Barnes & Noble Booksellers will be hosting an online chat with author Terry Brooks later today on the B&N Facebook page at 6:30pm EDT / 3:30 PDT.
Don’t miss out on your chance to chat with one of the most important fantasy writers of all time. Bring several questions because the chat is two hours long!
The chat is in support of his newest novel, Bearers of the Black Staff, Book One of the Legends of Shannara duology. The new book will be published next week on August 24th. If not before. Sneaky booksellers tend to sometimes put the books out early…
In the meantime, here is a short interview where Terry talks about why he set the world of Shannara in post-apocalyptic ruins and some key elements in his new book, Bearers of the Black Staff.:
Shawn Speakman: The Shannara series is set in a world that has risen from the ashes of civilization’s end. What made you decide to set the epic fantasy of The Sword of Shannara in that setting?
Terry Brookss: When I wrote The Sword of Shannara back in the late sixties and early seventies, it was intended as a one book project. So I wasn’t looking ahead to what might come after. My decision to establish Shannara in a post-apocalyptic world was predicated on a desire to show what might happen to a world in which science was replaced by magic — but magic that operated in essentially the same way as science. Thus, good or bad, it worked the same draining effects on the user and frequently had unintended consequences. The users couldn’t always know what the results would be. I wanted to look at how that would compare with our own world, letting readers make that jump all on their own, which mostly, I think, they did. All the rest, including the shift back towards science that began in Voyage and High Druid, along with the prequel series, came later.
SS: Rather than use a super plague or mass nuclear destruction or zombies, you decided the end of our civlization to come about in the Genesis of Shannara trilogy due to the cummulative negative little things we do each day. Can you explain that idea in a bit more detail and where it came from?
TB: My study of history teaches me that most strong civilizations come to an end incrementally. They don’t implode all at once. They aren’t overrun by invaders and wiped out — although that does happen now and then. Mostly, things chip away at the foundation until the whole thing gives way. In the case of the pre-Shannara world, the collapse was ultimately a combination of big things growing out of little. Sort of the perfect storm. I still think that is the danger we face in this country.
SS: What are some of your favorite “end of the world” books and movies?
TB: I suppose On The Beach, The Road and a whole raft of YA books from Hunger Games on down would qualify. Road Warrior and Terminator for movies.
SS: Bearers of the Black Staff is set in the ashes after civlization barely survies its own collapse. It has a blend of magic and technology. Was it difficult deciding what technology from our own world would survive?
TB: I had to think about it a bit. Mostly, all of it would be lost because most of the books and instructional manuals and the like were destroyed or lost. Also all the technicians were killed off, save a handful. Given that things reverted to a rudimentary existence for a thousand years after, what was recovered at first was eventually lost because it had no practical application. Vehicles and automatic weapons would be the first things to go. No way to reproduce or power them, no way to preserve them, a failure to keep them up — mostly — would decimate what was left. I settled on keeping things like the wheel and basic farming practices, primitive weapons and armor. There would be iron works and the like, but not much else. Since magic would become the dominant source of power and replace science, it would create an entirely new mindset about almost everything.
SS: Two of my favorite Terry Brooks characters ever are in Bearers of the Black Staff, Sider Ament and Deladion Inch. Did the post-apocalyptic setting inform how you shaped them?
TB: Well, duh. Sider is the direct heir — the last one living — of the Knights of the Word. Since his magic is the only apparent holdover outside of the magics held by the Elves, he needed to be what I’ve made him in the book — a kind of wanderer and loner. Deladion Inch is the other side of the coin, an anachronistic soldier of the old world turned mercenary and still hanging on to the old ways and the old weapons that he thinks are the best way to survive.
SS: Will the survivors of the Genesis of Shannara trilogy ever learn from their mistakes? Or is humanity doomed to repeat itself and its destructive ways?
TB: What do you think? What does history tell us? What do we see almost every day from our behavioral patterns. We learn, but slowly. Mostly, we forget and repeat our mistakes.
Bearers of the Black Staff will be available in bookstores on August 24th in the US and a week later in the UK.
