Gradual Interview
(answers from November 2008, as of Jan 11 2026, 11:31:39 PM)
www.StephenRDonaldson.com
© 2004 by Stephen R.Donaldson

Sarah

Mr. Donaldson - I am a HUGE fan.  I've read the gradual interview for a few years and always wanted to ask a question - not necessarily for the answer but just so that a writer whose work so strongly affected me would simply know that I exist.  (obssesive fan wave)

In a recent post you said "Unearned knowledge isn't wisdom: it's merely dangerous" and it succinctly describes on of the themes of the first chronicles, when the Lords sought out Kevin's lore that had been hidden from them.  Was Mhoram equal to the temptation of desecration because he earned the knowledge, he paid the price?

Is this why earthpower is so dangerous?  Because it is unearned?  Which of course made me think of Kevin's dirt and how the people are now blind to the earth-sight.  It seems like a sentiment a Master would say.

This may be a tad "theoretical" but how then, when you receive unearned knowledge, can you earn it?  How can Linden earn (or become worthy) of her inante knowlege of the staff of law?

(final obsessive fan wave)

"Unearned knowledge isn't wisdom: it's merely dangerous."  Hmm.  We can make subjects like this as complex as we want.  But the simple answer, I think, is that there's more than one way to earn knowledge.  Direct study of, say, Kevin's Lore isn't the only way.  And there's more than one way to earn wisdom.  Direct study of, say, Kevin's Lore isn't the only option.  In fact, it may not even be a particularly effective option.

Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary Samurai, and author of "The Book of Five Rings," once wrote, "He who is the master of one thing is the master of all things."  Like much of what Musashi had to say, that's pretty da*n cryptic.  But I take his statement to mean that the discipline of becoming "the master of one thing" teaches the student what *mastery* itself requires and implies; and that the requirements and implications of mastery are the same regardless of the "one [specific] thing".  Further, I infer from Musashi's statement that there really is only one kind of mastery:  mastery of the self.  Everything else is just a way to get there.

Therefore Mhoram is "equal to the temptation of desecration," not because he has mastered Kevin's Lore, but because he has mastered himself.  Kevin, in contrast, for all his knowledge and power, never truly became a master because he did *not* master himself.

This, I think, reveals the true fallacy of what the Masters have done by trying to suppress all knowledge of Earthpower.  Knowledge itself isn't the issue:  *mastery* is the issue.  But the Masters have chosen to believe (perhaps unknowingly) that no inhabitant of the Land can ever be the master of his/her self:  an error of emphasis, if not of intent, which leads to all manner of problems.  Not the least of which is the unconscious irony of calling *themselves* Masters.  By my understanding of Musashi, if the Masters had truly achieved *mastery* themselves, they would have chosen a very different path.  (Why else would LF believe that the Masters serve him, albeit unintentionally?)

So sure, Linden can earn her power, even if she can't benefit from the study of Kevin's Lore.  All she has to do is...well, you get the idea.

(11/03/2008)

Christian

Hello Stephen:

Nothing new to add.. I just wanted to Thank You for the effort you put into the Gradual Interview. It allows us to fight the mental rumblies until the next installment.

I was wondering if you would know where I can get / purchase a digital version of the great cover art at the back of the First Chronicles (UK version, I believe). When you place the 3 books together, you get a panoramic painting of the Land. I believe the artist is a certain Goodfellow (as I have read in the GI), but am uncertain. 

Thanks and Regards,
Christian

I have no real answer for you.  The company (Fontana) which orginally published the "Covenant" books in the UK has since been absorbed several times by ever larger conglomerates; and the current UK rights holder, HarperCollins, is completely unresponsive.  However, you might try to locate a web site or contact information for the artist, Peter Goodfellow.  Decades ago, he did brilliant work for "The Chronicles".

(11/03/2008)

Doc

 SRD Wrote:
"I wouldn't agree to work with someone else's characters, settings, themes, or stories, even if you held a gun to my head. That's what hacks are for. (Don't get me wrong. Being a hack can be a perfectly honorable profession. It simply isn't *my* profession.) Now, if you held a gun to the head of someone I love, I would naturally agree to anything. But I would be lying. Unashamedly. Stalling for time until I could take a whack at you. The very idea of trying to do someone else's work fills me with existential nausea"

Then why did you write the short story, What Makes Us Human?

A good question.  I suppose I could rationalize my decision to write that story by saying it was a new experience, and as a matter of personal philosophy I don't believe in prejudging--or automatically rejecting--new experiences.  Or I could observe that I took everything except the central concept (Saberhagen's Berserkers) outside the context of anything that Saberhagen had ever written.  (In fact, I never even used the word "berserkers".)  Or I could attempt a different kind of rationalization by remarking that Fred Saberhagen was a personal friend and I really didn't want to disappoint him.  But the real explanation is this:  Pure Ego.  Fred showed me some of the other stories written for "Berserker Base," and I wanted--meaning no disrespect to anyone--to prove that I could do better.  In other words, I wrote "What Makes Us Human" for my own ego gratification, not for Fred's benefit--and certainly not for the story's.  (Which I now consider to be an inadequate reason to impose a story on readers.)

