A few months ago, House of Cadmus had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Robert V.S. Redick’s fantasy novels Master Assassins and Sidewinders, the first two books in The Fire Sacraments series, a planned trilogy. With incredible world building, great prose, and a cast of fascinating characters and plot, The Fire Sacraments series is a compelling read we’d recommend to all fantasy fans.
Related: Master Assassins | A Review
Robert V.S. Redick on Writing and The Fire Sacraments
For fantasy readers unfamiliar with The Fire Sacraments series, what would you tell them to expect or not expect from your series?
A lot of everything. Honestly, I think this is one of the challenges the trilogy faces from a marketing point of view: it’s not a one or two-trick pony but is ambitious across a spectrum of categories. It’s a grand desert road-trip adventure, a fond-but-critical interrogation of the epic fantasy genre, a character- and language-centric literary endeavor, and a meditation on love, war, family, cults of personality, poverty and privilege, the nature of genius, and a few other things.
None of those ambitions were really afterthoughts; I felt the need to stretch myself in all of them. And I suppose that means that this series will likely be most satisfying if you come to it hungry. Readers tell me that The Fire Sacraments is quite the immersive experience. I know that for some, such immersion is exactly what they’re after. For others, it will be a bit too much at the end of a long day. I respect that 100%. We read, as we write, according to our needs.
In House of Cadmus’ reviews of Master Assassins and Sidewinders, we called The Fire Sacraments series “intelligent fantasy,” meaning fantasy that is well plotted and exciting as fantasy should be, but with a distinct focus on depth and well-written prose—something that’s not always at the forefront of the fantasy genre. Aside from plot and characters and tropes, what are your thoughts on your approach to prose?
I’m so glad someone’s finally asking! I’m in love with language. But I’m also realizing that such a claim is more complicated than I once believed. No one gets to define what good writing is. No one gets to melt wax on the page and press their signet ring into the wax and say, “Lo! We the Chosen find this to be good.”
I’m certain we’re all better off thanks to that lack of authority. But at the same time, we’re also better off seeking and celebrating the writing that truly works for us, and making a case for it. Good prose is work, just as good plotting and world-building are work. And yet I’ve seen people dismissed as elitists for stating that they find some fantasy or SF just too poorly written for their tastes. There’s no reason to be timid about that, or about any aspect of your reading preferences. Just as there’s no reason to be haughty.
This is a long prelude to my answer: I try to write prose at the same level as the prose I love to read. I never feel that I manage it, of course: not in a world that includes Toni Morrison, E.M. Forster, Amit Chaudhury, Kij Johnson, Sofia Samatar and other demigods of style.
Do you find it difficult to balance the excitement and adventure readers expect from fantasy with the thoughtful attention to character introspection and development that give the story real depth and impact?
Sometimes, sure. But I think that struggle occurs not in the actual writing but in the silent, uncomfortable gestation period before the writing starts to flow. My books seem to find their form in that pre-writing stage, as I fret and lose sleep and stare at the wall, trying to see what the whole thing could be. Once I can see that, it seems I’ve already struck that balance, or perhaps come to terms with an imbalance. What’s probably happened in that time is that I’ve settled certain questions for myself about how to know these characters and feel the life in them. After that, adventure and character development seem to be complementary pursuits.
What is your take on fantasy tropes? With so many in the genre that can make a story archetypal and predictable, how do you use them in your own writing to instead enhance the characters and plot?
Not always with perfect success; very few novels are a perfect success. Over the 2,300 pages or so of my first series, there were moments when I felt I had reinvented a trope (the deadly bridge, the secret magical haven) and given it beautiful new life, and a certain number of readers responded with, “Yeah, we’ve been all over that ground.” And there were other moments when I felt I was walking a pretty well-trodden path, and readers found that path new and amazing.
Either way, I think the writer’s task is the same: try to see it new, clean, sharp, freshly born into the world. If you don’t see it that way yourself, it could well be that you’re right, and that you ought to dive back into the primordial imaginative muck and feel around for something else to share. If you don’t feel like you’ve found some unique treasure to lift up and share, don’t expect it to knock your reader’s socks off.
Tell us about the process of writing the second book in a trilogy. After receiving such high praise from so many well-known fantasy authors for Master Assassins, did you feel any additional pressure? Did you have any concerns about a “second book slump?”
I wish I had been more concerned! Then perhaps I would have understood what I was in for. The trouble with Sidewinders was not so much second book as middle volume syndrome. Book II of a trilogy has to perfectly extend and expand the story you’ve launched in the first volume, perfectly set up and rush to meet the grand conclusion of the third, and be a great read all by itself. Holy smokes, that was hard. My first series was a quartet, so these “middle” tasks were split over two big books, with Book II still more in the realm of beginnings and Book III firmly leaning towards the close. That luxury obscured the difficulty of what I was doing a bit. I’ll never be blind to it again. There’s a reason that, when we build physical bridges, the middle’s the last part erected. Too bad we can’t do that with trilogies.
The world building in this series is complex, vast, and richly detailed. Take us through the process of fleshing out this world. How did your own travels impact the world building?
