If you were at all into the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (now known as Legends), you’ve heard of Matthew Stover. He burst onto the EU scene with Traitor, a lynchpin novel in the epic, 19-book New Jedi Order series—a novel that is widely regarded as the best Star Wars book ever written. And if Traitor isn’t your top pick, it’s highly likely that Stover’s profound novelization of Revenge of the Sith, which takes the story of the movie to new heights and new depths, sits at Number One.
But while Stover found his widest readership writing for Star Wars, he is an accomplished author of his own, original fiction as well. In May of 1997, he released his debut novel: Iron Dawn, a swords-and-sandals riot of a book set in Tyre during the years after the Trojan War, as Egyptian sorcerers and Pictish warriors and Greek Myrmidons clash. It’s a rollicking ride, and laid the foundation for Stover’s trademark action scenes.
But Iron Dawn was just the warmup. A few months later, Stover dropped Heroes Die on the unsuspecting world. The first of The Acts of Caine, Heroes Die is a high-concept SF/Fantasy blend that sees a dystopian future Earth ruled by ruthless corporations and controlled through virtual reality entertainment…with a twist.
The virtual reality of Overworld that Earth’s audiences enjoy is a real place, an alternate dimension of Earth populated with real people—and real elves, real dwarves, real dragons, real ogrilloi. Real magic.
The titular Caine is the persona on Overworld of the Actor Hari Michaelson, and Caine’s adventures across the four books of the series are unlike anything else yet put to the page.
I sat down with Matt recently to discuss his writing history, the themes of his books, and, just possibly, the future of Overworld…
DM: What does your prewriting process look like? Do you fall more on the end of detailed outlines, or are you more of a “pantser”?
MWS: The answer changes depending on which story we’re talking about.
In order:
Iron Dawn was written without an outline, but it closely tracks a plotline I’d already developed for a role-playing game—plus it follows a pretty standard swords & sorcery template. Call it outline-lite.
Jericho Moon got the full outline: a detailed synopsis, one page per chapter, beginning to end. Which I had to throw out halfway through, but that’s another story.
Heroes Die was a complete overhaul of an unpublishable behemoth I’d started in college. That 500,000-word first draft was my outline, but I mostly ignored it.
Blade of Tyshalle was not so much written as it was assembled. I had the storyline of each of the four protagonists roughed out in notes, but the specifics of each and the ways in which they were interleaved were mostly intuition.
Traitor was written straight from a one-paragraph pitch I made at a story conference at Skywalker Ranch. As with most of my SW work, it follows a straightforward three-act structure, which helps simplify the plotting. Once I knew what needed to happen in each act, I could have some fun improvising the actual chains of events to underline the themes.
Shatterpoint came off a one-sentence flash that came to me while I was struggling to come up with a Star Wars-appropriate war story to launch the Clone Wars adult book series. “How about Apocalypse Now, but with Jedi in it?” Again: three acts.
Revenge of the Sith was written with Mr. Lucas’s final shooting script as my outline. The 20th Anniversary Annotated Edition goes into considerable detail about my process for this specific book.
Luke Skywalker & the Shadows of Mindor makes the three-act formula explicitly part of the holothriller premise. I wanted to evoke all the get-the-gang-back-together-and-kick-bad-guy-ass sequel movies you’ve ever seen; my main concern in the scene-by-scene writing was to make each new situation so impossibly out of control that surviving it precipitates a new situation that’s actually worse.
Caine Black Knife came about because the Act of Atonement (originally to be called His Father’s Fist, until someone at Del Rey editorial decided that title evoked gay incest porn) was turning out to be longer than Blade of Tyshalle. I realized that the Black Knife genocide and Caine’s return to Purthin’s Ford could be stitched together to form their own complementary narrative — one that would significantly lack the metaphysics and existential musings that some people disliked in Blade. And I had a two-book contract.
Caine’s Law is where I put all the metaphysics and existential musings, because fuck those people anyway. This was the closest I’ve ever come to true pantsing, I’d guess. I started with the scenes that I knew the book would need, and then worked out what that scene implied about the rest of the story, grinding through all the changes the narrative would need for it all to fit together.
DM: The way Caine’s Law ties back and recontextualizes things in the previous books is crazy. Did you always have the ending of Caine’s Law in mind for the series, or was the Act of Atonement a later creation?
MWS: Recontextualizing has always been my jam. Part of the fun in writing sequels is that you get to reframe the previous stories in a new light.
