Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
It's in a book too though, WN pg 265 HC
R: Exactly!
Now, you did recently sign an agreement for a steampunk trilogy… Is there anything you can say about The Cinder Spires?
J: The Cinder Spires has gotten a better response from my readers than anything that I’ve done recently, just in terms of them thinking it’s something cool. These are my beta readers, from the beta asylum, which I call the asylum because you have to be a bit crazy to be there, because I’m just a bear for cliffhanging chapters, and sometimes they’ll have to wait a couple of weeks between them. So, there’s something wrong with those people, but there they are.
They think it’s pretty great, it’s kind of “Hornblower” meets “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, it’s very focused on the characters, with very strong influence from Firefly I think.
R: Awesome.
J: Yeah, if you’re going to steal from somewhere, you know, pick a good spot. But yeah, we start off with a disaffected ship captain who used to be part of the navy buy got drummed out of it for being an up-right honourable guy, who’s now running his own ship. We’ve got some other characters who are scattered around who are being drawn together by the lord of the spire.
Everyone lives in these enormous spires that spire for miles above the ground below; the surface is this deadly place you don’t want to go. The lord of Spire Albion, which is where the story begins, is assembling what is essentially a team for critical missions. That’s what this first story is, it’s him drawing this team together, and dispatching them as this war is beginning with a neighbouring spire of jerks.
So that’s kind of where we get going. One of the team members is the daughter of one of the young noble houses, and one of them is her cousin who is warriorborn. They don’t know quite how it happened but a certain percentage of the popular seems to be born with what seems like genetic modification to be faster and stronger and better and cooler. As well, there are cats in the Spires who talk and who are just the most arrogant, annoying little bullies.
R: Well, yes… They’re cats.
J: They’re cats, exactly, but these cats can talk, and they have opposable thumbs and matches. So, these are cats who are along the lines of: “I see that you enjoy having no rodents in your warehouse. Perhaps you would continue to enjoy having no rodents in your warehouse. Perhaps there will be a bowl of cream sitting out for me… or it might all catch on fire.” You never know what’s going to happen, but one of the characters actually has a close relationship with a cat and can speak cat. The cats speak their own language, they probably could speak the human language, but why would they? They’re cats. Why would they stoop to that? They understand humans, perfectly, except for when they don’t… and that can all happen within the same morning. They can choose who to ignore and who not to. The cats are horrible.
Then we’ve got these wizard figures. All the technology is based around these crystals that can channel various forms of energy, steampower and a kind of Frankensteinian electricity. They’re engineers who can do all kinds of cool stuff, but they’re also these figures called etherealists who work with the crystals. The etherealists are all completely nuts, I mean, over-the-top hair on fire nuts. Except for the ones that aren’t, and those are the ones you really have to worry about, because there’s something really wrong with them.
You know, the guy who’s sort of dribbling and walking in circles in the corner, who’s an etherealist? Okay, he’s probably not a threat. The one who’s inviting you to high tea? Forget it, you don’t even want to go near that one.
R: Here be danger.
J: Exactly; you know they’re crazy, the question is: how? And if you can see they’re crazy, they’re less dangerous.
But yeah, that’s sort of them getting this team together and figuring out how they’re going to get things done. I’m having a great deal of fun with the book, it’s been a tremendous good time for me, so my beta readers have been tortured extra. Which I think is good for readers.
R: Of course, especially beta readers, they deserve it. This sounds like it’s going to have quite a bit of a different feel compared to Dresden.
J: Very much so. It’s going to be closer to Alera than anything else… Multiple character viewpoints, so it’ll have much more of that feel.
I also remember Jim mentioning something about magic, and those who knew magic, were wrong in some way. For example there is one person who knows magic but he doesn't know how to handle a doorknob so he has someone to open doors from him. But the dangerous magicians are those who seems like normal humans, because there must be something seriously wrong with them. Something along those lines anyway.
About your steampunk series, is there going to be magic in there, or technology, or is there going to be a magic vs. technology thing?
The answer to that is: the magic in the Dresden Files is technology, it’s just really, really advanced. It’s something that we don’t really understand with what we’ve got right now, but there’s actual rules to how it works, and so on. Yeah, there’s stuff that looks like magic in steampunk, it’s not necessarily really magic, but there it is. And there are characters who deal with it who kind of look like wizards, but not. But they might as well be, for story purposes, and none of them are sane. They’re called aetherialists (sp?) and if you’re an aetherialist, you deal with aetheric energy and you know how to make it work. And you’re not like an aetheric engineer, who can build a cook gizmo using it, you can just do it without the gizmo, and it tends to do funny things to your brain. So one of them, kind of the master wizard of the entire place, can’t open doors because doorknobs defeat him. They’re a highly advanced technology and he just can’t understand them. So he’s got an apprentice who can open doors, but she can’t talk to anybody except for the little jar of crystals that she has with her. So she’s sort of useless in other situations. The really scary aetherialists are the ones who are absolutely sane, the ones who will pour you tea and say, “Would you like a biscuit with that?”—those are the ones you have to look out for, because they’re wrong in a bad way.
No, someone asked which authors Jim can recommend to them. Brandon Sanderson was one of the straggler names.aah
So... I haven't been on this site for a while, but did I miss something here? Is there actually going to be a movie? And are we seriously brainstorming about who to cast???No sorry no movie, they are basically doing this for fun
(Be still my beating heart)
D-E-D dead is Jim emphasizing dead and being cute at the same time.Here's the video where the quote comes from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DbsSGiGCmw
This raises a very important question for me.
How durable are the reddit servers?
Fortunately, this should pose no problem for Tuesday's Reddit event. Even an AMA with Obama couldn't bring them down for long!
I just hope anyone from here got through, and is taking notes on questions/answers that might need to make their way to Sereck's WoJ compliation.Things like that are no problem though, since they answers tend to stay up years after the event, so it is just to go to the link and check
Whoops...now it's been rescheduled.
but too bad there were to many people who wanted to ask questions today, well atleast it means I get some sleep