This was The Golden Age, which together with The Phoenix Exultant (2003) and The Golden Transcendence (2003) made up the long novel also titled The Golden Age; there followed The Last Guardian of Everness (2004) and Mists of Everness (2004), forming The War of the Dreaming, and a third epic, The Chronicles of Chaos, commenced with Orphans of Chaos" (2005), continued with Fugitives of Chaos (2006) and concludes in April 2007 with Titans of Chaos. All of these volumes are breathlessly exciting and grandiloquently rhetorical.

SCI FI Weekly interviewed John Wright by e-mail in January 2007. With the publication of Titans of Chaos in April 2007, all three of your long novels will be fully in print. The first of these, the three-volume The Golden Age, is ornate far-future SF; the second, the two-part War of the Dreaming, is near-future apocalyptic fantasy with mythic elements; and the third, The Chronicles of Chaos (in three books), is contemporary fantasy combining myth with young-adult sensibility. You've covered quite a literary range. Do you have any favorite among these works? Which subgenre or combination of subgenres have you as author found most congenial?

Wright: Forgive me if I make two slight and minor corrections. War of the Dreaming is set in America of an unspecified post-Vietnam pre-impeachment decade, so (by now) it is an alternate near-past rather than near-future. The Chronicles of Chaos is not of young-adult sensibility, unless young adults are considerably more adult than they should be. While there are schoolchildren in the book, it is not written for schoolchildren.

I have no favorites among my works. My books and I maintain a cool professional relationship, marked by decorum and distant courtesy. We have agreed not to get emotionally involved with each other.

I long ago entertained the notion that even the best authors may not know which of their books are good or bad or why. Seeing the work from the craftsman's point of view, they are able to judge only whether the work accomplished their ambition. If their best work falls to one side of what they meant it to be, they judge it harshly, even if the misaimed arrow struck gold; if their worst work is exactly what they want it to be, they laud it abundantly, and wince in puzzlement when the world shares none of their enthusiasm.

On that scale, of everything I have written, the one where I most perfectly struck the mark at which I aimed, and the one that gave me the most personal satisfaction and joy to write, is Null-A Continuum. This is my homage to and continuation of the books of A.E. van Vogt, World of Null-A and Players of Null-A: these books are my favorites since childhood, and had a great influence on my life. The kind permission of Lydia van Vogt, the great author's widow, allowed me to write an authorized sequel to these seminal works, now sadly neglected. It has not been published yet, and all the negotiations and legalities have not been worked out to everyone's satisfaction, so keep your fingers crossed.

The manuscript turned out exactly as I wished it, with all the old-fashioned astonishment and wonder, the superscience and non-Aristotelian philosophy, the plot twists, breathless pace and cosmic scope which define a van Vogt-style book. For this reason, fans of my writing might be less interested in this yarn than I am, because in it I write less like myself than is my wont.

But in my fondest dreams of being a writer, I never would have dared imagine that I, no one else, would be the one to bring to life on the page once more the galactic dictator Enro the Red, the shadow-being known only as The Follower, the alluring and mysterious Patricia Hardy, or that I would discover the ultimate origins and infinite fate of that helpless yet superhuman being, Gilbert Gosseyn. I got to pick who was the Cosmic Chessplayer manipulating Gosseyn's confused multiple lives and multiple identities.

It was sheer delight to draw implications from hints A.E. van Vogt left unresolved in his original tales, and to decide which of Gosseyn's implanted memories turn out to be false to facts. This is the only science fiction I will ever write meant for John W. Campbell's Astounding.

To answer your second question literally, the subgenre I have found more congenial is the hard SF or far-future romance of my first book, The Golden Age. The public reception was more gratifying, as that work drew more attention than my fantasy works.

I am not sure why the one is better received than the other. I speculate that the fantasy field is more crowded, and that some of the conceits for my fantasy (shining and new when I invented them) had been seen in the field, and so lacked luster, by the time the publication date crept around.

My fantasy books also both take place in modern times, and so I anticipated that any observation or criticism of the modern world would run foul of strongly held opinions contrary to my own. This happened, and this did not surprise me.

