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by R.J. Carter Published: May 1, 2009
I've seen a number of bylines on your novels: Kevin J. Anderson, K.J. Anderson... Gabriel Mesta. Just who is Kevin J. Anderson? He's a guy who writes too many books for one name, pretty much. I have lots of things coming out, and different projects that I'm working on. Mostly, I got to be pretty well known for big science fiction stuff; I wrote a lot of Star Wars novels, I write the big continuing Dune series with Brian Herbert. I've got my own big series called The Saga of Seven Suns which is seven volumes long, and they're all 600 to 700 pages long science fiction epics. And then I did a book called Captain Nemo, which is the life story of Captain Nemo and his friendship with Jules Verne and how he invented the Nautilus and then explored to the center of the Earth -- all kinds of interesting fantasy things; and at the time, I thought, 'Well, let's give the readers some sort of clue that this is a different sort of book than what they might expect from Kevin J. Anderson, so I put K.J. Anderson on the cover of it. I also wrote the novelizations for "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" and "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," all of which are that sort of Jules Verne / H.G. Wells kind of fantasy-based science fiction. So I thought maybe I should come up with an obvious pen name, because I'm no good at keeping secrets and I didn't want to try to hide the fact -- but to just give some kind of a signal that these books are a little bit different. But all my fans figured it out anyway, and it didn't make any difference, so I just went back to Kevin J. Anderson. Gabriel Mesta was... I've always liked that pseudonym, I like [my wife Rebecca's] last name better than Anderson, because so many people are named Anderson, and I get "Matrix" jokes all the time -- "Mr. Anderson" and things like that -- so I thought, 'Let's try something different.' I won't point fingers or anything, but with the Captain Nemo book under K.J. Anderson, the editor changed, and the publisher changed, and there were some distribution problems, so when the bookstore looks up K.J. Anderson in their computer it doesn't look too good. So we wanted a fresh start with a completely different name, Gabriel Mesta. But, everybody knew that was Keven Anderson, too... I love writing those kinds of books, and right now I'm doing more fantasy than straight science fiction. I've finished all seven books in The Saga of Seven Suns, I still have big Dune books coming out with Brian Herbert -- the next one's called The Winds of Dune, and that comes out in August. But I've got a big "sailing ships and sea monsters / crusades" fantasy trilogy that I'm working on right now called Terra Incognita; I'm editing the manuscript for the second book now, and the first one comes out in about a month. And then the Batman/Superman book is obviously comic book fantasy oriented. So... I don't know. I just like writing, and I write all kinds of things, and I have too many stories than I could possibly tell, so I just write as fast as I can and tell as many stories as pop into my head. On one hand you have your own creations like The Saga of Seven Suns and Terra Incognita, and on the other you have media properties like X-Files, Star Wars, Dune, and the Superman/Batman story, which are obviously other people's toys. What are some of the different advantages and challenges of writing in your own universe as contrasted with playing in someone else's sandbox? The big obvious thing about writing in my own universe is that, "The buck stops here." I'm the one that makes all the decisions, and I can tell the story however I want to: I can kill off characters if I need to, I can write whatever story is in my head and be required to please no one but my own self. If I'm writing for DC Comics with the Batman/Superman novel, or if I'm writing with Brian Herbert on the Dune novels, or for LucasFilms for the Star Wars novels, then you're borrowing someone else's toys -- you have to take care of them, you have to get approvals. In some cases there are large committees of approvals that you need to go through. With the Dune stuff, Brian Herbert and I pretty much make the decisions and do that, but still I'm borrowing something -- it's not my own creation. So that adds a few extra steps, an extra layer of responsibility. But on the other hand... This new Enemies & Allies book that's coming out, it's on the bookshelf and it's got the Superman logo and the Batman logo, and you instantly have a readership; I don't have to convince people, "Here's what the book is about, and here's why it's interesting and why you might want to pick it up and give it a try," like I have to do for the Terra Incognita books. It's got an interesting story, but I've got to take a few minutes and explain it to somebody, and hopefully intrigue them. This one, you see the first meeting of Batman and Superman, and you have [the readers] at "Hello." Tell us a little about The Last Days of Krypton and how that came to be, and why the pre-Superman focus. Well, going back to my previous answer, what I'm really well known for is writing huge, sprawling science fiction epics, and it occured to me that the story of Superman's planet, Krypton -- the most advanced planet in twenty-eight known galaxies with its own amazing civilization and these great characters, Jor-el and General Zod and Lara and Zor-El, all these characters from Superman lore... it occured to me that this was a grand science fiction story. This was very much like "The Last Days of Pompeii" -- it's an advanced, technological society, it's got an interesting culture, and the world is coming to an end. And you've got one scientist who says the world's coming to an end, but people don't believe him. And there's politics and civil wars, and it just occured to me that this would be a terrific epic story... and that telling the story of the last days of Krypton and building the Kryptonian culture was something that hadn't been done. And it fit