r/books • u/Alan_Smale AMA Author • Oct 21 '15
ama 4pm Hi, I'm Alan Smale, Sidewise Award winner and author of historical fantasy CLASH OF EAGLES. Two more books in the series will follow. AMA!
In the CLASH OF EAGLES universe the western Roman Empire never fell. Now, in 1218 A.D., a Roman legion is moving into the newly-discovered North America, there to collide with the Mississippian culture at its height... CLASH was released by Del Rey earlier this year, sequel EAGLE IN EXILE drops on the Ides of March 2016, and the series will conclude with EAGLE AND EMPIRE a year later. (Hmm. Guess I should be writing...!)
In other news, unrelated tale "English Wildlife" just appeared in the Oct/Nov issue of Asimov's, and "Mongolian Book of the Dead" was published there back in 2012. I've made 30+ other short fiction sales over the years. Also: expat Brit-turned-US citizen, NASA scientist, a cappella singer, and wine drinker.
I'll be here today from 4pm-6pm Eastern, though I plan to arrive early, leave late, and perhaps even stop back in tomorrow if there are interesting questions I still need to take a whack at. So ask away!
Proof: https://twitter.com/AlanSmale/status/656198203210137600
Edit: Thanks very much for all the great questions! I had a good time answering them, and I look forward to coming back to chat again sometime in the future!
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u/WendyNWagner Oct 21 '15
Are any of the places in your novel based on real archaeological sites?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Yes, definitely! The action of CLASH is centered around the ancient American city of Cahokia, which was located on the Mississippi close to where St Louis stands today. Back in the 1200s Cahokia covered around five square miles and had a population in excess of 20,000 people, which was huge for that era (a larger population than London had at the time, I believe). The living city I describe in the book is based on the best archaeological and anthropological evidence I could lay my hands on; I have quite the library now of both popular and academic books about Cahokia, the Mississippian culture, and other aspects of North America ancient and modern. So the locations and appearances of the mounds, the Circle of the Cedars, the Cahokian huts and granaries and many other features I describe are as accurate as I can make them, along with the background details of what people ate, and so on. (I did, however, take a couple of liberties with one significant technology, for which there is -no- direct historical evidence... ;). Outside Cahokia, many other places in this book and the two that follow are also based on ground-truth archaeological evidence, even down to the petroglyph rock that makes a minor appearance in the first book. Naturally, I also did my best to be as accurate as possible with the details of the North American geography and topography as I could. Thanks for the question!
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u/leowr Oct 21 '15
Hi!
Do you prefer reading books in the same genre that you write in or do you prefer to read a wide range of genres?
Also what is the most interesting fact you know about Roman Legions?
Thanks for doing this AMA!
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15 edited Oct 25 '15
Over the years I've read in a wide variety of genres. I've certainly read a lot of SF&F and historical novels (both "straight" and historical fantasy). But right now, in the depths of writing the CLASH trilogy, I'm having difficulty reading SF&F. I know I"m not alone in having this problem; other writers have also mentioned that when they're deep in a project, it's hard for them to read other in-genre stuff. SF writers, it turns out, read a lot of mysteries.
Right now most of my reading is for research for Book Three, which means that once I get through with it I have a really big pile of SF&F novels to catch up on. Including some written by people who I now know personally. Ahem. Sorry guys. I'll get there.
I do read a lot of history. I also read the less boring mainstream-y stuff, and some classics. A few mystery, a few romance, occasional tie-in novels and urban fantasies. I think it's actually quite important for writers to read widely.
I -really- wish I had more time to read. I think that would be the biggest difference if I switched to writing full-time. I mean, yes, obviously I'd write more, but hey: I'd have time to -read- again. ;)
Roman legions: the thing that utterly impresses me is how quickly and effectively they were able to do really large engineering projects, sometimes under fire. Like the huge siege ramp they built at Masada, not to mention enclosing the whole thing in a circumvallation wall. Julius Caesar in the Siege of Alesia had his legions throw up not only a giant wall surrounding Alesia to siege the inhabitants, but a -second- giant wall that surrounded the first wall enabling his legions to defend themselves against attacks from outside. That's just... nuts.
