Hello and welcome to the Metal Pippet, the world's most real soccer analyst podcast. I am Michael Kayley. We are back and we're not doing a soccer analyst podcast. We're not doing athletics, we're not doing soccer.
I don't know as we do. I'm joined by Mike Pippin and do you wanna help people? What's going on? Let's do it.
The music turns on as well as Please download subscribe to the Cash Happiest podcasts patreon.com doublepippet and come hang on the Discord. And I'm gonna start this podcast off by digging into the politics thread in our Discord. And before I do it, I'm going to issue a warning which is like, don't go in the politics. Don't.
Don't do it. Like, I haven't even heard of this. What is this politics? You pretend it doesn't exist.
I take the medal on my shoulders of being in there and I cannot tell you enough. You shouldn't do it. But in the politics. The other day somebody dropped out a post from this guy from Robert J.
Bennett saying one thing about Kritzker is he could use Oliver Platt as a body double and govern the nation from two places at once. And Frank F. Asked, is that the author? Elston Nelson, who is a longtime follower, said, RJB is a pure poster.
He should be our friend, to be honest. And I've got to say, I could not agree more. So please welcome to the podcast. Robert Jackson Bennett.
Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. I can ask, have you ever been introduced by one of your own posts before?
Yeah, There was a YouTube like interview between two Perns where this guy had done his research and had gotten posts of mine on red going back to like 2013. It was hugely embarrassing. You can see my live reaction and just like the sheer dismay of like, finding out that he had. He had really followed me down every rabbit hole.
That was something I was recommended. We have not done that. So for listeners who don't know we're having our round because one, we are fans of his work, two, the Discord is fans of his work. And three, he has a book coming out on April 1st and I will say that there's at least one couple of people among our listeners who have advanced copies and are already singing this phrases.
So we cannot wait before we just chat. Do you want to do like. Do you have a can two sentences on the book? Yeah, it's a murder mystery series.
Don't have to read all of them together. There's only two. I mean, it sounds like a huge number yet, but I intended them to be standalone, so you didn't have to, like, read every single one to give us happiness. Force.
It is about a fantasy empire that is invaded each wet season by titans from the sea. And the whole of their economy and purpose and being is built on trying to keep them out. They've done it somewhat successful the past few, like, centuries. The way that they do this is they use the blood of leviathans that they fell to change their own bodies and give them enhancements.
For example, a perfect, like, memory, which is what the protagonist has. He is an assistant. He's like investigator for the Empire for crimes and murders and things like that. He has a perfect blank memory.
This does, of course, make his life. It cuts his, like, lifespan about in half. He works for an insane person named Anna who is a genius but is hypersensitive, so much so that she refuses to go outside of the room too often. And she lives most of her life with a blindfold on her eyes because she likes to focus on things that she thinks matters or finds quite interesting.
And they go around the countryside solving murders and trying to make sure that law and order are maintained and justice and good sentiment are maintained so that the empire can keep fighting the vibe and keep living and functioning. So the first book of the series is Tamed Cup. The one coming out first is A Drop of Corruption. And I see it's called A Drop of Corruption.
And Ana and Din mystery is that sort of like threading? It's kind of a weird point right now because I actually want this series to be called the Shadow of the Leviathan, which was like, for all the political, like, readers out there, you probably know what the Leviathan is and about how this is a series that's both about these monsters from the sea as well as the nature of the state. Like, who gets to be the people who decide what the state is, who's a citizen, who's not, what's justice? How does it work?
Not at all. No, not at all. Taco. Yeah, I really want this.
But at the same time, it is a little cozy. There's some fun. Like, I want to be a good hang for everybody. And so also calling it Ana and Din, the Plague mystery that responds to one of the things that is notable about this and that is, you know, when Tinted Cut came out was a story.
One of the reasons people disagree about Mega so Much is that the. This kind of genre mixing is, you know, it happens, but it is so unusual. And I think that like in particular doing the mixing with mystery genre creates a very different kind of experience of mysteries. I think that's what the Hana and Din mystery gets at, which is if you go, you look up mysteries, you ever get book recommendations, if you like to read mysteries, and it's an author who has a detective who finds themselves in different situations over and over and over again.
