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Interview mit Sam Sykes (Englisch)
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Mr. Sykes, first of all thank you for the opportunity to ask you some questions. My name is Goetz Piesbergen and I am an editor for the German online book magazine Splashbooks.de. Splashbooks is part of the Splashpages network, one of Germany's largest networks of online magazines about multimedia themes like books, comics, games or movies.

Let's start with an unusual question: What book is currently lying next to your bed?

I'm currently in the process of moving, so I don't actually have a nightstand to put any books on. In a revelation that might be far more than you ever wanted to know about me, though, I sometimes sleep with books in the bed, like tiny, ink-covered lovers who give me paper cuts if I get too frisky.

And that book is currently The Perilous Prophecy of Guard and Goddess by Leanna Renee Hieber. This book being a largely gothic romantic fantasy, you would think it would diminish my masculinity. You'd be wrong. I can make even reading about well-dressed, uptight women with difficult relationships seem manly.

And if I burst into tears based on a woman's romantic struggle? That's also manly. But only when I do it.

What is your favourite genre besides Fantasy?

Gosh, I don't know. I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately: specifically, memoirs of defectors from the North Korean regime. Why? I have no idea. It doesn't really serve my book in any way. But before that, I was reading on the mating habits of angler fish (don't ask, just read Tome of the Undergates) and before that, I was reading urban fantasy.

I'm either a really open-minded reader or a really faithless reader, wantonly flitting from genre to genre with no regard for their feelings or anything beyond my own curiosity.

Your mother Diana Gabaladon is also an author, best known for her  "Outlander " series. Have there been moments when you relied on her experience? Or did you try to avoid this topic when you met each other?

Well, there's no point in suggesting it's not been at least a little beneficial in some ways. None of those ways have been professional, though. Rather, I wasn't prepared for a lot of the emotional and lifestyle-involved issues that came from being published. It was nice to have someone on hand who had been there before.

That's roughly about as far as it's ever gone, though. I've never really consulted her on elements of style or anything artistic. I wanted my own voice to shine through.

What influence did your mother have on your own decision to write?

Man, if you were looking for stories of inspiration and familial strength, I hate to disappoint, but again, she didn't have a huge influence on the decision to go into writing. I sort of started it because I'm utterly incompetent at all things but writing (I was kicked out of three different programs in university before I settled on creative writing).

She's provided a lot of wisdom and experience, but all the important decisions have been my own.

Do you think your mother's name opened doors for you in your own career, or did you have to fight the preconception that you were just "the son of"?

Not really, no. Publishing just doesn't work like that. My agent wasn't going to take me on just because of who my mother was. My publishers weren't going to publish my books just because of who I was related to. I've gotten to where I am because my editors, agent and publishers all think my book is good. They are a business, they're in it to make money.

And one last question about you and your mother: She's among the authors who have strongly spoken out against fan fiction stories involving her characters. What is your position on this topic?

Good, because I am getting SO PISSED OFF ABOUT THESE QUESTIONS.

Just kidding.

This issue hasn't come up for me just yet. I kind of hope it doesn't, because I've never been as tactful as her when people disagree with me. I tend to solve most of my problems through screaming and throwing rocks.

I really enjoyed the colourful cast of your adventurers. Especially the dragon man Gariath was a very interesting character, very unique in his own kind of way. What inspired you to create this character?

Well, a lot of the characters in Tome of the Undergates are subversions of characters who we've seen before in fantasy, given their own special twist. Kataria is a member of an elegant, alien race who happens to be quite inelegant and barbarous, Lenk is a hero with no particular desire to be heroic or even noble, and so on.

Gariath, likewise, is a character who, on the surface appears to be an angry, brutish beast. That's not entirely uncommon in fantasy, but like with every character, there's more going on with him than there seems to be.

Gariath is a character with a tremendous amount of emotional baggage. Believing himself to be the last of his race, his family dead and surrounded by creatures that don't understand him and fear him, he's naturally very lonely and depressed. But, given that he's four hundred pounds and nearly seven feet of muscle, he expresses his depression in a different way.

He's very clearly suicidal. He has absolutely no regard for his life or the lives of others and has no particularly strong urge to go on living, but at the same time, he's too scared to take his own life and tries to be killed by throwing himself relentlessly into battle and other dangers.

Ultimately, I wanted to know what a person who has no reason to be afraid of anything is afraid of. Gariath was the answer.

Which of your characters can you relate to best? If they were real, with whom would you go for a beer at the end of the day?

