Lamb and Robert E. Howard. One day Asim was just… there, ready to start talking about his adventures with his friend Dabir. I could hear the tone of his voice long before I knew his full background. I wish I was always so fortunate with a character. As for the short stories, you bet those were helpful. With them I got to think about my characters and their interactions for years. I was effectively getting years of practice and background research out of the way, though I didn’t know it at the time. The novel was a new story, but it was about people I knew well because of the groundwork I’d already laid. There were a few things to unlearn, most notably Asim’s precise role. Earlier on he had always referred to Dabir as “master,” for I had first imagined Asim as Dabir’s servant, even though they relied upon one another to succeed. By the time I started work on their real origin story I realized that they saw each other as partners, not as employer and employee. If I should be so lucky as to have the earlier stories collected, I’ll have to make a few dialogue changes! Early on, too, I had set tales in a mythical corner of the caliphate, much like Clark Ashton Smith and others had done when inventing imaginary provinces of countries in historic times. When I wrote the novel I decided to dispense with that idea entirely and just keep the story in the real world. A real world with evil sorcerers and djinn, of course.
I’m glad you mentioned that, because I thought I noticed a shift towards a more specifically historical context with The Desert of Souls — you always did have the great texture of pre-Medieval Near Eastern culture in the Dabir and Asim stories, and a fair touch of the legendary and mythic traditions of those times, but the novel really roots them in a time and place. Did you do much in the way of deliberate research for the period? Would you say the ‘historical fantasy’ approach is more difficult to pull off than one unattached to real world chronology or geography?
If you’re serious about what you’re doing, both approaches have real challenges. I find that inventing details that feel realistic is similar to researching to learn what the historic details were, although you’ll be called out on different kind of mistakes — internal inconsistency or lack of creativity, amongst other issues, when you’re inventing, and failure to adequately research when you’re working with real history. I do my best, but I would like to do better, which will entail the study of Arabic and Persian so I can get to original sources. I got serious about researching once my characters started talking to me, but even with some great texts on hand it took me years to feel comfortable with the era, and I’m still uncovering information I didn’t know, or that I missed the first time. I suppose that when you create it yourself you are automatically connected to the setting, but fashioning a rich invented world can take just as long as knowing an unfamiliar part of the real one.
Do you think that you’ll always see your fiction through the lens of fantasy? Many historical writers tend to specialize only in historical fiction, whereas it seems a lot of fantasy writers feel free to move between pure secondary world creation and stories that take place in the real world to a greater or lesser degree. Would you try your hand at straight historical fiction one day?
I wouldn’t rule it out, but the only straight-up historicals I’ve ever contemplated were some Cossack stories that could be inserted into one of Harold Lamb’s historical fiction cycles. They would be pure pastiche, and mostly just to amuse and challenge myself. I doubt that I’ll ever get to them, because I haven’t yet found enough time to get to all of my own stories.
I’m a big student of ancient history and know far more than I should about certain periods, for instance, the Second Punic War, but I think of myself as a fantasy writer. Almost all of the other story cycles and novel series ideas on my back burner are 2nd world fantasies. One of them is informed by the life of Hannibal of Carthage, and others are influenced by other periods, but the worlds are imaginary.
It does seem as if a love of, and familiarity with, history is something most fantasy writers share — especially those renowned for their world-building skills. What would you say is the effect history has on the imagination that makes it such a potent influence on fantasy fiction and those who write it?
When you come right down to it, history is the story of people and societies, and as such can serve as a great source of inspiration and information. If you’re writing a fantasy novel and are looking for tips on how a society could be constructed, I think a wise first stop is to read some good history books. Too often, history is presented to young people as dull lists and worksheets and watered down paragraphs so bereft of detail that nothing interesting really seems to have taken place. I credit a lot of my own interest in history to two great history teachers, William Johnston in my 7th and 8th grade year and Herman Fanning my sophomore year in high school. They both brought history to life for me by going beyond the text books to talk about the stories behind the scenes, and providing more details about the people involved. I came very close to majoring in history in college because of those two men. I think if more teachers were like them, I would run into more people who loved history.