right in with the type of book that I'm well-known for doing. When I talked to [DC Comics president Paul Levitz] about it on the phone, he was very pleased with the idea. He thought that it was something that should be explored, and that I was the one to do it. So it's not a super hero book, where somebody dresses up in a costume and flies around with powers. These are all people on Krypton in the middle of a science fiction planet, basically. And it's the story of the downfall of their society. It's characters give you the background that people are really interested in for the origin of Superman, but people want to know more than just, "There was one scientist guy who said the world's coming to an end, so he stuck his baby in a tiny spaceship and sent it off." That's about all people know about Krypton, and I was able to paint the rest of the picture. How soon afterward did you know you'd be working on Enemies & Allies? You know, we were playing around with different ideas, and I was almost thinking of a sequel to The Last Days of Krypton to tell the whole story of Supergirl's origin and Argo City, which is how her parent's -- Jor-el's brother -- survived, and there's a whole group of Kryptonians that were slowly dying in this domed city flying off on a fragment of the planet. I thought that would be really interesting. But we were looking for the next "big" novel that they wanted me to do, and I guess Supergirl wasn't what they wanted me to do for the second thing -- we may still go back and do that story. I hope so, because I really like it. But they called me up and said, "Well, let's figure out what the next one to do is. How about something with Batman?" I brainstormed with the editor. I didn't want to just do another "Batman and Superman fight the jewel thieves" novel, I wanted something that was significant, because when you have a novel, you have a chance to really get into the characters and establish things or explore major events that maybe you don't have the room or the depth to do in just a comic book. We decided that the first meeting of Batman and Superman would be a terrific way to go. And I said, "It's a little hard to swallow if you set it in the modern day that Batman and Superman have never heard of each other before." It just seemed like it gave us a whole lot of interesting opportunities to set it back in the fifties, in the Cold War -- a more innocent time where you really could have a hero flying around fighting for truth, justice and the American way -- and lots of fascinating details that I'm more interested in than if I just set it in hum-drum everyday life now. Your 1950s Clark Kent and Superman seem to draw heavily on the George Reeves image... He's definitely George Reeves, yes. What inspirations did you use, if any, for Bruce Wayne and Batman? The Batman stuff... the Bruce Wayne stuff, has just been so all over the map that the character of Batman has been so different from the clever but friendly guy in Detective Comics in the forties and fifties, to the campy Adam West, to the very dark and sadistic Dark Knight of Frank Miller's comics, to the Tim Burton version which is still dark but not nearly as dark as Frank Miller's -- and then the modern Christian Bale version. They're just all over the map. But I modeled my Bruce Wayne after James Bond. The James Bond novels were just coming out, and they were very popular in this time period that I was setting. So of course I had to make it so that Bruce Wayne, the rich playboy who is very suave and has a woman on his arm all the time, and who is secretly Batman, is modeling himself after James Bond. And the character comes right out and admits that in the novel, even to the point of drinking a faux Vesper which he has to tell people how to make. That seemed like the perfect thing to do, because Casino Royale, the novel, had just come out in this time period. The Batman/Superman love/hate relationship has been done almost ad nauseum since Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns slobberknocker between the two characters. What things did you take into consideration when setting up your confrontation to keep the dynamic fresh? In my confrontation, this is their first time -- they're both feeling each other out. Bruce Wayne, as Batman, is doing high-tech stuff. He's making a suit that can resist bullets, and he's coming up with gadgets that can help him swing and climb and break through things. And he watches the news, and he sees this Superman guy flying around, shooting heat beams out of his eyes and bullets bouncing right off of his chest; and for Bruce Wayne, because he's a rational guy -- he's not just going to assume Superman is somebody from another planet who has super powers because of the yellow light of our sun -- he's wracking his brain to figure out "How does Superman fly?" He can't see a jetpack anywhere, and, "Where do those heat beams come from?" Since Bruce Wayne is running Wayne Enterprises, the only other company in the world that could have high-tech stuff like him would be Luthorcorp. So thinks that Superman might be a patsy of Luthorcorp. From Superman's point of view -- Superman, to whom the law is black and white, and who could never imagine running from the police like Batman always does, could never imagine there would be corruption in the police department as Batman well knows there is. What I was really delving into was that they're polar opposites, but they're two sides of the same coin. They both have the same goals, they're both good guys, but they don't understand who the other person is, where the other person is coming from. In a lot of the more cliched confrontations, it ends up being fist-fights and wrestling matches between the two, and they have to rig up those scenes so that, of course, Superman just doesn't flatten Batman with one punch. In mine, I tried to make it more of a conflict of personalities and attitudes that resulted in friction until they realized that they were being set up. I hope I came up with something way different from the usual Superman and Batman standing there with