The Orthogonal Bet: The role of complexity in world-building

Danny Crichton:

Hey, it's Danny Crichton here. We take a break from our usual risk gaming programming to bring you another episode from our ongoing mini-series, The Orthogonal Bet, hosted by Lux Scientist in Residence, Samuel Arbesman. The Orthogonal Bet is an exploration of unconventional ideas and delightful patterns that shape our world. Take it away, Sam.

Samuel Arbesman:

Hello and welcome to The Orthogonal Bet. I'm your host, Samuel Arbesman. In this episode, I speak with the novelist, Lev Grossman. I've been a fan of Lev's novels for a long time. He's the author of, among other books, The Magicians trilogy, a splendid set of books about a university for magic, fantastical worlds, and much, much more. These books are amazing. Lev's newest book is the novel, The Bright Sword, a retelling of the legends of King Arthur, particularly what happens after Arthur dies. I devoured The Bright Sword and found it fascinating. It's a book that weaves together ideas about gods and magic, the layering of myths across history and much more, all of which I wanted to speak with about.

Lev and I had a chance to discuss the story of King Arthur, its gaps in its history, the layering of gods and stories over time, the nature of magic and religion, the importance of secondary worlds and the magic in The magicians versus the magic of The Bright Sword. We even had a chance to discuss Lev's next project, which is a space opera. This was a lot of fun. Let's jump in. Lev, so great to chat with you. Welcome to the Orthogonal Bet.

Lev Grossman:

Thank you so much.

Samuel Arbesman:

Your new novel, The Bright Sword, it's wonderful. It's similar in some ways to your previous novels, but also quite different. I think it would be fun to start with what led you to this story of, I don't know, the misfits or the dregs of the Roundtable or however we want to describe it. Yeah, I'd love to hear what led you to that?

Lev Grossman:

First of all, you said what every novelist longs to here, which is that it's similar but different. That's what every novelist aims for in their next novel.

Samuel Arbesman:

You succeeded.

Lev Grossman:

In terms of what led me there, like many people, I was quite obsessed with Arthur when I was younger. I came in through The Once and Future King. And for most of my life, I considered the Arthur story to be a story that had already been told, that T.H. White had told it in a definitive way, and any little scraps that he might've left had been picked up by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mary Stewart, Bernard Cornwell, and we were done. That was a wrap on King Arthur, but the Arthur story has a very singular quality, which is unlike almost any narrative that I think that lives in our culture, which is that although we have been telling it for a very long time, the Arthur story is older than I realized before I became a serious Arthurian nerd. The earliest traces of it, or tellings of it come from possibly as early as the 7th century, so we're talking 1,200, 1,300 years.

The Arthur story, it has a way of changing its meaning over time. The bones of it remain the same, but it becomes about different things. It becomes about kingship. Originally, I think it was a resistance anthem of the Welsh who were trying to keep the Saxons out. I think for T.H. White, it was probably about the specter of World War since he wrote it in the mid-twentieth century. For Marion Zimmer Bradley, obviously it was about feminism and neo-paganism. Every age gets the Arthur that it needs. It was not apparent to me that we had the Arthur that we needed yet. I felt as though King Arthur must surely have something to say to us, but he hadn't said it yet, and the question was how to tell that story in such a way that he says it? And I was very slow to arrive at that idea, but probably some of it, if I'm being honest, came from Game of Thrones.

Samuel Arbesman:

Interesting.

Lev Grossman:

The engine of that story, or the thing that kicks it off is the death of the king, or two kings, but probably Robert Baratheon. The whole story is this extended succession crisis. I began to play with the idea of what would a story look like if the king who died wasn't Robert Baratheon, it was King Arthur? And when I did that, a whole lot of lights lit up and I realized there was something very interesting there. It's a basic convention of the Arthurian story that the story ends with Arthur's death. When you read Thomas Malory, for example, Le Mort d'Arthur, the label says what's in the tin.

Samuel Arbesman:

Right.