All this talk about historical fiction naturally brings us around to Harold Lamb. When and where did you first encounter his work?
I first found him as a high school sophomore. I had to write a short history paper on a famous historical figure, and I happened to find Lamb’s biography of Hannibal on the library shelves. I loved that book. I had reread books in the past, but they were always novels or short story collections. Hannibal was the first non-fiction text I revisited again and again. Lamb presented what was almost a Shakespearean drama about a man blessed by the gods with brilliance and charisma, doomed never to achieve the one thing he truly fought for, which was the preservation of his homeland, the citystate of Carthage. A military genius, Hannibal won battles employing tactics that are still studied today, but no matter how clever he was, he could not win the war. He had luck in abundance, but it was almost a curse, for while he continued to survive, all those closest to him fell. When he returned home to Carthage after the war, he turned his intellect to reforming the state. He eliminated graft and corruption, and overhauled the elective system so that senators, appointed to lifetime power, had to be elected every two years by the people. Though beloved by the commoners, his sweeping changes drew only ire from the ruling elite, who lied to Rome, saying Hannibal was still plotting against them. He had to flee his city and wander for the rest of his life, taking employment with more and more distant places as a military adviser while the Romans expanded their holdings. Hunted to the end by Rome, he finally died by his own hand rather than permitting them to capture him alive.
It certainly wasn’t an uplifting tale, but it was a story about a man of integrity and honor who strove the whole of his life for what he believed in, and I deeply admired him for that, as well as his inspiring leadership and military brilliance. Those few surviving personal anecdotes about him revealed a dry, modern sense of humor. Lamb’s presentation of the information made a lifelong Hannibal fan of me (I don’t mention this in casual conversation anymore, as I have grown tired of having to say NOT Hannibal Lecter). I was old enough to understand part of the reason I loved the book was because of the writing, so I looked up other books by Harold Lamb and discovered the first collection of Khlit the Cossack stories. That was the most exciting fiction I’d read since Fritz Leiber’s tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and I recognized that I’d found a gifted author.
From fan to editor — how did you make the transition from admiring Lamb to actively working to preserve his legacy? The eight volumes of collected shorts from Bison Books must have been a great deal of work — did you realize what a huge undertaking it would be when you started?
When I started I had no idea that there would even be an undertaking. I was just curious about all the stories he’d written that hadn’t ever been reprinted. There were a lot of them. One day while hunting used book search sites I saw two titles offered by the same seller. At that point I knew what all the names of Lamb’s published books were, yet these were unknown to me. I looked into the matter and discovered that these were some complete stories removed from pulp magazines and sewn into hardback covers by the late Dr. John Drury Clark for his personal reading. He had a box full of additional unreprinted Lamb stories, unbound, that Dr. Clark’s widow hadn’t put on the market because, she said, they were in pretty bad shape, though intact. I bought them, and as a result soon owned the bulk of Lamb’s uncollected fiction. It truly was like a treasure trove to me.
What a joy reading those stories proved to be; I savored every moment. I’ve talked elsewhere about the expectation that uncollected works are usually lesser stories — forgettable or early stuff — and how these grand novels, novellas, and short stories within defied that common wisdom. Unfortunately, they were all on dry, flaking pulp paper, and I decided that if I really wanted to preserve these, I’d best scan them, because some were disintegrating every time I turned a page. Those in the worst shape had letters and entire words dropping off from the margins.