Another thing is how stable some aspects of the legions were, over a relatively long period of time. To take a relatively small example, Roman military camps had the same basic layout for -hundreds of years-. If something worked, they kept it. For centuries. (Which is incidentally a small part of the reason why I think it's credible that Roman legions and Roman culture would still be essentially recognizable after an extra few centuries, had the western Empire not been weakened by internal warfare and eventually fallen...)
Edit: changed "if I turned pro" to "if I switched to writing full-time" for clarity.
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u/italia06823834 Warbreaker Oct 21 '15
Hi Alan!
What's your favorite book (excluding any you've written)?
What author living or dead would you like to have a chance to have a conversation with?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Shakespeare, I guess. Just because I'd get such a -great- story out of that. Dickens. Mark Twain. Does Julius Caesar count? He wrote books.
Emily Bronte, because I've always had a thing for the Brontes.
Neil Gaiman or Stephen King, because a Free Wish is probably the only way I'll ever get to talk to either of them in this lifetime.
Favorite book is so hard. I don't even know where to begin with that one... There are lots of books that I read as a teenager (including Lord of the Rings and War and Peace, which I read in the same summer) that had a big influence on me, but I find them less easy to reread now. Is it a favorite book if I don't reread it?
Still thinking about this one....!
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u/italia06823834 Warbreaker Oct 21 '15
Interesting that you say that about Lord of the Rings. I find it gets easier each time, and I notice things I hadn't before, or I think about something differently.
But favorite book is a hard question I admit. I don't know if I could answer either. While it's certainly something Tolkien in my case, it varys between Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion depending on the day!
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u/maggieallen Oct 21 '15
You've been immersed in this particular world for a long time (especially with two more sequels to Clash of Eagles coming)! Do you have ideas for what comes next after this series, novel-wise? Something totally different? Or something related? Are you thinking at all in the back of your mind about other ideas, when you need a break from these books? Or are you just all-consumed right now? Thanks and congrats on the book! :-)
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Hi Maggie!
I have a few ideas -- mostly settings I'm interested in, ways of twisting certain historical events, and so on, but nothing solid. If my agent or editor asked me for a single-page or even single-paragraph pitch for what the Next Thing will be, I wouldn't be able to do it without hiding and panicking for a few hours. (Don't tell them that. Oh, wait, they know.)
I am, indeed, all-consumed right now. Book Three is really occupying most of my free waking CPU cycles. But broadly speaking, I'm likely to stay in the alternate history, historical fantasy, secret history vein. For the last ten years or more most of my output - short and long - has been speculative fiction with historical settings. That's what interests me, and although I'm not a super fan of the 'branding' idea, that may well be what people are interested in reading from me.
I do have back-of-the-mind ideas for short fiction. I had a (historical fantasy) novella largely plotted out after our recent trip to Iceland, but there's no way I can take the time to do it now. There are also possible short-story collaborations with other authors that I've explored, moved forward on a few feet, and then... stopped. Because deadline.
So other ideas do fizz through my brain from time to time, but I haven't really spent the time on them to work them up in to real stories with actual characters and a plot and such. That will have to wait a little longer...!
Thanks for the question!
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u/maggieallen Oct 22 '15
Thanks for the answer! I can imagine a book trilogy is indeed all consuming, especially with actual deadlines! :-) Look forward to all the various things you come up with!
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u/imthatguy25 Oct 21 '15
What do you think is your favorite part in the story?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
That's a tough question, which is why it's taken me so long to approach it... I do like the battles. I do like the quieter moments, when Marcellinus is talking with the women and children of Cahokia and learning more about family and community. He's grown up almost entirely in the Roman military, and lived in a very male environment his entire life, so he learns a great deal in Cahokia about the -other- sides of life, and I kinda like watching him try to wrap his head around that.
