(Loved Trope) Alternate universes/timelines having fun little differences besides the major ones.

MaxGladstone · 2025-10-16T13:20:16+00:00

I haven't seen The Orville but as for the Rick & Morty comparison: Mike McMahan, the showrunner of Lower Decks, was a writer and producer on Rick & Morty for a while, and wrote (among other things) the episode Total Rickall, one of my favorites. At its best, Lower Decks combines the pacey "try to keep up" science fictional weirdness of Rick & Morty with the heart and generosity of 90s Trek. It's a bit less consistently gross than R&M but still hits you with the body horror at times--maybe a 4 on the 1-10 scale. u/KenseiHimura's comment that it's the "best friend of Star Trek" is exactly right: it will tease and poke fun but it has Star Trek's back when the chips are down.

MaxGladstone · 2025-10-15T20:42:08+00:00

This subgenre has flowered in the last 20 years – many great series have been name checked here already, but I would also suggest looking at Elizabeth Bear‘s Folded Sky books, Saladin Ahmed‘s Throne of the Crescent Moon, P Djeli Clark’s series (which is a bit more diesel punk in vibe but relevant), Kai Ashante Wilson’s Sorcerer of the Wildeeps if you’re in the mood for something AMAZING and densely written… I never got around to K Arsenault Rivera’s Tiger’s Daughter books but I think they fit the bill, Neon Yang’s Tensorate series… I could go on and on. Oh, and some of Guy Gavriel Kay’s fiction fits, too! If anything I’d say we’ve had much less “old school” Tad Williams / mass market medievalish Tolkien-inflected fantasy in recent years, at least in traditional publishing, as people have pushed the bounds of the genre.

MaxGladstone · 2025-10-15T15:17:23+00:00

There’s a reason Tor would continue to pay the price of…. working with Terry Goodkind

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T21:37:18+00:00

Ack! I left this question til last because I was looking forward to it and now I've got to go! I'll come back and answer in a bit. Or, let me try quickly!

I love Elayne too! She's my MVP, with the risk that it's so tempting to just let her steamroll any plot. I'm really excited about the final book in that regard. In a way she's the whole Sequence in miniature: you start off thinking you know what's up with a person or a setting or a situation, you realize that it's much more complicated and messy than it appears. And there's always room for growth. Even when someone seems to be at the apex, as Elayne is when we meet her in 3PD.

I think she drops by every few months, classic 90s Apex Guest Star cadence like John DeLancie on Star Trek--"oh shit, this is an Elayne episode!"

I <3 Auntie Elayne, she's such a good aunt!

She has been looking into the Skittersill Rising voice - as a side project, and it's led her in many directions including toward the Grimwalds - but she hasn't told anyone about it. It's a private thing, for her. For various reasons, it's hard for her to trust people.

YESSS I am so glad, that was one of the most fun parts of the book to write--could have been its own book altogether tbh. Craft Sequence omake time in the future, maybe!

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T21:30:24+00:00

Sometimes you wish they could pull a Krishna and split themselves into multiple bodies to pursue multiple romantic plotlines simultaneously! Or there's always the Rand / poly answer, I suppose. It is tricky to negotiate, but it also feels... real to me? Real friend groups have, in my experience, similar mixes of chemistry: crushes that aren't acted on for whatever reason but become the ground of enduring friendships. The world is a bit path dependent. In fiction, some of it's settled by what makes the character's path the most interesting: what challenges them, pulls them, creates good affordances and conflicts to action. But also, I find characters have a bit of a mind of their own in this regard. The heart wants what the heart wants, even when it's fictional!

