Robert Jackson Bennett is a multi-award winning and Hugo nominated author. His most recent novel and first in the new Shadow of The Leviathan trilogy is The Tainted Cup, a murder mystery featuring the brilliant and eccentric detective Ana Dolabra, and her assistant Din, who attempt to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of an imperial officer in one of the country’s grandest mansions. Prior to The Tainted Cup, Robert wrote the Founders trilogy and the Divine Cities Trilogy.
Minus World: I heard you mention you wrote Warcraft III fanfic.
Bennett: Yeah, that was how I got started. I was on a forum waiting for Warcraft III to come out, and we weren’t sure what it would look like. There was a fanfiction section and I’d never heard of fanfiction. And because this entire world hadn’t been built out, we were able to get in and play around a lot more, and it was the first time that I’ve had people read my work and say, “I really like this. You’re pretty good at this.” And I was like, “oh shit.”
MW: So, how are you feeling now that The Tainted Cup is out there in the world in the reader’s hands?
Bennett: The odd thing about being a writer is that you live in a timeline. For example right now, I’m in the finishing stages of the sequel to the Tainted Cup and trying to make sure I stick the landing on that one. The other thing is that a lot of writing is not done publicly. There is no public acknowledgment of almost anything that I do. And I very, very rarely get to meet anyone who has ever read one of my books that isn’t related to me or someone that I’ve known for a very long time. So the way it feels right now is like you are a horse that gets to be taken out of the barn once a month and goes on a plane ride and then you go right back in the barn and you know that you’re not going to get this kind of attention for weeks, years.
MW: Because you’ve got your nose buried in your word processor.
Bennett: Right. So, it’s kind of weird where like 90% of my attention is focused on trying to get this next thing done. The remaining 10% is trying to be focused on enjoying that this is happening and people are absorbing it and seem to like it.
MW: Do you have any rituals or traditions when you finish a book?
Bennett: I used to, and I think this is my 12th book, and once you’ve done it for so many years, it just stops being interesting. It’s like the birthday of the 12th kid. You’re like, “you’re still around. That’s good.”
MW: Good job.
Bennett: Yeah. Good job. So we don’t really do that that much anymore.
MW: When you write, are you a plotter? Are you an explorer? When you had the idea for Tainted Cup was it just “I want to write a murder mystery,” and then you built around that? Or what exactly is your methodology?
Bennett: This one was a little bit more tortured than most because I knew I wanted to write a crime novel set in a fantasy empire. And I think, like a lot of writers, no matter how old they are, it’s really easy to get focused on the set dressing and all the ornamentation and the artifice as opposed to the shape of the thing. Like, “What are we doing here?” And so I told my editor that I wanted to write a murder mystery in the style of all the Nero Wolfe books by Rick Stout.
What I wrote first, Din was this tortured, drunken, crazy improvisational, almost criminal, who’d been forced into this line of work. And Ana was his controller, almost like his untouchable handler. I could feel it not working. And when I sent it to my editor, he was like, this isn’t really working. And it’s tough to explain why, but it’s not really a murder mystery. This is more like a crime novel, but it’s also not a terribly focused one. And I just sat back and thought about it for a while, and I realized that if you’re doing a murder mystery, which is predicated on problems of the unknown, like something has happened, we don’t really know what has happened, and if someone did it, we don’t know who they are. And then you also have the unknown levels of the world itself. This is a fantasy world. Where when the reader comes into it, I could be a shit bag and front load an explanation of how the world works, like how the magic and the rituals work. But if you want to do it properly, you have to organically let them comprehend what the story is and what’s happening in this world.
MW: Show don’t tell, right?
Bennett: Yeah show don’t tell. So that’s an unknown to a much larger one that’s harder to get through. And if you have a narrator or a protagonist who is unreliable, who’s erratic, who’s crazy, then also the protagonist becomes an unknown as well. And that doesn’t really work. If they are to function as the viewpoint of or the launching point for the entire story, the audience needs to feel that they’re on firmer ground. So I needed to basically switch their relationship, and this made total sense. Once I thought about it, I was like, yeah, no kidding. If you have a genius detective, they need to be the weird one and the investigator has to be the somewhat normal one.
MW: To be the one who the reader sees things through.
Bennett: Yeah. To be the “Watson.” So once I did that and I started to shape Din into someone that was a little bit more approachable, more normal, someone who’s a little young, a little stiff, a little uncertain, it all fell into place much quicker.
But I would continue to stress that you have to get a better grip on the shape of your story when you are writing something, because that informs almost all the rest of it. This happened in the sequel too, where the first half worked great and then the second half got a little bit fuzzy and my editor was like, I think that the issue here is that this functions more like a thriller than a murder mystery. In a thriller you know that a crime is happening and you are rushing to stop it. Whereas in a murder mystery, the crime has happened and you are trying to figure out who did it before they strike again. The crime has already happened. And so once that slotted into place, it all happened very quickly. Trying to grasp the shape of your story, and the beats within it, I think is very critical when you are planning almost anything.
