This third installment of an interview with Jim Hines covers forthcoming books and favorite fantasy authors.
You've got a story in the recent anthology, IF I WERE AN EVIL OVERLORD. What -would- you do if you were an evil overlord?
Jim: I would round up all Internet spammers, provide each one with a single spork, and force them to fight to the death in my Arena of Doom. I would also create an elite squad of Black-Helmeted Goons, who would be loaned out to the wonderful folks at Writer Beware to help them take care of scam publishers and agents. Then I would outlaw reality television.
Finally, I would steal enough money to live happily for the rest of my life, hand power to my successor, retire to Hawaii, and let the next overlord deal with the inevitable uprising.
THE STEPSISTER SCHEME and GOBLIN WAR are both forthcoming. I'm guessing GOBLIN WAR stars Jig - so what's the other book about?
Jim: THE STEPSISTER SCHEME was written partly in response to the proliferation of princess stuff out there. I have a six-year-old daughter, and we have princess sheets, princess dress-up clothes, princess tissues, even princess bathroom wipes. The fairy tales have been diluted and sweetened to the point where my blood sugar spikes just thinking about them.
So I decided to write my own book. Imagine a cross between the fairy tales of old and Charlie's Angels, and you'll have a rough idea. I love these characters; I love imagining who they would become, given the darker nature of their stories. My three heroines are more complex, more conflicted characters. Plus Snow White has her mother's magic mirror, and Sleeping Beauty has turned into quite the butt-kicking warrior woman, and it's just a great deal of fun.
You've said you're primarily a fantasy, rather than science fiction, author. What draws you to fantasy over sci-fi?
Jim: This was a hard question to answer. I read and enjoy both, and I've never made a conscious choice to write more fantasy than science fiction.
Really, I see genre as primarily a marketing tool. People who like a certain kind of story will probably like similar stories, so let's group them together in the bookstores and hopefully we'll sell more books. There's a strong overlap in SF and fantasy readers, so SF/F gets lumped together. And you can debate for hours whether fantasy is more optimistic than science fiction, or how science fiction is more forward-looking while fantasy is trapped in the past, or which genre is more "mature".
But when you get down to it, it's because my science is a bit rusty, and I really like swords and dragons and magic.
Who are the fantasy authors that you particularly like?
Jim: Union regulations require me to mention Tolkien, of course. For me, Lord of the Rings was a slow read, but I'm in awe of the world he created, not to mention the beauty of his writing. I have tremendous respect for Ursula LeGuin's ability with language. Terry Pratchett and Peter David do marvelous things with humor. Tanya Huff is simply wonderful. Really, there are too many authors and too many new books for me to do justice to them all.
If I do get that Evil Overlord gig, I'm scheduling plenty of time to catch up on my reading!
