Karen Traviss

Darasuum Kote ... Vode An

By Rebecca Buchanan
August 1, 2006

An early science fiction fan, Karen Traviss has turned that love into a career. The author of a number of sci fi novels (including the brand new Matriarch), Traviss is also known to Star Wars fans as the woman who created Mandalorian culture virtually from whole cloth. Traviss took a few minutes out of her busy writing and con schedule to answer a few questions for ST.

Sequential Tart: Were you a science fiction fan as a girl? If so, which books or series were your favorites?

Karen Traviss: Well, this is going to be more about TV than books.

I'm not a reader. I hate reading novels and always have. I was raised on TV, radio, films and comics: I come from a very blue-collar background and novels weren't part of the fabric of my class culture, so all my facility with language comes from other media, and mainly from non-fiction. I thought I'd read "a lot" as a kid until my friend, critic Farah Mendlesohn, gently pointed out that I've read next to nothing, because every time she asked, "Have you read...?" the answer was "No." I couldn't even do an essay on the military aspects of Starship Troopers for her because I still haven't read the book. Seen the movie, yes ....

Last time I read a novel was 1998, I think. I saw 2001 aged 13 and from then on I only read SF, with the exception of the following books: The Cruel Sea, Satanic Verses, and The Hunt For Red October. I think I half-read Gore Vidal's Creation when it first came out waaaaay back. I had to be forced to read novels at school, and most of the time I just wouldn't even read under threat. I love writing, not reading. They are absolutely not co-dependent, just culturally linked for many people, and anyone who says writing fiction can't happen without reading novels needs to look at cognition and language acquisition theory. I'm certainly not the only novelist who's come via an alternate route. Someone did tell me about another British SF novelist who took almost the same route as me — working class kid, grammar school education with lots of Latin and Greek, but no love of reading novels, and he turned into a novelist too. Maybe De Belli Gallici is what did it ....

I started on SF young, though. Five years old, thanks to Mum, who's a big SF fan. I saw the title sequence of the BBC's original A For Andromeda, written by Fred Hoyle, and asked Mum what Andromeda was. She said it was "some stars that were so far away that the light takes millions of years to reach us." I was knocked flat by that idea and my fascination with what else might be out there was born. That incident is in the acknowledgements for City of Pearl, but Mum said, "I don't bloody well remember saying that". But she did, and here I am. Neither Mum nor I have any idea how she knew how far away the Andromeda galaxy is, because she left school at 14 and had a very basic education with no science whatsoever.

I think the first SF book I read — aged about eight — or at least the first I recall reading was Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and what little I did read was only SF from age 12 or 13. I read Clarke, Asimov, Blish, and of course Harry Harrison. My favourite book is still Harry's Bill the Galactic Hero, which is wonderful and I first read it aged 13. (That was a major SFnal year for me.) I used to re-read it a lot, finding new things all the time, and I'm still discovering how clever and laden with meaning the language is. I have a first edition BTGH signed twice by Harry — once for its original owner, and once for me when we appeared on a panel together at Worldcon in 2003. That was a defining moment for me.

ST: Which other science fiction (and science fact) works have most influenced your own?

KT: A For Andromeda is now proven as the influence, I've found. The BBC just screened its remake of it this year. I even stopped work to watch that; I wanted to see what it was that had transfixed me as a five-year-old and effectively changed my life. And I was struck by the themes that resurface in my own work: I just sat there thinking, "Oh God ... this really did shape me." It's humanity embracing technology that gives it choices it can't always handle, the alien among us, the nature of identity, humanity dealing with the idea that it isn't top of the food chain, irresponsible companies and governments — all that must have hit me very, very hard aged five, because I clearly reacted to it, either because some of those ideas were there already or because they started me asking questions. And yes, it's perfectly possible to think about those issues at that age, even if you articulate them in different ways. I obviously did.

A buddy who's a TV historian tells me the BBC found some of the lost footage of the original series and it's going to be on DVD. That's a must-buy for me.

ST: How has your own military service influenced your writing?

KT: Depends what you mean by influence. You might as well ask how has being a journalist influenced my writing, because that's the really big one. Journalism is the sum total of how I write — the way I approach characters, themes, the fiction process itself, and even how I use langauge.