Lev Grossman:

Arthur will die, and then everyone will grieve because it's a great tragedy and the story will end. I became very curious about what would happen if you left the cameras rolling, as it were. T.H. White's great stroke of genius, or one of them was the idea of telling the story of Arthur's childhood. Nobody had ever done that before. All that stuff about Arthur being tutored by Merlin, he just made it up out of whole cloth, and he gave us Arthur as a young boy, which we'd never had before. He discovered this vast tract of land on the map that had never been explored, and the time after Arthur's death was similarly unexplored. There was very little writing about it, and I realized that you could do something very interesting there, and I realized also you could do something very modern there. Something about that world that Arthur leaves behind where the center has not held, the pillar that held everything up has collapsed and we're left in the darkness with this broken kingdom, and the institutions and the stars that we used to steer by are gone.

When I looked at that world, I recognized it. It felt like the world that we're living in now, and I thought maybe that's the Arthur that we need. That's the Arthur I've been looking for.

Samuel Arbesman:

That is an amazing description. Related to the world of loss, you're describing as almost this modern world, in what sense would you describe that? Because on the one hand, I can think about people talking about the ideas of disenchantment, but obviously, this world is still very much enchanted. There's lots of religions, there's layers of gods and things like that, but there still is this sense of loss, versus modernity, which has certain aspects of, okay, when there's disenchantment, we can no longer believe these things are only one among a suite of different ideas. How do you think about that specific kind of loss and its parallels in the modern world?

Lev Grossman:

Well, I think in part, and now I'm going to start speaking in cliches, it's the loss of the institutions that we trust. The level of trust in public institutions right now is very, very low, and I think something similar happens when Arthur dies. The entire faith of a kingdom was pinned on him. What we discovered late in his reign when Mordred rebels against him as in fact, people didn't even trust him in that way that we thought that they did, but once he was pushed, he fell very easily. There's something very recognizable about that. Something that happens in the Arthur myth is that after the quest for the Holy Grail, God withdraws from Britain. Up until that time, God is very present in the Arthur story. There's never a question whether the Knights believe in God as God is always sticking his oar in. He's always sending miracles and marvels. He takes a rooting interest in battles, and even individual sword fights. He sends them adventures and quests.

After the quest for the Holy Grail, he ceases to do that, and this is made quite explicit in the stories. There are no more adventures after that and God doesn't speak to them in that way that he did before. So although there's still enchantment, Morgan le Fay's spells still work the way they used to. God has gone very far away. He's taken the Grail with him. He's taken Galahad with him, and he no longer guides them. He no longer chooses them when he has a quest to do. And so in some ways, they feel as though the world that they're in, it still has the magical, but it lacks the divine, and for them, it's everything. They no longer have that to strive for. They don't go on quests anymore, they just do tournaments. They just play games essentially, and it doesn't mean what it did anymore. And to me, there was something that I saw in that, I recognized in that, and it spoke to me, and I feel like it speaks to this moment that we are in history.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's really interesting. Yeah, this moment of loss or hiding of certain things that we had taken for granted or assumed are there and are no longer there. Related to gods and magic and those different ideas, on the one hand, there's, as you mentioned, this idea of the divine has hidden itself post the Grail. On the other hand, there's this layering of gods that you explore and try to make explicit where there's the old ones or the old gods. Then there's the Romans, and then eventually the one God of later Rome, which parallels a lot of just the layering of different peoples in the British Isles, people moving over and over and over. How do you think about that layering, that syncretic approach of different ideas? And you explore this in the book, but how did you think about that when you were writing, as well as how should it speak to us as modern people?

Lev Grossman:

You're hitting on something extremely important. Something that I noticed about Arthur, in some ways, The Bright Sword is a very traditional Arthur book in that we counter all the favorite tropes. I'm an Arthur fanboy myself, so we needed to have a sword in the stone. We need to have the quest for the Grail, Lady of the Lake, all that stuff has to turn up. But when I reread the story, something resonated for me that I hadn't seen a lot of earlier stories deal with, and that's the fact that Arthur is living in what we would call now a post-colonial nation. Rome has occupied Britain for 350 years, I believe around 410, and then historically, to the extent that we think historically about Arthur, Arthur would've turned up around the turn of the 6th century when Britain is still grappling with the trauma of having this historical violence, of having been occupied by Rome for so long and its indigenous culture suppressed.