What I did not anticipate, and what frankly I find inexplicable, is this: In both fantasy works, I used certain elements from Christian mythology as freely as from pagan mythology, handling them somewhat fairly but perhaps with not the greatest respect in the world. I expected criticism from Christians for this show of disrespect to their revered beliefs. Instead, I got criticism from anti-Christians for failing to show sufficient disrespect toward Christian beliefs.Crossing genres as you have: Do you think that in general fantasy is winning out commercially over SF? If so, why do you think that is, and is it a good thing?

Wright: Yes; fantasy is obviously outselling science fiction. Go into any bookstore and look at the relative shelf space assigned to each. This is a fair measure of the relative interest of the book-buying readership.

Modern fantasy outsells modern science fiction for several reasons:

First, fantasy has a lower entry barrier to the first-time reader. He needs to know some basic high-school physics to get the basic appeal of a hard SF story. On the other hand, everyone knows what a magic sword is.

Courtesy to first-time readers has a cost. For example, if I put a space elevator in a story, a pause to explain what this common SF prop is might lose the interest of longtime readers. Media tie-ins avoid this stumbling block by taking place in backgrounds known to be understood by the readers.

Second, soft SF stories, such as the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs, have been pushed from the scientific world into the fantasy world by the growth of knowledge of science. No one now can set an adventure story in the lush, dinosaur-infested jungles of Venus or among the crumbling ruins of ghost-haunted Mars (except perhaps S.M. Stirling). The middle ground between the two genres is being pushed in the fantasy direction.

Third, fantasy requires less math. (Sometimes. I had to calculate how long it would take to walk down from low Earth orbit for my hard-SF book, if the beanstalk were stairs all the way down. But I had to calculate a Hohmann transfer orbit for an Earth-to-Mars flight by a magic Greek trireme in my fantasy book, so there you go.)

Fourth, the cutting-edge sciences no longer easily lend themselves to adventure stories. A rocket ship crash-landing in the steaming jungles of Venus can easily have a half-clad but comely cavegirl appear, pursued by savage space Neanderthals, whereupon our red-blooded Robinson Crusoe of space, with his torn shirt, can leap into the fray with his space-ax without much ado. Rocketry is naturally romantic and adventurous. Finding the romance in molecular biology, computer sciences or superstring theory is more difficult.

Fifth, fantasy more accurately reflects the worldview, the assumptions and taste, of the young audience. Most of my readers played Dungeons & Dragons in school, not Traveler, if you catch my reference. Without getting into a debate on where the genre boundaries lie, let me say only that someone who likes Star Wars is more likely to feel at home with the themes and characters and types of Narnia or King Arthur stories than they are, say, with the themes of Citizen of the Galaxy or Ringworld. I know many fans for whom Star Wars formed the heart of their imagination, but none for whom Apollo 13 did. (This is the only hard SF movie I can think of; I am sorry that it is a historical piece rather than a prediction.)

The hard SF world is a world of sharp edges and Newtonian impossibilities: It is the world of "The Cold Equations," where what cannot be done is not done, no matter how badly we want it. The fantasy world is a world where the honesty and good-heartedness of the halfling allow him to carry the cursed magic ring to the brink of the volcano, even where mighty men, soldiers and sorcerers, would falter and fail. He has a safety net, because Fate is on his side: Even if the wretched starveling bites his finger off, the Ring will go into the volcano anyway. In effect, the hard SF world is paternal and rational and harsh; the fantasy world is maternal and emotional and forgiving. Harsh and rational is not in fashion these days; it was not what the younger generation was raised on. The kind of self-reliant character that was second nature to readers of the generation that fought World War II is rare these days. The kind of self-indulgent character that was second nature to readers of the generation that did not fight the Vietnam War is more common.

