Garth Nix talks Massif, sci-fi and his next book
We chat with bestselling author Garth Nix about his latest novel Massif.
A&U: Can you tell us a little about your new adventure Massif?
GN: Massif is a science fiction adventure story, set about three hundred years in the future, about two hundred years after an entire mountain range lifted off from Earth and turned out to be essentially an alien entity, an enormous starship. That Massif offered to give humans a lift to the stars, and it turned out there was a whole network of these sentient, star-faring mountains crisscrossing the galaxy. Humans took up the offer, and in the time this book is set, have been riding Massifs for centuries, going out to colonise new worlds and to make war on other humans . . . Massif is the story of the crew of one small warship, who in the course of trying to rescue one of their own who is stranded on a fought-over target colony planet, are drawn into the continuing unanswered question of their age: why do the Massifs carry humans to the stars. What’s in it for them?
A&U: Where did you get the idea for this unique world?
GN: Massif began for me with a vision, or an imagining, of a mountain range tearing itself from the earth, ascending up into the sky, becoming smaller and smaller as it climbed up to orbit. From that initial imagining, I had to work out what was going on. Why would a mountain range do this? How could it? What if it was actually a kind of alien, or an alien starship? Or actually both? Then I had to work out a story on a smaller scale, a human story, and I decided it would be about the lives of the seven-person crew of the Sassafras, a ship being carried to a distant war by a Massif named DrummerBoy, after its avatar, a huge, constantly drumming creature something like a bipedal hamster . . .
A&U: Beyond your imagination, how do you approach writing about the more technical aspects of space and military battles. Do you have to do any particular research?
GN: I did have to do quite a lot of research for this book. One of the decisions I made early on was that the Massifs would not let humans use any advanced technology on or near a Massif, or on the interplanetary ships the Massifs gifted to humans. This was to prevent humans being able to work out the nature of the Massifs, their avatars or their technology. So the humans have to fit out their interplanetary ships with pre-1945 technology (though they come with inexplicable drives and power from the Massif). No transistors, no integrated circuits etc. So I had to research vacuum tubes (valves) and work out how this old tech would work in space, how it would interact with the Massif’s tech-cancelling field and so on. Apart from that, I also had to do various calculations relating to ships moving in space, the speed of missiles and the effects of vacuum and so on. More than I usually have to do!
A&U: If you could be friends with any of the characters in MASSIF, who would you choose and why?
GN: I think they would be a good crew to be part of, I’d like to be their comrade, and certainly if I was in a military force in the far future then I would be relieved to be with such a competent bunch. Quite likely some of them could be annoying sometimes, or I might not particularly want to be with some of them socially, but they would be utterly dependable in any tough situation.
A&U: What’s your favourite science fiction adventure?
GN: I have many, many favourites! How could I choose only one? I am a big fan of science fiction adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, Marko Kloos, Ann Leckie, John Scalzi and more; going farther back, I loved Andre Norton, Robert Heinlein, Keith Laumer, Jack Vance, C.J. Cherryh … there are simply too many to list.
A&U: What’s next for you?
GN: My next book, which I have delivered but has not yet gone through the editing process, is The Even-Handed Booksellers of Edinburgh, the third in the series after The Left-Handed Booksellers of London and The Sinister Booksellers of Bath. Right now I am writing a young adult coming of age fantasy that is firmly in the centre of the fantasy genre, with elves and dwarves and dragons, but also with unique touches of my own (I hope). It hasn’t been announced yet, so the title is still under wraps.
Massif
by Garth Nix
Gripping, intelligent science-fiction from worldwide bestselling author Garth Nix. For fans of the Expanse series by James S A Corey including Leviathan Wakes, and David Weber's Honor Harrington books.
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