Military — in terms of the technical and political detail, I owe more to my time as a defence correspondent than the time I was in the reserves. I had high-level access to key people and I also got to scramble over some fun kit, from submarines to helicopters. Personally, I don't think you can ever really know what it means to be in uniform until someone is shooting at you in earnest, and you sure as hell can't sit in judgement on service personnel until you have. In the reserves I never had anything remotely like a front line role, so I never presume to know what someone on the front line feels. I do know what that bond with your mates feels like, though, especially when you rely on them for your safety as you do on board ship, and how automatic that bond is: and don't forget I also come from a naval port that was also a garrison town, and most of my family served at some time or were in the defence industry, so it's embedded in my culture, as it is for many of my generation from that city. I had a brilliant time in the RNXS, crewing small ships, and I preferred that to the Territorial Army, where I had a specialist media role. I like getting my hands dirty, I admit.

The main thing for me when it comes to the military is to tell the truth in fiction — to portray folks in uniform as honestly as I can, even if it's in a universe that's actually more fantasy than SF like Star Wars. Fiction gets under people's radar far more efficiently than fact, and I know that all too well from the jobs I've done: so I'm careful what I write for readers who may never have met a soldier in real life, and are vulnerable to influence by fiction. Don't believe anyone who says fiction doesn't influence — why else do you think that PR people fight to get ideas, campaigns and even products in fiction works? Because it influences. Look at all the people who play combat games and then claim they understand how it feels to be under fire. Humans are vulnerable to the power of myth.

Under the radar, as I say. I know, because I worked in PR too. But now I only use my Sithly powers for good.

ST: The novels of Cavanagh's Star are part political thriller, part environmental fable, part social commentary, and all Sci Fi. How did you feel when City of Pearl was accepted for publication? And how did you create such a compelling character as Shan Frankland?

KT: I sold the first three books of the series and thought: "Oh good. Money, right on target." It was always planned as a six-book arc, and book four is out at the end of September, with the final two in 2007. I'm a business. I drew up a five year business plan in late October 1998 because I loathed my existing job, and I stuck to that plan. So I was able to leave the day job and write full-time when my first novel came out in 2004. I wish I could say I was thrilled and all that, but it was more a sense of reaching a milestone date on the business plan.

I built Frankland the same way as I build every original character I create: from scratch. I look at the environmental niche — distant planet, one-way ticket and ask what kind of person ends up there, what drives them, what's wrong with them, what's functioning. I do a psych profile of the character and build from there. That's why they work. They're as real as can be made in an artificial environment. A story really is a computer simulation in my head — I build the characters, put them in the environment, and let them interact. And that's the plot. No, none of my characters are ever taken from life, because filing the serial numbers off real people makes for bad fiction as far as I'm concerned. Real people simply don't have enough "concentrated interestingness" to work in a book. One of my buddies is a very successful police procedural writer who does the exact opposite, and all his characters are lifted — damn, I even know and recognise some of them — but we agree to disagree on that. All I say is that it doesn't work for me. Part of that is because I have to "live" the characters as I write them, and I want novelty, not familiarity, and certainly never what's in my own head, because I live with that and I don't write to rehash my own existence. It's escape.

I want to write people I've never met before and don't know, because I write very tight third person POVs, no narrator; everything you read is through that character's eyes and the filter of their own experience. I'm a journalist by trade, so all I do is report what the characters tell me. I don't steer the reader, and I don't tell them what to think. I know some readers want to know what the "truth" is in a story, and I have to tell them they're not going to get any answers handed to them — I don't know what the truth is or even if it exists. Each character sees the world the way they see it, and that's often in total contrast to the way the world sees them. The reader just has to make up their own mind who they want to believe. Like a balanced news report, in fact.

ST: How did you come to write in the Star Wars universe?

KT: I was invited to — totally out of the blue, before my first novel was published. Late in 2003, Del Rey asked me if I'd be interested in writing SW in the future, and in February 2004 they asked me to write a tie-in for the RepCom game. City of Pearl came out in March that year. They'd seen an advance manuscript of City of Pearl, or one of my short stories in Asimov's or something — as had Lucasfilm — and I got the call. I didn't know anything about Star Wars, and I didn't know anything about tie-ins either. But I wrote the kind of fiction they wanted, so I got the invite.