And interestingly, Arthur is what we would think of as on the wrong side of that particular history in that he is a Romanized Briton, one of the Britons who's part of the upper crust. He's taken on the ways of the occupiers. He still speaks Latin even though the Romans are long gone. Again, this is our historical theory about who Arthur would've been. And so there is that interesting sense of layering and division within this kingdom of Britain, but I also became interested in the story of Arthur. Something that I think people take up Arthur for now has to do with this idea of nationhood, this idea that the people who are here now in this country have always been there. They have a right to this nation. We have to keep that nation pure and undivided, untainted by outsiders, and it's something to some extent that's built into the Arthur story. The earliest versions of Arthur are about a warlord trying to keep the Saxons out, trying to keep Britain, as it were, for the Britons, and of course he fails. He can't do that.

The kingdom that results is a much more mixed kingdom. It's the Britain that we know today, with all those filthy Anglo-Saxons in it, as well as a lot of Celts and many people from many other parts of the world. But there's something about that dream of a pure nation, which is very frankly Trumpian, that links to King Arthur. So something I wanted to make clear and make part of it was that it is a layered kingdom, would be a good way of putting it. Another way is that it's a very impure kingdom. I actually make a point that the Druids, who were the priest kings of the Celts, when they looked at Stonehenge and the stone circles, they had no idea what those things meant. No more idea than we did because the Druids didn't build Stonehenge. The people from whom the Celts took Britain, those are the people who built Stonehenge. The Stonehenge is actually evidence of an even earlier layer that comes before the Celts.

Samuel Arbesman:

Wow.

Lev Grossman:

And who knows how many layers there are below that? So there's something about that sense of the depth and complexity of history that I tried to bake into the world of The Bright Sword because it seemed very important, and again, something we're very, very aware of now. When I say we, I mean Americans really, are trying to be a whole country and yet feel divided against each other.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's really interesting, and I think we're alongside recognizing the consistent layering and all this constant mixing and the way that this has always been. There's also just this sense of immense time. You mentioned this with Stonehenge was already there when the Celts began to do their thing and they had to reappropriate and understand it. This reminds me of there's some fact to the effect of that we were actually... Modern us are closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the pyramids, the construction of the pyramids. And so just recognizing that there are these vast swaths of time and they all play together in this interesting way. And I wonder if there's something there in terms of the Arthur stories in the same way that the Arthur stories play on this layering that the stories themselves have constantly been reinterpreted over and over and over, and there's the layering of the stories themselves that also is part of this reinterpretation?

Lev Grossman:

Wow, absolutely. I think it's part of the strength of the Arthur story, and this is something that fascinates me. The Arthur that we know is mostly the kind of, "I'm an evil version of Arthur," that was written by people like Malory and Chretien de Troyes and people like that. When they wrote it, it is set in the 6th century. They knew enough to know that Arthur was that old, but they gave him all the trappings of the contemporary world because that happened to be how they wrote historical fiction back in that time. So the Arthur we know is a mashup. He's a combination of 12th, 13th, 14th century Britain with 6th century Britain, and as such, highly problematic for historical novelists because he's a feature of anachronisms and he has braided into him all these little traces of different parts of history. He's a very Christian figure, but also a very pagan figure.

There's something, as you say, syncretic about Arthur, which you don't realize when you first glance at him because you just see the top layer, but it's one of the things I think that makes the story so strong and enduring is the way that it has been deposited over time and taken into itself these different elements. That moment which is iconic, where Bedivere returns Excalibur to the water right before Arthur's death, hurls it into the water, and the Lady of the Lake reaches up and catches it and draws it below the surface. That is a very, very old trope. It is older than the Romans. It is an Iron Age trope.

Samuel Arbesman:

Wow.

Lev Grossman:

This idea of retiring weapon in the waters, and it's survived for centuries, for certainly more than 1,000 years, and then resurfaced in the Arthur story when it was added to it in probably the 12th or 13th century. You realize how powerful these tropes are and how the whole thing is melted together out of them. It's really quite wonderful.

