Making Something Out of "The Prince of Nothing"

R. Scott Bakker chats with SFF World about The Darkness That Comes Before, the first volume in his new fantasy series, "The Prince of Nothing."

When you build a world, what you’re doing, it seems to me, is taking a lifetime of shared cultural and historical associations and sculpting them into different shapes. When writing contemporary fiction, you simply say ‘New York’ and all the associations come ready made. But when you say, ‘Carythusal’ or ‘Nenciphon,’ the words are meaningless. The fantasy author really has one of the most difficult jobs in fiction: he or she has to make the meaningless deep with meaning --the more authentic the better, as far as I’m concerned. This is one of the things, I think, that makes Tolkien such a genius.

Some fantasy authors, Guy Kay comes to mind here, take things ‘ready-made’ from that quarry of shared associations. The advantage is that much of the work is already accomplished: once the reader realizes that Sarantium is an alternate Constantinople, the associational image is immediate and clear. Others mine the collective quarry in a more eclectic, fragmentary, or mysterious fashion--here the work can be more difficult, since nothing comes ready-made. Because my interest lies in exploring and extending the conventions of Tolkienesque epic fantasy, I followed his ‘middle approach,’ making use of fragmentary but still extensive parallels, drawing primarily on the Hellenistic Mediterranean, which I find so interesting because of its inclusion of the far more ancient contexts of Egyptian and Sumerian societies. I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.

There's a lot of other great earned wisdom about storytelling and getting through the years before acceptance and publication in the interview, as well as some thoughtful reflections on science fiction and fantasy, so do make your way through all the pages.