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| Barbara Hambly is an outstanding fantasy writer who has a Master Degree on Medieval History. She combines real history with fantastic worlds and characters. She has written the Dragonstar series, which feature compelling stories about dragons, wizards, witches and incredible characters, taking the reader in a terrific trip to the land of fantasy. She has also written a series of vampire books, short stories that were inspired by the Star Wars saga, stories about the Star Trek characters, as well as alternate stories of the Beauty and the Beast. She also writes fiction and has published a series of seven books on her character, Benjamin January located in New Orleans in 1830.
Interview by Marisa Darnel Artist Interviews: Barbara, can you talk to us about your last novel, "Dragonstar"? Barbara Hambly: "Dragonstar" is the fourth book of a trilogy: "Dragonsbane" was written as a stand-alone in the mid-eighties. "Dragonsbane" was about a not-very-powerful witch who is married to a warrior, who takes on the job of slaying a dragon, essentially, to buy protection for his people from a King whose royal house has been absentee rulers for generations. Ten years later I started the sequel trilogy -- "Dragonshadow, Knight of the Demon Queen", and, lastly, "Dragonstar" – because I loved the characters of John Aversin the Dragonsbane, Jenny Waynest the witch, and Morkeleb the Black, oldest and wisest of the dragons. So it’s difficult to talk about the book without talking about the other three in the series. "Dragonstar" is actually (I feel) the lightest and most hopeful of the three sequels, when everyone’s dismembered lives get put back together. In "Dragonstar", demons from another world – one of several Hells – possess both dragons and wizards in a complicated effort to make war on the demons of another Hell: they attack through the magic of the wizards they conquor, literally turning their magic against them. One reason I wanted to write the sequel trilogy was to deal with the concept, “Happily Ever After.” What happens to people who go through the awfulness that generally takes place in an adventure fantasy? What if it takes a long time to get over being possessed by demons? Don’t heroes ever experience post-traumatic stress disorder after seeing cities burned and civilizations destroyed? Another theme I wanted to deal with was the spiritual development of dragons, and what they evolve into. And, in "Knight of the Demon Queen", I had a great deal of fun interjecting a quasi science-fiction sequence with demons and our dragonslayer hero riding around in subway cars and fighting it out with submachine guns, just to see how the two parallel genres would mesh. I actually had a great deal of fun with the whole arc of four books, though admittedly the middle two are pretty dark.
BH: That’s a little hard to say: I simply wanted to tell stories. All writers play the “What if…?” game – What if the vampires had to solve a murder mystery and couldn’t go out in the daytime? What if a hero started out to slay a dragon and ended up siding with the dragon against the people who’d hired him to do the slaying? What if men stopped being able to work magic of any kind and only women – previously magic-less – suddenly acquired power? (That’s the next fantasy, due out in August: "Sisters of the Raven"). What if a free black man in pre-Civil-War New Orleans were the hero of a series of murder mysteries? These all end up in different genres and publishers sometimes frown on a writer not doing what’s expected of him or her or the genre. To me it’s all storytelling. AI: You must have done an intensive research work to be able to write seven novels about Benjamin January that were located in New Orleans in 1830. What can you tell us about that? BH: Yes, I do a lot of research about antebellum New Orleans for the Ben January mystery series. I adore research. Not just reading books, but going to the places I write about, picturing how big the rooms are and what the sunlight’s like and how the air smells. I’ve done a little bit of historical re-enactment, which is also part of research, understanding a little bit of what people in the 19th century had to put up with just living every day. I enjoy the January mysteries because they’re very low-tech: the New Orleans City Guards can’t run a forensic check on a crime scene, and there are no fingerprints or even photographs, let alone blood samples – always supposing the New Orleans City Guards are going to bother to investigate your murder in the first place. Cholera had pretty much the same symptoms as arsenic poisoning, and New Orleans being more or less a frontier town, people got shot in the streets and barrooms every night. My husband had lived in New Orleans for thirty years, and for several years he and I lived in both places, traveling back and forth every couple of months. I got a good feeling for the town then. AI: Which of your books would you like to be on the Silver Screen? BH:
There are a lot of books I’d love to see films made of: "Those
Who Hunt the Night" (the first of the two vampire books); "A
Free Man of Color or Sold Down the River" from the Benjamin January
series; "Dragonsbane; the Darwath Trilogy" (Time of the Dark,
etc); several others that I’m too tired at the moment to think
of. (I’m severely jet-lagged as I’m filling in the answers
to these questions). One book that got very little publicity which I
thought would be a fun film was "The Bride of the Rat-God",
which was a sort of light horror novel about Hollywood in the 1920s:
it had fun characters and an entertaining setting. BH: I’m an early-morning person – I get up while it’s still dark and go to the gym, to get my exercise out of the way before I start working. It’s critical to me to get enough exercise because I think better. I feed the dogs and the cats – I have two of each – and do the little maintenance chores involved in keeping critters; I like to get stuff out of the way so that I can settle in and work for several hours at a time. One of the problems about being a writer is that it isn’t glamorous at all; there’s not much of an answer to your question. I come home while it’s still fairly early in the morning, and work until I go to bed. Some days I have dinner with friends in the evening. Some evenings I go to dance classes, which I enjoy. Some days, instead of working at the computer, I go to the library and do research. I live very quietly, and I enjoy living quietly.
You Can Visit Barbara Hambly's Official Site at: www.barbarahambly.com |
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