Sarah Gailey Yelling About Books: Max Gladstone’s Hugo-Nominated Craft Sequence

On the heels of Max’s nomination, he yelled with talked to Sarah Gailey (also a Hugo nominee this year, for Best Related Work) about the Craft books, magic, worldbuilding, pain, and Middlemarch. It’s the first installment of an irregular interview feature we’re going to call Sarah Gailey Yelling About Books.
Gailey: I’m coming to you live from the internet for an interview with actual genius and Hugo Award nominee Max Gladstone. Max, thank you for joining me. First question, and sorry if this is obvious, but who are you wearing?
[caption id="attachment_16788" align="alignright" width="200"] Max Gladstone, Esq. (Probably.)[/caption]
Gladstone: This guy? Oh! Oh dear, I didn’t realize I was still wearing him. I mean, you know, it’s been a tough winter in Boston, and everyone needs a bit of, hah-hah, insulation, and he is quite fashionable isn’t he? Once I got all the squishy bits out, of course. Durable, too! Oh, and shoes by John Fluevog.
Gailey: One of the coolest things about your Hugo Nominated Craft Sequence series is that you can read the books in any order. As I understand it, the titles indicate the order of events, but don’t dictate the order in which the books must be read. Which book would you recommend readers start with?

Gladstone: The whole idea came out of an idiosyncratic problem: I grew up in a tiny town in Tennessee, and the local bookshop rarely had all the books in whatever series I wanted. I always appreciated how Terry Pratchett’s books could be read in any order—and I thought it gave his world a breadth and openness unmatched even by writers whose individual volumes ran to a thousand pages at a stretch. So I wanted to write books that could be read in any order, fruitfully. When I started doing that, I found the form had some huge artistic advantages: I could unfurl the world at my own pace, introduce visions of history I’d then problematize…So many tricks and tools at my disposal!
If the reader has a choice in the matter, Three Parts Dead is probably the best place to start, because it contains the most 101 introduction to the world and its rules. But anywhere should work! Except maybe Four Roads Cross, which is kinda sequel-y.
Gailey: Good, because I started with Three Parts Dead and if you hadn’t said that was the best choice I would have been left with no choice but to destroy this interview and all evidence of our conversation and affiliation.
Gladstone: …
Gailey: The worldbuilding in the Craft Sequence universe is impeccable. After I read Three Parts Dead I angrily texted all of my friends asking why they hadn’t told me to read it sooner, and then I yelled at them about how perfect the worldbuilding and magic system is. What was the seed that started your development of the world?

Gladstone: Pain.
Specifically, the pain of the 2008 financial crisis.  But that was more the seed in a crystal sense, the seed that brought together a bunch of ideas floating in solution.
For a long while I’d been interested in heroic aftermaths—in what happens after the Climactic Struggle of the World—because this seemed to be the state in which I was growing up, in the US in the ’90s. People were even talking about “the end of history,” which was obviously clickbait even at the time (though we didn’t yet have a word for clickbait), but also terrifying, because the world we lived in was still fundamentally unjust and broken. So what happens when the Big Epic Fantay story is over, and the world’s still busted?
As I grew up, I tried to figure out how the world fit together—how bankruptcy works, how countries and NGOs operate, what money is and how it functions, how the wheels of the world turn. Our lives in the early 21st century are shaped by enormous immaterial forces, some of our own design, some emergent from our actions or beliefs: corporations and markets and political parties. We use business and political jargon to discuss these phenomena, and much of that jargon is designed to sound a bit odd and boring, but there’s a much older, and much more precise, system of language and metaphor designed to discuss the activities of enormous immaterial forces that shape our destiny: the language of magic and religion.
So, when the 2008 crisis happened, when enormous ostensibly immortal, immaterial “persons” (in the corporate sense) were dying in front of our eyes, leaving huge psychic scars across the landscape, and lay ruined upon the mountainside—when CNBC news anchors suffered crises of faith on national television—when the gods started to die and we were left trying desperately to keep them alive—the world picture snapped into focus, and I knew where I wanted to start writing.