MW: How much fun did you have designing the map for this fantasy world?
Bennett: Almost none at all. I hate maps. Maps really nail you down as a writer. You saw this in the Game of Thrones show. There was some giant battle that had to take place, and I didn’t watch the show, but I heard everybody complaining where they were saying this giant army moved like 2000 miles in two days. That’s a bunch of horse shit.
MW: You had to suspend your disbelief a little bit there.
Bennett: Yeah, but if you didn’t have a goddamn map, you could get away with that because the plot needed a giant fight to happen like this. The audience wants the giant fight. If you don’t give them the map, then they’re cool with it. They like it. Maps completely pin you in and nail you down in a way that’s very uncomfortable.
MW: I’m never designing a map ever again.
Bennett: You will find yourself in a corner where you’re like, I don’t know how to get this over here. The other thing is to make sure you don’t ever tell them the scale. Like how far is it between these two cities? And that makes it a lot harder. Readers will say, “You said it took them six months to travel this far, and two weeks to travel this far? I’m not buying it.” If you’re a writer, you are focused on the characters and the emotions and the theme. You’re probably not thinking, “Hey, I don’t think that the carriage wheels would have held out that long. They probably would have had to swap those out.” It’s all logistics. It becomes a real planning job of trying to coordinate the arrival and departures. And I became a writer explicitly because I didn’t want to have a real job like that. I don’t need to know about those things.
MW: Tell me about writing a murder mystery in a fantasy setting.
Bennett: It’s interesting to sit down to write a murder mystery in a fantasy world because these stories typically are not conducive to this kind of setting because for a murder mystery to go right a dead person has to be something that’s gone terribly wrong. It is a violation, like this shouldn’t have happened. Whereas in most fantasy stories, there’s a lot of killing like in Lord of The Rings. Like you find that if you find a dead guy in the woods at his house, you think orcs got him, and then you go on with your day. But there’s never going to be an organized, bureaucratic procedural push to figure out what happened here. That’s not going to happen.
MW: You don’t you don’t run into many detectives in Middle Earth.
Bennett: Right, so you needed to have a large, stable society. You had to have a lot of people and you had to have a system of laws and you also need a system where they had saddled people with the authority to find out what’s happening. And I quickly realized this can be fantasy, but it can’t be like the classic fantasy that we’re always thinking of because those just don’t fit like in Game of Thrones, no one gives a shit about corpses.
MW: There’s so many of them.
Bennett: Yeah. So my perspective started to shift towards something like Dune or the Book of the New Sun. Which were both like alien worlds that still have institutions that are somewhat inscrutable and uncanny but exist to exert rights and privileges.
MW: The setting for me is usually secondary. It’s more what is the story being told and who are the characters acting out the story.
Bennett: You just have to make sure you have the right components to make it go. Because if you don’t have those components, you can’t invent on the fly, “this is the guy who has the right to investigate this death.” There also has to be real consequences. That needs to be pre-built in, as opposed to, “I need to invent the circumstances for this to happen on the page.” That’s not satisfying. You don’t want to see them struggling to invent reasons to investigate the dead body. You want them to go off and start looking at the scene.
MW: I think that the opening hooks the reader immediately, and I think I think you did a really great job getting us to buy in, and want to know what happened to this person.
Bennett: And the thing that is kind of critical about that is if you’re talking about a well-ordered, well-run society, then mystically it becomes a forward facing story as opposed to a backwards facing world and fantasy. You’re always looking backwards like you used to live in the Garden of Eden. Things used to be perfect, and now we’ve been cast out and the world has fallen and we’re all trying to get back to the days where the kings and angels lived among us. So it really started to again take on the shape of science fiction, because science fiction is forward facing. It thinks that the past was crappy, but we can invent new things to make things better. We just need to have a struggle with the present now to make sure that those are enacted correctly. So it is a story with lots of beards and swords and magic and nobility and big, big armies of well-plated dudes. But at heart it looks like a fantasy, functions like a murder mystery, and a story that’s ultimately, I think, a little bit of a science fiction story.
MW: What games you are playing or have played recently or anything you’re enjoying right now in your downtime when you’re not writing?
Bennett: Thief. One of the things I’ve always been aware of because I knew that Terry Pratchett had been really into them, was the fan-made submissions that exist, and apparently there’s dozens of them out there but one came out last year and was bizarre. It’s called The Black Parade, and it looks like it’s made in 1999-2000. The levels are great and they’ve put a ton of work and energy into it, and it looks awesome. So I’ve been really enjoying that and taking some inspiration from it because there are few games that get Lovecraftian in a way that’s super fun. Thief was always really good at that because the world would change on a dime and there was no preparation for it, which is probably what it’s like to actually fall into a Lovecraftian story.
MW: Yeah, dealing with the old ones and Eldritch Gods.
Bennett: And The Black Parade carries on that tradition of making you feel unnervingly close to being in a realm that you should not be in.
