Max Gladstone and the Mystery of Inspiration

Max Gladstone is a busy guy. He�s marketing Full Fathom Five, the third novel in his Craft Sequence even as he prepares for the release of the next book in his out-of-order series of stand-alone books. On top of that, he recently released an interactive text-based game called Choice of the Deathless. He writes weekly, thoughtful blog posts, keeps up with his fans on Twitter, and, I imagine, all the while is imagining in the back of his head an alternate world of necromancers, goddesses and lawyerly witches (or witchy lawyers?)

With so much going on, I�m grateful he had time to talk with me on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Gladstone got me thinking about the mystery of inspiration. In the interview, he cites a number of sparks that gave life to the �post-industrial urban fantasy� landscape of the Craft Sequence: the financial collapse of 2008, his years working as an English teacher in China, where he saw non-profits collaborate with less-than-savory for-profits to achieve worthwhile outcomes and the Horatio Alger-like transformations of children of poor Chinese farmers into world-trotting bankers and engineers.