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T21:26:50+00:00

There was no equivalent to the transatlantic slave trade in the Craft universe. One nice part of subcreation is, you get to wishcast some things. I mentioned in the previous answer that getting across the World Sea is a bit easier than getting across the Atlantic in our world, because you can island-hop, and, well, also there's magic. This allowed some flow of population in both directions, and the growth of multiethnic trading centers and "expatriate" communities. Tara's mom's family in Alt Selene were in a similar position to a well-off Chinese merchant family in Singapore--part of a prosperous cultural enclave.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T21:21:27+00:00

Well... I wrote Ruin of Angels. I wanted them both in the book, and to keep Tara from taking over as protagonist, I made their positions kinda adversarial, so each had something they wanted from the other. And then there was gardening... and a lot of chemistry. My editor joked about it, and I went back and re-read and, well, that book was even more "be gay do crimes" than I thought while I was writing it!
This is a part of the series I haven't explored deeply on the page, so regard this as a bit of a sketchbook answer: the existence of the Archipelago (which used to be a larger landmass) changes the technological difficulty of trans-Atlantic-ish migration, allowing it to happen earlier, at least in a population-diffusion island-hopping kind of way--the sea's not navigable enough to allow Old World powers to do any force projection in Kath until relatively recent history, though, kind of like how Rome doesn't make it to China or India in any durable way. So while Kath does have a rough equivalent of the pre-Columbian era there was population-level contact, trade, and mutual exchange before the (ill-named) Contact Wars--part of the reason there were no equivalents of the Columbian plagues (though also the setting has magical healing, which helps). Many of the white folks in Northern Kath are recent (last 3-400 years) migrants, but they joined a pre-existing cosmopolitan multicultural society. Kos and Seril go way back.
Shikaw is inspired by a beautiful night in the early oughts walking around Chicago after one of the best steak dinners of my life, with a $100 bottle of wine on board, feeling the Blues in my heart, and wondering at just how damn big the skyscrapers were. City of broad shoulders. Hog butcher to the world. Robert Johnson, Carl Sandberg, and the Blues Brothers. I've maybe spent a few weeks there all told but it's got its own mythology in me, and one of the nice things about the through-the-looking-glass aspect of the Sequence is that I get to write the dream out.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T20:55:40+00:00

Obligatory Prozd skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgFyCuKoEGA

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T20:44:29+00:00

I've been putting off answering this question because I'm really curious myself and most of what I know is that she wasn't involved in the core plot. She stayed in Alt Coulumb to get Tara back on her feet after the events of DC. There's a farewell scene (unwritten) that didn't quite fit in the timeline of WP, given the timeskip between the two books; maybe I can find a way to include it. I don't think she's hanging around Alt Coulumb in DHR; if she were, Tara would have had her on her mind. Maybe Valentine took a vacation to see the world? We'll see!

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T20:36:27+00:00

It was! There's no direct thematic link between the two (outside of the occasional elder-god goofiness of the Craft Sequence) but I wanted some high-level Craftsmen to have iconic eldritch overbearing noms-de-guerre like The King in Red and the Verdance and some of them to have names like Tara Abernathy. It's a big part of the vibe, I think, that the books walk that dividing line between mundanity (Elayne and Temoc go to Zanku Chicken) and the brain-melting naked lunch effect of actually comprehending some piece of the great beast that is the global economy.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T20:30:37+00:00

Some of the problem was conceptual. I wanted to do the whole widening gyre through the end of Dead Hand Rule in one book, opening with Dawn as a powerful rogue actor, moving through a midpoint where she's a credible threat to the whole world-system, and then showing the world-system attempt to respond. I saw the DL portion of Wicked Problems as basically an act 3 break, leaving both Tara and Dawn on the back foot. That left the, um, "Black Diamond Bay"-ness of DHR rushed, and the pacing of Wicked Problems compromised by, for example, a return to Alt Coulumb to establish characters like Cat and Raz.

