MARLBORO — On Jan. 14, Brian Staveley became a published author when his debut novel, The Emperor's Blades, was released by science fiction and fantasy publisher, Tor Books.
Although this book is his first, Staveley's literary journey has already been a long and varied one, taking him from the study of poetry at Dartmouth and Boston University, through a 12-year career as a high-school English and history teacher and a year in Asia, to his present home on a dirt road outside of Marlboro, and to his present vocation as a writer of epic fantasy.
In Stavely's own estimation, this journey is a circle. His arrival in the genre of fantasy was, in fact, a return.
While growing up in southeastern New Hampshire, fantasy was Staveley's first literary obsession. As a student, he discovered how to pass dull class time by hiding books in his lap and reading them with his head down against his desk.
At school, he was able to plow through dozens of fantasy novels. His enthusiasm for the genre did not make him a picky reader.
“If it had swords,” he says, “I probably read it.”
Another long-term interest, military history, also grew from Staveley's youthful consumption of fantasy stories, in which clashing armies and world-shaking battles are a staple trope.
“I read about plenty of invented battles, but I wanted accounts of the real thing, to see if all those fantasy versions had anything to them,” says Staveley.
He never planned to join the military himself, but his reading led to a fascination with historical battles, tactics, and strategy that continues to this day.
A return to fantasy
Staveley's literary ambitions appeared at first to be following a different path.
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, he began to study and write poetry, and went on to earn a M.F.A. degree in creative writing (poetry) from Boston University.
However, when Staveley began to consider publication, he found himself returning to fantasy.
His job teaching English and history at a private high school in Cambridge, Mass., gave him summer vacations, which he devoted to writing. Although he also worked (and continues to work) as an editor for the small poetry publisher Antilever Press, he wanted his own writing to have more of the basic appeal and straightforward narrative thrust of the stories he had compulsively read beneath his desk as a boy.
He approached this goal as a challenge, and the genre seemed a perfect strategy for meeting it.
“I wanted to try my hand at something that might appeal to a broader audience,” he says. “Ta-da: epic fantasy.”
As his work advanced, writing in the summer was not enough, so Staveley quit his teaching job. He wanted to live cheaply and without distractions, so he moved for a year to Asia, with the goal of producing a complete, publishable book.
His life there became nomadic.
“Most countries will only give you a one-month visa, so I'd find a small town, work out a one-month deal with a guest house, and write,” Staveley says. “When the month was up, I'd head to a different country.”
“I spent time in China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, sometimes doubling back to the places I enjoyed most,” he adds.
Paring it down
The 300,000-word book that came out of Staveley's experience takes place in the mythical Empire of Annur, where a murky conspiracy had just assassinated the Emperor and now threatened the story's heroes, the Emperor's three adult children.
The storyline of the book would go through some changes within several drafts over the coming years, but this basic scenario would remain at its core, and eventually, it would come to print as The Emperor's Blades.
In the meantime, many changes had to be made - most significantly, the word count needed to be brought down.
“Agents and editors tend to frown on massive novels from debut writers,” Staveley explains. “Because I hadn't done any market research, I discovered at the end of the trip that I'd written a book that was far too long and needed to start over, more or less from scratch.”
In 2012, Staveley's rewriting paid off. His agent, Hannah Bowman, brought him a three-book contract from Tor Books, a highly respected genre publisher with a 30-year history that many fans of science fiction and fantasy, including Staveley, feel a personal involvement with.
“I've been reading Tor titles since I was a little kid, and when I met [company founder and publisher] Tom Doherty, when he shook my hand and told me he liked my book, I almost fell over,” Staveley says.
Staveley's three books for Tor will form a trilogy - The Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne - of which The Emperor's Blades is the first installment.
Staveley says that the second book in the trilogy, Providence of Fire, is in the final editing stage and will be published in 2015. The trilogy's conclusion is currently in progress.
Appeal beyond the genre
Staveley hopes that the world he's created in his trilogy will appeal to both fantasy fans and others through his use of the basic literary elements that transcend the genre: characters and their conflicts.
