T.C. Rypel
The Gonji origin epic, BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL. This will actually be the seventh book in the series but the first set in Gonji's homeland of 16th-century Japan. Albeit, of course, this is an alt-history, heroic-fantasy version of Japan. The time seemed right to answer a lot of questions about the land Gonji had been exiled from, what his youth had been like until his flight to seek his Destiny in the West.
The first five novels in the Gonji series (now in re-issue from Wildside Press) began in the middle of Gonji's life of adventures, which grew to encompass a background concerning sinister off-world tyranny that had quietly manipulated our Earth's history for millennia. The recently released sixth book, DARK VENTURES, was the first series book with shorter tales and an essay that chronicles the creation and publishing history of Gonji.
BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL is quite an ambitious challenge, in some ways rivaling the epic "Deathwind Trilogy" that began the series back in the 1980s. For one thing, Gonji's parents were a trip to get to know, in BORN. His samurai father was a young daimyo---warlord---and his mother, a wild and vengeful shipwrecked neo-Viking shieldmaiden. Their meeting during an apparent apocalyptic event, with the Japanese islands at ground zero of a multi-dimensional gateway overlap, became so portentous that what began as a novella demanded the richness of treatment that only a novel could provide.
The story of Gonji's eventual birth (and mandate from Destiny itself) during the year-and-a-half-duration cataclysm even includes a possible origin for the classic kaiju---the giant monsters that so famously overrun Japan in the Toho Films movies. The delightful, if intense, challenge was to ground all the spectacular events deeply in the HUMAN experience of it all. It's a survival story of grim magnitude, which changes not only significant lives in my alt-history but also, to some degree, even the geography of Japan. (Our earth is one of many concentric planets in an interdependent, out-of-phase system---one of the key facets of the series mythology.)
So it's quite an undertaking.
The first five novels in the Gonji series (now in re-issue from Wildside Press) began in the middle of Gonji's life of adventures, which grew to encompass a background concerning sinister off-world tyranny that had quietly manipulated our Earth's history for millennia. The recently released sixth book, DARK VENTURES, was the first series book with shorter tales and an essay that chronicles the creation and publishing history of Gonji.
BORN OF FLAME AND STEEL is quite an ambitious challenge, in some ways rivaling the epic "Deathwind Trilogy" that began the series back in the 1980s. For one thing, Gonji's parents were a trip to get to know, in BORN. His samurai father was a young daimyo---warlord---and his mother, a wild and vengeful shipwrecked neo-Viking shieldmaiden. Their meeting during an apparent apocalyptic event, with the Japanese islands at ground zero of a multi-dimensional gateway overlap, became so portentous that what began as a novella demanded the richness of treatment that only a novel could provide.
The story of Gonji's eventual birth (and mandate from Destiny itself) during the year-and-a-half-duration cataclysm even includes a possible origin for the classic kaiju---the giant monsters that so famously overrun Japan in the Toho Films movies. The delightful, if intense, challenge was to ground all the spectacular events deeply in the HUMAN experience of it all. It's a survival story of grim magnitude, which changes not only significant lives in my alt-history but also, to some degree, even the geography of Japan. (Our earth is one of many concentric planets in an interdependent, out-of-phase system---one of the key facets of the series mythology.)
So it's quite an undertaking.
More Answered Questions
Dean
asked
T.C. Rypel:
If this has already been asked I apologize, but I've always felt that the Gonji series would make a great film or TV series, especially now in the era of CGI. I've thought that Keanu Reeves would be great for Gonji. Has there been talk about a film and who would you like to play the title character or others?
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