It's just kind of like a. It has very particular genre requirements, but that are often. That are rarely mixed with the sort of fancy world building you're talking about. Like, it's kind of tricky.
I think too hard about genre. I think most people think too hard about genre, about what something is in and of itself. Because like there are certain genres that are constrained by plot. Like a romance.
Like at the end of romance they've gotta get together. If they don't get together, it is by default out romance. It can be like literature, it can be like kitchen sink drama, something else. If she dies, if he dies, if they break, it doesn't get dinner.
It's a different book from a romance. You talk to romance writers, they all can agree on that. What happens if it's like a lot of romance but they don't get married? Not romance.
It just isn't a murder mystery that specifically you have to find out who the murderer is at the end. In mystery itself, not necessarily like, you know, there's lots of great like mysteries that don't offer the closure that you expect from. In mystery, you have the thing you're hunting for at the start, but you might not find it exactly to the extent you want, if at all. So those are two plot constrained genres.
And what's always kind of interesting about fantasy is I've never really been convinced it has a plot constrained genre type. The only thing people seem to bring on that this guy have a map and there needs to be a big ass fight towards the end with a bunch of swords. That's kind of the run of it as well as some invented words that are tolerable. There's a lot of them that are intolerable, but people like that too.
They like to sense the impression of like world building that they want to get in the way of plot, story. And so because fantasy has to me no plot constraints. And since a mystery does, it seems, it seems great that they can nest inside of each other. And I think that this has been done for lots of times though they might have known it like all the Harry Potter books, the first four, the best ones are basically a very beat by beat like mystery or something is a missing contained location.
And just like how in a murder mystery there's like night by night and we're all staying here and each night somebody else gets killed. Something else happens A bit strange in like Harry Potter it's you know, Halloween and it's Christmas and then it's exam time and then it's break or whatever and the games, blah, blah, those are all the sorts of kind like the chronological points at which you can expose a little bit more of the mystery to four people in the rooms. See someone like trying to do something shady and say what's that about? And to follow up clues.
And I think that's why those books were so successful. I think they got a lot less successful when they veered off and started trying to do an entirely new broader world plot. They lost a lot of whimsy and lost a lot of the structure and they got real bloated. And so I kind of learned from that.
I was like, I thought to myself wanted something that's much more pared down, much more self contained where for each helping you know exactly kind of a little bit of what you're getting. But it's been kind of interesting where I've seen some of you say oh I thought that it would stay in the same city like close to the sea and still have the monsters in it. I don't know if I like this or I thought that the plot, they would have the same plot sort of stuff from the first one. Why are they in a new place with a whole bunch of neat like, like new characters?
I don't like that there are people who basically have a very fixed idea what fantasy is beyond the map and the swords and shield stuff. And it is kind of interesting to see them crash into the genre conventions of a murder mystery and just kind of freeze up. I'm like, did you not know what this was? It is a mystery book, it's a murder mystery series.
And it was very important for me as well to not have it be in the same place all the time. Because one thing that's really fun about like fantasy is exploring going to new places. If you're not going to a new place in a fantasy story, it sometimes kind of sucks. Like at least at Hogwarts there was new parts of the school.
You learned about something, you went somewhere. But if you're playing like a game, like a fantasy game, it's a Sequel, it's in the exact same place. Kind of feels weird. You want.
You want new things to touch, like new rules, new Personas, new ambiances, all that kind of stuff here. So it's basically just in and Anna as they roam across this giant empire that's hundreds of years old with lots of secrets, lots of dangers, trying to figure out who killed that guy. Yeah, it's interesting when you sort of talk about, you know, very purposely, intentionally melding those two genres together. Divine City starts with a murder and a murder mystery, but quite clearly sort of.
I mean, I don't want to speak for your perceptions, but as a reader, it's pretty clear that it's firmly located in fantasy and not in the conventions of a murder mystery. Even as that is the driving incident of the plot. And especially the first Posterity Stairs is in a lot of ways a murder mystery. Yeah, I like that.
Was inspired by the John McCarry novels like Ticker Taylor, Switchers Finds by who Drink the Cold and things like that. I was like, I really wanted to take that sort of stale beer spy plot and drop it into a political struggle that takes place in a fantasy world. And a lot of his books actually kind of do have that same sort of, like, mystery format. I would say, like, you could suggest that Tinker Taylor is actually a murder mystery.