This sounds more sarcastic and critical than I mean it to be. One is not better or worse than the other, but the generations have different tastes and expectations, and this is based in part on their different sense of how life works. Personally, I think the fantasy world is more akin to real life than the science-fiction world. I think miracles actually can occur. (That my books were published, for example, is a miracle.) But the appeal of science fiction rests on the wonder provoked by scientific speculation, and as we now live in the future—I just read an article about the Starship-Trooper-style Power Armor being developed by the Army—the sense of wonder is harder to provoke, and modern science is harder to work into a story where a clean-limbed fighting man from Virginia rescues a space princess. Looking at your first published trilogy, The Golden Age: Taking into account its influences, ranging from Stapledon through van Vogt through Zelazny through Vance through Cordwainer Smith through Gene Wolfe, was this an attempt at a climactic SF text, a grand summary of the entire genre?

Wright: Yes. An easy question!

I was trying to write a Golden Age-style SF story, to capture the sense of wonder of sheer technological innovation, and to star a hero typical to the Golden Age of SF: My protagonist was an engineer who wanted to build a spaceship and was being hounded by an uncaring, reactionary society. The good in the story was unambiguous intellectual rationalism, as symbolized by the Earthmind; the bad was the force of unreason, symbolized by the Nothing Sophotech.

So indeed, I was trying to write the typical or archetypical SF tale. On the other hand, I suspect most SF tales are attempts to write the typical or archetypical SF tale. The Golden Age trilogy is the story of a marvelous interplanetary utopia, aureate with luxury and wisdom, entering into a crisis that will either destroy it or compel it to move onto an austere wartime footing. Is this your commentary on inevitable historical change, the choices ultimately facing any great civilization? Would it be fair to infer a resonance with our own time?

Wright: Yes to the first.

It is also my commentary on all Utopian writing. I have read anarchistic psychological Utopias (World of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt); anarchistic libertarian Utopias (The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith); and even anarchistic Anarchist Utopias (The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland). I have read one too many anarchistic Socialist Utopias (The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon and even Road to Oz!—albeit, I must note, not Land of Oz. In one, the Oz folk have a money economy. In the other they don't. Baum was not the master of continuity).

What I had never read was a realistic Utopia, one which takes into account the real scarcities of economics, or the real limitations of what could and could not be changed in the human condition no matter what the technology permitted. One such unchanging reality is that violence becomes ever more attractive and rational an option to a potential aggressor the more unwary and peace-loving a peaceful society becomes. Even a Utopia could maintain its peace only by a combination of rigid uniformity of certain social norms (such as my Peers and Hortators pursue) and by a common power to keep all parties in awe and terror of retaliation (a government with a standing army, in this case Atkins the soldier).

There is no intentional resonance with our own time, except to the degree that our time must, willingly or no, confront certain inevitable realities that confront all ages, both those that slumber and those shocked awake. The book was written during the era before the current war and after the Cold War, a period some commentators call a vacation from history.

I do see parallels with our current war I find disquieting.



The Golden Age, although a single sustained novel, does break naturally into three parts: a volume exploring grand utopian vistas, a volume detailing utopia's seamy underside and a volume exploring the hard decisions the utopia must take in order to preserve itself. Was this progression a conscious effort at a narrative dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis?

Wright: No. I meant the narrative to be an uninterrupted whole. Phaethon loses his armor and is flung into the sea to drown because every hero must spend a night in the belly of the whale.

There is no synthesis at the end: The opponents do not combine. One side wins and the other loses. Daphne wins, and the various people (and oecumenes) standing between her and her man lose. The fears of the Hortators in Chapter 2 turn out to be correct in essence: Phaethon's effort at star colonization provokes the first interstellar war. They are unable to maintain the peace and prosperity so dear to them.

I mention Daphne and not Phaethon because I have the sneaking suspicion that she is the heroine of the novel.

The final Golden Age installment, The Golden Transcendence, features an astonishing voyage into the sun by battling antagonists—a climax indeed worthy of the most grandiose of space operas from SF's own Golden Age. Such audacious plotting is typical of your work; how do you manage to keep this prodigious output of invention and dramatic incident flowing?

Wright: I beg your pardon? I've only written four [long!] novels so far. My output can hardly be called prodigious as yet. The question is premature, but I thank you for the compliment.

