Robert Jackson Bennett on What Makes a Book an Epic

Across five published novels, Robert Jackson Bennett has made it a point to never write the same book twice. His debut, Mr. Shivers, won the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for best horror novel. A year later, The Company Man picked up the Philip K. Dick Award for best sci-fi novel and the Edgar Award for best mystery. The Troupe, a fantasy novel (or is it horror?) set on the vaudeville circuit in the early 20th century,  was named one of the best books of 2012 by Publisher’s Weekly. His newest book, City of Stairs, out this week, marks his entry into the epic fantasy genre.

This week, he was kind enough to offer us some thoughts on what exactly “epic fantasy” means to him.

If you’re like me, when someone says the word “epic” then the first image that comes to mind is a bunch of very serious, medieval-looking people crossing an impressive landscape, on their way to do some very important things. This is probably more “epic fantasy” than simply “epic,” but that’s the way my brain works.

A few people have labeled my latest book, City of Stairs, as epic fantasy, and that got me thinking: what makes something epic? What are the ingredients needed to produce an epic atmosphere? Unlike a lot of story types, “epic” is about the feeling in a book, rather than the contents. The original term “epic” just meant “song,” which doesn’t quite apply anymore, and the ten qualities of epic poetry would probably not slide by my editor these days. (“Why do you keep addressing a muse? What’s the deal with these lists? Also, this one dude’s been talking for seventy pages!”)

I started thinking about the recent stories people generally consider to be epic, especially epic fantasies, which appear to be in resurgence—witness A Game of Thrones—along with some historical epic novels like Phillipp Meyer’s The Son and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and epic films like Ben Hur, Gone with the Wind, and Doctor Zhivago.

After examining the evidence, it seems to me that “epic feeling” can be created by:

Size
No surprise here. For something to feel epic these days, it needs to be big. But bigness doesn’t necessarily mean geographic size, which most people immediately think of—armies marching through the desert or thousands of ships sailing across huge seas. It can also mean time. Works like The Son, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Ben Hur take place over decades or generations, and this produces that epic feeling.

The Son is a pretty nice example of this: though set in Texas—my home state (and I can confirm it’s quite big)—and taking place largely in the 19th century, one of the ways the book succeeds is by looking at Texas through the eyes of three very different generations of one family. You see the very landscape change, as well as the nature of the civilization inhabiting it.

But geographical size is still of key import. The Lord of the Rings and Gone with the Wind both feature a lot of traveling, and both qualify as epics. What’s really necessary, I think, is a sense of vast movement, whether it be in the physical realm (a crusade making its way to the Holy Lands) or in the temporal realm (a single estate viewed through many generations, likely through tumultuous times).

But in order to make this movement work, you’ve got to move through something interesting. Which means you need…

Immersion in a deeply realized civilization
The “rules” for epic poems stated that the protagonist must embody the civilization, but we now use the technique called “worldbuilding” for this, creating and exploring a deep, rich set of rules and influences upon a large group of people in any given time and place. We want to get a cross-section of the way a whole civilization works: politics, trade, religion, fashion, and technological advancement.

For epic fantasy, this will include all of the above, but will likely also include magic. People will want to know “The Rules” of the magic, and its history, how it relates to trade, and so on. Part of the fun of Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles is watching the protagonist create magical devices and try to sell them. While this might ordinarily be boring, it works because it provides perspective on a richly realized world.

But to be really epic, the world can’t stay stable. That means you need:

High stakes
I tried to imagine a situation in which an epic didn’t involve huge damn armies, but rather a different story of high stakes, like love or passion. But this proved quite hard.

Though The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is primarily about three dudes trying to steal gold—pretty low stakes, no potential apocalypses here—it’s set during the American Civil War, amid explosions, giant armies, and meaningless death. Ditto for Gone with the Wind. Though theoretically just about a family trying to survive and a prideful person trying to find love, it too is set during the Civil War, and thus has the vast backdrop of death that epics seem to need.

So yeah, it seems as if epics need to have the characters living, fighting, and loving in the shadow of huge death and upheaval, most likely war. Sometimes they can be instrumental to the fight, or they can just be trying to survive. But epics need to have worldwide upheaval, if not a veritable apocalypse, threatening everything.

So does City of Stairs pass the test?
Well, as I wrote the test, I’m going to say: sure. It isn’t a huge book by epic fantasy standards, but one of the things I wanted to do with it was invent and explore a history of a world. History is hugely important in City of Stairs, because—due to several miraculous and tumultuous events—very few people know any of it. The people of this world have only scraps of knowledge, but the overwhelming framework of what happened weighs on them every second. As some characters state, it often feels as if they’re afloat upon a vast river of blank time.

Do I attempt to immerse you in a civilization with its own rules?  Absolutely: the Continent once lived, breathed, and functioned using the miracles provided by its Divinities, its gods. The miracles bent reality, allowing them to live and work as they chose. When one of their slave states rebelled and killed the gods, all those miracles vanished, taking an entire way of life with them.

So perhaps City of Stairs is interesting because now there is a tremendous vacuum of rules. People are attempting to maintain rules that are no longer there, or are no longer relevant.

And are the stakes high? Well. A god might be getting resurrected. What stakes are higher than that?

City of Stairs is available now in paperback and NOOK.