clenched fists and ready to slug it out. The book isn't out just yet, but have you had any sort of feedback? We've got thirty-nine reviews on Amazon already from people who've gotten pre-release copies, and we've got a four-star rating so far. I've gotten a lot of fan mail from the people who read it ahead of time, and a lot of buzz from the reviews. My own readers who have read it, they just think that it really captures the feel of the nostalgia of superheroes, but it also gets into the real heart of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, and all of their supporting casts. If you could go forward with this series, would it be another Superman or Batman story, or would you be looking at expanding this 1950s world of heroes? Well, other than the fact that Superman's a baby launched at the end of The Last Days of Krypton and now here he's full-blown Clark Kent and being Superman -- I'm not really sure that I'd call Enemies & Allies connected to The Last Days of Krypton, other than it's in the same universe. I would kind of like to stay within this fifties time period -- I'd like to keep going in it. But I'm still hoping for that Argo City story. Wonder Woman's another possibility. There's all kinds of things to do, and the DC Comics people and I, now that this one's just coming out, we're starting to talk on the phone about "How about we do this?" or "How about we do that?" We don't have it decided or confirmed yet, but I sure loved working on this one, and the readers love what they've read so far -- in fact, this is one of my most unexpected compliments: I just got this wonderful praise and gushing talk on the Howard Stern show yesterday; Howard Stern says he's reading Enemies & Allies and he was liking it, so it was a nice, unexpected little plug. You mentioned Wonder Woman, and I was going to ask if there were any other characters that you'd like to take a crack at if you had the opportunity to work a novel around them. I've been following the DC Universe for quite a long time, and there's a lot of interesting things, but the slight drawback when you keep adding characters to the mix, like doing a Justice League novel or something, is that you've got so many people with so many super powers, how do you come up with a problem that's big enough that it requires all of these people to solve it? I mean, you don't really want a bunch of superheroes having a committee meeting when the monster's trying to destroy the planet. I've always been very fond of the old Justice Society people -- the original Alan Scott Green Lantern, the Jay Garrick Flash with the Mercury helmet. I've written a series of Justice Society comics called Strange Adventures which are all set in the forties. I like Wildcat -- he's sort of this retired boxer who now dresses up in a costume and he's a superhero. Those are fun characters to deal with. I'm not sure they would stand up to a whole novel, but who knows? There's a lot of ideas to explore, and a lot of characters. It's a little bit harder in a novel to really grasp a superhero and whatever powers they have, whether it's beams coming out of their eyes, or the glowing green ring shooting something. When you portray that on a comic page, everybody gets it and they know what they're expecting. But when I'm writing Superman, and I'm in his head, and he has to make heat beams come out of his eyes, well... what thought process does he do? Does he click his heels together and wish for heat beams to come out? How does that happen? In comics they don't have to address that sort of stuff, but in a novel you do, and I would have to come up with something that would really work for me. I mentioned Wonder Woman before. One of the problems that you would have if I would put Batman, with his full-fledged rational mindset, and Superman, who's a science fiction character because he's an alien from another planet, and Wonder Woman, who's really a fantasy character because she's got Greek gods coming up out of the ground and Aphrodite made her come alive from a figure made out of clay... it's hard to make those three universes fit together into any sort of sensible thing. But the challenges are often what make for the best stories. Is there a release date on Terra Incognita? Yeah, it's June 5th from Orbit, and I think it's my very best book, ever... but it's my new book, so I always think it's the very best one ever. It's very ambitious. It's meaningful to politics today, but it's also a great story and has lots of characters in it. It's set in a fantasy world that's very much like our age of discovery, like the 1400s with Prince Henry the Navigator and Columbus. One of the unusual aspects of this project is that my wife [Rebecca Moesta] and I have written all the lyrics to a crossover rock CD that's based on all the storylines in the first novel, The Edge of the World. We took one of the storylines and wrote the lyrics for songs, and we've got a real record label, ProgRock Records, and we've got Erik Norlander who's a well-known composer and keyboardist who wrote all of the music for us. I found out that a lot of the musicians whose work that I listen to were also fans of the novels that I wrote, so we all sort of had a fanboy get-together. We have the lead singer from Dream Theater, the lead singer from Asia, the lead singer from Saga, we've got the violinist from Kansas... all kinds of people that play on the rock CDs that I already own, and they all perform on this CD. Our group is called Roswell Six and the CD just came out. I don't know that that's ever been done before, where the same author has written the lyrics and the novel and they all come out together. So I'm just having fun. Anything we can tease your Star Wars or Dune fans with as far as future works? With Star Wars, I have nothing on the back burner at the moment, but there are always different projects coming up. The next book of Dune is called The Winds of Dune. It comes out in August, and we just got the cover for it, so I'll be posting that on my website, WordFire.com. |
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