Even though the guy who gets, quote, murdered is not dead. He just gets shot in the back on a job in. Where was it? Somewhere in Eastern Europe.
And it's trying to figure out who made this happen, who did this. What's interesting about his book is that usually rather than drawing upon a time span of a couple of days, weeks, it draws upon years. Because it's more of a reflection of all the characters that have known each other for years. And realizing S Phi is due that the guy that you thought you knew for years is in fact someone else.
But it still has that same kind of format where there is an inciting event, a violation of some kind. We gotta find out what happened here. And then you go and hunt. So I had to look it up.
It was killing me that I didn't remember immediately. Czechoslovakia. Operation Testify in Czechoslovakia. So, yeah, I think that's interesting.
Both the point about how the sly novel starts with this sort of mystery, but then it tends to build into something larger. It seems like one of the things that is going on here is that there's different kinds of stakes depending on what kind of story you're writing. And that the stakes of a Le Carre novel are at Once going to be deeply personal. And also the stakes of international conflict in a way that is that the murder mystery usually is.
I mean not 100%. Like you can. That's something that can mix in the gen, but usually the stakes in the mystery are more medium than that. Yeah.
And it's going to be kind of interesting because although the Titans are a huge part of the Empire and what they are and why they exist and what the folk of the Empire have made themselves like in response to it, those are all really high stakes stuff. But I really kind of made a conscious choice to not make din like a hero of legend kind of stuff. Because when I first said I was going to write a story where the whole empire is based on fighting these giants, these like monsters, a lot of people like that's going to be a great battle. Like that one guy whose whole job is killing these things.
It's going to be so cool when he like runs up his arms and stab him in the back. And I was like, no, I'm trying to be realistic about this and try and focus on like how can a nation pull itself together and like be willingness and thousands of people to face these things and die and like having to bring them down not through this graphical sword, but like we have found a way to build thousands of cannons and coordinate them, make sure they're all high powered and that they all work on that they all fire correctly. The most advanced stuff we could possibly do that is a much more huge thing to me than a guy with big muscles going like, you know, all like cgi. And I really wanted it to be sort of a man on the street concept of empire, which is like how you know, like a lot of war is and that a lot is like waiting around chaos and not understand the whole thing.
And being a manager as opposed to being a warrior. I think that's something that a lot of people kind of miss these days is that a warrior is like a raider, a pillager and a soldier is often like a manager, someone who has a task, a job concept of service. It's not always. It's not always glamorous.
It's not always a cool thing to be a cog in the machine. And Dennis most certainly told again, you're a cog machine. It is a really, really, really big machine. You're not the coolest part of the machine whatsoever.
In fact, you probably have one of the worst jobs. You're going to go around and solve murders, but it will never fix anything. These people are dead. They're not coming back.
There's lots of places where you get to kill, like a Titan, be part of the army that kills a Titan. And they get to feel awesome. And these people who build these amazing things, like, for the Empire, these like towers and walls and bridges, they get to feel amazing about that. There are people who have all these, like, reagents and cures that they can use to grow back limbs.
And you're not gonna get to do that. Your job is to maintain law and order and justice. And that is a thankless, thankless task. But without it, everything comes undone.
This discusses something I find remarkable about the series, which is that it's a series about existing in this world, which is in some ways very challenging. But it's a. The world itself, certainly in the first book. But I think what you're saying to us now is it's muddling.
It's existing. It is muddling through. I don't say it's static, but it's not so much of what is. You said there are no, like, nobody agrees on fantasy sort of structures of plot.
But much of fantasy and science fiction too, is existence. In some, the six are existence. Right. They are in some way built into a clash of the world that was fundamentally one thing before and will fundamentally be something else going forward.
And, you know, they can take all sorts of different forms. I think both, in both of your previous trilogies, there's an element of that and the sense, again, this is. This is not that. This is us solving problems in a world that continues to exist in one way or another.