I don't know. They all seem like they'd be pretty lousy drinkers, don't they? Lenk wouldn't want to talk to you, Kataria or Gariath might try to kill you, Denaos would drug your beer, Asper would scold you for turning to the devil's brew and Dreadaeleon would be smashed after the first round and go around awkwardly hitting on every lady he could find.

And I've done all these things while drinking myself, so I guess the answer is that I can relate to all of them fairly well. Lenk being the main character, he's probably the closest personification. I guess that means I, too, am a misanthrope with voices in my head?

During the last years I've noticed an interesting trend. It seems to me that many authors, like for example Brent Weeks in his  "Night Angel" trilogy (Rezension von Band 1, Band 2, Band 3, d. Red.), are writing fantasy stories which are very brutal and bloody. The same goes for your book, too. What was the reason for your decision to write such a story? And do you think that these kind of stories will become more and more commonplace? If so, why?

The short answer is that brutality is closer to life. It's difficult to accept the idea that a society in which assassins, warriors, adventurers and wizards are running around is one that would be particularly clean. Presumably, the only thing stopping us, in our day and age, from solving a lot of our problems with violence is that there are laws and history keeping us from doing so. The same can't be said for these stories. It lends an air of reality to it that can sometimes border on the gratuitous.

I think the more interesting aspect to focus on is this idea of reality, though. Fantasy has always been criticized for being escapist with no real impact on reality and these books are the retort to that criticism. Not because of the blood and guts, necessarily, but because you'll notice that these stories deal with human emotions, human fears, human insecurities. The violence is just a reflection of that. In Brent Weeks' work and in Joe Abercrombie's work, the violence always comes with emotion. It's never done just to be gratuitous.

These stories have thrived in recent years, it's true, but like all trends, I have the sinking feeling that someone's going to take it too far and write a super-gory, ultra-bloody massacre of a book that's just plain uncomfortable to read and ruin it for everyone.

I've read in an interview that you have planned the  "Aeons' Gate" series as a trilogy. The second novel has already been published, so the end is in sight. Are there already plans what you will do next? Will your next story be placed in the same universe or are you going to create a new one?

-Oh man, I hate these questions. Not because I don't want to answer them but because I really can't right now. I've got big plans. Big plans. Elephantine plans. Ones that will make you just scream like a little girl when they're finally unveiled.

But since I've only barely run them past my agent? I can't say too much, I'm afraid, suffice to say that it's going to be awesome.

I really liked the drawings of some of the characters on your homepage. Any chance that there will be a comic adaption of your books? If yes, what would be your dream creative team?

Ah, yes. The Lost Pages were a favorite of mine (and I'm really behind on getting the second round of them up, I'm afraid) done by the talented Michael Lee Lunsford. I really like his style in general, so I'd like him to at least be around for creative input if it were to become a comic book.

Other than that, though? I'm not sure. I'd really like to be on-hand to write it, at least.

What does your typical work day look like? Do you set yourself a certain goal in the morning like "Today I want to write 5,000 words"?

I've never been able to understand people who can write like that. I envy them, certainly, for their ability to do it so handily, but it's not something I can typically do. I go until the mood is spent and then I have a hard time changing. It's difficult to go from a scene in which a man is ripping off another man's jaw and then transition into a scene in which two people are trying to understand why it's okay to love each other, you know?

So, typically, I try to get each scene done in a night. Sometimes, this is doable. Sometimes, it isn't.

Do you listen to music when you're writing? If so, do you prefer certain bands?

I used to listen to a lot of music from the Final Fantasy video games when I wrote. There were no words to get into my thought process and they all tended to be about conveying a certain mood, so it was handy to listen to something intense and adrenaline-filled when writing a fight scene, for example.

Lately, though, it all tends to distract me. This business has killed my musical soul.

There are still people who speak badly of fantasy stories because they consider them as nothing more than cheap tools of escapism. What do you answer to those critics? What makes fantasy worthwhile in your books?

I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. Every piece of art, by definition, makes a statement about humanity, what it means to be human, what it means to be who we are. We can't not do that. Fantasy just tells it a different way than mainstream literature.

Beyond that, though? I have no idea why the opinions of people who voice these sorts of things matter. They like their stories, we like ours. We get something from fantasy they don't and they don't have a great desire to go finding it, otherwise they wouldn't dismiss us so out of hand.

Their opinions don't really matter. To me, at least.

Thanks for your time.

Thanks for the interview! It was a hoot and a half!

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Special vom: 20.05.2011
Autor dieses Specials: Götz Piesbergen
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Interview mit Sam Sykes (Deutsch)
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