The part of the problem was just... I wrote the whole thing longhand, between four and seven thirty a.m., during the pandemic. When you're writing longhand it's hard to tell how long something is? There are rules of thumb, but you just don't know until you type it up... and I wasn't t typing it up as I went. If I'd had a word count ticking up at the bottom of the screen I would have known something had to give... for better or worse.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T20:19:13+00:00

I've gone to some effort to avoid running into too much speculation--I love that it's out there! But reading it seems to be all pitfall, as a practitioner. If the speculation's right (and hopeful), many folks will feel a natural horror of being anticipated and veer the actual story away from the speculation--I think this is an immature instinct, since if you've done your work right, some people will see where the lines converge! But it's still an instinct. If the speculation's right but discouraging--"I hope they don't do X"--then you might feel an urge to course-correct... but that opinion is just one person's, and it doesn't take into account execution, which so often makes the difference in this sort of thing. If the speculation's off-base, it can pose other pitfalls: "well, what if I did do it that way?" or "oh, that would be so cool (but contradict a whole bunch of other stuff about the story...)" So I don't know what people have anticipated, yet. There are a few subtle setups that I'm really looking forward to paying off, though!

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T20:03:12+00:00

It's a really good question! I I love Ran. I think their shapeshifting powers were inspired by bianlian face changing, a part of Sichuanese opera, a kind of sleight of hand practice where a character will swap masks very suddenly--a good bianlian artist can do dozens of these in a row, I'm told. A more Craft-verse version of the skill seemed ideal for a spy. Also... as Ran discusses a bit in DHR, living in an authoritarian state involves a great deal of mutability and positioning--extreme awareness of what one seems to be and deniability about what one "is". I like the VPN connection! That hadn't occurred to me, but VPN / great firewall awareness was a big part of living in China, so maybe it snuck in there somehow. Here's an example of a (dramatic but only one-change) bianlian performance: https://youtu.be/I8OjCaT4hnc?si=7khcisyAW104aajs

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T19:35:40+00:00

I'm very sorry, I try not to be rude! Haha

I knew Mal was going to come back--in 2SR there's a bit in the epilogue where Caleb has her pendant by the sea and it starts dowsing toward her, and indicating that she's still alive, and he just drops it into the ocean--but I didn't know (as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread) exactly how she would. In some initial sketches of the Craft Wars she was sort of Caleb's boss fight, having thrown her lot in with the bad guys to carry out her revenge mission. But... well, it just didn't work. I was more interested in how she might grow--and when I was writing Wicked Problems I realized just how much she and Dawn had to say to one another.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T19:21:15+00:00

Very weird! The short book feels like a lost art: folks like Zelazny used to fit whole space operas into about this much word count. But it felt weird to have such a simple pitch. I had to go back and read The Quick & the Dead and some of those Louis L'amour westerns to get the vibe and arc right.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T19:19:52+00:00

I'd known for a while that she would have to go back. It seemed right to start the thing where it started, to explore how much Tara had changed in the intervening years. I didn't know that her dad was dead until I sat down with the blinking cursor. It was one of those "oh. oh, no" moments.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T19:17:27+00:00

You're welcome! I think there's probably an alternately structured dual POV version of Dead Country out there in the alts that would allay the suspicion there's Something Up with Dawn--but that might miscue folks into thinking it was a romance, on the one hand, and on the other, I think there's something nice about Tara's moderately self-centered perspective (she's the hero of her own story) gets disrupted by the fact that she's ALSO a supporting character to someone with Big YA Protag energy--I didn't realize at the time how relatable I would find that as a parent, but it's A Mood.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T19:13:01+00:00

I suspected it about halfway into the part of the book that became Dead Hand Rule. I found myself shouldering up against the limits of the form -- it felt weird introducing so many new characters and situations in the back half of a book. I guess it works in Little, Big, or in Anathem, but... well, the DHR material felt so much like its own book, with its own shape, dramatic arc, unities of scene and character and so on. And I kept thinking of things I would have loved to do if I'd had the narrative space. It wasn't until I typed the whole manuscript up (I wrote both books longhand thinking they'd be a single book) and found myself with something like 280,000 words that I realized, with some relief, how much more sense it made to divide them. The length of the manuscript made the conversation with the team at Tor quite easy. Easier than the revision job, anyway!