I don't know, like, maybe you have stuff planned for future books. I don't want to get ahead of you or have you get ahead of yourself, but the stories are very much situated in an existing world, and the focus seems to be on being in this world instead of the ways in which the world is building to some sort of climax. Yeah, I think that might be challenging for some years because I think we have gotten to a level and I think the fairy who said this, but like all the Marvel movies, everything's 911 all the time. And if it's not 9 11, it's like, even larger than that.
I will admit that in my previous series, it did get kind of boring to just constantly threaten all of existence. I sometimes, quite literally, that if this happens, then the reality, as we know the fabric of all stuff will fade and be gone. That gets kind of like. That gets exhausting to write.
To write at that constant, like, level of, like, tenor. It's Also hard for the characters. It's hard to have character based interactions in like a holocaust. You can't do that.
That's enough. Because a lot of what's good about having these, like, moments is that you're stuck together. You're just trying to have a good hangman, just trying to figure it out, what do you want for dinner? Those are fun moments that really bring these things out.
And I also think it's a little bit true of how we are now. There's this, like, right now in the world itself. I feel like everyone's waiting for this big wave to come along and sweep away all the bad things and leave only the good things. There's going to be this purging, the scouring, this collapse.
Something like, we have framed these things in our brains in a matter of Titanic struggles. And it's ironic for a series that is expressly about Titanic struggles, but the way you succeed in these things is not with a big guy in the sword who does magic. It's with sending letters, trying to organize supply lines, trying to manage people, trying to like having to manage. That's the thing that they keep saying.
We are not like. Like the goal here is not to wipe out all the evil in the world, is to manage it so we can keep going next year and do a little bit better each time. I think that's for criticism. I think that's closer to what reality is.
I think part of this might be the fact that in America, a lot of our concept of ourselves is built on the Second World War, which had titanic struggles and all this cool stuff. And we think of it as like, holy, like combat. And we forget that a lot of it was just, you know, someone had made the factories run and outproduce and out supply and outmaneuver and just flood the zone with just cheap, useful stuff. That is the titanic struggle there.
And it's not pretty. It's not. Well, I think it's pretty because I like spreadsheets. But that.
But it's not cast in the fantasy mold as we think it's. And there's always like a big moment in each of these books where, like, Anna does something amazing by just getting a big stack of paper readable. My wife's in the foreign service department and she's got a big old plaque on her desk that says, you know, amateurs talk about tactics of professional study logistics. And it's, you know, it's just.
It is the thing that I find or fascinating about it is that what things get ported over into a fantasy world to sort of be looked at out of the context that they exist in. Our world is oftentimes very different from, you know, series to series, from medium to medium. I go to, like, Galactica a lot for this, where they, you know, that show really likes to take elements of social struggle and, you know, flip them 180 and understand, like, okay, what if the good guys were doing this instead of the bad guys, so to speak. And I think a lot of what exists in TikTok exists in this world is you looking at a lot of the things that make sort of society tick that are often not looked at in outer context.
And, you know, all the stuff that you're talking about, about big societies working together and the logistics and the burden and how it all works together, and then how do you do plot within that is something I don't think we've seen a lot in the past. I think it's a little tricky because a lot of this stuff is stuff that seems very boring, but it's also the foundation of every big battle we've ever thought of. For example, a huge concern in this series is land. Who has it?
What are we, like, using it for? Because they grow all of their, like, magic, so to speak. It's all farmed, it's all cultivated. It is grown in fields and in swamps and in the special places where it's not.
You don't need to control the fields and swamps around it and make sure that it doesn't leave out anywhere. So land is very critical. And they also have to contend with the gentry, which are like, the high, like, nobles who own the most land and walk out the most, say, and how it gets used. And at first you're like, man, something about land.
This is, like, so boring. This is about, like, you know, farms and stuff. And you realize, like, the Middle Ages was guys trying to take land. That was what it was all about.
There's all these weird maps, like, go to, like, I don't know, like, the Netherlands or to Belgium. I'm in Belgium right now, actually. You're in Belgium right now. Like, it's kind of crazy.
It's like, hey, is this. Is this Dutch? Is this French? What's the deal here?
I could talk for hours about this. Every street has two names, the Dutch one and Dutch one. There was recently a controversy because a ticket taker on a train did not say hello in both languages to the people getting on the train. Like, yeah, it's a.
