A&A The Official Matthew Woodring Stover Discussion Thread

Working on anything new in the SW universe Matt?

 

Nope. I've got the last Caine novel to wrap up, and once that's done I am more or less at liberty. If no other gunslinger projects turn up, I'll likely be moving on outside the genre.

It would not surprise me, however, if Del Rey turned out to be a bit leery of offering me another one, given my chronic deadline issues. They seem to have a stable of writers who, unlike yrs trly, can turn in their bloody books on time.

 

Hogwash. After the last few SW books of yours that I read; you can take as much time as you damn well please! IMO.

 

And peace to you.

Being a blown-deadline junkie can be a liability when contributing to a multi-book series. Not to mention driving the production and marketing folks into hair-ripping-out foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy.

 

Who says you have to take part in a "multi-book/author" series to write another SW novel? A new book along the likeso LSatSoM would be more than satisfying, and I'm sure there isn't a SW fan out there that would complain either.

 

(The following is largely guesswork and possibly dead wrong.) Even if it's not a multi-book saga, they have their schedule mapped out a year or two in advance at least, with the hardcovers and paperback originals nicely spaced out so as to complement rather than compete with each others' sales. So missed deadlines may mean they either have to reschedule multiple books or have two books coming out closer to each other than they'd like. Sometimes they get lucky and can simply swap two books in the schedule, but I'd guess that doesn't happen too often.

 

Would you quit using logic already?! I just want another Stover-penned SW novel dag-nabbit!

 

Me too. Make it so.

 

Yeah, Heroes Die would make a great NC-17 movie.

Anything less is selling the material short.

But good God, seriously, if the movie would be done right, it would be absolutely mind blowing. The actual audience in the theater being the audience that Caine is performing for would be just so....great. I would love to see Pallas fight in IMAX. Especially the river part of the book.

Oh geeze, I guess I need to obtain Blade of Tyshalle. But first I need some scratch.

Oh, yeah, my copy of Traitor is in 5 pieces nowadays. I've read it so much and borrowed it out to friends so much.

I'll just have to buy a new copy then!

 

I've lent my girlfriend my SW comics and Atlas as an EU introduction, and I have just lent her Traitor as her initiation into the books. Mr. Stover, I love all of your Star Wars work. Supposedly, Del Rey is moving more towards one-shots and trilogies and duologies. I would love to see you write one of them. Your novels are a true pleasure to read. I particularly enjoy your usage of POV to make the story come alive.

After going to the movies this weekend, I really want an adaptation of Traitor. I know it will never happen anytime soon, unless LFL has a collective paradigm shift, but i can dream. If done exactly right, it would be a killer movie. Especially the Garden scene. As would Shatterpoint.
And, from a marketing perspective, it would help to generate interest in the EU.

 

Just wanted to stop by and thank the guy who wrote one of my all-time favorite Star Wars novels.

The tone of those wonderful old Brian Daley Han Solo novels (which I've read at least eight times each- wish I could get my hands on the Lando Calrissian books, though... *sigh*) + Luke Skywalker = a match made in heaven, I say! You, sir, are a genius. A kriffing GENIUS!

 

Thanks, everybody.

I, too, think TRAITOR would make a pretty cool film . . . as part of the animated NJO, which will never happen either.

 

*sigh* Yeah. That would be too much awesome to ask for.

 

Hello, just wanted to say thank you to one of the best SW authors there is for everything you've done. I've read all your SW stuff, except the RotS novelization. (It's on my shelf in hardback edition, though, beckoning me to hurry up with my other books and read it)

Also wanted to ask something: If you were to write another SW book, (Do it, Del Rey, do it, Del Rey, do it, Del Rey) what would you want to do? Any specific era or character you'd like to take a crack at?

 

You mustn't lose hope!

 

I keep up my hope that one day Del Rey will come to Mr. Stover begging him to be the one who writes a duology fleshing out the Second Great Schism and the Hundred Years Darkness.

 

I finished Blade of Tyshalle this weekend so I figured I'd drop by and offer my abbreviated thoughts. Basically, it was pretty cool. I liked the character of Deliann a lot, though I thought he was more interesting as Kris Hansen. The best parts of the book were when he and Caine were on the page together, with my favorite part being the flashback at the very beginning. I didn't really understand what happened to Kollberg or how the whole Board of Governors/Blind God communal mind thing worked; as a metaphor it made sense but I couldn't get my head around the mechanics of what was physically happening there. For the most part, though, it was a lot of fun, and I hope Deliann, Raithe, and Orbek show up at some point in later books.

