Benjamin Liar is joining us today to talk about his novel, The Failures. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Welcome to the Wanderlands.
A vast machine made for reasons unknown, the Wanderlands was broken long ago. First went the sky, splintering and cracking, and then very slowly, the whole machine—the whole world—began to go dark.
Meet the Failures. Following the summons of a strange dream, a scattering of adventurers, degenerates, and children find themselves drawn toward the same place: the vast underground Keep. They will discover there that they have been called for a purpose—and that purpose could be the destruction of everything they love.
The end is nigh. For below the Keep, imprisoned in the greatest cage ever built by magicians and gods, lies the buried Giant. It is the most powerful of its kind, and its purpose is the annihilation of all civilization. But any kind of power, no matter how terrible, is precious in the dimming Wanderlands, and those who crave it are making their moves.
All machines can be broken, and the final cracks are spreading. It will take only the careless actions of two cheerful monsters to tip the Wanderlands towards an endless dark…or help it find its way back to the light.
What’s Benjamin’s favorite bit?
‘Sophie Vesachai was burning butterflies again.’
That’s it. That’s my favorite bit.
That line, right there—easily and unquestionably my favorite bit of The Failures. It might be my favorite thing I’ve ever written; possibly ever will write. I’m ambitious, but that one is gonna be hard to top.
I mean, I like to think it’s a pretty good line. But that’s not why it’s my favorite bit. I like the alliteration, but that’s not why it’s my favorite, either. I even think it’s kinda evocative, mysterious, perhaps a tiny bit shocking—a lot of weight to put on just one line.
But that’s not why it’s my favorite.
It’s my favorite because with that line, and just that line, a character named Sophie Vesachai walked into my head, fully formed, and has never left. I’ve heard of this happening to other writers, but folks, it is bananas when it happens to you. It’s like opening an often-used closet and discovering a person living in there—a person who cheerfully informs you that they are there to stay.
Now—for those of delicate disposition out there, as I assuredly am—the subsequent paragraphs in the book make it quite clear that our hero is burning mechanical butterflies, tiny clockwork creatures with paper wings. That doesn’t make it good, but then, I don’t think anybody could ever describe Sophie as ‘good’. Or bad, really; she is who she is. She saved the world when she was a little kid, like something right out of a story, and it ruined her life. Got a bunch of her friends killed. Got her exiled from her family, and implanted with forbidden technology that will mean her death if she ever uses it again. Now mostly she likes to drink, sleep with whoever she wants, and smoke on a balcony overlooking an ornate street dug out of the stone deep beneath the largest mountain in any universe, in an underground city called The Keep which has never heard of the sky above, or anything so silly as sunshine, or trees…
And she likes to set fire to poor little defenseless clockwork creatures, and watch them try to fly with burning wings.
I know, right? It’s not nice. It’s not comfortable. But it felt so true, and when Sophie Vesachai walked onto the page with that line, I knew I had a book. I knew, right then, as the words were inking themselves in phosphors across the screen, that the vast and disparate collection of nearly thirty years of ideas and worldbuilding and characters and situations that I called ‘The Wanderlands’ was going to turn into a dang book. And I knew, too, what it was going to be about. It was going to be about the kinds of people who would burn butterflies to prove some sort of sour point to a world—a machine—that had ground them up and spit them out. I knew it was going to be about failures, reprobates, degenerates… and how they got that way.
And I knew it was going to be about Sophie Vesachai. The troubled ex-hero at the heart of the complex web of plotting and betrayal and avarice. That it was going to be about trying to heal from the trauma of the past. I knew it was going to be about people who had given up on being heroes… and it was going to be about those same people trying to forgive themselves enough to do some good.
Well… maybe I didn’t know all that. It was a long time ago when I wrote that first line, when Sophie first slouched into my head. But it feels like I knew all of that, all in an instant; one big moment the like of which I only expect will ever come once.
‘Sophie Vesachai was burning butterflies again.’
Yep.
Easy.
That’s my favorite bit.
LINKS:
BIO:
Benjamin Liar has been a writer, musician, filmmaker, game developer, bartender, cartographer, estimator, semi-professional drinker, ditch-digger, file organizer, rockabilly bassist, bad actor, screenwriter, house painter, passionate fort-builder, reformed preacher, drywall hanger, decent friend, and terrible lover. His name is clearly a pseudonym, but you still shouldn’t trust anything he says.