In my own defense, I can only say a) I was a lot younger then, and had never put myself in that position before, b) in retrospect, I consider "What Makes Us Human" to be my weakest story (for reasons which are obvious to me), and c) the experience taught me to Never Do That Again.

(11/03/2008)

Andrew Calverley

Hello. 

Sorry if it seems like I'm trying to pick holes in your story. Such is not my intent, it is amongst my favourite books. Just curious as to where the motivation for naming the Giant-Raver 'Satansfist' came from.

Since "Satan" is a concept/entity that is apparently absent from the Land, it seems unlikely that the Raver is named thus to invoke fear in the Land's inhabitants. And since at no stage in the first trilogy does TC (or Hile Troy)meet Satansfist, it seems unlikely that the Raver is named thus to scare TC.

I'm not the most knowledgable of people when it comes to religion, but isn't "Satan", by that name, endemic only to 'Christianity' and the Bible? There don't seem to be any other Christian references in the Land (for example, they have "the Creator", not "God")

Anyway, I don't want to labour the point. Your intention with naming the Raver this is clearly not lost on the reader. For lack of better words, his name indicates he is there to do the devil's punching. But wouldn't Mhoram be as intimidated by the name Satansfist as he would by Andrewsfist or Stevesfist?

Since your question is essentially identical to a subsequent one about my use of the word "christened" in "Fatal Revenant," I'm going to respond to both at once (with apologies to Mark E.).

I don't know why readers find this concept so difficult to grasp, despite my many efforts to explain it.  But whether or not you choose to believe that the Land is "real" independent of Covenant's and Linden's perception of it, you simply have to accept the fact that I derived *all* of the original content of the Land (including its languages, characters, names, and magicks) from my understanding of Covenant's mind and experiences.  To the best of my (admittedly flawed) abilities, I have striven mightily throughout "The Chronicles" to preserve the theoretical possibility that everything in the Land flows outward from the many layers of Covenant's consciousness--and later of Linden's.  So words like "Satansfist" and "christened" (and moksha, turiya, and samadhi, and Sheol, Herem, and Jehannum, and others far too numerous to count) *fit* my intentions because they can be justified by Covenant's (and then Linden's) prior knowledge of such notions.  By this standard, there is no substantive difference between a name like Satansfist and one like, say, Mhoram.

Readers clearly have strong--and divergent--opinions about the implications of what I'm doing.  Which is all well and good, as far as it goes.  But it has no real bearing on how *I* think about what I'm doing.  *Thematically* the story has left the idea of "unbelief" behind; but that doesn't free me to change the rules I've established for myself in "The Chronicles".

(11/03/2008)

Michael Lerch

Mr Donaldson,,About Your Muse or Muses: Do you have a Muse or Muses? Do you care to talk about your Muse(s),, the Muse encounter or experience? Is there any particular story or character in your art that can be taken as the Muse experience? Is there anything about Muses you would like to share with the Donaldson readers?

The Insequent of the Last Chrons strike me as very Muse like. I have wondered if that was your design.

I'm afraid that my instinctive reaction to your question is:  huh???  In other words, I don't have a "Muse"; I don't even think about such things; and in fact I'm not entirely sure what a "Muse" is supposed to be.  In my (purely personal) experience, ideas can come from anywhere.  For me, they're most likely to come from some intersection of language and emotion; but that is by no means predictable or certain.  Ultimately, I suppose, all of my ideas come from some place inside me (a place I cleverly call "my imagination").  But what triggers or catalyzes them varies too much to be specified.

However, if we agree that "Muse" means "imagination" (which it probably doesn't), I do have one thing to say on the subject.  The imagination is a muscle.  The more it's exercised, the stronger it gets.  People who wait around for some sort of "Muse" to strike live in constant danger of atrophy.