Samuel Arbesman:

I guess to a certain degree, it also gives you the freedom to say, "Okay, which version is the correct Arthur? Is it this one? Is it that one?" The answer is yes, they all are because they're this constant reimagining. On the other hand though, and you mentioned there are these tropes and these features that have been around and repurposed for the Arthur story. If you look at, I think the Cinderella story, it's been around for hundreds if not thousands of years, I believe, at least in various versions.

When you were thinking about telling your version of the Arthur story, did the fact that there is this layering of historical components to it, did that make it easier to do the research in some way? Because you could on the one hand say, "Okay, because there's so many different versions, there's so many different time periods, anything goes." On the other hand though, I think people probably subconsciously have a sense of what is Arthurian, but it's one of those, "We know it when we see it," kind of thing, and they can only tell you it's wrong versus what is right. And was that the way you approached the research and how to think about all this?

Lev Grossman:

Well, the research was a pain, frankly. I don't mean to complain about Arthur, but this book took me almost 10 years to write.

Samuel Arbesman:

Oh, wow.

Lev Grossman:

And one of the reasons was for a fantasy novel, it does contain a hell of a lot of fact, but the facts are, to paraphrase William Gibson, not evenly distributed. The past is here, it's just not evenly distributed. And so I guess Arthur, he exists in the two periods at once, the period in which his story was really codified, the medieval period. And so it's very important to know all about that, but then of course, there's this stony bedrock of the dark ages where he was truly engendered, and you have to know all about that as well. And then you have to decide which part of those two pictures you want to include. And then there's all the stuff in-between, like Sir Palamedes was a Muslim. He cannot actually have been in 6th-century Britain because Islam did not begin as a religion until after that, but he's a beloved and chronicle part of the story, and frankly, really, really interesting to me as a character.

So I needed to put him in there, even though it was anachronistic. And he comes from Golden Age Baghdad, which is all wrong, that it doesn't fit with Dark Ages Britain. But there you go. In a way, it's a candy store in that you can take whatever you like, but you have to make it all fit together and then plaster over the cracks so nobody can see.

Samuel Arbesman:

Were there any particular mythical tropes in the same way you mentioned returning a weapon to the water? Were there any tropes that you were aware of that hadn't been incorporated into the Arthur stories that you felt were worth including just because of their being hallowed by time?

Lev Grossman:

Yes, it's a good question. Not at the face of it. I chuck in a dragon, which is not a particularly Arthurian thing, but I think I'd have my fantasy novelist card revoked by the guild. I did not include a dragon in my story, but what I really found was I found myself combining tropes in a way that I hoped was new and interesting. For example, the Arthurian world, it does have that strange quality, that it has two flavors of the supernatural in it. It has the divine in it. Angels are always turning up and God is sending miracles. But then it also has the magical in it, the indigenous supernatural tradition of Britain. And ordinarily, these two things dance around each other, and when one enters, the other one leaves. And so you don't have to deal with the inconsistencies between them.

When I started The Bright Sword, I swore a mighty oath that I would have a fairy in a big fight with an angel because A, it was so cool, and B, you have to decide which rules do you want to abide by and which to break? And one rule of the Arthurian tradition is that no one's supposed to talk about the fact that we have fairies and angels in the same story, even though they don't really belong there. And I thought, "No, no, no, these two, they've danced around each other for long enough. Let's put them in the octagon and have them square off," because there's something exciting about bringing together tropes that don't belong together.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's great. And you see this a little bit in your Magicians novels as well, this idea that gods and religion and magic, they're not distinct. There's this continuum of these supernatural powers and how people think about them, how you can call upon them. I guess a little bit more in terms of The Bright Sword, how did you think about that? And in addition to making the entire book as a way of getting the fairy and the angel have this giant SmackDown, how did you think about magic and gods in terms of... Were there any larger rule sets for how you thought about this, or was it more just things that felt true to the story that you wanted to pursue?

Lev Grossman:

It's tricky, and it goes to that syncretic quality of the Arthur story. In truth, the rule sets are not wholly compatible. It's like trying to play, I don't know, D&D and Warhammer at the same time. In the Celtic world, who created the world? Who created the cosmos? Well, nobody knows. The Celts don't tell that story. It's understood, I think to be forgotten in time.