I dream a long while before I write too much, but those dreams aren’t super binding, and in any event tend to have more to do with a character or two than with a world. Once a character’s heart begins to feel like it’s there, my mind starts casting around on its own for an understanding of what sort of (enjoyable) world might produce such a person. A sort of beneficial see-saw motion starts up: musing on that lets me sketch in a little about the world, which in turn opens up a little more understanding of the characters, which amplifies my need to understand the world. I think of my characters as carrying these powerful torches everywhere they go; the light of those fires reveals the world to me as needed.
I’m 100% certain that my travels have strongly affected my writing. And I’ve been blessed to do a lot of it: conservation & ecological justice work & research took me to Indonesia, Europe, and many parts of Latin America. Regrettably, climate realities have made me resolve to travel less going forward, unless I find low-carbon ways to circumnavigate the globe, or work that’s so convincingly useful to the planet that I can justify the footprint.
But to bring this back to world-building: while the impact is profound, the subconscious processing time seems to be measured in years. By the time incidents from travel surface in my writing, they’ve been transformed and recombined and blended with other dreams and impressions so entirely that even I fail to recognize them. Quick example: in The Rats and the Ruling Sea we visit an abandoned stone city deep in the jungle, the lair of a kind of infernal crocodile-demon. That setting must have been influenced by the two days I had in the vast ruins of Tikal in Guatemala, which in 1991 were still remote and haphazardly managed, so that my traveling companion and I could slip in after dark and walk the stone avenues still half-lost in the rainforest, and climb the eroded pyramids up through blankets of mist. But the scene also must have taken a bit from the old walled city of Cartagena, and what I’ve read about Inca architecture, and probably ancient Old World cities like Fez and Aleppo. And who knows what else. What I like to imagine is something rich and evocative but not traceable to any single analog in our own world.
Readers get to learn a lot more about the wider world and the continent of Urrath and enjoy fresh perspectives from new character points-of-view in Sidewinders. These interludes and eye-opening cutaways from Kandri’s POV were some of my favorite moments within the novel. Which of the new perspectives was your favorite to write? Why?
Wow, tough to choose! It was energizing for me as well to have new minds to inhabit in Sidewinders. Lady Kosuda and General Agathar developed as a pair–these two proud, strong, and very different people on opposite sides of this epochal, ruinous conflict. I loved inhabiting both of them. But for sheer minute-by-minute pleasure, I’d have to go with the supernatural being (trying to weave around spoilers here), because it presented such interesting contrasts: compassion and detachment, power and vulnerability, thousands of years of wisdom but no mouth to share it with. That was wild writing
While there is a realistic depiction of misogyny in The Fire Sacraments series, it feels like a trait of sexist characters themselves, not the book itself. This is a distinction where the line is sometimes blurred in male-written fantasy novels, where female characters feel flimsy and unimportant and topics such as rape and abuse are used to exemplify the “real-world grit” the author is trying to create while feeling somewhat glorified in a congratulatory “men-slapping-each-other-on-the-back” way that never truly acknowledges the obvious horror and pain of such abuse. As a female fantasy reader, this is something I can’t help but note, just as I noted the difference in your series. While your female characters began as what I thought could turn out to be typical female supporting character archetypes, they revealed themselves to be interesting, well-crafted characters who were, most noticeably, treated with respect and empathy by the overall narrative. Tell us a bit about your process for creating these female characters and giving them the voices, aspirations, and respect they deserve within the narrative.
I can’t tell you how glad I am that you read the books this way! It’s very much an ambition of mine to think and write about misogyny as honestly, and non-sensationally, as I can. It’s easy to wave a banner and say, “Congratulate me! I’m a feminist and I’m a guy!” But it’s much harder to decide what that could mean and to try to work accordingly.
For me, feminism is about more than gender. As a practice, it’s also about shutting up and listening, especially to those whose circumstances are different from my own. It’s about constructive self-doubt. It’s about sustained attention to power, privilege and coercion in all their forms, including those that have been normalized and made invisible, mostly to the advantage of men.
It does not mean, however, only seeing the humanity in characters with admirable or enlightened worldviews. Perfect characters are dull as paste. Characters with only a token flaw are almost as dull as paste. But conflicted, confused, morally gray characters are fascinating. They have wild dogs inside them, fighting over their hearts.
And yet this is where, to your point, things get so tricky. When does depicting something turn into endorsing it? We do our readership no favors by sanitizing war, for example–and gendered violence is a real, hideous part of war. But as you note, we also do them no favors by rendering such violence like a movie scene we can just pan over and forget. To do so is to airbrush out the terrible, often permanent harm such violence inflicts. To do so, in short, is to lie.
The idea holds true in less extreme contexts than war, of course. If your empathy is selective, it’s flawed. If your care, thought, patience or imagination are lavished on some kinds of characters (male, or white, or wealthy) and begrudged to others, you’re severely limiting what your novel can be.
I don’t think I strike this balance perfectly. If I ever did think so, it would probably mean I’d lost my way.
What do you hope readers take away from your books?
The joys and solace of immersion in different lives. A healing escape from the self. Fun, laughter, fear, catharsis. Kinship with characters I’ve tried as hard as I can to bring to vibrant life. A renewal of wonder at the human spirit. All that, yeah. I wouldn’t be writing epics if I wasn’t a romantic at heart.
Connect With Robert V.S. Redick
Website: https://www.robertvsredick.com/
Twitter: @RobertVSRedick
Support The Fire Sacraments Series
Master Assassins Sidewinders
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Thank you to Robert V.S. Redick for taking the time to provide us with such thoughtful answers to our questions.