“The Emperor's Blades does have magic, but I always wanted to make sure that the magic was there to serve the development of character rather than for its own sake,” he says. “If magic makes a character's life more complicated or difficult, I'm all for it; if it's just a lot of lightning bolts and grimacing werewolves, I don't need it.”
The three characters through which readers will enter Staveley's world are the siblings Valyn, Kaden, and Adare - children of an assassinated Emperor who must solve the riddle of their father's death.
Staveley says that having three main characters allows him to add depth to the world.
“I felt as though I needed at least three (the second book has four) to tell a story with some complexity,” he says. “More characters means more locations, more secondary characters, and a greater richness to the unfolding plot.”
Through the diverse experiences of these three characters, the reader can examine all aspects, high and low, of Staveley's invented world. Kaden is an initiate in a mystic order of monks, while Valyn is an elite soldier and Adare, as the imperial minister of finance, finds herself deep in palace intrigue.
For readers already steeped in the fantasy genre, Staveley hopes the world of The Emperor's Blades will have something new.
One of his goals for the series was to create a fantasy empire that wasn't obviously based on any real-world civilization, and especially not on Medieval Europe. Nonetheless, he wanted his invented society to have a feeling of geopolitical realism, and for that, his former career as a history teacher proved useful.
So far as the Annur Empire has any resemblance to a real historical empire, Staveley says the closest analogue is Tang-era China.
“The Tang, especially in the first portion of the dynasty, were expansionist and cosmopolitan,” he says. “At its height, the dynasty controlled territory almost as far west as modern Afghanistan, and plenty of traders moved in over the so-called 'Silk Road.' Dozens of languages and ethnicities coexisted inside the empire.”
The Annur Empire, likewise, is a multi-ethnic society of a sort rarely portrayed in fantasy novels, where civilizations tend to be monolithic and monochromatic.
Another innovation Staveley claims for his world is the unit of special soldiers to which the character Valyn belongs.
“Lots of fantasy involves bands of elite warriors, but I haven't come across anything quite like a modern special-forces unit in a fantasy novel,” he says.
The special forces of Annur are known as the Kettral, and they are Staveley's attempt to imagine an equivalent of the Navy SEALs or the SAS (the British Special Air Service) in the context of a pre-modern fantasy world.
In another way, however, the Kettral are an obvious departure from the real world: They fly into battle on giant birds.
“The Kettral work in small teams; each member is a specialist, and they fly massive hawks to drop behind enemy lines,” Staveley says. In The Emperor's Blades, he draws on his military reading to imagine the tactics and combat role of the Kettral in detail.
Hobby provides inspiration
Although Staveley has no personal military experience, the detail he uses to create verisimilitude in his world comes from his own life. In particular, the physical trials of his characters owe a lot of their descriptive depth to his hobby of adventure racing.
Adventure racing is a backpacking and orienteering challenge in which teams compete to be the first to reach a series of designated points. The sport entails crossing difficult wilderness terrain as quickly as possible in unpredictable weather.
“Adventure racing is an interesting sport because so many teams quit mid-race,” says Staveley. “It's a fascinating glimpse into human nature when these teams fall apart. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons: hypothermia, broken bike frame, tachycardia, etc.”
But, he says, in most cases, “the team just stops working.”
“When you've been hammering hard for 45 hours, and you've got another 24 to go, and it's pouring rain, and you're out of food, everything seems like a good reason to quit,” he says.
These glimpses into human nature in response to these hardships translate well into fiction, he says.
“Physical suffering makes everything else more difficult; it's harder to stick to your own convictions when you're cold, exhausted, and hurt; it's harder to have reasonable discussions; it's harder to think clearly and logically. And if an author has one job above all, it's to make things difficult for his or her characters.”
Other, quieter moments in Staveley's books come from different aspects of his life.
“Sometimes I'll look out the window with my son and try to find good ways to describe the sky or the clouds or the weather,” he says. “There's really no end to the importance of paying attention to real life while writing an invented story.”