It's a lot. Yeah, it's quite Fascinating. And that's something we always forget because I think, you know, when we think of history, we're really thinking about like 03% of people who live there. We're not talking about some Porsche who had like grow turnips.
Even though that guy who grow turnips was like the foundation of everything else. And it mattered like which part of lang you tried to grow the turnips on that matter. That was about critical import. And so it's kind of funny where I think that for some people this micro, but it's also like this, like who owns what, owns which.
A little bit of land is the driving force of most of human history. And like, and I think part of this comes from like I used to work in events where like I'm trying to throw parties, receptions, lots of like pd, like professional development. And you always be met with some of these really great huge plans for what they want to do. It's like, okay, how are we going to get in the door?
Who's driving this here? Which loading bay do you want to use for this? How expensive is this furniture? Do you want these guys handling?
Or these are your own guys? Because one's more expensive than the other. And these are just things that people don't really think of. And I think that this speaks to like how the world works, is that the world is much more complex than anyone thinks.
Like, if you like, like that's about parties, that's about how am I getting my destiny, my computer, like set up when it comes to stuff like silicon chips or steel or all that stuff, how does that work? Like, who gets to decide that stuff? And that level of complexity is really fascinating. That was actually one thing that inspired a good bit of the story was I was reading about like one of the first things that inspired kind of the empire was reading about the like Ottomans and about how one reason they had a huge empire and the only reason why they were so successful was that they embraced complexity.
And that was why they were able to make so many like cannons and fields, many armies and things like that was that they would conquer a new nation and adopt their most successful policies and then support, overdraft the whole empire. This is for very broad strokes since they were on for hundreds of years. And so that probably isn't true all the time, but I found that really interesting where they won that because they had the coolest army or whatever they could get at stuff, change it into something else and ship it and use it faster. And I was like, oh, that's even Worse.
That is actually even worse. It's not without having a cool like leader or anything like that. You want to have so much cool stuff in guys that even a dumbass to win this fight. That's.
That that is almost an answer to the question I was going to ask. But one thing that you've talked about in other interviews, interpretation of this is how you've been reading a lot of nonfiction as a way of thinking about how to write this kind of fiction. And I totally see that like here you're like sort of early modern medieval empires and where sort of large scale bureaucratic structures could be built at a certain like level of technology. And I was just interested like what were the, what were the books that you found the most useful for thinking about some of these issues?
I'd say one that was a big inspiration was the Verge. Who was the writer? Patrick Wyman. Patrick Wyman.
There we go. Patrick Wyman. And this was really interesting in the idea of basically when you go before like the 1500s, the idea of a nation just kind of is a thing. The like France and like England or France and England, they are a loose agreement among the ruling elites that if I get my ass in trouble, you're going to come help me.
And here's how we're going to coordinate all these wars, which is basically all we ever do. The point of kings make war and about how during the Italian wars they use new technologies and really debt, a lot of it was debt that they like that they kept on having to take on to pay for these wars. And like a like lucid ring of lords couldn't manage this level that could not like find a way to field these armies and pay for all this cool stuff. And because of this like, like series of wars, we like wind up with a more like solid idea of France, of Spain, of England.
That was also the last time more or less that like Italy was a world power because after that, because they were, they weren't really a nation. They were a bunch of states and like cities that got fought over again and again and again. And because of that they wouldn't be a nation until I think like the late 19th century. And they never really got to take that path that France, anyland, Spain did and to a lesser extent the whole Roman Empire.
They didn't get to take that path. And they missed that jump that basically crowned them for the Renaissance and for colonialism and the age of Empires and all that shit. They just missed that chance. And so that really inspired a lot of this where it was the guys who were trading wool and keeping track of all the debt and the money and all that stuff.
Some of this was inspired a little bit because when I wrote Foundry side, I wrote a lot about like Venice and things like that and how they did voting and stuff that was incredibly interesting, but I couldn't use it in stores whatsoever. There was this idea of how a nation run by like merchants would be different from one that's run by warlords. So yeah, let me drill down a little bit on the process of something like Foundryside versus the process of something like this, because I remember when you were writing Foundryside, I believe I saw like Internet posts from you about sort of the origination of the idea of sort of programming language as a magical system in a lot of ways. And I sort of wonder if building from something like that to create a world, to create a story, to create, you know, whatever your art is, is it the same kind of process what you're doing now?