Rare is the author who knows where his ideas come from, or how long his creative genius will last, or why the ideas sometimes flow easily or sometimes with difficulty. It is simplest to say inspiration flows from Mount Parnassus, and to sacrifice a white heifer to the Muses when they have been generous.

I get my ideas mostly by stealing them from my betters. The only difference between a great author and a mediocre one is that great authors steal from the greats. I suggest reading the classics for loot.

That flow of ideas: It's notable how thoroughly and deeply argued your work is, a constant intellectual challenge and guide to the reader. Are all your books at a fundamental level Socratic documents, philosophical romances?

Wright: Not intentionally. I mean my books at a fundamental level are cliché-ridden, hackneyed space opera. (Even my fantasy reads like space opera. For goodness' sake, one of the characters in War of the Dreaming stepped straight out of pulp!) I am trying to follow in the footsteps of E.E. Doc Smith, I just get sidetracked: philosophical musings on deep issues tend to creep in without my noticing. I let them stand merely because I find them interesting, and I hope the readers do as well.

My works are Socratic only in the limited sense that I feel the need to have both sides of any argument come on stage. I used to be a lawyer; I expect the counsels for both sides to present their case. And they always have a case. I prefer my villains to have some justification or excuse for what they do. No one, in real life, commits acts of atrocious evil for evil's sake (except an Al Qaeda terrorist, of course. And even they have an elaborate system of theology to justify their dark and cowardly crimes against innocent bystanders.)

Looking now at The War of the Dreaming: This was written before The Golden Age, wasn't it? Did you originally conceive the apocalyptic plot as taking place around the year 2000, tying in with a generalized millennial fever?

Wright: No. Everness was indeed written before The Golden Age. But I originally conceived the plot as taking place in the year in which it was written, 1994, President Clinton's first term. It was tied in to my general youthful mistrust of Big Government, which is reflected in the ease with which the politicians accept the usurpation by dark magicians and sinister grinning sea-demons who talk like movie pirates.

The scene at the end where a couple copulates in the Oval Office, I meant to be shocking. Of course, in the scene I wrote, the two people were in love with each other, and lawfully wed. It is a mark of how rapidly the standards and mores of a culture can decline that this scene, shocking when written, by publication time seemed quaint and innocent.

The mansion of Everness, overlooking an ocean of sleep: What suggested to you a war fought among and through the landscapes of dream? Is there some influence from Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany there?

Wright: I have no idea where the idea came from. Perhaps from Mount Parnassus (see above). I was temp-working in an office, doing some utterly routine and undemanding task, Bates stamping or the like, and staring idly out the window at the sunset, and the image, perfectly formed and complete, of the opposition of patient mortal men against an unsleeping, infinite enemy from afar beyond the seas of darkest dream appeared full-grown in my imagination, as startling and complete as the birth of Athena in her armor. I had the whole plot, start to finale, in an instant.

The influences of Lovecraft and Dunsany are marked. I stole from the greats (see above). Indeed, Randolph Carter's trip to the moon in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is repeated in the Everness book, except that I added pirates. The Black Ships that ply the waters of dreamland, whose disturbing rowers are never seen, are one and the same in my book and Lovecraft's. At one point, they sail into the "Third Hemisphere" mentioned in Dunsany tales.

You seem in War of the Dreaming to be subverting a lot of fantasy's heroic conventions, both via the ragtag character of the heroes defending Everness and via the basic foolishness of the villains—the masochistic kelpies, the existentially confused selkies, poor abject Azrael de Gray. Although the fate of the world is at stake in its pages, is War of the Dreaming best understood as apocalyptic farce?

Wright: I'm afraid I don't understand the question. I am sticking to fantasy's heroic conventions with white-knuckled reactionary conservatism. The only thing I did not do was make Galen Waylock a farmboy on Tatooine, and give him a loyal manservant named Sam.