Samuel Arbesman:

Oh, interesting.

Lev Grossman:

But of course, in the Christian tradition, it's God who created the world. So did God create the Celtic gods as well? Why would he do that? So there's a little bit of hand-waving. Mostly, you almost have to adopt a pagan mindset. The pagans were very actually quite welcoming to Jesus as a deity. They all thought, "Fantastic, this Jesus fellow you've got sounds fantastic. It's great. We'll sacrifice to him. Absolutely. Just give us a little bit of that magical bread that you guys are always waving around and everything's going to be cool." It was a relatively new idea that there could only be one God, and it's an idea popularized by Christianity, but there's something quite wonderful and rich about this pagan world in which all the myths are true. Nobody is wrong. You choose which one you like. You don't try to get too persnickety or legalistic about who exactly created the world.

So I try to approach it from a pagan point of view, which is to sell Christianity a little bit sort of course, because really, the idea of goodness, the idea of virtue, which is not really well organized in pagan traditions. Say this for Christianity, it organized it pretty good. And that idea of goodness, that ideal, that chivalric ideal, that Christian ideal, that's what makes Arthur special, and it's what haunts his days and nights. There's no story without the Christian God. He wouldn't be the Arthur that we know. So there's no piece of the puzzle you can lift out without the rest of it falling apart.

Samuel Arbesman:

So there's a term, I think it's monolottery, where it's like, basically rather than monotheism of there is only one God, there are many gods, but you're only supposed to be worshipping that one God. And I feel like there is actually some interesting power in using that kind of approach with King Arthur, where there is this constant tension of, "Okay, there are all these other things in the pagan world, but I have to keep on being true to this God, to the Roman God or the Christian God."

But there's also this idea, you mentioned virtue, and so it's less about just the gods and which ones we kind of pick and choose, and more about what are the ideals that fall out from the different beliefs and gods that you choose to latch onto, I guess?

Lev Grossman:

I think that's very accurate. Something that I tried to adopt going in is that everybody's beliefs are true, and it's all real, and nobody is wrong, though everybody was just going to have to fight it out to see who's going to win. It's Game of Thrones up there as much as it is Game of Thrones down here.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's a really good take on that. It makes it more compelling. If everything is true, then how do people choose? There's a lot of strife and tension there. Moving to your Magicians novels, but staying on the topic of the world of magic, it's not quite a rule set, but it's much more clearly, I guess laid out in the sense that magic is not this thing that is particularly easy. There's craft, there's work. You have to go to school to learn these things, or you have to spend a lot of time learning this. Did any of those ideas seep into The Bright Sword, or was the idea of magic very distinct in terms of how you thought about The Magicians novels?

Lev Grossman:

It's interesting because I can remember coming to the bits where magic is to be worked and thinking, "Well, at least there won't be a learning curve for me here because I already know how this is done. I wrote three books of it." But of course, when you dig into the pagan tradition of magic, especially the Celtic one, you realize that it's running off a different power grid than for example, Harry Potter or the Magicians. In that, when the Druids did magic, I think there was some spell casting. I think that there was some wand waving and so on and so forth. I suppose they had staves, but a lot of the magic that was done was of a transactional nature. The world was absolutely full of spirits and gods. When the Druids looked around and they saw a big boulder, "Well, there's a spirit associated with the boulder and with the mountain over there, with that unusually large tree, that also has a god associated with it."

So there's this wonderful populated landscape. When he needed supernatural work done, it was often a matter of negotiating with different spirits. Fortunately, I've been sacrificing to the spirit of the boulder for some years now. And so he owes me a solid. He will make sure the crops thrive or whatever it is. So what I realized is that it was much more of this connected web of relationships that structured and characterized the magical world for the Celts and for the Druids. And of course, Merlin was a Druid. Something that was pointed out to me by C.S. Lewis. Merlin was of course, a Druid. And so that was the kind of magic that he practiced.