The only aspect of the book I wasn't so hot on was the lack of finality where death was concerned. The passage in Heroes Die where Caine kills Berne was really powerful, describing how everything that this man had been is suddenly transformed into nothing more than meat. In this book, though, the whole plot with Pallas Ril's consciousness being trapped in the sword just felt weird, but ultimately it didn't bother me that much because it was necessary to the plot and she was only temporarily resurrected. Deliann's resurrection, on the other hand, just didn't sit right with me. As I mentioned before, he was my favorite character, so I was really hoping he wouldn't die, but when he did, it was a very touching and meaningful scene that did justice to the character and I didn't mind it in the slightest. Bringing him back felt like a literary cheat so that the character could both get an awesome death scene and still be around for later stories. I would have preferred one or the other; I'm not a big fan of stories where death is a revolving door. The other death that bothered me in this regard was Ma'elKoth's. Cool as the character was, I was starting to get sick of him by the end of the second book, so it was incredibly satisfying when Caine bisected him in mid-sentence. Except that turned him into God for some reason (and an annoyingly talkative God at that), which kind of undercut the catharsis of Caine stabbing him in the face.

None of that really came into play until the very end of the book, however, so by and large I really liked it and hope to get a hold of Caine Black Knife soon. It'll be interesting to see where the tension comes from now that Caine is apparently able to call on the powers of God at will.

Spoilers highlighted in the most obnoxiously piecemeal manner possible.

 

Thank you very much for the thoughtful commentary.

I agree with you about the finality of death issue; however, in the mythic tradition to which the Acts of Caine belong, death is final . . . as it marks an irreversible transformation of a hero, rather than simply extinguishing a character. And in the books (very much as in real life) the real effect of any action is literally incalculable.

And the Calling Upon the Powers of God business is . . . complicated. You'll see.

If you're interested in a more grimly final life-or-death story, check out my first two novels, Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon. While they are much in the same tradition as the Caine books, the death/rebirth business in them is wholly metaphorical, as opposed to literal.

Also -- though I haven't been around for a few days, or I would have caught it sooner -- I'd be very grateful if you can persuade a mod (Havac would be ideal, as he's passingly familiar with the Acts of Caine) to black out the spoilers in your commentary. Every so often, my SW books engender a new Caine fan, and spoilers give me a rash.

 

Sorry, it didn't even occur to me to do that since the book's almost ten years old. PM sent.

I enjoy your writing style a lot, but I've been kind of leery of picking up your non-Caine/SW books. I'm generally not that into fantasy as a genre, and... this may be weird for me to say, but I tend not to be a big fan stories that follow female protagonists. Female characters in literature, especially sci-fi/fantasy, are rarely that interesting to me; like in literature in general, the men seem to get all the best stories. Even in your books, while I didn't think any of the major characters were poorly written or developed, Pallas Ril was easily the one I was least interested in (I did, on the other hand, like Avery Shanks). You know what I mean, or do you tend not to notice a correlation between the quality of a character and that character's sex?

That said, I have yet to dislike any of your books, so I'll probably try to find a gap in my reading list for these two when I get a chance. Looking at them on Amazon right now, is Heart of Bronze just an omnibus of the previous editions or are there any significant changes to the text?

 

Well, thanks.

I like Avery too. You may like Barra. She and Pallas Ril have nothing in common beyond some details of anatomy.

Heart of Bronze is indeed an unrevised, unre-edited omnibus of Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon. If you can get a copy on the cheap, I recommend it; it's the SFBC hardcover, and is the only hardcover edition of either of those books.

 

I'll throw in my recommendation for the Barra novels; Barra's basically Caine with boobs. So, neither the typical female placeholder character or the stereotyped oh-look-I'm-high-kicking-people-and-delivering-one-liners-I'm-so-strong character.

 

Thank you, my friend. And thanks for the spoilage hiding above.

 

Matt, is the demon Ma'elKoth summons (not spoilworthy in its MacGuffiny role there IMO, but a mod can correct me if I'm wrong) in HEROES DIE the same entity that was communing with Caine in the Retreat portion of CBK? Or is this meant to be an ambiguous "Stover doesn't comment on the text" thing?

 

Matt - What kind of research did you have to do for the Barra duology? What books/websites did you use/read? I'd be greatly interested in reading them myself; as well as knowing what sites you used. That timeperiod is of interest to me, I just find it fascinating.

 

The idea that they might be the same is interesting. But that's all.

P_AP--

When I was writing the Barra books, there very nearly wasn't any such thing as websites. I developed a bibliography by signing up for a mailing list (primitive precursor to forums) devoted to Mediterranean archaeology and just asking those folks -- mostly doctoral candidates, but also some professors and some enthusiasts -- what books I should read. My primary text on Jericho was that of Kathleen Kenyon, who oversaw much of the excavation in the 50's. I also spent a lot of time with translations of writings from that period, and with transcriptions of the central stories of pre-Hebraic religion in Canaan. I also spent a lot of time rooting around in a useful overview from a University of Chicago Oriental Institute guy that basically correlates the histories of Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia.

My primary text for Joshua and the "Habiru" was the King James Version of the Old Testament. I also got a lot of mileage out of The Book of J.

I'm sure that you can find more than I ever read with a two-second Google search.