It was not the writer's intent that anyone would regard the villains as foolish. They were meant to seem horrifying, walking biological-warfare undead, and chuckling cannibal-murderers. One also feels pity, I suppose. They are victimized by their own evil in a fashion that logically follows from their evil axioms, creatures of perfect hypocrisy (in the case of the Kelpie), perfect dishonesty (in the case of the Selkie) and unparalleled pride (in the case of Azrael de Grey). Koschei the Deathless lives eternally but in eternal misery, because he gave up his humanity to shed his mortality. All this is merely a comment on the nature of evil: It is a self-destructive and wretched affair.

No farce was intended by your humble author, but of course, if you get more enjoyment out of reading the book that way, I am pleased that you should. As an author, I understand my own book about as well as a mother understands her teenage daughter: Which is to say, in some ways, not at all.

The War of the Dreaming mixes all manner of mythic materials—Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Greek, Norse and Celtic mythology, King Arthur, the Book of Revelation, comic books ... why this brew of seemingly disparate traditions?

Wright: I blame the influence of Roger Zelazny and Michael Moorcock. I wanted a book that could take place in a multiverse, to provide room for sequels.

In a multiverse, either every world has to have its own pantheon (a work of endless pain for an author to invent each one) or all pantheons of all peoples have to be at some level the same, different masks for the same multidimensional entities. At the time when I wrote the novel, this was not an idea I had seen done before, and it gave the various mythical characters more facets to their personality: Oberon and Odin being the same being, for example, or Puck and Mercury, or Lamont Cranston as King Arthur's heir.

Also, both my fantasies take place in the modern world, and the author has to be ready with some explanation as to why some people believe in Jinn and some in Angels and others in UFOs. Once the main character talks with a necromancer from beyond the grave, I cannot seriously have him dismiss other mythologies as myth.

There is a scene in a famous book where an elf is sitting on the back of a dragon explaining to the wizard-boy that there is no such thing as the supernatural, no reason to believe in the gods. I wanted to avoid the absurdity of something like that.

At some point after your first three epics were completed, you converted to Christianity, having been a resolute humanist before. How did this come about?

Wright: Now, this is a difficult question to answer, because to talk of these deep matters automatically provokes half the audience, and bores the other half. I will try to be as brief and delicate as I can.

Humanist is too weak a word. I was an atheist, zealous and absolute, one who held that the nonexistence of God was a fact as easily proved as the inequality of five and twice two.

However, my disbelief began to erode as fatherhood and war pressed upon me the realities of the world. I was a Stoic, a disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca, who say the ground of morality is duty; but I was also a liberal of the classical Enlightenment, which says toleration is the ground of morals. Both these strands in my philosophy were naïve: Humans cannot live by the strictness of the Stoics; humans ought not live by the laxness of the liberals, libertarians or libertines. The two strands did not match. Modern philosophy, which is based on self-interest or utilitarianism, is unsuited both for war and for fatherhood. Growing aware of the defects in my system, I sought something with more experience and wisdom.

Where is wisdom found? I read the deep thoughts of the most highly regarded thinkers of the modern age, and found them vain and shallow. The insights of Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Marx, Wittgenstein and other luminaries of the modern world contained simple errors in logic a schoolboy can dismiss with a laugh. Each in his own way asserted that man was irrational, and the truth unknowable: But if so, how did they prove this unreason? Using reason, or otherwise? And how exactly did they come to know the truth that truth was unknowable?

In popular culture, the books influencing the morals and values of the current age, such as Stranger in a Strange Land or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read like they were written by a Man from Mars, or a mental patient. They know nothing of real life.

The salient characteristic of modern philosophy is a speculative disconnection from reality. Michael the Martian and Karl Marx expect the super-humans to live together without jealousy or scarcity of resources. Money will simply overflow the collection plate, and anyone can take as much or as little as he likes. But what if someone is dishonest or selfish, comrade? Ah, but the theory does not allow for that.

In contrast, the writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, all read like things written by mature men. The ancients, Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero, Aquinas and even Augustine, solidly prepared the ground from which a sane, mighty and just civilization could be grown.