MW: One of the things I love most about the Founders trilogy is the magic system, and one of the things I enjoyed most about it was Clef tricking these things to go against their programming just because no one accounted for that. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that as AI has become more prevalent. In the later books, I think it ties even more closely to what we’re seeing now with AI. If you were writing Foundryside, Shorefall, and Locklands right now would you use what’s happening right now to inform you how you wrote those books?
Bennett: Probably a little bit. I probably would have done something a little different because I wouldn’t have wanted to pull it too directly from reality. The idea came to me when I was thinking about a cyberpunk story, about a world where the buildings are alive and each one has their own AI, and a girl who lives on the rooftops. This is also taken from a video game. What was it? Transistor which has a sentient weapon with a soul trapped inside. I was thinking about a girl with a key or like a key card like that. Where she could talk to the buildings and let her move through them, and it wasn’t until later that I started thinking about trying to write a fantasy series that would work with code that I was like, “Yeah, I already have this in the back of my head.” I think I really beat the buzzer on that because that only had a shelf life of a couple more years.
MW: It put the speculative in speculative fiction.
Bennett: Yeah it is. It is super weird to see people reference Clef and tweets and things about LLMs.
MW: I’ve seen people tricking the chats on a car dealerships websites into generating programs in Python.
Bennett: Yeah I think that one also they were trying to get it to contractually give them a cars for $2. Occasionally I have people ask me, “Why don’t you write science fiction?” And my take is that the world has become so incomprehensible and strange that I don’t know if science fiction can really handle it. And it’s much simpler to remove the circumstances to a secondary world where the weirdness of our current lives goes more at home and it gives you more stable footing to examine what’s happening right now.
MW: Just the way that the world is presented didn’t feel pure fantasy to me. You’ve described it as cyberpunk yourself, and the Corpos remind me of when I was out in Silicon Valley and I visited a bunch of the different tech campuses. You have all these giant corporations siloed off from one another, and they might play nice on the surface, but you have skullduggery that happens like trying to poach engineers and things from the other companies. Did you draw any inspiration at all for the campos within Foundryside from Silicon Valley?
Bennett: Yes, absolutely. I became aware that I was stunting on the phase where each had their own style and culture and what they were making. And if I recall I kind of stumbled into the Campos thing. I was going to call the names of all the neighborhoods that were owned by the merchant houses, Capos, because the capo in Italian means “the head” but then that started to feel stupid. So I changed it to Campos and it wasn’t until later that I realized that campus is what Apple and Google and all of them called their own things. Which was kind of hilarious that I kind of backed my way into that one. But it’s also kind of funny because in that story, we’re in an era where they have been around for decades, but they’re all starting to look a little bit decrepit or they’re no longer making too many cool things. And, you know, that kind of feels like where we’re at right now because like five or six years ago, I would have said that Google does the coolest things in the world. Now on Google search it’s getting measurably shittier and is returning more and more garbage. And they’re also like they kind of have screwed up the game with A.I. where they were the ones who were leading the charge there and then someone else came along.
MW: And ate their lunch.
Bennett: Yeah, and it’s kind of funny about how these things grow very sclerotic and rigid, and you get stuck in your own ways and you don’t even realize it.
MW: Yeah. And the next big thing comes along. But now you’re so big you can just swallow them up before they have a chance to truly compete with you.
Bennett: Yeah. So things never really progress or start to compete. Yeah, that’s, that’s the problem. And instead you can waste a bunch of money on VR like Meta which spent like a moon landing’s worth of money trying to create the metaverse.
MW: One of the things I really enjoyed in the Founders trilogy was the tonal shift between the books, because you’re telling very different, like it’s a lot of the same characters, but the story that you’re telling starts with a heist and then the big bad shows up and then the last book is eight years after the events of the second book, and you’re dealing with nation building. How did you reach the point where you said, “This is how I need to tell this story?” Did it just come to you naturally or did you spend a lot of time pondering what Shorefall is going to be? What is Locklands going to be? How far out had you plotted Sancia’s journey?
Bennett: I took a lot of inspiration from Halt and Catch Fire. Maybe the last great cyberpunk businessy show. It’s in the eighties, but what’s really great about it is that it jumps through the ages of technology where it upends all the characters and they change circumstances and they change locations. So someone who’s on top of one suddenly becomes someone who is much less powerful in the next one. And months, if not years pass between the two, which I think is the appropriate scope of time to examine the pace of change for technology. Which is kind of what I wanted to do with that series. I did something similar for all the Divided Cities books. For that, I had taken some inspiration from The Wire, which was very happy to hop around and follow a new protagonist where you saw old characters, but someone else was definitely leading the charge of the current season. Someone new was there.
But in the Founders trilogy I pursued the Halt and Catch Fire perspective, and I always knew that I wanted it to end in something that was akin to a war where technology had broken down the barriers of a society so much. It had changed how we move real world things around and contort the real world so that eventually it led to the emergence of something akin to an AI they all had to fight. A magical AI was an interesting concept. And the more that I thought about it, the more I was like, “This is completely terrifying.”
MW: Robert, thank you for taking the time and I’m really looking forward to diving into The Tainted Cup.
Bennett: Awesome. Thank you so much.
