Robert von Stein Redick has done his share of time in academia: he studied tropical conservation at the University of Florida, literature and Russian at the University of Virginia, and fiction writing at Warren Wilson College. (He’s also been a freelance writer for the Valley Advocate.) With literary bona fides like his, it might prove surprising that Redick, a Valley resident, is currently best known as the author of an epic fantasy series called The Chathrand Voyage. Redick recently chatted about his new foray into the fantasy world, and how he’s approached it as a writer of literary concerns.
The first of a planned four titles in the series, The Red Wolf Conspiracy focuses on an enormous ship (the Chathrand) crossing the waters of an equally outsized sea in a complex tale of war, peace, intrigue and magic. The second volume, called The Ruling Sea in the U.S. and The Rats and the Ruling Sea in the U.K., just hit the shelves, and Redick recently completed a draft of the third book.
The Chathrand Voyage is clearly an enormous undertaking, and Redick is pretty clear on what makes it so. “Writing an epic fantasy does involve one very different aspect for me [as a literary writer]—I had to create a world. Not just in the sense that every fiction writer creates a world… you have to invent the world. That’s a gigantic investment,” says Redick. “If you short-change it, the reader will know. There’s no shortcut to sculpting with loving detail a convincing world for your book to take place in. That is a really difficult challenge—such a challenge, frankly, that I think it stands in the way of a lot of books that people are capable of writing. But they never have time to sit down and gestalt that world. Tolkien spent his life doing it. There’s a reason he did that, and it shows.”
The results of Redick’s world-creation have earned him some heady praise, and the complexity of the Chathrand world is apparent when he attempts to summarize a plot of baroque twists and turns.
“The series overall takes place on a gigantic, 600-year-old sailing ship, the only ship left that’s capable of crossing the Ruling Sea,” he explains. “In the first book we are brought into a story of intrigue and duplicity and warmongering from the point of view of a young woman who’s the daughter of an admiral. She has been groomed for a very long time, against her knowledge—she is going to be a piece in the gamesmanship. It’s announced to her that she’s going to be taken to the other side of the world and be given in matrimony to an enemy prince, and at that moment the two sides are going to lay down their arms and sign a treaty.”
And things, of course, get pretty crazy from there, with intrigue masking intrigue and plot revealing subplot as the enormous ship gets underway.
“This second book finds the great ship the Chathrand about to set off across the Ruling Sea,” says Redick. “It’s an experience of sailing right off the map, and the cognitive map as well, that the whole story has revolved around so far. The fourth book will definitively conclude, in catastrophic fashion, the whole thing.”
Redick at first intended to write a single, medium-sized novel, but all that world creation led to many an interesting detour, and a story that needed more pages. In part, the reasons for that were external. “I was just stepping into the first draft when Bush decided to invade another country,” says Redick. His response to that stimulus was far from the sort of retreat to escapism that many critics hang around the neck of fantasy and science fiction works, and it is in such moments that literary instincts seem to have prevailed for Redick.
“I couldn’t help my feelings being inflected in the story. War and peace always had a place in the story, but they became more prominent—a darker, more involved melody, a darker tone and story emerged from what I was feeling and seeing happen around me,” he says. “That’s another choice we make [as writers]—how much are we going to let in of our own deep feelings?
“Some genre writers can make the choice to think of what they’re executing as a technical challenge and less as a deeply personal challenge. I think that’s much more rare for ‘literary writers.’ I feel strong emotion every time I sit down to write, and I think that makes me a literary writer.”
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It’s a wonderful thing to see the lines between science fiction, fantasy, mystery and other genres and “literary” fiction growing ever more blurred. At the far ends of the spectrum—say, Danielle Steel and James Joyce—the differences remain stark. Many writers whose books reside in the “literature” section still look down on their genre cousins.
Nevertheless, the convergence of style and genre is a trend that’s readily observable in works like the Interfictions anthologies published by the local Small Beer Press. The anthologies are full of works that don’t abide by the usual strictures of genre, and are the products of the Interstitial (the 10-dollar word for in-between) Arts Foundation.
In the case of Redick, reading some of his earlier work does not offer any intimation that a few years later he’d be crafting works with undeniable genre trappings, a move that few writers with high-powered literary chops pull off. Just witness these sparking lines of metaphor from “Uncrossed River,” an award-winning 2004 essay about crossing paths with River Phoenix:
“Of course we all drag contradictions around, bags of shot tied to our ankles. Most of us live with the discomfort; gnawing the ropes now and then but mostly slogging forward, awkward but upright.”
Hardly the stuff that serves as a typical trope for the “elves and wizards” brand of epic fantasy writer. It’s clear that The Chathrand Voyage is a fully realized invention, stuffed with the well-rendered unfamiliar, but it’s also clear that Redick brings into it moments of literary lucidity that would serve well in any context:
“Ormael was once a great fortress-city, built on high cliffs over a blue and perfect harbour. A place of music and balconies and the smell of ripened plums, whose name meant ‘Womb of Morning’—but that city no longer existed.”
That refreshing brand of fantasy writing works in Redick’s hands largely because he doesn’t find the genre/literary divide necessary. “For me, fiction is fiction and the fact of its split is artificial, whatever the origin,” says Redick. “If you look at the oldest stories, there was no divide between the fantastic and the non-fantastic. We couldn’t very well throw the Odyssey into the genre category and look down at it.”
Redick says some of the current differences are largely a matter of marketing and the readerships that have developed. In speaking with the Berkshire-based science fiction writer Paul Park, Redick says, he’s explored some of those differences. “Often, SF readers are so in love with the thing, the invention, that they see the language as getting in the way. They’re going to rush to [the experience] as fast as they can. For literary readers, people conditioned to look for literary books—the language is everything.”
More esoteric matters, however, are less of a concern with genre publishers. “Until late fall, I don’t think I had ever quite understood what world I was dealing with in moving from literary circles to fantasy and SF circles in one sense. … There’s a relationship to shareholders and a hope and a prayer of making real profits that intrudes in the genre field more realistically, more directly. Ultimately you have to keep your own council as a writer, and the industry may or may not reward you for your choice. But you’ll screw it up if you don’t.”
Following his muse into that promising “interstitial” zone worked: The New York Review of Science Fiction, hardly alone in its words of praise, said, “Robert Redick’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy is a strong debut and a good addition to the ranks of novels challenging the fantasy genre and pushing its boundaries.”
The tastemakers of the genre fiction world clearly find the concerns of a literary-minded author worthwhile, and that raises a big question: are they aware of the helpful arrival, maybe even intrusion, of the literary? Will science fiction and fantasy unconsciously turn to the literary for new energy now that so many half-baked iterations of “robots and rayguns” or “elves and wizards” have sputtered into life to imitate each other?
Here’s hoping Redick and the increasing number of writers of genre fiction who refuse to cede bigger concerns in favor of soulless plot succeed in blurring the lines even more.
Robert V.S. Redick reads from The Ruling Sea at Amherst Books on March 19 at 8 p.m.