I reached a point in my life where on all divisive questions of morals and manners, I agreed with no one other than my hated enemies, the Christians. I knew in my cool atheist heart they must be wrong in theory; I could not explain how they were correct in practice.

I began to read history. The modernists are right to fear it. Once a man knows the context and origins of the ideas of modern times, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain faith in them. It becomes impossible to condemn Western civilization for shortcomings that fall short only of ideals unique to Western civilization. It becomes impossible not to notice Western civilization is nothing other than Christendom.

The conclusion pressed on me was that modern thought is a parasite on Christianity, and has no intellectual life outside her. The basic motif of the modern intellectual, one endlessly repeated, is of a man sawing off the branch on which he sits. The moderns delight in assertions that, if taken seriously, would disprove the axiom used to make the assertion.

The profoundly unserious nature of modern thought astonished me, and still does. I stump my secular friends by asking them to explain to me why cannibalism is wrong. Their humanist doctrines are insufficient to give a reason for humane humanity.

History told me that everything I admired about the noble and great-souled pagans still survived in Christianity: Aristotle was still alive in Aquinas, and nowhere else. The cool rationality of Athens had been preserved by Rome. Everything in paganism from which the civilized mind recoils, as slavery, infanticide, polygamy, sodomy, had been defeated by Christianity, and made a recurrence only when and where Christianity retreats.

I reached a point in my studies of history where I was forced to grit my teeth and conclude that the progress and enlightenment of Europe was due to Christianity, not despite it; and that when Europe departed from Christian roots, barbarism and darkness unique to the ideologies of the modern age descended. The crowning achievement of the rejection of Christian norms in modern times was communism: Its crowning achievement was death in such large numbers that only astronomers can grasp them.

I knew the Christians were evil in theory; I could not explain how so much unique good came from them.

Greatly daring, I attempted an experiment in prayer, addressing a Supreme Being I knew with deep certainty did not and could not exist. My prayer was quickly and awfully answered.

A miracle occurred. I suffered a supernatural experience and found all the foundations of my carefully examined and rigidly logical philosophy swept away as if by a tidal wave of blazing and supernal light. A great and powerful spirit visited me.

The whole thing was as simple and astonishing, as easy to explain and as hard to explain, as falling in love.

I am one of those rare creatures whose belief in the supernatural is due to empirical considerations. My mysticism is entirely scientific. Alas, the second step in the experiment, when the miracle occurs, cannot be reproduced before the eyes of skeptics.

Worse yet, the experiment was like toying with radium: I was mutated and changed by the exposure.

Being still a creature of pure logic, logic requires me to conclude either that I am mad as a March Hare or that my memory and perceptions were veridical.

There is insufficient evidence for the first theory, and Occam's razor cuts against it: Assuming everything was actually coincidence or an act of the subconscious mind, would be merely to assume that these things, coincidences and the subconscious, act with more power and foresight than empiricism can confirm. It is what Karl Popper called a non-disprovable assumption. Not science: an article of faith.

I am left with the second explanation, a simpler one, postulating fewer entities: I saw whom I saw and He is that He is. My integrity as a philosopher, not to mention my pride as a man, will not allow me the evasion of a return to my former beliefs, much as I might respect them. The world is far odder than I would have believed. The oddest thing of all is joy.

Has your writing altered fundamentally in spirit since your conversion?

Wright: Well, my next book is titled Crusaders of Aslan Slay the Vile Heretics of Mars, which is an uplifting children's fantasy story about a magic lion ripping to shreds Semi-Arians, Gnostics and Albigensians. On Mars. The sequel will be called A Handmaid's Tale of Mars, in which a benevolent all-powerful theocracy, by strictly enforcing the biblical notions of sacred matrimony and sacred virginity, uplifts the dignity of women. On Mars. And then Matrix of Mars, where a Chosen One from Zion will die and return from the dead, fulfilling the Prophecy and overthrowing the Diabolical Architect of Deception. On Mars. Oh, and Left Behind on Mars, where Michael Valentine Spith, the schismatic founder of a heretical antichurch, turns out to be the Beast from Revelations. But aside from that, no, no obvious Christian influences on my writing. None.