So in some ways, very different from the magic of The Magicians, which was much more abstract. It's much more part of that modern fantasy tradition, which we know and love. But the rule set, as you say, it was quite different. And annoyingly, I had to relearn how to write about magic for The Bright Sword.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's interesting. And also, when I think about the world of magic and the magicians and how it operates, it reminds me a lot more of how... And maybe this is my hat of my computer science background, it felt much more about learning the craft of coding and things like that, which I actually have written a little bit about this kind of stuff, versus in The Bright Sword where it's much more... Rather than learning a craft or a skill or computer programming or whatever, it's much more around building relationships and getting to know people and almost being really good at networking or sales. It's like working in sales, but for the spiritual realm.

Lev Grossman:

It's not particularly human centered.

Samuel Arbesman:

Oh, that's really interesting.

Lev Grossman:

I think that's because in many ways, that modern fantasy tradition that we talk about has developed as a reaction to or as a way of understanding technology. I think that a lot of the things that magic does in books like Harry Potter or The Magicians or 1,000,000 other books, it takes over many of the functions of technology, but it does them in a way that is very different somehow, that it endows them with the kind of aura and the meaning that we don't find in technology. Not to rubbish technology, but I think that one of the reasons that fantasy literature is so popular right now, and it has absolutely exploded in the past 20 or 30 years, is the same reason that it became popular or became important for Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in that we are in the aftermath of a technological revolution, and we are still trying to catch up within ourselves with the consequences of what we have done to ourselves as a civilization. And I think that thinking about magic, telling stories about magic is a way of trying to understand where we've come to in our history.

Samuel Arbesman:

Do you think that's also related to the idea of enchantment and disenchantment, where it's because of the technological realm that has controlled so many of the things around us, we feel maybe certain aspects of disenchantment, however we want to define that term? And as a result, rather than re-enchanting the world and beginning to believe nonsense, we instead tell stories that help us make things feel more real in the world, and fantasy is kind of the embodiment of that?

Lev Grossman:

It draws him among certainly fantasy novelists, but also historians who write about this kind of thing is once the world has been disenchanted, it can never be re-enchanted in the same way. And when we talk about magic, we don't talk about it the way we did in ancient times, or even many of us, I think, talk about religion in the same way that we used to. So we're searching for new ways to enchant the world and find a relationship with it that feels, I don't know, meaningful to us. And I think we're still casting about for it.

Samuel Arbesman:

Well, and even in your Magicians novels, there's the sense in some of the characters, they learn magic. They think this will fill that meaning gap or whatever it is, and they're not really satisfied. They realize that they're still the same people. They just now have a lot more power. I guess the difference is when they move to your more magical world of Fillory, that's when they begin to feel a certain kind of larger set of stakes. Do you think that people almost need these secondary worlds as a place, that's where the meaning resides, whether it's middle earth or Fillory or whatever?

Lev Grossman:

Yes, I think that's true. I think there's something about our world which even novelists can't endow it with meaning the way that it used to have. But something that we see, and I think it's a very interesting trope, is when characters go into a secondary world like Fillory or even Narnia, once they get there, meaning is not as stable there as they had hoped. This, as it were, fantasy of another world that's full of meaning where you can't really feel that despair, that lostness that I'm trying to get at in The Bright Sword. Even in the novels, it tends to be not as true as you want it to. And you tend to bring your problems with you to the secondary world, and you have to find a way to solve them all over again.

Samuel Arbesman:

Do you think that's just due to the fact that people are people and we're always searching for what we don't have? I imagine there are certain less realistic fantasy novels where people have whatever they need or these worlds are imbued with as much meaning as we might require, that doesn't feel that realistic. An equivalent, and this is more moving to the science fiction world, is in the world of Star Trek and the Federation, one of the things that people will sometimes say is the most unrealistic thing of these stories is not warp drive or certain replicators or whatever it is. It's the fact that human nature has almost shifted, where people no longer are acquisitive in quite the same way. They just want to better themselves and there's no need for money or certain things. And it's almost like there is a post-scarcity society, but humans have adapted to it in a way that maybe is aspirational, but sometimes maybe even a little bit less realistic.

And I wonder if, whether it's fantasy or science fiction, there's a certain cleaving there where certain novels and stories take human nature as given, "This is how we are and we're not necessarily going to change, and we have to recognize that," versus saying, "No, no, no. If we just smooth out our edges, then everything will be good?" That maybe is an abandonment of humanity.

