Exclusive Interview

Sebastien de Castell is a Canadian fantasy writer, mostly known for his Greatcoat series that has been described as "Three Musketeers meets high fantasy", and which got him nominated several science fiction and fantasy awards, such as the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and the David Gemmell Awards for Fantasy.

Q: HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO JUGGLE A FOCUSED CAREER AS A MUSICIAN, OMBUDSMAN, INTERACTION DESIGNER, FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHER, TEACHER, PROJECT MANAGER, ACTOR AND AS A PRODUCT STRATEGIST?

Writers as a species seem to be remarkably prone to working in all kinds of different jobs, and I was certainly no exception. I’d often work in a particular field for five to seven years and then shift careers to something entirely new. Fortunately, I was rarely working in more than three of them at a time, otherwise I’d have started forgetting which was which. You never want to show up at a big project launch meeting swinging a rapier while singing a pop song. Actually, looking back on some of those projects, maybe the rapier would’ve improved things.

Q: WHICH OF YOUR MANY CAREERS WOULD FIT INTO YOUR TOP THREE FAVORITES?

My top three favourite careers? Well, there’s lots of competition for the third slot since I loved all those strange and varied jobs. Working as an ombudsman was philosophically enriching; interaction design allowed me to explore the way people relate to technology; teaching is an excellent way to learn because your students are always challenging not just the material but the way one might think about the subject; fight choreography and acting were both tremendously fun and took me on some wild adventures. So, all of those are going to have to share the number three slot.

Number two, however, is unquestionably music. I still perform with bands periodically and there’s nothing quite like the combination of the physical, intellectual, and emotional connection you experience when a group of musicians performs together on stage in front of an audience.

As for number one? Well, who wouldn’t want to be a full-time fantasy novelist? It’s the best job in the world!

Q: YOU MENTIONED DOING A CAREER IN ARCHAEOLOGY BEFORE HATING IT. WHAT LED YOU INTO THAT FIELD AND WHAT MADE YOU LEAVE IT?

Like so many before me, I was seduced into an archaeology degree by the Indiana Jones movies. I should’ve been suspicious when on day one of classes nobody gave me a bullwhip and fedora. One of the wonders of university is that you can go through almost an entire degree before discovering what it’s like to actually work in that field. Archeology is both a marvellously fascinating subject of study, and – if you happen to enjoy camping and digging in the dirt with a toothbrush all day – an excellent job. Alas, I really hate camping and I get bored easily. You never see Indiana Jones camping. So, really, I blame him.

Q: HAVE YOU GIVEN YOUR CHARACTERS ROLES OR KNOWLEDGE IN THE FIELD AREAS IN WHICH YOU WORK?

One of the joys of writing fantasy is that in addition to devising magic systems and coming up with fabulous worlds, you also get to invent entirely new cultures and jobs. Most of the time, my main characters are employed in fields that make sense for the societies in which they live but don’t exist in ours. The fun part of this is that I can imagine myself in professions that neither I nor my readers could otherwise experience in our daily lives. Who wouldn’t want to be employed as a swashbuckling magistrate or card-playing philosopher?

Q: HOW LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO WRITE YOUR FANTASY SERIES THE GREATCOATS BEFORE YOU WON MULTIPLE AWARDS AND RECOGNITION FOR IT?

Mostly, I get nominated for awards and then lose to more deserving authors. Every once in a while, though, I’ll discover I’ve won an award and an engraved glass plate or little statue or a leather book-shaped award will turn up in the mail. Traitor’s Blade, my debut novel in the Greatcoats series, received some lovely nominations for the Gemmell Morningstar Award, Goodreads Choice Award and even the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. I lost them all – proudly! When Spellslinger won a French fantasy award, I found myself wondering whether it was because the French liked the book even more than the English, or whether the translator secretly rewrote it and made it a better novel.

Acclaim is a lovely – but momentary – event. It’s nice because it can mean interacting with other authors and seeing your name in the paper, but it’s an ephemeral experience that disappears quickly.

Knowing that you’re earning a living from your books is far more motivating both financially and emotionally. And yet, neither of these can compete with the spiritually sustaining joy of finishing a novel. That’s the feeling never goes away.

Q: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR WRITING STYLE?

Despite being a fantasy novelist, I’ve always been influenced by the prose style of hardboiled writers like Raymond Chandler or even modern neo-noir authors like Dennis Lehane. They write with such a sense of immediacy, not only making scenes cinematic but also visceral. The difference, of course, is that my books are less cynical and driven more by notions of idealism and the redemptive power of friendships. So, while I might think of my style as having neo-noir roots, most readers probably never notice that influence. In fact, with the Greatcoats, readers and reviewers often bring up Alexandre Dumas and the Three Musketeers, but while I’m delighted to fit into the swashbuckling tradition any way I can, stylistically I write with a much more contemporary and informal voice.

Q: WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO WRITING BOOKS IN THE FANTASY GENRE?

Fantasy is alternately praised or derided as offering an escape from our own world, but what draws me to to the genre is the opportunity to explore and juxtapose the familiar with the fantastical. I like to venture into lands and cultures that can have both similarities and stark differences to our own. My favourite fantasy novels never left me wishing I could stay forever in Narnia or Middle Earth, but rather had the effect of making me perceive my own country and culture in a different, less jaded light. That’s fantasy literature’s greatest power: not to escape our own lives, but to re-enchant the world in which we live.

Q: YOUR LATEST RELEASE COMING OUT THIS MAY, THE MALEVOLENT SEVEN, IS ALSO IN THE FANTASY GENRE. CAN YOU SHARE WITH US, READERS, WHAT IT IS ABOUT?