Heroes Die was written as a standalone, which lasted right up until my agent told me what Del Rey was willing to pay for a sequel. Blade of Tyshalle was written to be my full and final statement on the whole Earth/Overworld universe; I had fallen very ill while writing it, and couldn’t be sure I’d live long enough to write another. The Acts of Caine was just a tag I suggested to Del Rey to make clear that Blade is the sequel to HD. The Caine Black Knife/Caine’s Law duology came about later. When I wanted to step away from Star Wars, I decided to give Caine his shot at redemption, and I thought people might be interested to see some of the metaphysics that undergird the worldbuilding play out in a more explicit way. Plus, it let me a write a time travel story without ripping off the classics, which continues to warm my geek soul to this very day.
DM: How often do you write something that you know will never see the light of day? Do you have any trunked novels?
MWS: If I finish a book, I publish it. The reason you haven’t seen anything new from me in fifteen years is that my shitty health broke my brain.
DM: Jericho Moon is an incredibly memorable book, in part due to your choice of antagonists. How did you decide to make the Tribes of Israel the antagonists, and what was your approach to doing so in a way that doesn’t caricaturize them?
MWS: The Israelites are the proximal threat to Our Heroes, but they’re not the bad guys. The villain of that book is their god.
The way to avoid caricature is to present people as they see themselves. I relied heavily on the Old Testament, much of which is (at least notionally) their own accounting of their cultural history. My versions of Joshua and Eleazar and the Tribes are extrapolated from the text of the Pentateuch, supplemented by the best archeological evidence available at that time.
The Barra books are premised on the idea that the foundational myths of ancient cultures might be (loosely) based on fact. As it happens, there are real-world archeological timelines that place the real Fall of Jericho within the same century as the real Siege of Troy. And there’s this curious fact of the Biblical narrative: Joshua never conquers Jerusalem. He’d taken or destroyed every other city in Canaan nearly thirty years before, but Jerusalem remains in Canaanite hands until (I think) the Benjamite Rebellion or something, decades after Joshua’s death.
Jericho Moon is my swords & sorcery version of why.
DM: Were Barra and Caine to meet in a bar, over/under five minutes before fisticuffs?
MWS: More likely they’d end up in bed. They are very much each other’s type.
DM: Hah. What differences have you found between writing IP vs. writing original fiction? Did you ever feel stifled by writing IP?
MWS: Never.
Sure, there were stories that couldn’t be told in Star Wars fiction (to choose a random example) even in those pre-Disney days, but those aren’t the kind of stories I write. They knew exactly what they were getting when they hired me; it was Heroes Die that convinced LucasBooks to offer me Traitor. They hired me to write the kind of books I already write, except set in the Galaxy Far Far Away.
IP constrains the building blocks you have available to construct your story, that’s all. You build your story out of whatever blocks they give you. All you have to do is figure out an interesting way to put them together. If you can’t, you’re in the wrong line of work.
DM: The Acts of Caine deals heavily with questions of personal will and volition, and the consequences of those choices. Do you find it ironic that your most famous works ended up being under the direction/umbrella of Star Wars?
MWS: You think my Star Wars books don’t? Have you read them?
That I’m mostly known for Revenge of the Sith is a matter of minor bitterness to me, but only over money. If any of my originals had sold that well, I’d be a wealthy man. This is my main complaint, which ain’t that much of one.
I write because I hope to tell stories that will be important to people. Star Wars let me reach readers that otherwise would never have heard of me, much less read my fiction. Twenty years later, some of those people still stand in line to have me sign their copies.
Yeah, I’d like the money—but like the man said, money can’t buy me love.
DM: Well, you have plenty of love from readers, that’s for sure! Favorite “bad” book and least favorite “good” book?
MWS: I’m not sure what a bad book is, unless you’re talking about shit like The Turner Diaries or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The only novel I can remember finishing despite hating the story was The Scarlet Letter—because I had to, for freshman AP English in high school. I re-read that particular festival of yawn about fifteen years ago, to see if maybe I’d just been too young for the story. Adult me hates it just as much as teenage me.
Any book I enjoy is a good book. I don’t have time for books I don’t enjoy.
DM: How do you feel about many of the social aspects of Earth in The Acts of Caine seemingly coming true so quickly?
MWS: Nobody wants to be right about this kind of shit. In the interview at the back of the 1999 mass market of Heroes Die, I wrote “All you really need to bring about this future is a few more years of the Republican Congress.” I just never thought they’d be this bad, and have this much popular support. I genuinely underestimated how many of our citizens are stupid, greedy shitbags who hate the idea this country was founded upon. We’ve never lived up to that idea, but what made the American project great was that we kept trying.