That’s how it started. I bought a scanner and optical character recognition software and started preparing the manuscripts in worst shape first. What can I say? It took years, for the OCR process was time consuming, though far faster than typing the texts. I continued to track down other rare stories, assisted by family and friends in my search, and eventually found all of Lamb’s work for Adventure, where he did almost all of his best work. I got to exchanging notes with other Lamb fans, and we daydreamed about how great it would be to have these old texts between covers, and to have the serial stories collected in order, and by and by I started approaching publishers about reprinting the work. Because I’d been a professional editor for many years at that point, it wasn’t that intimidating to talk to another editor on the other end of the phone. What I didn’t know was that even though I’d already put in years and years of work that it would take years more! But the result was worth it, and a lot of good people helped me make it happen. Lamb’s work is too good to be forgotten, and it is my fondest wish that it not only stays in print, but that it will be rediscovered and enjoyed by a widening circle of readers.
It was most definitely worth it, and I share your hope that Lamb’s fiction will enjoy a justly-deserved renaissance. For anyone unfamiliar with Lamb’s extraordinary output, where would you recommend they start?
Readers who don’t know his work seem most responsive when they start with Swords from the West. It’s a fantastic collection of Crusader stories, showing the fall of kingdoms and the dooms of men, desperate battles and brave comrades, shrewd maids and scheming nobles. If you’re already a fan of the Conan stories and Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar cycle, or love heroic fiction short stories in general, you might start with Wolf of the Steppes, the first of four books collecting the ongoing stories of Lamb’s Cossack adventurers. They’re from earlier in Lamb’s career, but Lamb was so accomplished that after the first short tales in Wolf, Lamb hit his stride and drafted some truly fantastic adventures, sending his character into lost cities, forbidden temples, and some of the most desolate and fascinating places on earth. I fell in love with his fiction because of these tales, and I love them still.
What would you say are the things you’ve learned from Lamb, as an author?
I’m still learning! I certainly try to emulate a command of the historical period I’m writing about, as he did, but I can’t help feeling that I’m building with smoke and mirrors while he was fashioning real structures. The man spoke at least a half dozen languages! I love how he never bothered taking you anywhere that wasn’t interesting to see, and the way he would place his characters in situations that required great cleverness to survive. I have to say that, much as I love rogues and “gray” characters like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, I also love the honor of Lamb’s heroes, most of whom would rather die than break their word or betray their convictions. I think those kind of protagonists have become unseasonably out of favor, and their outlooks mocked for being naïve or unrealistic, but I honestly wish that we saw more characters like them. Lamb was ahead of his time in understanding that good or evil didn’t reside only with people across the border, or folk with different religion. In Lamb’s writing, your most loyal friend might be someone who would have been a natural enemy. He wrote with, as John Miller said, “an honest multiculturalism.” Lamb’s women might not usually have been warriors, but they were vitally intelligent and shapers of events very different from female characters in the work of his contemporaries. I could go on and on about what’s great about Lamb. I guess you could say that I strive to follow his lead on all of these things. Most certainly I admire his skill at plotting. Things click together like puzzle pieces assembled by a master craftsman, but his plots aren’t usually predictable; events in the stories rise from the collision of motivations between characters. That’s certainly something I strive to achieve with my own fiction.
We’ve talked about historical fiction and historical fantasy, but you also have a history with gaming. Tell us a bit about your new Pathfinder novel, Plague of Shadows.
James Sutter, the editor of the Pathfinder line, is pretty selective about what he buys, so when I was invited to submit ideas I had to throw several his way before one finally took. I think the line in the pitch that hooked him was “Jirel of Joiry crossed with Unforgiven.” I made it clear that I wasn’t going to lift the plot or character, but that I was going to strive for a similar feel. As for the subject matter, I think that James described it pretty well in a blurb he posted recently: “It revolves around the exploits of not one but two bands of adventurers journeying in eastern Avistan, two decades apart. The parties are connected by Elyana, an elf seeking to cure her former adventuring partner (and former lover) Stelan from a curse that’s connected to events — and people — from their shadowy past. Elyana’s journey will take her and her companions from Taldor to Galt, into Kyonin and to the Vale of Shadows, where the consequences of events decades before will affect Stelan’s future.”