Malevolent Seven is an irreverent dark fantasy filled with mercenary mages of dubious moral character who find themselves accidentally caught up in a battle between god-like forces threatening to destroy the mortal realm. Despite their insistence on not being heroes, they’re stuck trying to save the world – unless someone comes up with a better offer. It’s wilder and fasterpaced than my Greatcoats novels, but retains some of the themes of friendships and found-families that I love both as a writer and as a reader.

When I first shared the manuscript with my publishers, I proudly informed them that Malevolent Seven contained more swearing and dirty jokes than any other book I’d ever written, and that none of them could be removed for publication. Looking back, I’m not so sure my editor didn’t actually add a few swear words of her own.

Q: WHO ARE THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN YOUR NOVEL, THE MALEVOLENT SEVEN?

Cade Ombra is a mercenary wonderist – a mage who draws his spells from one of the dozen different planes of reality where the laws of physics work differently enough to make magic possible. In Cade’s case, his spells come from the Infernal Realm, which is rather uncomfortable for someone who’s trying his best to avoid becoming an even worse human being than his fellow magesfor-hire. Accompanying him is Corrigan Blight, a big, boisterous Tempestoral thunderer who mostly gets off on blowing things up. Galass, a blood mage whose magic keeps trying to exsanguinate her comrades. Along for the ride is Aradeus, the world’s most handsome, swashbuckling rat mage whose convinced that rodent magic is the noblest of all, an angelic being betrayed by her celestial rulers and a demon who happened to be trained by the most honourable paladin who ever lived. Oh, and there’s an enthusiastically yapping jackal who may or may not be the most dangerous of them all.

Q: WHAT THEMES WILL READERS FIND IN YOUR NOVEL?

In the world of Malevolent Seven, as in our own, there’s a lot of talk about who’s good and who’s evil – which side is right and which side is wrong. But most of us don’t get to choose the society in which we’re born or even which side wants us and which one doesn’t. Cade Ombra is always wrestling with the fact that the good guys seem just as willing to engage in havoc and destruction, murder and mayhem as the bad guys. If the methods are the same, then are the sides really so different? And if you can’t trust in the idea that your side is righteous, what’s left? For Cade, what’s left is trying to take care of the people near him, which is why friendship and family are as central to Malevolent Seven as all the magic and blowing things up.

Q: WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO ASPIRING WRITERS IN YOUR GENRE?

Write the book you want to read . . . boldly. Don’t tone down your writing, don’t avoid so-called clichés or tropes or whatever other nonsense people are nattering about on social media. If you loved Twilight, then write about vampires that are twice as sparkly and broodingly handsome as the ones in that series. If you love big adventurous quests with unicorns and dragons, make your unicorns and dragons the most magical of all and give your characters the coolest swords. Don’t back away from what you love just because you’re afraid of not being unique enough or people on the Internet claim that sub-genre is passé – doing so will only water down your voice and passion. It’s easy to ‘tone something down’ or make it more ‘sophisticated’ later, but it’s incredibly hard to bring a story that you’ve drowned in your insecurities back to life. Write the book you want to read as boldly, irreverently, and honestly as you possibly can.

Q: WHAT OTHER PROJECTS ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON AT THE MOMENT?

So many projects! When you’re fortunate enough to reach a certain amount of success in this business, the demands on your time start to multiply between writing, publicity, travelling to various events, negotiating contracts that range from new series to translations in other countries to film & TV options. Thankfully, the work that occupies the lion’s share of my day remains writing new novels including:

• FATE OF THE ARGOSI, the third Ferius Parfax book that spins off from my young adult series, Spellslinger, comes out in August, 2023 worldwide.

• CRUCIBLE OF CHAOS, a standalone Greatcoats novel featuring my new favourite swashbuckling detective will come out later this year.

• OUR LADY OF BLADES, first of the new Greatcoats quartet, is scheduled to hit shelves in March, 2024.

• PLAY OF SHADOWS has been finished for ages, but it’s coming out in March 2025.

• During the past couple of years, I wrote two quirky mystery novels that I adore: THE TROUBLE WITH TUPPENCE and COLD STEEL FOR CROOKED HEARTS. Some of the world’s top publishers have excitedly informed my agent that neither of these could ever be a hit with readers. I’m inclined to see if I can prove them wrong.

• Finally, with both the Greatcoats and Spellslinger series having been optioned for television, I get to have the pleasure of periodically meeting with vastly more famous and talented people than myself about how they might be brought to the screen. No promises, of course, as Hollywood is as strange and fickle a land as any fantasy realm one can imagine, but still, tremendous fun!

About Sebastien De Castell

Sebastien de Castell had just finished a degree in Archaeology when he started work on his first dig. Four hours later he realized how much he actually hated archaeology and left to pursue a very focused career as a musician, ombudsman, interaction designer, fight choreographer, teacher, project manager, actor, and product strategist. His only defence against the charge of unbridled dilettantism is that he genuinely likes doing these things and that, in one way or another, each of these fields plays a role in his writing. He sternly resists the accusation of being a Renaissance Man in the hopes that more people will label him that way.

Sebastien's acclaimed swashbuckling fantasy series, The Greatcoats. was shortlisted for both the 2014 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fantasy. the Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Debut, the Prix Imaginales for Best Foreign Work, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. His YA fantasy series, Spellslinger, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and is published in more than a dozen languages.

Sebastien lives in Vancouver, Canada with his lovely wife and two belligerent cats. You can reach him at www.decastell.com