Is it a different process? Are you just doing something similar to different ends? Or do you find it like. Is it like a thoroughly different way of going about it?
The thing that is tricky here for me is that a lot of people really miss theme when it comes to this stuff. Like we had to bring practice recently, just last week. And one of the things that my son whose eight wanted to do was he wanted to go off in the woods and like larp with me pretty much when he was 5 and 6, we would go on heights. I would bring like some toy hammers and swords and we would go off and like fight goblins and invent a story for what we were doing.
And he loves it. I think it's a fun way to have play that is like story based or whatever. But it's kind of funny because the way he thinks about the story is like, what level do I need to get to get this magic? And what does like this magic do?
What are its advantages, its pluses and minuses? Does this give me rolls to stealth kind of stuff? He's thinking about the mechanics of the way that the magic works and the way that the world works. And I think this.
And like I've done a couple of workshopping class where someone will bring a story under the start of a book to kind of get feedback on. And a lot of the things that I see is something like, so the reason why they got to get these rocks is to sharpen the bone blades to be able to kill the demons. And I'm like, that is interesting. Who Cares, though.
Like, why? Like, what does this tie back to? Or, like, you know, we gotta practice this type of magic to seal this thing and make sure this doesn't come through. But ghosts will always bleed through it.
I'm like, great. Again, that is a game element. This is sort of like. Like, the thing they're doing is they're creating sort of the parameters of the sandbox.
That's really only 20% of what is happening. The thing that I'm gonna ask is, so who is the. Who are the people that matter in this? What do they want?
What are the problems? And how is that tied back to this magic thing that you've created as well as the things you want to look in the story? What is this looking at? Because a book is a lens that you're using to examine something else somewhat.
That's how I write. I think each book. I mean, at the least, a book is a lens, like, into what is on the mind of the person who's writing it. Sometimes it shows nothing, but usually there's at least a little bit of something.
So when it came to foundry side. And I kind of have this fun little idea of, like, magic as code, because, like, a magic is a command that you give the world change. And I was like, what if it's like a command within, like, a console and. But you have to write on the world itself.
That's really fun. It was inspired by some things I read about in, like, Venice, about how they would cast their votes. They would write it down and put in a wax ball, like these little scrolls in wax balls. For some reason, I thought what they wrote on the object themselves to convince the objects to do things that they shouldn't, they had to place an argument.
That's what code is. It's an argument for why the computer should do this. In this one, it is code for why the world should change. And so I kind of just sit back and think, like, okay, but it can't just be that.
It needs to be something about the elites and about how they are using this code to change reality to their whims and how they want to be, not just through magic, but through wealth, about how they can, like, build these walls and wall off the rest of the world and build these enclaves where the water is cleaner, the air is cleaner, and you can do what you want as opposed to the slums. And so then that kind of proceeded naturally from there because the. The idea became a little bit about how technology empowers people somewhat randomly. And then through the Effects of gathering more power to itself.
It usually breaks things up that all of the systems that you built to make that technology go get eaten alive by the power created by that technology. Because it's outgrown itself, almost like a tumor in this fashion. It probably has something to do. It rhymes with unchecked capitalism.
The idea like capitalism needs the rule of law and democracy to work, but it will eventually, like a fire, try to escape the oven you built for it and burn it all down. So it was a little bit about that and then. But the thing was tricky was I found that I made up my mind about that in a little bit. I was like, I know I can feel pretty hard how I feel about technology and about how that works.
And so then I kind of moved on to the idea of like revolution and how technology and changes in society, power are attempts to change ourselves. Then this is a thing that is both in the abstract sense in the stories and also something they do in their bodies. Literally. The idea of trying to change yourself and change how things work and change the human spirit and human heart and how.
And how those things very frequently fail. And I think that's something here in, like America that we don't really examine, which is that most, like revolutions don't go well. Most of them fail and they fail for various. Usually along class lines.
That's something like American electroclass are like revolution pulled from the top in the middle of the bottom class. But they usually fail along class and power lines. And so I wanted that series to look back in that fashion and try and feel how I felt about those things. There's a quote by writer YouTube.
