About one year ago, a saga well known abroad eventually arrived in Italian bookstores: ‘The Second Apocalypse’ by Richard Scott Bakker. The first three novels of the saga were published by Mondadori in a single volume, titled Il principe di Nulla (The Prince of Nothing).
The story, set in an imaginary land called Eärwa, with a vaguely Byzantine and Middle Eastern atmosphere, revolves around a Holy War launched to reclaim the sacred city of Shimeh.
During the conflict, the paths of many characters intertwine, among them Kellhus, a mysterious monk gifted with superhuman intelligence and perception, the tormented barbarian Cnaiür, the sorcerer Achamian and his partner Esmenet, a cunning prostitute seeking social redemption. In the background looms a threat greater than any human intrigue: the return of a malevolent entity, the No-God, which once, millennia ago, endangered the very existence of the world.
Such a plain summary, however, does not do justice to the richness and quality of these novels, which fall under speculative fiction yet display an expressive and thematic originality that sets them apart from the genre’s stereotypes… and as Tolkien admirers, we all know that this can happen, but it is not so common. So, I have decided to keep it brief, because I prefer to let the author speak for himself. I contacted him, driven by the genuine wonder these books inspired in me—something I thought I would never feel again after decades spent wandering through literary fantasy worlds.
Richard Scott Bakker, a Canadian from Ontario, studied literature but has expertise and publications ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. He has been nominated several times for the Locus Awards and, with the novels of ‘The Second Apocalypse’, since the early 2000s he has become a reference point in the grimdark genre, even though the philosophical and psychological imprint of his storytelling makes it hard to categorize. Bakker has often stated that one of his greatest sources of inspiration is J.R.R. Tolkien, and he kindly agreed to this interview, which we thank him for and are delighted to publish exclusively for AIST.
(Versione italiana disponibile qui).
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My first question will certainly be about your experience as a reader of Tolkien. You have stated that he was an important author in your formation (alongside Herbert and Howard), and I will ask you which of his works impressed you most, and why.
I literally had my first in genuinely philosophical experience when I was 10, reading The Fellowship, staring out across the living room, sunlight through the sheers, and suddenly thinking, what the hell is this? Something about the length of the step from my immersion to just sitting there seeing sunlight, maybe. An experience of genuine awe, one which hit me continuously reading Tolkien. It’s pretty clear to me now that I was being rewired by the crafty old professor. Highly illegal. There’s no warning. Nothing to let you know you are holding a Bible.
That is the effect the first foray into Middle Earth does have on most of us I suppose! To me it was less philosophical but still awe-inspiring, I guess. May I ask you which Tolkien character or episode struck you most?
Aside from the obvious (Moria and Helmsdeep were two of the most intense reading experiences of my childhood), I’d have to say Grima Wormtongue always struck me in need of some backstory. Language become cancerous, physically polluting minds. Seems like the world is going through something similar.
In fact, we can catch small glimpses of Tolkien characters in the stories and personalities of ‘The Second Apocalypse’ series. For instance, there are some Gandalf traits in the wise, low-key yet deadly sorcerer Achamian; Kellhus’ rise from obscurity to the most prominent power positions reminds us of Aragorn’s, and there is some Boromir in the conceited, arrogant attitude of Ikurei Conphas. But then each character’s arc is so dramatically different, with little to no space for Tolkien’s concepts like eucatastrophe or redemption. Did you choose to represent Eärwa stories in such an unforgiving, dark way looking for narrative realism or to distance yourself from the consolatory mood of Tolkien-esque fantasy? Or for any other reason?
When you write a thousand words it’s hard to say you have a handle on your meaning, let alone when you write a million. I know what I was thinking back when I started, what I hoped to achieve, and I know that those goals took on more and more of a life of their own. The crazy thing is that I always looked at The Second Apocalypse as hard science fiction, both in a literal and a figurative sense. The thing that’s always so mightily impressed me about The Lord of the Rings is that Tolkien could very well have been burned at the stake in the days of Torquemada. This is because The Lord of the Rings is more than fiction, it’s an answer—like the Bible. Tolkien takes a fantasy version of ‘hard fact’ with a comparatively insane singularity. He understood how ancient myth knotted yarn to yearning, how the very ontology of the world possesses the shape of human desire, and he set about to craft such a world with as much care as inspiration to conjure—to make these things believable. He understood that the representation of awe required it be first and foremost believable.
My original, adolescent idea was pretty mechanical: Earwa was to be the photographic negative of Midde-Earth. The idea was to take Tolkien’s mythic realism, to create an ontologically moral world, only to populate it with psychologically real characters. Scriptural worlds are chauvinistic worlds: what happens when you find yourself a woman in a reality that truly does value men more? A great many women still believe they live in such a reality. So where the quest is one of out and out overcoming in The Lord of the Rings, finding certainty and redemption, the quest in The Second Apocalypse is to endure the progressive breakdown of received moral certainty, to lay siege to Golgotterath, the very crash site of meaning.
And this is the curious sense in which I’ve always seen The Second Apocalypse as literal hard SF. From the very beginning I’ve viewed Kellhus as a harbinger of superintelligence, and have tried to show how its mere presence destroys the possibility of mutual effort, reduces everything to manipulation. We too have our own rendezvous with crashing meaning, I’m afraid.