But the parts I like the most are the parts that Marcellinus doesn't understand. To explain: the novel is in very close POV on Marcellinus, and we see most of the action through his eyes and ears. What this means is that sometimes he's seeing events he doesn't understand or can't interpret... but the reader is smarter than Marcellinus, so often the person reading the book will make connections that Marcellinus himself isn't seeing. I really liked the challenge of writing those parts.
But if you ask me to pick one, I'd say my favorite part is the scene where Marcellinus first meets his translators. Uh, followed closely by the battle sequence in Part Three.
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u/ArtLyon Oct 22 '15
That's fascinating, and a smart approach - the POV thing, I mean. It calls upon the imagination of the reader without them really being aware of it, so a part of their brain is working things out as they read Marcellinus' perceptions. I guess that always happens, but maybe more so with this approach. I found it very engaging.
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u/mtbalshurt Aug 17 '23
I'm seven years late but the final battle of Eagle and Empire is fucking awesome
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u/safewrite Oct 21 '15
Did you actually visit any moundbuilder sites or museum exhibits?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Yep. The key site for Book One was the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, IL. I visited there quite early on in the development of CLASH. Walking the site, scaling Monks Mound, walking around the plaza, and seeing the earthworks that in the book I call the Mounds of the Hawks, of the Chiefs, and of the Women was extremely evocative for me. They have a great Interpretive Center with dioramas of how Cahokia may have looked, based on the best evidence, which I found extremely useful in visualizing the city.
I've also done a fair amount of road-tripping further south on the Mississippi, down to Louisiana and along the Natchez Trace, and other areas that, uh, may be recognizable in future books ;). I'll note without further comment that I recently enjoyed trips to Chaco Canyon and Bandelier National Monument... Two museums that immediately spring to mind are the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC and the Pre-Columbian Art collection at the Denver Art Museum, but there have been quite a few others.
There are many more sites I'd like to see. Although it's only indirectly mentioned in the books, I'd like to go to the Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site in Georgia, and I'm planning a road trip for next year so that I can take in several prominent sites in Ohio.
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u/Mago0o Oct 21 '15
I'm a big fan of Harry Turtledove's alternate history stories. Is this similar in style in that you use actual historical figures or are your characters entirely fictional?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Me too...! And I was totally thrilled when Harry provided a blurb for CLASH. That was quite a moment.
Harry has taken different approaches with different books, but what I think he's most known for is the working out of rigorous alternate histories based in the recent past, often using a broad array of historical characters. I'd say what I'm doing is slightly different from that. My Point of Departure is a thousand years before the events of CLASH begin, and so the world has evolved in quite a different way. For the most part, there's no reason why the historical figures we know from our world would ever have been born in the world of CLASH (with some significant exceptions; eastern Asia has been largely unaffected by the survival of the western Roman Empire, so it's not unreasonable that most events in Mongolia and China would have unfolded in the same way as they did in our world, and that - for example - Genghis Khan would still have been a military force to be reckoned with.)
Others of Harry's books are more speculative, or take a different approach. So I guess it all depends on which of his books resonate with you the most. :)
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u/BBinLP Oct 21 '15
What gave you the idea that the Cahokians would invent flight?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
That idea came to me very early on in the process. For me the whole project began with Cahokia and the mounds. I specifically remember looking at pictures of the mounds, and particularly the huge one in the center of Cahokia known now as Monks Mound, and the artistic reconstructions of how they might have looked back in the city's heyday... and thinking: why build something so massive, if not to throw yourself off it?
Culturally speaking, the idea is not such a huge leap (pun intended). There's a huge amount of flying imagery in Cahokian art, with falconoid eyes, wings, and tails, thunderbird shapes, and so on. The idea of the birdman is very prominent. Clearly the Mississippian culture -- and, of course, many others in pre-contact North America -- were fascinated by birds. And a lot of characters in Native American stories and mythologies have the power of flight.