ST: You've pretty much single-handedly created Mandalorian culture. How much of it existed before you stepped in? Did you draw on any real world cultures for inspiration?

KT: Jim Luceno brought the Mandos back in The Unifying Force in 2003 after everyone thought they'd been wiped out. When I showed up in 2004, there was a whole story waiting to be told about where they'd been all that time. Jango was clearly not the last Mandalorian; the people and culture survived, so I wanted to work out how that happened.

This is how I got into it; I didn't believe the Kaminoans could train SAS-style commandos, but they were supposed to be the only ones who knew about the clone army before Geonosis. So I asked LFL for permission to make a big addition to the AOTC story — that there were others who knew about the army, because Jango had to recruit training sergeants, and he would of course pick mainly Mandos. LFL said yes, and the Cuy'val Dar was born. Inevitably, I started looking at what I could find in the Holocron about Mandalorians, and I saw a lot of gaps begging to be filled.

What I had to work with was largely Marvel comics, KOTOR [Knights of the Old Republic] and a bit of the Fett family — that was it really. But that was enough to grab me. It was like they were already there in my head waiting to be let out, and it was the most natural thing in the world to fill in the gaps. I didn't set out to model them on any culture, but there's an internal logic and "character" of any society that's dictated by their environment — in fact, it's just like creating an individual character. I already had the continuity that said they probably weren't originally human, that humans had adopted the original Mandalorian culture, that they were nomadic, that they were a militarized society. Just those three facts hat told me a huge amount about the kind of people they'd be.

There was little mention of formal government, too — and suddenly I saw them like Celtic tribes, Picts in fact, and it all made sense. Ancient Celts had a very loose and informal tribal structure, self-governing, but ready and willing to come together as one army to face a common threat. It even fitted the Marvel comic with the oddly Scottish Fenn Shysa. Behold a retcon. And the existing Boba/Jango continuity gave me clues to work from too; they're both Mandalores in their lifetimes, but they're still both working as bounty hunters, so that told me what kind of job the "head of state" could be — not at all like we'd expect, more a part-time figurehead. It's like the Queen or the Prime Minister driving a taxi most of the week but fronting up when there's legislation to be sorted out. Eccentric, pragmatic, informal, and tough.

And then we had Jaster Mereel, a reformer, a hands-on Mandalore, and that's totally different. The style of leadership is very varied, and that's another clue to retconning them. You can retcon just as much from what they don't do as what they do.

ST: How did you go about creating the Mando'a language?

KT: When I was writing Hard Contact, the continuity guy at LucasArts — Ryan Kaufman — asked if I wanted to see the lyrics that would go with the game soundtrack, in case they were any use for the book. They'd been written by the composer, Jess Harlin, and I was instantly taken with them and asked Jess if I could use his lyrics to develop the language for use in the book. It went from there. Jess made a brilliant job of the lyrics, and the sound and weight of the language felt real to me, so I took it as the foundation for the feel of the it — the phonemes — and built from conceptual basics. It's only in the last couple of months that a Mandarin speaker told me how similar the concepts of Mando'a are to it, but I don't know the language at all. Once you start asking, "What do I need to express things?" then you tend to re-evolve languages just like real ones. It's how human brains work — and Mandarin was never in Jess's thinking or mine. He was going for soft sounds — Hungarian and Latin — and I picked that up and added Gurkhali, Urdu, Romany and Celtic sounds. Not words — just sounds. With a few deliberate exceptions, like "dinii", "birgaan" and "wayii", which are there as a nod to my home town's dialect, the vocabulary was created from scratch, too.

ST: I notice that the word ad means both "son" and "daughter", while buir means both "mother" and "father." Mandalorians seem to have a different attitude towards sex and gender than we do. Why?

KT: Because they're Mandos, and they're different. And lots of real languages have no gender — Hungarian and Finnish, for a start.

Mandos look as if they have traditional gender roles, and then they surprise you. The women have to be bloody tough — even if they're not fighting, they often have to keep the home going while the old man's away, and that's not a job for a woman who worries about where she'll find the next nail bar. I saw the Mandos as a militarized culture, made up of some elite full-time troops, but mostly folks who were trained enough to front up as reserves, effectively doing some kind of national service but also being farmers, engineers, and, yes — mums and housewives! I'll give you a spoiler from an upcoming work: one of the characters says, "Only one thing frightens a Mando man, and that's a Mando woman."