Both Eärwa and Middle-Earth conjure their atmosphere from a deep, distant yet vivid temporal perspective. While Tolkien hints at it in The Lord of the Rings and then recounts all the past events of his secondary world in another tome, The Silmarillion, you chose a different path: one of the main characters, Achamian, is a member of the Mandate, a school of sorcerers bound to relive in dreams every night crucial past events happened two thousand years before. Through this ingenious narrative trick the reader is made aware of ancient history and conflicts. Don’t you think, however, that this cryptic, fragmentary way to reveal past events little by little might create some confusion in the reader?
Think? More like ‘know.’ And the first draft was so much worse. The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum were two of my favourite reads in college and I wanted to marry Eco’s textual and bookish density (in English translation at least) to my world.
I turned a marathon into the hurdles.
And now to the depiction of non-human creatures! Apart from Men and his ‘trademarked’ Hobbits, who technically speaking are a kind of Men, Tolkien introduces Elves, Dwarves, Ents, Orcs, Trolls and several other monsters or creatures, combining elements of folklore and myth with his own creativity. However, none of these creatures are bizarre, grotesque and sometimes disturbing as the Sranc, the Nonmen or, even more, the Inchoroi. As a fan of the horror genre, I really have a soft spot for the Inchoroi, and I love the ‘tag line’ “We are the race of flesh, we are the race of lovers” coming from these less-than-amiable creatures. Where did you get inspiration for such ominous beings?
Us. Though I think Marxism has nowhere near the resources to explain our present plight, I do think Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the Enlightenment reveals some frightening implications. Once ‘God is dead,’ which is to say, religion no longer possesses the social credibility to enforce canonical value judgments, its either liberalism or war. With the former horn, only appetite, the need to feed and fornicate, is left to assure cooperation. Consumption.
The Inchoroi are what we become on a nightmarish extrapolation of this, our present system. Humanity post purpose, beyond good and evil.
Your average fantasy reader, basically.
The power of persuasion and manipulation. Here we are with Kellhus. What I found original in this character is the fact that his manipulative skills are not a mysterious set of tricks (à la Obi-Wan Kenobi, let’s say), but are very well explained as deriving from his keen perception and logical analysis of the other men’s behavior and past. So, every time Kellhus bends other minds to his goals, we know how he achieves that, and this is very satisfactory from a reader’s point of view. In Tolkien’s Legendarium, many villains have a sort of magnetic, persuading power, from the dragon Glaurung to the fallen wizard Saruman. Yet Kellhus is not exactly a villain… or is he? Without spoiling too much, what is the meaning and the function of this pivotal character in your story?
So back in the 80s one of my best friends and I sat down and calculated when, given Moore’s Law, we could expect computers to have as many transistors and we have neurons. We came up with 2016. I was also a huge Herbert fan, so well and truly terrified of superintelligent AI. The last forty years of my life have been a technological countdown. The idea of Kellhus being so intelligent as to be dangerous was baked in from the beginning. It wasn’t until I read Metamagical Themas and Consciousness Explained in the early 1990’s that I came up with the idea of Kellhus as a ‘meme master’ I think—back when ‘memes’ meant more than trash-talk celebrity. Once again, the original idea was mechanical–to replace the doe eyed innocent with a Machiavellian superintelligence—but it grew into so much more as I wrote and rewrote The Darkness that Comes Before over the course of the 1990’s. This was around the time when I began to recognize clear cut short circuits in the internet flame-wars that preoccupied the web back then. I realized the internet was as much an outrage ratchet and rationalization machine as anything else: that far from correcting our biases, it was magnifying, even exploiting them. So a focus of my interest became the way Kellhus short circuits the relationships around him, twists those close, by virtue of his superintelligence.
And then I asked the age-old question of what a godlike intelligence would do when faced with the Dark Master’s return.
Your representation of female characters has aroused some controversy because there are just a few of them, and in roles subordinate to men’s – at least in the first trilogy. Strangely enough Tolkien has been wrongly accused to be a misogynist, for the very same reason (too few female characters in The Lord of the Rings). Did it ever cross your mind to have a female Kellhus? Or would have she really been -too- overpowered, in this case? Just kidding.
I was actually pressured by my first editor to change several characters to women. Again, I had this schema that I came up in my teens: the Waif, the Whore, and the Hag, types presented to be broken down to evidence the madness of ontological patriarchy. Esmenet, in particular, finds herself emancipated by Kellhus. The question then becomes, “Is moral truth dependent or independent of the morality of the speaker? What does it mean to be manipulated by truth?” Heady, fascinating stuff, I think. Unfortunately, some readers seem to see representation of trial as endorsement of cruelty. They just see women fooled by becoming free.
Can’t explore without crossing lines.
Languages are a love-interest for many creators of secondary worlds. Certainly, that was the case with Tolkien. Judging from the material in the appendices, and the care you put into devising names for characters, geography and lore in Eärwa, one may assume that fictional idioms are quite relevant for you as well. What is the role of languages in the building of ‘The Second Apocalypse’ saga and world?
I put a dreadful amount of work in, but this is always a topic of embarrassment for me. I do my best. I have a couple of names I would nominate to be Middle-Earth worthy. But I cannot read the man without feeling his genuine mastery of linguistic roots and mythic association. I’m at most a pale imitation. My associative pallet tends to have more philosophical colours.
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We would like to thank again Scott Bakker for his time with us, while also remembering the books of his saga:
The Prince of Nothing
1. The Darkness That Comes Before (2003)
2. The Warrior-Prophet (2004)
3. The Thousandfold Thought (2006)
The Aspect-Emperor
1. The Judging Eye (2009)
2. The White-Luke Warrior (2011)
3. The Great Ordeal (2016)
4. The Unholy Consult (2017)