Maybe we will again.
DM: Have you thought about looking at HRVP with the theory of illness as a metaphor that people like Hutcheons and Sontag have talked about, and as more than just the instigator of everything in Blade of Tyshalle but as a metaphor in itself for everything that happens in it?
MWS: I had to look that up. My impression (from the overview) is that they were talking about illness in terms of real-world social framing, rather than its uses in literature. HRVP was always a metaphor, or at least symbolic.
I devised it originally as a throwaway to serve practical duty in the worldbuilding, both as the historical trigger for the collapse of liberal society into the authoritarian system of the novels, and as their current cultural bogeyman. It’s the official justification for the caste laws. As Kollberg says at the beginning of Heroes Die: “The Nazis had the Jews, the Communists had the counterrevolutionaries, we have the HRVP virus.” I chose the acronym deliberately to evoke HIV, which had been used that way by the American Right—less than ten years before I wrote that book, for example, prominent right-wing pundits had been arguing that HIV+ people should be rounded up and put into internment camps. I didn’t even bother to work out what the acronym stood for until I started working on Blade of Tyshalle.
It became a plot device in Blade because I wanted an extreme threat to Overworld that wasn’t something Caine could solve with his fists—and because it allowed me to reference a particularly shameful episode in US history, and shed some light on the nature of the Overworld Company. And the smallpox/rabies concept let me use a bit of body horror to underline some of my personal thematic concerns. Blade is an attempt to frame Caine’s story as heroic myth; when you’re working with mythology, everything becomes a metaphor. To quote one of the several characters in Blade who are smarter than I am: a powerful-enough metaphor grows its own truth.
As far as Sontag/Hutcheons goes, HRVP is the opposite of any illness-as-moral-question social framing. It was specifically devised to erase any moral dimension from the actions of its victims. And as a blunt metaphor for Earth’s interactions with Overworld. It’s part of the whole Blind God concept.
DM: Fascinating stuff. At the end of Traitor, Jacen tries to teach fanatics in the Vong a lesson by forcing them to compromise, and Vergere comments that he will show them that fanaticism is self-defeating. I love that idea, but over time I’ve come to fear that it’s too optimistic. How do you feel about that concept now?
MWS: The universe teaches that lesson. Unfortunately, it does so on its own timeline, which can be inconvenient for those of us who hope to survive this shit.
DM: Do you have a personal favorite among the Acts of Caine books?
MWS: It would have to be Blade of Tyshalle. It was intended to be my masterpiece, and while it falls short of my ambitions for it, I think it fails in interesting ways. It was also my first experiment with non-linear storytelling, and a lot of the techniques I first tried there would become important features of later books. The little preparatory myth-centered bits that introduce each chapter were early attempts at what would become the mediations on “the dark” that introduce each act of Revenge of the Sith, and so on and so forth. I’m particularly fond of how I managed Deliann’s entry into the main plot in “Four,” and the reading-his-memories-in-reverse business to lay out his backstory; this is what gave me the idea for how I presented the Retreat from the Boedecken sequences of Caine Black Knife.
DM: Which were some of my favorite parts of Caine Black Knife! There have been rumors and hints over the years about a sequel book (series) on Overworld. Can you give us an update on that?
MWS: I don’t have good news on that.
Without going into too much that I’d prefer to keep private: My health has always been the main limiting factor on my writing. I’d been improving for several years, and was just getting my groove back when I got a catastrophic diagnosis early this year. My issue is currently well-controlled with medication, but the drugs that keep me alive have been fucking with my brain for about six months now, and it’s a crapshoot whether I’ll ever be well enough to finish another book.
That being said, I do feel occasionally well enough to work. When I can, I work on my Age of Caine project, which follows the unintended consequences of Caine’s Law across at least four distinct realities, each with its own cast, thematic concerns, and plot—only one of which concerns Caine and the Earth/Overworld axis. As currently conceived, it’ll be something like twelve books all told (which is roughly how many I’ve written in my entire career so far, but I’m talking about aspirations here, not probable outcomes). The idea was to play with some genres beyond swords & sorcery—one’s a post-apocalyptic western, one’s a coming-of-age urban fantasy, the third’s a hardboiled shadow-war thriller, and the last one is teen superheroes against a dystopian Christofascist world government that has actual angels at its command.
The one that has most of my attention these days is the western. Its working title is The Caine Solution. In the words of Stan the Man: ’nuff said.
DM: WOW. Thank you so much for your time and all of these insights. You have a legion of fans wishing you the best with your health and your writing!
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