ST: How did adoption come to be so important in Mandalorian culture?

KT: They adopted a whole culture from aliens, which tells you a lot about their attitude to "otherness." Plus Jaster adopted Jango. I took it from there. Remember, these are warrior people who live with the reality of sudden death and orphans left behind. So the fact that they'd adopt what helped them survive — culture and people — made sense. All they care is that you follow the cultural code — they don't even care what species you are, as we see from the continuity I inherited that had non-human Mandos as well. So adoption of individuals is a natural progression of that mindset.

ST: Several years ago, Dark Horse did a story about some Republic Commandos. Any chance that you will do a comic about Omega Squad or Delta Squad? Or the Null ARCs?

KT: I think you mean last year, 2005 — there were two comics, both by Ryan Kaufman. The first RC fiction was Hard Contact in October 2004, because it tied into the game, which was originally planned for release then. I have no idea if I'll ever do a comic, because it isn't up to the writer. You wait to be asked, and that could mean tomorrow, or it could also mean never.

ST: Many fans have wondered if the unmodified ARCs would comply with Order 66, or fight alongside their Jedi Generals. Do you plan to address that issue in any future novels or short stories?

KT: Why just the ARCs? Why not RCs, or even CTs? Just asking, because there appears to be this assumption that genetic modification means automatic compliance. It's not that simple.

When I started Hard Contact, I mapped out the whole story arc up to and beyond Ep III so I had a solid idea of what happened to the characters, and that's sitting in my notebooks. So if LFL and Del Rey want more sequels, then Order 66 is already in there waiting.

ST: MacBeth is for Klingons. Mandalorians would favor ...?

KT: Anything — they don't care as long as they get paid. I think they're the kind of people who get weepy over a buy'ce of ale, and sing mournful songs with endless choruses after a hard day's conquering. Maybe they're more into musicals than Shakespeare: I dunno.

ST: My husband loves the character Kal Skirata. Did you create him, or did he appear elsewhere?

KT: He's one of my original characters. All the Republic Commando characters who have appeared in the books except Delta (and the obvious names like Obi-Wan) are my OCs. Skirata confuses some people. You see him as he sees himself but also what he does — and there's a mismatch. It's human delusion, his own self-view contrasted with the view of the outside world: which one really is Skirata? If you look at his actions, he's a total thug — but with one saving grace, his total paternal devotion to his lads. But he's done some very bad stuff, he doesn't see his own kids — why? we don't know the whole story yet — and he maims and kills and steals. He's not a saint. He's a survivor. He has moral lines he won't cross, but he'd knife you for a bet. His rant at Etain in Triple Zero is a classic case of pot calling kettle if you ask me!

ST: Did you mean for Kal Skirata to look like Ed Harris, or was that the idea of artist Rob Hendrickson?

KT: No, Rob Hendrickson's idea. The image Rob did of him for "Targets" was like a picture taken from my brain — absolutely Skirata, lined and grey and intensely punchy. I bought the original art, and it's gorgeous. He looked a tad more classy in "Odds," which I thought was flattering .... Skirata probably imagines he looks like that, the vain little bugger, but he's much more weaselly in my head. Typical SAS weasel man, and I say that with the utmost respect and affection for the SAS. The little wiry deadly special forces guy is a physical type well-known to UK troops, I think ... so roughen up the Ed Harris image a bit, make him short and wiry, and you'd probably have the combined Traviss-Hendrickson image of him!

ST: Any chance that the short stories you wrote for Star Wars Insider will be collected?

KT: No idea, I'm afraid. So far they're appearing as bonus stories in the novels.

ST: What other projects are you working on?

KT: Four books on the go as I speak and a stack of other stuff. That's all I can say. My idea of a great way to spend my spare time is sleeping. It's such a novelty. I really should do it more often.

ST: Which conventions will you be attending?

KT: I'm GoH at LepreCon in Phoenix next year. I don't attend as many cons as I'd like because of the logistics of being in the UK.

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