The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

"These are basically stories about an awful man who I hate. He’s deeply unpleasant, and he has this magical ring that can save an entire world, that he just refuses to use. You spend the entire book thinking, ‘Just use the ring, Thomas Covenant, just do it…’ I need to explain the way that I’ve always bought books. I was going to be a rock star, you see, but unfortunately, I was not a particularly good musician, which will hold you back. So I spent most of my life entirely skint, and I read whatever was in the second-hand shop. I’ve never read the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and I’ve never read any of the other chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I’ve only read the second. The world of it is such an amazing bit of writing. It’s just astounding. You can see the influence of Tolkien in it, but some of the other stuff in it is just… I get quite jealous about it. He has these really beautiful moments: there’s the Ranyhyn, the horses, and the giant Saltheart Foamfollower… And there’s a whole thing in these books where the cycle of nature is massively accelerated, so forests grow up and then they die in a season. That has also dropped itself into The Bone Ships , which I didn’t realise until afterwards, although I did it a different way. Because that’s what you do, if you’re a writer: you steal something and then reinvent it, and then you can say, ‘Actually, no, that’s mine.’ I have no wish to read any of the others. I know people are not fans of the first ones, because of some of the acts that happen in them, so I’m not going to read them; and I’m not going to read the third ones, because everyone I know says they’re not quite as good. So I’m just keeping those three books, and my memories of them; they’re a huge influence on me. They’re well worth it for the breadth of imagination, and because it’s very grown up, in a way that – this will get me in trouble – things like Wheel of Time did not feel grown up when I read them. They felt aimed at late teenage me (and I know someone’s going to tell me that changes as you read the Wheel of Time books onwards, but I’m not going to read ten books. I’m far too lazy.) But the Thomas Covenant books were not holding my hand at all, which I liked; I like to be pushed by a book. But please, just use the ring Thomas, God . It’s been made unfriendly by the bad guy… I talked about this being a grown-up book, but the bad guy is called Lord Foul. You put so much information into all of this, Stephen, and then you’ve just half-assed that, haven’t you? But it’s a beautiful world, which feels very real when you read it. It’s not a friendly or an unfriendly place, if you take out the influence of the bad guy; it’s just a place with its own rules, and it will work by them. And if you get caught up in that, then that’s unfortunate, right? So, for context, I went back and forth on my list for today – I wanted to have Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander books there, because I adore them, and the world of a 17th-century sailing ship is so arcane, it feels like a fantasy world. It’s just so weird. So I wanted to write something with ships. And in Whitby Museum, they have ships that have been carved out of bone by Napoleonic prisoners of war, and that stuck in my head: ships of bone, that’s pretty cool… So I wanted bone ships. Why would you build your ships out of bone? And the only answer is, because there’s no wood. So I needed to engineer a world without wood, which is how we get this world of vines that grow quite quickly during a season and then die back, and they’re not strong enough to make big ships. And then you get onto the question: how big does something need to be if you’re going to use its bones for ships? And the answer was: really big. So I had sea monsters. My editor was straight in with, ‘Let’s call them dragons.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think they really are dragons…’ But she said, ‘No, no, no. They’re dragons .’ So okay, we’ll call them dragons. And that was the starting point. There wasn’t really much else, because I don’t sit and work things out at all. I have a few ideas that I want to do; I had a very clear idea of where we’re going for the end of the third book, which I’m not going to tell you because it’s hugely spoilery, and that feeds in right from the beginning of the first book. And then I create the world as I write. Everything snowballs, the plot feeds into the world, and it’s really useful because you’re never stuck. You’re never in a corner with the world: I can do what I want in it, it’s mine. Yes. There’s a matriarchal society, which I just wanted to do, because it makes people look at power again. I had this idea that in a lot of our societies, the ability to produce heirs is seen as a way to corral women, when really the women have the power because they actually bring the children to life – so I flipped it. And that was the starting point to set up this society. Then it’s all about making sure the people in it really do live in it. So, for example, they say ‘women and men’ all the time, because women are more important than men in their world, so that’s how you structure the language. It’s a really simple thing that is also very alien when you read it, because you’re not used to it. Also, in both the Bone Ship books and the Wyrdwood books, my most recent, I have a non-gendered character. It’s so hard to catch that, because I’m old now, and I’ve got forty years of not using non-gendered pronouns. I have to teach myself that. I’ve always wanted to write books that everyone can be in, which I think comes from being a bit weird all your life. So there’s trying to catch that, and then create ways that people can fit in that don’t feel like our society. Because I don’t want to go and read a fantasy book and think, “Oh, I recognize this from my world”. (Although obviously I have also massively ripped off the Age of Sail …) There was one plan, which is that I have a deep mistrust of people in power. And the idea was that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or a woman in power, they can still be awful. I’m very equal opportunities about who is awful. The rest of it is all very organic, working it all together to find out where I end up. And then by the time I finish the second book and am writing the third one, it becomes very frustrating, because I can’t make things up anymore. I’ve got to live in the rules of my own world."