Lev Grossman:

Well, it's interesting. True utopias are very rare, even in fiction, and partly because it's difficult to tell interesting stories.

Samuel Arbesman:

They're boring.

Lev Grossman:

Yeah, exactly. You look at Iain Banks, the Culture novels, where technology is-

Samuel Arbesman:

Exactly. Right. It's always at the edge of the Culture novels. Right?

Lev Grossman:

Yes. But even in Narnia, and this used to absolutely haunt me as a child, the fact that in The Last Battle, the last book of the series, much maligned, although I happen to love The Last Battle, Narnia itself collapses. This world that they went to, that they discovered, that was where the meaning was. That's where everything was good, and yet it falls apart, and they are forced to retreat further up and further in, as Aslan says, into Aslan's land, which in some ways was a happy, satisfying ending. But it left me thinking when I was done, "How long before Aslan's land collapses and we'll have to go somewhere else?" And you imagine the Pevensie is just retreating from one collapsing utopia to another for the rest of time. It's surprisingly difficult, even for a genius like C.S. Lewis, to imagine a utopia which is perfect and stable forever.

Samuel Arbesman:

That's interesting. And I would say the part that haunted me of The Last Battle was the fact that everyone dies, and we don't even note that fact. That was the thing that just seemed very strange.

Lev Grossman:

Really stayed over it, yeah.

Samuel Arbesman:

But related to these secondary worlds, going back to Fillory. When you created Fillory and developed it, what was the process there? Was it taking bits and pieces of these other secondary worlds and making them work the way you thought they should? Was it in service of the specific story? I imagine it's a combination of all the different things, but what was the process there?

Lev Grossman:

When I wrote about Fillory, to be completely frank, I imagined myself that I was writing a letter to C.S. Lewis. And what I felt that I was doing in my arrogance was trying to surface aspects of the Narnia world that to me, didn't fully make sense. Like Aslan's place in it, for example. I could never understand why Aslan didn't work harder as God king of Narnia to make things better for his subjects? His subjects would always be fighting and killing each other, and he would be wandering around in the woods, flirting with Lucy and would show up, not even at the very last minute, a little bit too late for everybody to come out of it okay.

And I suppose you could blame it on the deeper magic, but always that problem, the familiar problem of the existence of evil. It frustrated me and I tried to push it to a further extreme in the Fillory story, that along with a basic lack of an economy or apology, and the presence of Santa Claus. C.S. Lewis, terrible world builder, absolutely terrible. I find it interesting to pick at the seams of Narnia and try to undo them a little bit. And once I'd undone them enough, there was Fillory.

Samuel Arbesman:

Okay. Related to that though, I was having this conversation with a friend of mine about the extent to which when you build these worlds or when you're telling stories, whether or not things not fully adding up makes them more realistic because the way that the real world is messy, there's always things that are never quite explained. And so I think he had written about Tom Bombadil and Tolkien and just this weird thing that's out of left field. And there's ways of making it all make sense, but it just seems a little bit different. I think Santa Claus is probably a little too different for Narnia, but did you think about anything there of how do you balance order and disorder and regularity and messiness?

Lev Grossman:

Oh, it's absolutely true. I'm working on something new, which I'm actually doing with a collaborator, and periodically, we'll be looking at one of the systems we've put in place and we'll stop and we'll think, "No, no, there has to be one that doesn't make sense."

Samuel Arbesman:

That's great.

Lev Grossman:

And so we'll build in an exception or two, which just breaks the whole thing, but you just don't look at it too closely. If you don't, it doesn't feel real. And the paradigm that I use in The Magicians books is of language, which of course, it's system-like, we impose order upon it retroactively with declensions and conjugations and all that stuff, but the exceptions almost outnumber the rules. That's how you know that you're dealing with a world that feels properly real, is because it's frayed at the edges. Even Tolkien who was an absolute fiend for order and for completion, probably never been a more rigorous builder than Tolkien. He has to have Tom Bombadil in there. One of my favorite moments in the Lord of the Rings is when Tom Bombadil puts on the ring, the ring of power, and nothing happens.

