Chris Roberson talks about new novel, Set The Seas on Fire : UK SF Book News

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Aug

11

Chris Roberson talks about new novel, Set The Seas on Fire

Posted in: UKSFBN Talks To on 11th August 2007 by Sandy Auden

Chris Roberson's name is already on the grapevine as a rising genre star and his career certainly seems to be gathering momentum. The last twelve months has seen the release of The Voyage Of Night Shining White from PS Publishing and Paragaea: A Planetary Romance from Prometheus Books; with The Dragon's Nine Sons coming out from Solaris in 2008.

But that's not all. His current novel was released this month and is called Set The Seas on Fire. It's a historical fantasy, a nautical adventure set during the Napoleonic wars, full of all manner of ship-to-ship combat, muskets and sabers. But at its heart it's really a love story. With zombies.

UKSFBN tracked Mr Roberson down to pop him a few pertinent questions...

UKSFBN: What is it about the Napoleonic wars that you find interesting enough to set your books in its era?

Chris R: "To be honest, it was a TV series that set me off. A year or so before I started writing the book my wife and I watched a bunch of the Horatio Hornblower movies starring Ioan Gruffudd, and I was hooked. I then read a few of the original Hornblower novels, and loved them. Around the same time I read Peter Aughton's Endeavor, an account of Captain James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific, and Herman Melville's Typee, for reasons that escape me now.

"In any event, ideas about the Napoleonic wars, tall ships, and south seas islands collided in my head (along with the notions about zombies and unspeakable horrors from beyond space and time that are always rattling around in there), and the result was Set the Seas on Fire."

UKSFBN: How much research did you have to do sailing and the Napoleonic wars?

Chris R: "I ended up doing a ridiculous amount of work. I have a sickness, to be honest. I sometimes think that if I could find a way to do just the research, and maybe the outlining, and publish that as a novel, I'd probably be happy doing it. I just love digging into a subject and looking for all sorts of unexpected connections. This project was certainly no exception.

"I did a little bit of sailing as a kid. Nothing serious, just little rinky-dink boats barely big enough to zip across a lake, but enough to give me a basic familiarity with the concept. And then I read loads of books on the subject. By the time I wrote the book, I'd crammed my head so full of Napoleonic-era sailing jargon that I could probably have passed the midshipman's exam for which the younger characters are studying in an early scene - the questions for which, by the way, were drawn from an actual officer's exam used in the time of Nelson's navy.

"I'd also been toying around with a series of stories featuring a Polynesian island culture, their history and their mythology. The island, Kovoko-ko-Te'maroa, I made up out of whole cloth, but I borrowed bits and pieces of their society from real cultures like the Hawaiians and the Maori. The stories I'd written so far dealt with displaced Te'maroans in the modern day, but it was a matter of relative ease to reverse engineer what their culture would have been like on the eve of European contact, and then roll the film forward from there."

UKSFBN: How do you ensure that you don't over-burden the story with too much factual detail?

Chris R: "This is the real danger of someone who loves to research as much as I do. I find that the trick is to learn everything that might possibly be known about the characters and the world they inhabit before I write, and then when it comes time to write to include as little of that information as possible. By including only the bare minimum of detail needed to tell the story, I hopefully avoid turning a novel into a three hundred page research paper."

UKSFBN: And why do you like to have an underlying love story involved in your books?

Chris R: It definitely is something that I seem to return to, over and over again. The trick is, the love story isn't always a romance between a man and a woman (or a man and a man, or what-have-you). Sometimes it's about the bonds between members of a family, and sometimes it's about a platonic relationship between two friends. But at the core of nearly all of my books is a notion of family or friendship, regardless of the setting against which the story plays out. I think it comes of having been a sad, lonely bastard for a few years during my twenties, angst-ridden and loveless, after which I knew the value to place on the relationships that meant the most to me. Most of my characters are looking for that kind of connection, in one way or another.

UKSFBN: Will Set the Seas on Fire be a stand alone or part of a series? Is it necessary to read Paragaea before this one?

Chris R: "Seas is part of a series of stand-alone novels which can be read in any order. The series revolves around an extended family of adventurers and heroes, the Bonaventure-Carmody family. Paragaea: A Planetary Romance is actually a sequel to Set the Seas on Fire, if you want to be specific about it, since the events of this novel predate those of Paragaea. But that said, either can be read on its own, and both can be read in any order. The same is true of my other Bonaventure-Carmody novels, Here, There & Everywhere and End of the Century. If you like one of them, chances are you'll like the others. If you don't like one, though, you still might like the others, as they're all quite different."

Visit Chris Roberson online at ChrisRoberson.net. More info about Set The Seas On Fire and The Dragon's Nine Sons at the Solaris website; The Voyage of Night Shining White can be found at the PS Publishing website and Paragaea: A Planetary Romance at the Prometheus Books website.

Source: Chris Roberson

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