Relax, just kidding! These books take place on Venus, not Mars.

I have seen no change as yet in my writing due to my conversion, but, to be honest, I am the last person anyone should ask on that point.

On the one hand, science fiction is basically stories about rescuing space princesses, so I am not sure how often questions of the religion of the author crop up. Can anyone (aside from an English major) see the Catholicism of Jules Verne peeping out through the symbolism in Master of the World, for example?

I have plenty of other opinions certain to be denounced as annoying and exasperating by our elite self-anointed superiors without bringing religion into it. (At least two reviewers criticized me for, as best I can tell, having my hero and heroine fall in love and get married. They don't approve of Mom, apple pie, the American Way or marriage. Gee, if that is all it takes to spark controversy, I don't need to go far out of my way.)

On the other hand, I write more by inspiration than calculation, and so certain background assumptions I make about how the world acts, the moral atmosphere, are sure to be reflected somewhere in the work: But it would not necessarily be visible to me. My guess is I might pen fewer naughty schoolgirl spanking scenes in the future.

But nothing I have written since my conversion has yet seen print, so I have no third-party opinions on the matter to confirm my suspicions.

Persons eager to spot a change have deceived themselves by reading works written before my conversion and published after, and announcing in public that I am writing Christian apologetics. I am embarrassed for their sake, so I will name no names. But the mistake should serve as a cautionary tale.

One problem these eager people keep running into is that the themes of the Christian tradition have certain universals that crop up in any fantasy story, and almost any SF story. Klaatu, E.T., Gandalf, Neo, Spock of Vulcan, Questor the Robot, Sparrowhawk of Gont, Superman, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Aslan the Big Lion all die and rise again. Only two of these tales were written by Christians, and only one (despite that the author says otherwise) with clear allegorical purpose.

Now, don't get me wrong. I certainly do intend to write thinly disguised Christian apologetics at some point in my career. I have attempted nothing in this genre yet. But if the strange and ironic pattern of events I have seen so far holds out, my pro-Christian work will be greeted with open arms by the anti-Christians and denounced with howls of contempt by Christians.

Your series now ending, The Chronicles of Chaos, bears some resemblance to The War of the Dreaming, but is more tightly focused. Five supernatural beings in human form are educated (and in fact imprisoned) in a strictly disciplined private-school environment. Is this inverted academy-of-magic a deliberate rebuttal of, or play upon, the Harry Potter novels, or YA fiction generally?

Wright: Chronicles of Chaos is a rebuttal or play on Roger Zelazny. I am telling the Amber books from the point of view of the bad guys, and I merely substituted quarreling gods from Mount Olympos for the quarreling Princes from Mount Kolvir. I substituted Zelazny's Chaos for the real Chaos of the Greeks, the dominion of ancient Uranian beings like Night and Death and Madness. I also thought it would be an interesting coming-of-age story to write it as a prison break, since most teenagers coming of age feel like they are escaping from prison. It turned (without deliberation on my part) into a meditation on the nature of power and powerlessness, which is also a theme pertinent to children growing into manhood; and this led into a meditation on leadership and loyalty.

So, no. The work was written long before I ever heard of Harry Potter. Through no design of my own, Branshead is the opposite of Hogwarts: a school where magical beings learn how to be muggles. The students want to break out of school and return to lives and families at home.

Nor is this book anywhere nearly gross enough to qualify for YA status. To win awards in YA fiction, one needs to describe rapist elfs sodomizing boys with thorn bushes, or a father having sex with the ghost of his little son he murdered. Incestohomopedonecrophilia, we might call that: One needs special names to describe the new perversions. I wish I were making those examples up.