Samuel Arbesman:

Right. Nothing.

Lev Grossman:

And you realize because he's outside that order that governs the whole rest of the universe. And of course, Tom Bombadil, he is irritating with all his poetry, and he doesn't really advance the plot all that much, but he is that one piece that doesn't quite fit, that makes the rest of it feel real.

Samuel Arbesman:

Right. You need a certain amount of exceptions to the rule, I'd view this almost as. Should it be physics, where you have a few equations that explains everything, or biology where there's some general rules? We understand evolution, but it's really squishy and messy, and that makes it feel that much more lived in, so to speak.

Lev Grossman:

Yeah.

Samuel Arbesman:

So are you able to share anything about this new project, or is that still far too early?

Lev Grossman:

It's late enough that I should be able to talk about it coherently, although I haven't very much. I'm actually very interested in science fiction and space opera. I was probably more of a science fiction fan when I took up writing fantasy than I was a fantasy fan, and I've always wanted to get my claws into it. So I'm working on a space opera, probably in the Star Wars tradition.

Samuel Arbesman:

Okay.

Lev Grossman:

Star Wars, I grew up on it. It's one of my basic loves in my life, and yet as a franchise, it is showing some age and some cracking around the edges, that basic opposition between light and dark. I think storytellers are struggling to wring complexity out of it when it has this very basic young adult, 1970s foundation. And so a friend of mine and I are working on, it'll actually be a graphic novel, not a conventional novel, a Star Wars like space opera, but something that's built much more on a contemporary chassis, something much more Game of Thrones like in the sense that there are many, many factions. There are many shades of gray. It's not really light versus dark and whatever passes for the force or the supernatural. It's much more disorderly, even than the force. And in fact, you have competing systems of supernaturalness, just as you have in King Arthur, and it's not really clear which of them is paramount, which of them represents the true worldview.

Just that messiness, that complexity. I feel like it'd be quite interesting to bring that to a story, a space opera type story. Space opera tends to be very fantasy-like. It's on the fantasy end of science fiction. It tends to tell those hero's journey kind of stories, which I love. So that is something that I have in progress that hopefully will be interesting. Although as it turns out, it takes a very long time to produce a graphic novel because somebody has to draw it. So probably, it won't see the light of day for a few more years.

Samuel Arbesman:

Well, that sounds fantastic. And you mentioned, we were talking about the Iain Banks' Culture novels. Are there any of those kinds of influences as well, or is there much more the Star Wars, that kind of space opera?

Lev Grossman:

Iain Banks is... It's not he's unsung, but I still think he's undersung.

Samuel Arbesman:

His work is fantastic. Yeah.

Lev Grossman:

Yes. And it's a big influence in me. That thing that he does in working with... I don't know of any technological universe that is higher tech than the culture. People, they can do just about everything with technology, and I don't know how he kept all this plate spinning because it's so complex and interesting. So in terms of the messiness of that world, it's certainly an influence and the humor of it, which I appreciate a lot. See, he's certainly an influence there, but the technology of this world, it'll have that industrial quality that the technology of Star Wars has. It's got that very used universe feel to it in that all the technology, it's very old and creaky, and it gets the job done just about, but not without a lot of shaking and rattling along the way.

Samuel Arbesman:

I think one of the other features of the Culture novels, and going back to what we were discussing earlier with an absence of meaning or a sense of loss, is the culture novels, there's not these larger purposes that the super intelligent minds are working towards. They're just having as much fun as they can in this weird, insensitive universe, which is, it could be a very bleak point, but it actually seems quite playful. Is there anything like that in this kind of world, or are there competing points of meaning that they're trying to argue over?

Lev Grossman:

I think in that sense, it's much more Banksian.

Samuel Arbesman:

Okay.

Lev Grossman:

One thing I could probably never be accused of is writing a novel of ideas. Everyone's down there in the mud trying to make sense of things, but the sense that they make never really makes that much sense. And even the beings of a higher order, they've hit the ceiling of their ability to make sense of anything. And as you say, they're just trying to have a decent time.

Samuel Arbesman:

Sounds amazing. That might be a perfect place to end. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.

Lev Grossman:

Thank you.

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