It's like, I write books to try and find out how I feel about things. And that's why I write books. And so what is interesting. So then like when I started to look at the Tainted cup, it is really a series about how to manage change.
And that looked like the empire is very, very old and has very, very old systems that have been revised and replaced and built out of and improvised upon. And it's about how you need to manage and maintain certain aspects of the state and like to give space for the others to change and breathe. And this is like. And you're going to have parts of the story that examine the idea that anybody can be arrested for murder is kind of a new and unusual thing.
Like, for example, if you think of like a murder mystery, the first thing you think of is the stories usually of the 30s and the 40s and 50s in England, often about a police Officer or a detective who is not noble and is not special by birth or by class or by creed or by race, who has to go into a usually like kind of fancy setting. And usually the people that he's looking at for these murders are a mix of class, upper class, middle class and lower class. Was it the butler, was it the duchess of stuff like that? But there is an agreed upon consensus that he can arrest any of them, he can take any of them away.
And I think that there is a reason why those became popular at that era. Because in Europe at the time, and really like around the world, the idea of rule of law was falling to pieces everywhere. The idea of the state being used to enforce rights as opposed to violate them was falling to pieces everywhere. And so I think that a murder mystery is a lot like a fantasy.
It's like a fairy tale that suggests when a bad thing happens, someone comes from the stake set, right? And they will, and they will take away the bad guy. And even if the bad guy is super, super rich, they can still do it. And this is a new thing in the empire that you're going to find out.
And it's going to be tough for them going forward. Because the goal of this I think is for it starts in the outskirts of the empire, like the armpit of the world. They're going to go inward throughout the stories to stranger, older, more ancient, more stranger places where there's more gentry, there's more like ossified parts of the state. And they're going to come in conflict with these older rules more and more as they go on.
I just sort of thinking like historically where you've placed this. I'm thinking about the Ottoman Empire, thinking about the Austro Hungarian Empire and what it would mean to live there. Because everyone knew that those two states were doomed. A person would live a full life maintaining order in that empire and doing all sorts of interesting things.
Their story has all kinds of built a big bones for them that have nothing to do with the collapse of that state. That like, if you're telling a story within this sort of confined timeline, all of those larger trends in that state can be happening around them without like coming to a head. You know, you read stories about people who were just alive in these times, like just living. And it's very strange, like PG Wickhouse, you know, he was hanging out France and didn't pay attention to the second war.
They're gonna figure it out. It's not gonna be the same out of the garden. That's out of More novels every single day, and that'll be fine. And they got captured by the Nazis and forced to, like, read out all these, like, transcripts on the radio about how, like, things are going to raid.
These cancer here. Don't worry about it. Which have been trouble the rest of his life. But it, like, it's just kind of striking to see that life goes on.
I think that's something that's very difficult for people to grasp that, like, you can adapt. That's not always a good thing. You can adapt anything. Like, you can adapt anything.
You can adapt to anything. You know, there's the two sides of that coin. And I think it's interesting to see in the story about how the people of the empire are adapted. Like, for example, one thing that I think people will find in the second book, and this was always the plan, is that it's not really an empire anymore.
It's actually kind of a republic. It's like, somewhere. It's like a mishmash. It has a senate.
The Senate is easily swayed by the gentry. The Senate is mostly populated by the gentry. But it's probably a little bit better than Rome, where the Senate wasn't even, like, on elected office. And so, like, is it as free as England in the 19th century?
No. Is it as free as right now? No. Is it as, like, equitable as all these things?
No. Is it more equitable than, like, Gondor? Yes. Having just, like, this king with, like, God blood in him who, you know, rules with the light of the West?
No. They're doing a little bit better than that. And I think that's one of those things that folks kind of struggle with in a lot of these stories, is that we've gotten so used to kings in fantasy that when we accept them and when we represent with a different system, we want to start to poke holes in it very quickly, even though, like, anything is better than kings. And so it's just kind of funny to have people come up against that and be like, well, it's really dystopian that the Senate is, like, so swayed by rich people is more dystopian than a king.