My book, written for an older audience, contains a hint of fetishism that seemed (at least to me, back when I wrote it) rather tame by contrast. My apologies to readers disgusted or offended, and I offer (by way of lame and self-serving excuse) that it is hard to tell in modern times where the line of good taste is supposed to be drawn, and I think I stumbled to the wrong side of it in this case. Many men for many years have bent their every effort to removing the signposts marking the line, and it is to be expected that sometimes even the wary are deceived. "From the point of view of the bad guys" indeed: Amelia Windrose and her four fellow "pupils" are subject to an unjust regime, making their attempts at escape heroic, plucky; but if they get free, might not the world end, justifying their imprisonment? You seem to be maintaining a shrewd balance of sympathies in this series ...

Wright: The question you raise is whether the ends justify the means. Does a person have a right to preserve his own life and freedom even when, through no fault of his own, he forms a mortal threat against another?

The conflict in the story is meant to be real, not something easily resolved. The solution reached at the end of the third book (let me say without spoiling the end) is a partial solution, compromise, a detente.

No need to put the word in quotes: They actually are pupils, studying and learning. Well, not Colin.Taking the previous question a step further: Amelia and her friends are simultaneously human adolescents and princes of chaos—is this combination of attributes in your view true, figuratively at least, of all teenagers?

Wright: No. I think teenagers are from the Planet Mongo, sent by the space-tyrant Ming the Merciless to weaken our planet's sanity and civilization. To think of them as being from Chaos would be absurd. By all accounts, Chaos is a pleasant if loud environment: Remember how courteously Satan was received and sped on his way by the Lords of Chaos in Book II of Paradise Lost. Teens are much worse than that. Have you seen how they wear their pants? Nose rings? Who aside from a cannibal from Rokovoko wears such a thing? No, they are beast-men of Mongo for certain.

Sorry, my evil switch and humor switch were turned on simultaneously. What was the question again? Yes, teenagers suffer a degree of chaos in their lives, which, in my opinion, is made worse by various social pathologies that afflict our culture. I do not think they necessarily suffer more than grown-ups, but they have no experience to rely on, and our culture has cut them off from the traditions and gathered experience of elder generations, which otherwise would guide them. The modern generation are orphans in that sense. The Chronicles of Chaos forms an interesting stylistic mix—contemporary teenage speech and thought, and high-flown Vancean rhetoric. How easy has it been to strike a balance there?

Wright: Hmm. Myself, I am dissatisfied with the way the dialogue came out, so I am not sure if the balance was struck at all. What's next for you, after Null-A Continuum?

Wright: I am currently working on a story about a man whose wife has flown to M3, the globular cluster in Canes Venatici, to plead for the freedom and salvation of the human race, destined to be overrun some thousands of years in the future by a posthuman Hegemony seated in the Hyades Cluster. Lorenz contraction will allow her to return to Earth still in youth, but some 70,000 years hence. The man intends to wait out the period until her return in suspended animation, but no institution in society, no corporation or trust fund, no government, nothing can last a period of time equal to what separates the present from the Stone Age. Like a buried pharaoh, he must discover some means to deter greedy coffin-robbers or curious archaeologists who come to disturb his sleep. And if she does not return, he must seek her across the star-gulfs: but he must wait until a civilization arises on Earth able to mount an expedition and launch a ship capable of traveling so far.

If such a civilization does not arise naturally, he must himself see to it that history is shaped according to his unyielding will, waking and sleeping as the ages turn to aeons, accumulating technologies from age to age as civilizations rise and fall, and condemning any age that has left his determined path to fire and destruction. And this is before he discovers the true meaning behind the alien civilization, or how the billion-year-old war between Andromeda and the Milky Way ties into the multibillion-year-old war between the factions of the Virgo Supercluster, or what the ultimate origin of the universe is, or how the eschaton will play out. My long-suffering hero will have a longer time to wait than he thinks. I mean this to be a cross between Homer's Odyssey and Poul Anderson's Tau Zero.

In addition to that ...

I also have a sprawling spacewar epic whose sprawl I am slowly mastering into shape (at the moment, on the back burner); a fantasy story about a haunted manor house, talking animals and the Holy Grail; the first seven chapters of the sequel to Everness are written; and the first three of a Chaos sequel. I also mean to try my hand at nonfiction writing, if I can find a publisher.