I wanted a story that started out with a linear feel so that it could move forward with momentum, then added complications as the adventure got under way. I think there are some nice character moments and well-motivated, though unexpected, plot turns. Personality wise Elyana didn’t end up being a Jirel of Joiry knock-off, although she’s definitely a kick butt protagonist, so she has that in common with the famous character. She’s also seasoned and clever, and she’s relentless — she simply never gives up. I had a lot of fun writing her.
How much did you know about the Pathfinder world before you began work on the novel? What would you say are the differences between developing a fantasy completely on your own, versus working in a world with a great deal of background already filled in.
I’d been doing some reading about Golarion for a review I was working on for Black Gate, and I’d been reading Paizo products for other reviews for years, so it wasn’t completely unfamiliar territory. But reading to get a sense of the place and reading to FIND a place to set the scenes proved to be two different things.
Working in a setting devised by someone else is a little like researching for historical fiction except that you can consult the creators yourself. There was also a great deal of freedom to improvise, with the caveat that everything still had to be approved by said creators. While there were certainly a lot of detailed spaces, there were empty spots on the map, and I was allowed a great deal of freedom to drop things in there and add information to the cultures in question.
And not just writing in another world, but writing in a world that is actually used by thousands of people to experience their own adventures. How do you make sure you’ve satisfied the demands and expectations of this very specific audience? Were there things you had to do differently for your Pathfinder story versus your Dabir and Asim novel?
On some levels writing adventure fiction is the same, whether it is for a game or not. You have to tell a compelling story that features interesting characters. Writing deals in a lot of archetypes, and fantasy gaming fiction tends to wear those archetypes proudly on its sleeves — the elven archer, the surly half-orc, the mysterious wizard. I embraced those archetypes and tweaked them, as any gamer would when designing a character for play. I thought about who the characters were and planned out scenes that would put them in conflict with each other so I could get a better handle on who they were and what was important to them.
Where the creation process began to differ from preparing for a Dabir and Asim novel was when I statted out my main characters. I’ve never done that for my fiction before. I didn’t use any kind of point buy system to create the characters for Plague of Shadows; I just figured this character would be at about this level with these attributes so that she could do these kinds of things, and this magic user would have to be at THIS level to throw THAT spell. I kept the rule book handy so that my spell descriptions would match, as closely as possible, what the Paizo maestros had created (and I have to say that a lot of those spell write-ups in the core rulebook are pretty spiffy).
I tried to keep all that background stuff incidental to telling the tale, though. There’s a great story about Gene Roddenberry explaining to the Star Trek writers in the original series that when a policeman picks up a gun he doesn’t stop to lecture about chambering a round or the chemicals or the speed of propulsion — he just uses it. In the original Star Trek, that was the approach to the use of technology — it’s virtually info dump free. If Kirk needs to use a communicator or a phaser, he just uses it, and the viewer infers what the item is for. That’s how I wanted the system specific stuff to turn out in Plague of Shadows. The story worked with the rules, but the rules wouldn’t be forefront. I didn’t refer to any spells by name, and people certainly didn’t talk about levels or hit points, but the actions matched up with what was possible with the rules if anyone wanted to peer behind the curtain. I tried keeping to existing monsters, too, although Paizo didn’t mind me slipping in a few critters of my own invention. They were also a big help in coming up with a few fixes and suggesting alternatives when what I’d described was too powerful, or not powerful enough.
I suppose the final important difference is one of tone. The stories of Dabir and Asim are first person and are meant to evoke an older storytelling tradition. Asim’s narration is formal and sometimes ornate (which, hopefully, is different than wordy — so far no one’s ever complained that my pacing is slow). Plague of Shadows is third person limited, and is written mostly from the viewpoint of Elyana, who tends to speak succinctly. She might be an elf with a bow, but she’s sort of a haunted, damaged noir heroine. I think she sounds quite different from the stalwart Asim.