Probably not for better or worse. Yeah, I like that. I remember when you were talking about who owns the land, and then again when you were talking about the fact that this is a very old empire that's not even an empire anymore, and there are systems upon systems and some that ossify and how you create space for change. This is probably a function of literally the week we are talking to you but somebody in the Discord who had just read Dated cup called it abundance.
Could it in a real way in terms of. There's, like, a very specific argument about, like, regulation and land use in the book. And I. I'm always sort of curious in which direction inspiration flows.
Are you building a world for your. For yourself? And then you look at it and you say, oh, I see, because I'm human and I've done all this research. Impacts and echoes of the world we live in.
Or is it the other way, where you're like, I want to take the things I'm thinking about in this world and I want to translate them in some way because of the things I have to say about them into the world. I am building probably a lot more of a ladder because, like, since about 2012 or so, I've been kind of a big climate guy and clean tech and, like, solar, wind, stuff like that. And that was really a portal into how much America hates to build things like power lines, or we don't really build enough power lines for anything. Transmission lines.
We refuse to do that, even though it would make our lives so much better. We'd have so much cheaper power, so much cleaner power, we'd have so much more of it. And. But, like, whenever that ever comes up, the idea of, should we do this thing that real good, we always don't know.
We absolutely refuse it. And it's mostly because the local landowners refuse to allow it to happen. And they can be big landowners or they can be small landowners, it just kind of doesn't matter. But it's this idea of wanting to keep the world around you static, wanting to keep the world around you controllable.
And that really appeals to me in this story where the world is inherently uncontrollable, both because there are the titans who want to come in and stop things, but also there are contagions that will infect you. But also some of the magic that is used by the Empire is a contagion in itself. They are changing flesh and root and branch to be something here. So it's this weird sort of tension, and this is probably a much more deft and graceful way of trying to talk about the themes that are talking about these things, but ossified, frozen, of this idea that there are select groups of people who absolutely want to keep things exactly the way they are, even though every element says, we've got to change, we've got to do something new.
I think also part of the, like, abundant stuff. And this is before it became, like, Poison coated a little bit in the last couple weeks. It was the idea of immigration. I would like to have all people, like, move to America.
I want all the geniuses in the world. That's always appealing, but it's also a very good argument for why should we. Why she would invest more in our people right now. Because we need all of them.
I've always thought in my head that, like, there is some kid out there who's going to cure the cancer that's going to kill me. But didn't because they never had a chance to. Because they were harassed out of school, like, sexually harassed because of student loans. Like that.
We put up blockades between ourselves and our, like, our health and our happiness. And we've said, well, this is just how this should go. We should really allow this to keep going, because it's really hard to change. And so that's like a little bit about where these things start to break down in the Empire is this, and you'll see this in a lot of stories is this idea of people who.
Where a situation has progressed to the point that it can't go on. And this is the thing that I've been. There was like a maxim that I heard, like, recently, which was like, if it seems like things can't go on any longer, you're probably right, but they can still go on longer than you think. And so Din and like Anna are always there at the exact moment where that starts to break down.
Where old rivalries, old tensions, new influences, new magics are changing things in a way that make that put change in the status quo and try to stay like, static, at odds. And you can see people start to break the law, break, like, kill and harm one another on both sides, where they're like, I can't stand this anymore. Someone's got to do something. And it's them as they have to come in and try and rearrange the world in a manner or at least like, lay bare how bad it is.
That's often their job, really. They're there to come back to those in power and say, this is how bad it's gotten some change. This is, of course, a lot of it is affected by, like, Anna, who is a genius and has lots of secrets and is more about the empire than I think a lot of people realize. I'm sorry.
And kind of gets that. That's kind of her job, so to speak. I am very excited about this book. And Robert, thank you so much for your time.
Do I tell people one more time how they can, must, and should get this book. They should do that. They can do that via Google and Dollars. It's in all kinds of bookstores and all kinds of Internet bookstores.
I know. It's being published in UK and in America at the same time. They both look gorgeous. I have one here, the English one.
It feels good, like. Like, it feels good on the COVID I don't know why, but, yeah. A drama. Corruption comes out.
April Fool's Day. That was not my idea, but, yeah, why that thing? Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.
Cheers, y'. All. Cheers. Yeah.