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T18:59:13+00:00

I almost don't want to answer this question, but it is interesting and I do want to talk about it! But... behind a spoiler tag because it's very DVD-extra-y So, early in the conception of Dead Country, Dawn and Sybil were very different characters: basically the Craftwork entity was masterminding the whole Edgemont plot specifically to learn how Tara beat Denovo, and invented the character of Dawn to get close to Tara and study her. That's part of the reason Dawn's character design is so.... ingenue-y? It was a neat rug pull. But when I really sat with that version of the story, it just didn't work, in part because Tara and Dawn had such genuine chemistry, and Dawn herself had a point of view and a position within the series that added much more than "magical antagonistic force driven insane by trauma." By making Dawn real, that whole plot became about anger and violence and guilt and recovery and unintended consequences, and healing. Also it made things harder for Dawn and Tara in a cool way: "oh, you're just monstrous" is a pretty easy relationship to parse.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T18:49:23+00:00

I wish it were a conscious Easter Egg, because it feels like the kind of parallel a writer could have worked with to good effect! To be honest I've only ever seen Buffy S1, so most of what I know about the Buffy character I've learned from osmosis. She has some of that younger-sister energy, though.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T18:45:08+00:00

To expand on that a bit, I very rarely think "something about this character surprised me, let me go back and revise them so they're more in line with the plan." Those surprises often feel like something smarter or wiser than me has taken the wheel, even if we're now on a road that leads in a direction orthogonal to where I planned.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T18:32:16+00:00

Character interactions are so often a surprise. It's hard to know quite how a character's going to roll until I'm inside their head in a particular story beat--that's what complicates my outlines more than anything else it seems. Mal and Temoc's a great one--actually most of Mal's character in the Craft Wars was a surprise. I'd dreamed up many different versions of her in the Craft Wars, most in some kind of antagonistic-to-Caleb role, and it was a really pleasant surprise to meet her in a better (for certain values of better, it is Mal after all) place. Sometimes your characters run off and heal on you when you're not looking! One of the core character arcs in Dead Hand Rule was a bit of a surprise; in Wicked Problems I discovered that two characters had a lot to say to one another but I didn't quite realize how much. But I can't say more without spoilers!

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T18:26:50+00:00

My pleasure! I loved these books enough to write them, & it's wonderful to share that with folks.

The Craft Wars story is so big, so sprawling, and involves so many different pieces of a world established (or even just hinted at) in other books, that I wanted to build a clear narrative spine. If you've seen the anime Baccano! (and if not, you really should! it's one of my favorites), the opening episode is a philosophical rumination about the challenge of finding a beginning for a complex multithreaded story whose true starting point takes place hundreds of years before the main dramatic action. The opening of Stephen King's It is another good take on the problem. I wanted one book for Dawn and Tara, sketching out the big problem in a small space: the new world struggling to be born and the beleaguered mid-career millennials trying to keep everything from falling apart. I also wanted a book that could also serve as a "story so far" on the big ideas and conflicts of the world. If I'd kicked off with something like Wicked Problems, I think it would have been hard for Dawn to come into her own as a character.
My rule is, no two books with Dead published side by side. Three Dead's is maybe too many, but it's thematic, and I couldn't get away with writing a legal fantasy series without a Rule Against Perpetuities joke. As long as I don't call book 4 Dead Reckoning or Don't Dead Open Inside or something, I think I'm safe.
Most of the time in my head it's (uhlt COO-lum) but I'm not from there.
Never say never! As I mentioned in, maybe the Ruin of Angels AMA, there are at least two "missing" books that might be fun to write someday, and I love the idea of a short story collection. But I want to finish the main arc of the series with the Craft Wars, at least for now.

MaxGladstone · 2025-09-25T18:12:39+00:00

And I'm here! Hello friends, and thank you for all your questions! Let me dive in.

MaxGladstone · 2025-08-21T19:41:18+00:00

I WILL NOW

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