Last year I was alerted to US author Daniel Abraham and The Long Price Quartet by the review site Risingshadow.net. I found the series intriguing, but also realized that I was late to the party: the series had been completed in 2009, but never distributed in New Zealand. So I was delighted to learn that Daniel Abraham had a new Fantasy series, The Dagger and The Coin, being published this year and that it would be released here. The first novel in the new series, The Dragon’s Path, is recently out in the bookshops and I seized the opportunity to talk with Daniel Abraham about it.

Helen: The Dragon’s Path is the first in a new series, titled The Dagger and The Coin—can you give readers an idea of what its about?

Daniel: It’s an epic fantasy series that borrows as much from Dorothy Dunnett as it does from Tolkien. It’s about war and banking, love and truth and murder and dragons.

Helen: In what way “Dorothy Dunnet”?

Daniel: Dorothy Dunnett is one of the underappreciated masters of historical fiction and, frankly, fantasy. She and Tim Parks were the people who convinced me that medieval banking was a powerfully cool thing. Plus which, I’ve read her House of Niccolo books through more times than almost anything else I own.

Helen: Do you agree that it’s fair to describe The Dagger’s Path as classic epic fantasy, with elements such as a medieval world, the legacy of a long ago past reawakening, a journey—the title reference to dragons even! What drew you to this very traditional, storytelling form?

Daniel: The first epic fantasy series I wrote – The Long Price Quartet – was built to be unlike anything else I’d seen in the genre. A different setting, an unfamiliar structure, and a story that wasn’t the usual at all. I’m very pleased with how those books came out. And having been there, I wanted to come back to the things that are the core strengths of epic fantasy and see how the lessons I learned out there on the borders of the genre could apply to those issues and concerns. That sounds a little pretentious now that I say it out loud. I was drawn to it because it’s what made me fall in love with the genre as a reader, and I wanted to come home to that.

Helen: Is there any sense in which you feel the story you are telling subverts the formula, either subtly or openly?

Daniel: Probably there is. I’ve taken out the traditional farm boy chosen of prophecy and put in a girl raised by a medieval bank, which is hardly the standard. And I’ve certainly taken a different perspective on the traditional dark lord. But subverting? I don’t know.

I’m sceptical of subversion for subversion’s sake. I think that there’s a real pressure to subvert the genre out of a sense of almost shame. It can be like a pre-emptive apology. I’ve done things that are different, but I’ve done them in an effort to reach the same places and effects, so I don’t think of it as subversive.

Helen: Could you expand a little more on how you feel that you’ve taken a different perspective on the traditional dark lord?

Daniel: A few years back, I was at a convention with Tim Powers. He was on a panel, and I was listening. He said that he didn’t just want his villains defeated. He wanted them humiliated and destroyed. I don’t. I want my villains understood and, if possible, forgiven. The Dagger and the Coin has its dark lord, and his rise to power and the things that come from that are central to the book. But he isn’t the kind of faceless “I’m evil because that’s what it says in the script” inhuman force that you have in Sauron. He’s sympathetic. You like him. You see the joy he takes in things, and the fear that drives him, and the pettiness. I think most evil isn’t pure, any more than most good.

Helen: Writers are also readers—so what are the elements that “spin your wheels” when reading fantasy? How do you approach incorporating them into your own writing?

Daniel: More than readers, writers are thieves. I was very careful planning this series to take all the things about fantasy that spun my wheels and put them in there. Epic fantasy is, I think, a genre about war and – in the best ones – an ambivalence about war. There are plenty of fantasies that are triumphalist, but the ones that really last are frankly melancholy. The Lord of the Rings was a massive epic fantasy about disarmament and the cost war has on the individual. A Song of Ice and Fire is among other things an essay on the futility of war. The aspect that I’ve taken in The Dagger and the Coin is the way that the story of a war, be it propaganda or history, outstrips the war itself. That’s at the large scale. The thing that I find myself going back to in books that I love are the characters. So I’ve peopled these books with characters I like spending time with. But I suppose that’s true in any genre.

Helen: So which are the characters in The Dragon’s Path that you most enjoy spending time with? And why?

Daniel: I like them all. I’d better. But for different reasons. I like Marcus Wester because he has so many of the good lines. I like Cithrin because she gets to think about economics and power and how you set prices and sell dresses and things that I actually find really involving. I like Dawson because he is so utterly opposed to everything I personally believe and he’s so much in love with his wife that I like him anyway. I like Geder Palliako because he’s a kind of character that I find wholly challenging. And there’s Clara. I’ve written a whole book since Dragon’s Path, so I’ve been able to spend a great deal of time with her, and she’s probably my favorite. For the moment at least.

Helen: One thing that impressed me in your earlier series, The Long Price Quartet, was how well you wrote women characters. Amat Kyaan and Idaan Machi particularly stand out for me but there are many more. So I couldn’t help noticing that in terms of major characters there is really only one, Cithrin, in The Dagger’s Path. It sounds as though Clara’s going to come into it more, but in this book she’s still very much a bit part. Was this approach a conscious decision on your part, or in some way driven by the plot?

Daniel: Clara Kalliam is one of those main characters who actually has a relatively small role in the first book, which is always tricky with these long, multi-volume stories. She is a tremendously important and central character, too, but you won’t see her as much until King’s Blood. Then from there on out, there are about as many primary women characters as there are men. That was intentional.

For secondary characters, I actually didn’t want Cithrin surrounded by very many women. I hadn’t thought about this until you asked, but part of what makes her story interesting to me is the sense of vulnerability and isolation growing into strength and community. We’re still in the first part of the series, so the vulnerability and isolation are more in the mix here.

One thing that’s interesting about these books that I didn’t consciously plan was the number of dead mothers. Two of the major characters – the two major characters really – lost their mothers very young, and in both cases I see that loss forming who they are.

Helen: In what way, “the loss forming who they are” with the two main characters—can you expand on that more?

Daniel: Cithrin is the girl at the center of the bank, and the thing that makes her individual and fascinating is the way she analyzes everything in economic terms. Where other people grew up with parents, she had a merchant and a manipulator. And what he gave her wasn’t love, it was an understanding of negotiation, gamesmanship, and trade. I think if she’d had a mother to take as a model, she’d have been an utterly different person.

Geder Palliako had a father growing up, but not one who was particularly nurturing. I see him as someone who, if he’d been loved a little more, might have developed more of a soul. Geder and Cithrin suffered the same kind of absences when they were kids, and I think it deformed them in similar ways.

Helen: So far, The Dagger and The Coin series is quite different in ‘feel’ to The Long Price Quartet. Do you see yourself trying something different again once this series is complete or would you like to continue with epic fantasy?

Daniel: It feels like every book I write is there to help build the tools for the book after it. What I’d really like to do after The Dagger and the Coin books are done is take what they teach me about accessibility and pacing and the strength at the core of epic fantasy and combine them with the unfamiliarity and strangeness of The Long Price books to make a single-volume story. I’ve told one story in four books. This one will be in five. I would love to use the things I’ve learned from them to write something that’s almost distilled. I don’t know what that book is yet, and I won’t for a few years, but I’m a little excited about it already.