Actual experience as a gamer is clearly a huge asset when trying to connect to a game-playing audience. But looking at your gaming history in a broader sense, how would you say that it has influenced the writer you’ve become?
It’s been a huge influence. I hope soon to sit down with some fantasy writers online at Black Gate for a round table on just how much so many of us were influenced by gaming. I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by my friend Sean Connelly back when I was 8 or 9. I’ve been gaming with one system or another pretty much ever since. That was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the early/mid 70s. Later I moved on to play systems with skills — like Star Trek and Traveller, and The Morrow Project, and Dragonquest. I’ve played a wide number of games over the years, usually, but not always, as the game master. Most recently my own group has played using the diceless Amber system, the Talislanta 4th edition, a homebrew percentile system, and in the last year, Pathfinder.
I’ve played some games where a good game master is really just a referee overseeing that the tactical combat goes well, which can be a lot of fun, but I’ve always preferred the games I’m playing to have a story. For all intents and purposes the game master becomes the story master and the rest of the players improvisational verbal actors who have the power to change the course of scene and plot. For those sorts of sessions to work properly, the game master needs to have a feel for story structure and a notion of character, or to develop such things. I am absolutely certain that game mastering has been great for honing my own storytelling skills.
I credit much more to my role-playing experience — sometimes while running a game I’ve developed ideas on the fly that I later used in my fiction, or tried out a story concept on my players before working it into my writing. One of the key conceits of The Desert of Souls was first tested out in a role-playing campaign I ran. And then the importance of role-playing as a gateway to imagination cannot be overlooked. Paizo’s Erik Mona has written at length about the list of recommended reading at the back of the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. This was Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, and for me and a whole slew of kids my age, it was one of the first codified lists of fantasy genre books we’d ever seen. I remember taking that list to the library and using it to search for books by Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny and Leigh Brackett — it was a great introduction to heroic fiction.
I remember that appendix! It was my introduction as well to so many of the great names of classic adventure fantasy. Now here we are some thirty years after that reading list was made, and fantasy fiction has absolutely exploded. Since it’s such a broad topic, and since Black Gate focuses on shorter works, I’d like to know in particular your thoughts on the trends in today’s world of sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy short fiction.
Just a few short years ago I had my finger on the pulse of sword-and-sorcery short fiction but I’ve been so busy lately that I’m not as in touch any more. I’m hearing good things about authors in anthologies from Rogue Blades Entertainment, as well as authors who’ve been printed in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, but I’ve only been able to peek in occasionally. So I’m no expert on current trends. I certainly like what I’m seeing in Black Gate. Many signs seem to be pointing toward a sword-and-sorcery renaissance, and I’m delighted that my fiction is seeing print while its getting underway.
It does indeed seem like an exciting time for sword & sorcery. To close out our interview, could you tell us a bit about what you are working on now? What’s next for Howard Andrew Jones?
I’m hard at work on the sequel to The Desert of Souls, currently titled The Bones of the Old Ones. Like Desert, it’s a standalone. I hope to turn in a draft to Thomas Dunne Books in just a few more weeks and then the revision process will begin in earnest. I’ve been jotting notes down for a third Dabir and Asim novel, and I’m looking forward to outlining it in full and throwing myself at some research. This week the first of four parts of a prequel story to Plague of Shadows is appearing on the Paizo Pathfinder web site, and I’m slated to turn over an essay to the indefatigable Jason Waltz for a new heroic fiction writing anthology.
Aside from these projects, I haven’t decided what’s next. I do have some short stories coming up in Black Gate, and I have a number of additional series ideas. I’m not sure if I want to move toward writing a book a year, or try to write two, each one in a different series, as my good friend E.E. Knight has managed. It will all depend, of course, on whether these first books sell.
I feel like we could continue this conversation indefinitely, but maybe I should let you get back to work! Thanks for the fantastic interview, Howard.
Thank you, Bill.