(11/12/2008)

Mark

I've only read the first Covenant trilogy, so my opinion of Covenant may change once I read all of them, (and I will eventually read all of them) but from the first three books I have some issues with the Covenant character. He reminds me of the people involved in the skeptic movement. About five minutes after entering the Land he decides, without any real consideration of all of the possibilities, that it is all a dream and cannot possibly be real. His disbelief holds until the end of the trilogy. However, something very interesting happened after the second time he was transported back to Earth. He tries to verify that Hile Troy (interesting name, by the way - I like it) is real by calling the Department of Defense, I think. If he is so convinced that the Land is all a dream, why would he even bother spending the cash on a phone call? I often wonder, given some of the things that skeptics say, whether they are really as skeptical as their public personas would lead you to believe. It's one thing for someone like James Randi to authorize himself to offer a dopey, unscientific (and just not very well reasoned) challenge for proof of paranormal abilities with a winning pot of a million dollars of someone else's money. (as if anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence would submit himself to a test of the paranormal run by the most hardcore skeptic on the planet) However, I don't know that Randi would participate in such a test if his life was on the line. For a while now I have suspected that many, if not most skeptics have a deep-seated fear that we really are going to find good evidence in favor of psychic phenomena or UFOs or one of the million other areas that skeptics think that they are experts in all at the same time, and think that they better fight their opponents to the death or else their faux "rationalist" belief system is going to come crashing down all around them. I guess I have two questions:

1) Is Covenant being honest with himself in the first trilogy when he doggedly refuses to admit that there is at least a small possibility that the Land is real?

2) Did you intend to draw a parallel between the mindset of the Covenant character and the mindset of the skeptic movement?

(Note to readers of the Gradual Interview:  for reasons which are about to become obvious, I wouldn't be making this message public if "Mark" had given me his email address.  I would have preferred to send a personal reply.)

"Is Covenant being honest with himself"?  "The mindset of the skeptic movement"?  Excuse me.  What part of the relationship between leprosy and Unbelief did you not understand?  Covenant is a "skeptic" because he has been taught (for good reason) that his survival depends on it.  That would certainly be a sufficient motivator for *me* if I were in his situation.

(11/12/2008)

Mark Morgon-Shaw

It's been a few years since I posted a question ...

I'm finding Fatal Revenant a tougher book to get through.  I keep needing to refer to the glossary to remember who is who and why.  So many characters seem to have been introduced.

It's probably just me and the reduction of brain cells since I read the original trilogy but I found them a much easier read, though the subject matter was sometimes tough, what with Lena's story and all.

I think I'm yearning for Covenant's return ( the real one ) as he was the character that made me love the original books so much. I guess I always root for the anti-hero.

I guess my question is will Covenant play a more central part in the final book and is the large array of characters all build up for a big payoff at the end.

Thanks

Mark

Boiled down to its essentials, your question appears to be:  Are "The Last Chronicles" worth reading?  To which I reply:  God, I hope so!  (I certainly *think* so:  otherwise I wouldn't write them.)  And I do like to believe that by now I've earned the right to be trusted by my readers.

Which, I fully realize, is no guarantee against disappointment.  But then, *nothing* in life is a guarantee against disappointment.

(11/12/2008)

Corsair

As a kid I read all kind of adventure related books I could get my hands on. Hergé, W.E. Johns, Jules Verne, MacLean and later Tolkien. Tintin and Biggles ruled when I was young. I always dreamt of roaming the world and experience all those places I had read about. Also to become all that which my heroes were. I took off when I was a teenager. Worked as a war photographer, journalist, negotiator and analyst. Got involved in a lot of shady business and intelligence related stuff. Mind games and complex plots with the highest possible stakes followed. I ended up seeing some of those prisons I had seen in movies. All (at least in retrospect) were interesting and rewarding experiences.
Got bored.
Nature, the most powerful of all forces started to attract me. 8000 meter mountains and visits to obscure areas followed. I ended up in those far away places where you and you alone were the determinator of life and death. Tibet's Chang Tang plateau brought me to the absolute limit, mentally and physically and almost killed me. Even so; it was a great experience.

I can temporarily quench the insatiable hunger for adventures of all kinds with litterature and films, but it's only good enough for a couple of months at the time. The Gap Series and Chronicles of Thomas Covenant have been some of the better substitutes for the real thing.

I read somewhere that you haven't drawn much of your writing from personal experiences, so I wonder if you ever have had the need to put your self on test, living through some of the situations for example Covenant had to deal with?

Also, you seem to be fascinated by foreign cultures, landscapes of the kind you don't find outside your door and mysterious tales of the past cultures.
Have you traveled a lot? Visited far away places to attend to a story teller's night of for example nomadic tribes? 

And finally:

"""This does not make me "a more gifted writer".(10/05/2005)""" 

I disagree.

Regards, Corsair

No, I don't share your apparent adrenaline addiction.  I put myself to the test every day when I write:  that's enough for me.  I write what I am not.  Some critics have argued that this approach is uniquely characteristic of American writers.  Maybe that's true.  For myself, I can only say that I face my own fears as best I can--and those fears revolve primarily around conflicts with myself, certainly not with nature, and rarely with other people.

Although I grew up in India, that wasn't my choice.  As an adult, I don't seek out strange (not to mention dangerous) places or people:  my head is already full of them.  And it is decidedly *not* the character of my experiences that makes me "a more gifted writer" (if I am one):  it's how I think about what I've experienced--and imagined.

(11/19/2008)