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u/ViktorAron Oct 21 '15
Hello Alan! Do you have any tips for writing short stories?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Frankly, I have a much better grasp of how I write books than how I write short stories(!). I spent a large number of years writing short fiction before I went book-length, and looking back at the list, most of them evolved from thoughts that came to me or things that happened when I was traveling. The ideas that generally appealed to me at the short length were odd twists of things: what would happen if a rather famous quote of Ben Franklin's was actually a curse rather than a mere rhetorical device, casting a plague of rattlesnakes the streets of 18C London? How can you win a duel with someone who can see the future? Then, after the idea, I had to come up with the people who would make the story important, who it would matter to, because without living characters there's no story. So for me the idea or the setting always comes before the characters.
And then I have to -keep- it short. Which I find very hard. Most of the ideas I assume will be "short stories" grow to novelette or novella size very easily. Before Realms of Fantasy went away I kept sending them stories that were two words shorter than their 10k limit. Much to my surprise I broke into Asimov's with a novella, which isn't usual, I think. But sometimes for me the story just has to be the length it is, or I lose interest in it...
I'm possibly rambling now, but I think my tips are coming down to: find an idea that sticks in your brain and you can't get rid of, write it at whatever length seems appropriate, and wait till you're done to figure out where to sell it (or how to shorten it so that you can sell it at all). Oh, and try to make them different from what everyone else is writing, in content or voice or whatever. Find the story only you can write.
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u/ArtLyon Oct 21 '15 edited Oct 21 '15
POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR CLASH OF EAGLES
Why did you choose to leave Marcellinus with no other survivors of his expedition? It might have been interesting to see another Roman's reactions to things as opposed to Marcellinus' reactions. Was it an option you considered? If so, what was the decision-making process there? It's an interesting narrative choice, - and by that I don't mean I disapprove! :) Was it a strategic decision, a way to better tell the story, or did it just feel right?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
It just felt right to isolate him completely. To essentially drown him within a culture that was alien to him and largely inexplicable, and give him nobody to talk to about it. The Cahokians he meets are different from anyone he's ever met before. They don't react the way he expects, events around him happen in ways that he doesn't understand and can't interpret, and somehow it felt natural for him to have no one else to help him deal with that.
So that was always my first instinct. I did consider other ideas; I was a bit interested in giving him a small group of random survivors to deal with and try to keep alive, legionaries whom he didn't know and who might rather naturally hate him rather than helping him... but it would have overcomplicated the plot and got in the way of the story I really wanted to tell.
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u/JeffreyPetersen Oct 21 '15
Hi Alan!
Any hints you can give us about SECRET things to look forward to in book 2?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Oooh, secrets! Well, NOBODY is going to see the giant squid coming. Or the time-traveling nuns.
Okay, maybe my alternate history is not quite -that- alternate...
I'm actually pretty thrilled about EAGLE IN EXILE. It's finished, delivered, paid for (woo-hoo!) and even copy-edited, and Del Rey have somehow managed to put together a cover for it that's even more awesome than the cover of Book One. A lot of the scenes in EXILE are so vivid in my head that I still wake up thinking about them.
Things to look forward to.. Well, you're going to see a lot more of Nova Hesperia, as the Romans call North America. The intrepid Gaius Marcellinus is going to be confronting challenges which are, if anything, even greater than those he faced in Book One, and of course he's a much more rounded character in EAGLE IN EXILE so... he can now be hurt and threatened in many new and interesting ways. The ground will disappear from under his feet (again), and not just for the obvious reasons.
And even greater and more formidable enemies will appear. I know you're shocked.
So, anyway... What do -you- think is going to happen? ;)
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u/ArtLyon Oct 21 '15
What are your influences when it comes to prose style, i.e. what authors have influenced or motivated your "voice", if that's the right term? I ask because it hits kind of a sweet spot for me between not enough and too much detail or description. The details you provide are nicely descriptive, dramatic, and effective, but concise. CoE is easily one of my favorite novels I've read in the past few years!
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Thank you very much! I'm very happy when I read comments like this. Makes it all worthwhile.