Gailey: The Craft Sequence is very city-based, and is about magic, which made me initially anticipate that it would be urban fantasy, but the scale is incredibly vast and universal. In reading your work, I am strongly reminded of N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy (which, similarly, is fantasy that takes place in a city but is a far cry from the urban-fantasy genre). What made you decide to take such a wide lens on the stories you tell?
Gladstone: I love cities—they’re like human oceans. You have so many different communities side by side, each living its own story, most intersecting, but you also have the layers of history and meaning that have formed the city over time (sometimes real physical layers, as people build new structures on top of ruins), which endure and affect the possibilities of each successive layer. A building built as a market becomes a bank, an apartment complex, a temple; fires change the paths of streets; governments come and go, and leave their marks. Much is destroyed, and reused. But of course cities aren’t just themselves. They emerge from, draw upon, and bridge larger, more diffuse communities—they’re light focused by a lens to a point. As a bit of a country boy, I’ve always found them a bit magical, unknowable, and strange, even now that I’ve spent about half my life living inside one city or another.
Cities also have a kind of magic, transubstantiating effect: you move to New York, and at some point, you’re a New Yorker. And then there’s the true miracle of nine million people living so close to one another, under such constant pressure, and remaining human, and kind. Saint Augustine, of course, talks about heaven as a city.
It’s always seemed to me that cities have a kind of cosmic significance—as meeting places, as battle grounds, as storehouses of history, as scars and models and destinations and ruins. I think that may be where that sense of scale you mention comes from: you can express the whole cosmos through, and around, the city.

Gailey: Yesterday, it was announced that Craft Sequence was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Series. How does it feel, and is there anything you want voters to know before they binge-read the series?
Gladstone: I’m flabbergasted and flattered and grateful. This is a fantastic honor, and I’m so grateful to the Hugo voters for this honor. I’m especially glad to be nominated for the Best Series award, because I think the Craft books, while they’re each excellent in themselves, work best as a series—they build on one another and reinterpret one another, and book by book establish a larger narrative.
As far as voters are concerned: hello voters! You can read the books in any order, but they’ll probably make the most sense if you read them in the order I did—which is to say, the order in which I wrote them. (Which is, thankfully, the order in which they’re included in Tor’s omnibus.) But if you’re interested in subject matter: 

• Three Parts Dead is about bankruptcy and dead gods
• Two Serpents Rise is about water rights and risk management and giant lava serpents 
• Full Fathom Five is about offshore banking as a religious cult 
• Last First Snow is zoning disputes, human sacrifice, and the Occupy movement
• Four Roads Cross is kind of about all of these things, and is a direct sequel to Three Parts Dead. 

So! Dive in where you like.
Gailey: Cool! Okay, lightning round. Best thing you’ve read in the past six months?
Gladstone: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I do not know how she is so clever. I do not know how she writes such excellent books. After I finished Middlemarch, I couldn’t bear to read any fiction in English for about a week.
Gailey: Beets, yes or no?
Gladstone: They’re nature’s candy!
Gailey: Wrong, beets are terrible, natures candy is clearly honeycomb. Favorite thing to write about?
Gladstone: The next thing I write about. Also, I really like arguments.

Gailey: How many spiders is too many?
Gladstone: However many spiders I say would be too many, how do I know they’re not all behind me right now, just scuttling out of the way when I turn to look?
Gailey: Ha ha ha ha don’t worry about it! Don’t look behind you! Hooray! You’re the best. Any last words? For the interview, I mean, it’s not like the spiders are going to get you any second.
Gladstone: Yay! You’re the best! Readers and friends: if you’re new to the Sequence, check out the Craft Sequence e-omnibus! And if you’re old hat at all this, the next Craft novel, Ruin of Angels, is now available for preorder! If you want updates from me as new stuff hits stands, you can sign up for my newsletter at my website. if you have any questions, about spiders or anything else, hit me up on Twitter.
Take care, and talk soon!
Pick up all five books in the Craft Sequence in an ebook omnibus for $12.