In the Ascendancy you have created an empire that is very similar to the Roman Empire in the structure of it's military, and some of their social customs; dress, manner of eating etc. Was there any particular reason for that or is it just a period you like and are comfortable with.
I didn’t want to write a medieval fantasy. I wanted to create a different feel and the Romans were ideal. A fascinating society, quite advanced and very ambitious. A system perfect for expansion of empire. Very organised. Perfect for mucking up by dropping the Ascendants on them. I enjoyed the research and learned heaps. One name check for you – Adrian Goldsworthy. A superb historian and expert on the Romans. I owe him.
You worked for so long with a specific set of characters in the Raven sequence, how difficult was it for you to switch gears so quickly into a completely different world and characters?
Very. And that, as much as anything else made it necessary to do. The comfort zone is a dangerous place for a writer, I feel. No matter how successful you are, you can get stale writing the same characters, world and style. You don’t have to look far for people who exhibit that. Even Terry Pratchett doesn’t write Discworld novels all the time despite their enormous success and I reckon the fact that he steps away from that world from time to time has helped keep the series as fresh as it mainly manages to be even now.
What I found tricky was not writing lines or creating characters that were mirrors of The Raven. I had to fight very hard to stop Paul Jhered being a carbon copy of The Unknown Warrior. I had to examine every line of dialogue, every attitude and gesture to make the men individuals. Again, I think I succeeded and as the drafting went on, it became easier because the new characters found their voices and began to shout for themselves.
You included lots of military details, styles of fighting both on land and at sea, compositions of forces, and the engineering techniques involved in early field artillery. Was this all research you did specific to this book, or was it knowledge you had floating around in your brain beforehand waiting for a chance to be used?
It was research specific to the books. I wanted to get the warfare as accurate as I could without becoming dull. The scale of battles was huge and I needed to have knowledge of how they were fought for real to make my versions anything like credible. Again, it was to distance myself from medieval warfare. Roman techniques were organised and devastatingly effective for the most part. What was particularly interesting to me was having to understand how it worked so that I could understand how it might go wrong. Terrain, enemy tactics, weather, the virus of panic. So much could turn order into chaos. I have assimilated a lot more knowledge than appears in the books. I think that’s the right balance.
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