Bite Sized Daniel Polansky

Daniel Polansky was our guest blogger yesterday but we managed to get our hands on this exclusive quick bite sized Q&A. There will be a fuller interview over in the main website in the next few days.

What is the difference between Low Town and Baltimore?

Fewer swords.

Pixie’s Breath, Choke or Wyrm: which would you recommend?

Depends on what you're holding.

Why winter? Is it a mood thing ...?

It's meant to evoke a certain atmosphere, sure.

How do you view the marriage of classic crime and high fantasy - and was it easy to pull off?

I felt like a lot of what is great about well done in crime novels, in terms of a fast pacing and realistic motivations, could be effectively introduced into a high fantasy mold. As far as the degree to which I did it successfully, I'll leave that to the reader to decide.

You have traveled a lot - do any of the strange places you have visited find their place in SRC?

In a sort of oblique way, I suppose. I've spent a lot of time in different cities, from Washington D.C. to Belgrade to Delhi, so that gets you thinking about the way these places are set up, and how an imaginary metropolis might behave. And sometimes you meet somebody or see some particular sight that you can wholesale thieve from reality and write up in your book. That's a lot of fun.

Do the names of places and things in the book come to you as you write about them, or do they come in the middle of the night, or whenever it is that you dream?

Getting a decent naming convention down is one of the more difficult parts of writing speculative fiction, and one I've struggled with. Sometimes things just come naturally, but usually it requires research and contemplation.

Your literary heroes, please, authors and characters

Heroes is kind of a loaded word. Obviously the archetypal noir hero as exemplified by Dashiel Hammet's continental op and Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe were a big influence on the Warden. In terms of authors that I've strongly connected with, really the list could run on -- everyone from Rudyard Kipling to Hannah Arendt to John Keegan to V.S. Naipaul.

Should the book be made into a film - who would you have direct it?

What is John Ford doing these days?

What would be on the accompanying soundtrack to Straight Razor Cure?

Ghostface Killah, Johnny Cash, and of course, J Dilla.

Who are your sci/fi and fantasy influences?

I'm sort of bearish about a lot of high fantasy. Like the rest of the planet, I love George R.R. Martin. I think Gene Wolfe has written some real classics. Jorge Louis Borges is a true genius, and someone I've probably cribbed from in a lot of ways.

Can you tell us anything about what’s coming next for The Warden?

Without going into to much detail about a sequel still in development, I would say very bad things are coming for the Warden. We'll see if he survives them.

Slums of the Shire with Daniel Polansky

Our guest blogger today is Daniel Polansky whose debut novel Low Town is published in the US today (16 August 2011) and in the UK under the title The Straight Razor Cure on 18 August 2011. He talks about being a history buff, not understanding fantasy and hopefully using his novel to answer some quesions.

Occasionally you'll be with a group of people and they'll get to talking about their favorite historical epochs, nostalgic for lives they never led. One person will talk up their childhood love of the Wild West, another reveal a penchant for Victorian England. This last one just has a thing for corsets, but it's better not to call them on it.

When my turn rolls round I take a sip of whatever we're drinking and look at my shoes. “The mid 90's were pretty good,” I say lamely. “Slower internet and everything, but at least we had penicillin.”

Perhaps it's my being a history buff, but the past sucked. For about a millennium and a half after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe just seems like a real shit place to reside. Lots of rooting in filth until you die at thirty a half mile from where you born. Nominally the nobles had it better, but still, your fever would have been treated with the application of leaches and your pretty young bride had like a one in two chance of surviving child birth.

This probably is why I don't understand fantasy—that is to say that collection of high medieval tropes collected by Tolkien and gleefully reproduced by two generations of descendants.

Take elves for instance—though perfectly capable of imagining a world where higher intelligence evolved in a species separate from humanity, my powers of make believe fail when positing that the relation between said species would be anything beyond unceasing warfare. Even a cursory glance at human history reveals our collective willingness to commit genocide on fellow homo sapiens—how much quicker would we have been to eradicate a separate species competing for identical resources? If elves existed, our ancestors would have hunted them down to extinction and erected a monument to the accomplishment.

But I digress.

Even when nestled comfortably in a quest to kill a dragon or overthrow a dark lord or what have you, strange thoughts plague me. What does the shady side of Gondor look like? How many platinum coins would a dime bag set me back? What is the point of hobbits? They're just short, fat people. People are plenty fat as it is.

Low Town is sort of my attempt to answer some of those questions (not the last one). It's the story of the Warden, a former intelligence agent and current drug dealer, whose gradual slide into self-destruction is briefly checked by the discovery of a dead body in the neighborhood he runs. An ill-timed bout of conscience rattles the easy cage of venality he's built for himself, and leads him on a collision course with the life he'd left behind. The Warden is a guy trying to survive the next few days, and not particularly squeamish as to what that requires—the sort of person more likely to populate a classic crime novel than to be found stocking the fantasy section of your local Borders (RIP).

More broadly, Low Town is an attempt to meld the best aspects of noir with a low fantasy setting—a meeting of tastes which I think complement each other nicely. The spare language and fast pace of good noir offers a pleasant counterpoint to the sprawling—one might even say bloated—length of much modern fantasy. On a somewhat broader level, the tendency of fantasy to focus on world shaking events often renders it irrelevant to the average reader, whose life relatively rarely devolves into single combat against vaguely satanic analogs. By contrast, noir is concerned with the individual, with greed and lust, sins all of us can comprehend to some degree. Low Town centers on the conceit that a world with magic wouldn't be altogether different from a world without it. People are still (on the whole) selfish, stupid creatures, focused almost exclusively on the immediate satisfaction of their basic desires, only now some of them can shoot fire out of their hands.

That's the idea at least. It comes out today (August 16^th) in the US and Canada, and on Thursday (August 18^th) in the UK and Commonwealth. I hope you check it out and see if I've succeeded, or if I'm just a pretentious clown. Or both.

Information:- http://www.Danielpolansky.com