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FAQs - The Three Worlds
For further information on the Three Worlds, see the Three Worlds Wiki (external site). You may also find my Three Worlds Timeline helpful, and my Printable Booklist.
- When is the next Three Worlds book coming, and why do we have to wait so long? You first talked about it in the year 2000.
- With the Three Worlds series, do I have to start at the beginning?
- I loved Karan and Llian. Why did you trash their reputations in the Song of the Tears?
- What is a ‘Darwinian Fantasy’ and why do you give the Three Worlds cycle this name?
- How much of the Three Worlds storyline had you planned out before you wrote the first series?
When is the next Three Worlds book coming, and why do we have to wait so long? You first talked about it in the year 2000.
And I said I was going to write it ‘one day’. And I have. It’s called The Gates of Good and Evil. Book 1, The Summon Stone, and Book 2, The Fatal Gate, are available, and Books 3 and 4 will be published in late 2019.
What’s the reason for this untimely delay, I hear you ask. At the end of each big fantasy series I always have a break by writing something completely different, so as to recharge my creative batteries, and to ensure that I don’t get stale and start writing the same books over and over again, as has happened to some other authors I won’t mention. And also, by the end of The Destiny of the Dead, and 2.3 million words of the Three Worlds saga, I was exhausted, creatively, and needed a long break from this story world.
I began two new series, one called Grim and Grimmer which is humorous adventure fantasy for younger readers (nine and up). These four books (The Headless Highwayman, The Grasping Goblin, The Despicable Dwarf, The Calamitous Queen) were published between May 2010 and June 2011, by Scholastic Australia.
The second series was my new epic fantasy trilogy, The Tainted Realm, Vengeance, Rebellion and Justice. The Tainted Realm is the same general kind of fantasy as my Three Worlds books, but set in a new world that I’ve spent a lot of time designing.
I’m sorry to disappoint everyone waiting impatiently for the next Three Worlds series, but when it comes it will be better than before, not just more of the same.
With the Three Worlds series, do I have to start at the beginning?
No, you can start anywhere because the three series are independent. At the beginning of each series I give all the background necessary to understand the books and the world. Having said that, you may enjoy the series better if you start at the beginning of The View from the Mirror, with A Shadow on the Glass.
I loved Karan and Llian. Why did you trash their reputations in the Song of the Tears?
I didn’t – I love them too. Certain characters with axes to grind trashed their reputations. My advice is, don’t believe everything that the characters say in my books, especially if they’re rewriting history that you know very well – trust your judgement about the heroes you know and love. And when The Gates of Good and Evil is finished in 2019 you’ll find out the truth.
What is a ‘Darwinian Fantasy’ and why do you give the Three Worlds cycle this name?
When I began writing in 1987, Fantasy was a narrower field than it is now, and it was dominated by tales about the struggle of good vs evil – clones of clones of Tolkien’s books, for the most part. I was fed up with that theme and wanted to write something different. In the Three Worlds cycle the underlying struggle is between four different human species, each of which has an equal right to exist. Each does their best to ensure the survival of their kind, even if they drive another species to extinction. No right or wrong there, no good or evil, just survival of the fittest.
How much of the Three Worlds storyline had you planned out before you wrote the first series?
I’d done quite a bit of planning before I wrote The View from the Mirror quartet, though in the end I ended up using little of it, because somehow the storyline I’d planned didn’t mean much to me. It didn’t seem real; it felt made up; logically planned, and all wrong.
So in the end, after many false starts, I simply began with one of the characters I’d thought a bit about, Karan, put her in the bad situation I’d planned at the beginning of the storyline, then abandoned the storyline and wrote her out of trouble and into worse trouble, simply making it up as I went along. That was torment for the first fifty or sixty pages because I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t see how it could work, but after that, when I’d begun to know the characters a bit the story started to flow (and it was at that stage that I realised that I wanted to be a full-time writer).
When I got to the end of the (first) book, A Shadow on the Glass, I was amazed to discover that it ended on a cliffhanger and I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going to happen next. However, I then spent a month or two plotting out what turned out to be the remaining three books of a quartet, and I more or less followed that outline in the years that it took to get the remaining books drafted (12 years from beginning in 1987 to publication of the final book in 1999).
When that series was in publication (and after a side diversion into eco-thrillerdom – I always write something completely different at the end of a fantasy series so as to recharge the creative batteries) I began planning my second fantasy quartet, The Well of Echoes. I deliberately set it about two hundred years after the events of the first series, so as to get away from all those characters, and to distance the world and times. I wanted to make the new series grittier and harder-edged, so I set it in a world that had been at war with intelligent alien creatures from the void, the lyrinx, for two hundred years, as a result of events that had happened at the end of The View from the Mirror quartet. And, despite reshaping the world and society solely for war, humanity was losing it.
Again, with the first book, Geomancer, I wrote it organically as I went along, then planned the remaining books in greater and greater detail towards the end (as one must to ensure consistency and make sure all the plotlines are woven in).
With The Song of the Tears, I’d done virtually no planning for the series before I sat down to begin the first draft. I’d deliberately not thought about it because I was so creatively exhausted by the end of Chimaera that I had to have a complete break from the Three Worlds (which I did by writing the first of my fantasies for slightly younger readers, Runcible Jones, The Gate to Nowhere).
For answers to a thousand questions about my books, please go to ‘The Three Worlds Wiki’ http://threeworlds.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page which contains more than 300 pages of detail about these books, characters, history, magic and plotlines. But be warned, it’s crammed to the brim with spoilers.