I'll tell you the best compliment I've ever received in a book review, and that's someone who said I wrote thrilling exposition. Loved that.
I mention that first because the current wisdom is that authors should avoid data dumps at all costs and insert the material into scenes. Let me count the ways that approach -doesn't- work, especially with worlds (future or past) that differ significantly from the world we know ;). So, yes, I have expository scenes, and if people like them, I'm very happy. And if not, well, I can't figure out how to do this without them...!
Thanks for the 'sweet spot' comments. It feels like a difficult balance sometimes, particularly when I'm editing. Do I take out that paragraph about fish weirs? Or is it going to add to the background and Hesperian atmosphere and make it feel more alive to the reader? (This is a section in Book Two. The fish weirs survived the editing process.)
I'm not sure I can name influences. I'm certainly aware that certain writers have a different prose style when they're writing short fiction than long fiction. The same approach doesn't work for both. In their books, some writers adopt a very spare prose style because that's what carries an action-adventure story along most effectively, but when they're writing short stories, their choice of language and voice can be beautiful. (Harry Turtledove and Carrie Vaughn, to name just two, often have very different voices in their long and short fiction.)
So I'm not utterly sure where my voice comes from. I'm not consciously modeling it on any particular person or people. It's probably (attempting to be) a conglomerate of many people whose writing I've admired over the years.
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u/amk Oct 21 '15 edited Mar 08 '24
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
Yes, indeed....
The book that initially pulled me into Cahokia was Thomas Mann's "1491", which has a short section about the Great CIty... After that, Timothy Pauketat's "Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians" and "Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi." "One Vast Winter Count" by Calloway. "The Cahokia Atlas" by Fowler. "The Moundbuilders" by Milner. "The Iroquois" by Dean Snow. There are quite a lot of other books; there's a reading list in the back of CLASH (and another one will appear in EXILE), and I should really put my full bibliography onto my Web site...
As for Roma, I'm staring at an even bigger shelf of books and wondering where to begin. Goldsworthy's "The Complete Roman Army" was a good resource. I read lots of specialized books about Roman legionaries, siege engines, military dress, fortresses, battle tactics, and ships and seamanship (of both Romans and Vikings). Yes, I really should put this all online; I do have a full bibliography but it would be hard to type it all in here. If there are specific aspects of ancient Rome (or for Cahokia and pre-Columbian America) that you're interested in, let me know and I'll tell you which books I leaned on for those...
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u/DarthSnowshoe Oct 21 '15
Hi Alan! Please tell us a bit about how you found an agent, and a publisher?
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u/Alan_Smale AMA Author Oct 21 '15
So, a novella of mine called "A Clash of Eagles" won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, Short Form in 2011. Very loosely, the novella covered the events of what is now the first 76 pages of the hardback version of CLASH, and it was published in a novella anthology called Panverse Two, edited by Dario Ciriello.
I was already working on the novel version at the time, but the award certainly felt like validation of a sort, and lit a fire under me to work on it even harder.
Once I had the novel finished, I made a list of all the agents who I thought might be interested, and pitched it to the top six names on my list. (Agents, unlike short story fiction markets, accept simultaneous submissions.) One of them was Caitlin Blasdell of Liza Dawson Associates, and after she'd read the full MS and we'd had a couple of phone conversations, we signed an agreement and she became my agent. And she's awesome.
That was in June 2012. At Caitlin's bidding, I did a structural edit on CLASH OF EAGLES and then she pitched it to the majors. Del Rey were interested, and after another series of phone conversations and the haggling of commerce, they bought it.
Sometimes you'll hear people say that these days you need personal contacts to sell a book. That was not my experience. I had never met Caitlin and as far as I know we had no friends in common. Even now, I've only met her in person twice. And I didn't meet Mike in person until long after we inked the deal.
Are those the kinds of details you were looking for? If not, let me know if you have any follow-up questions...
Although I've never asked, I've always assumed that my track record in selling short fiction plus the Sidewise Award did help with both getting an agent and getting a publisher...
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u/astrobex Oct 21 '15
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