Welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m chatting to regular contributor Guy Haley – but this time it’s a little different to usual, as we’re talking about Richards & Klein, a brand new “rewritten, remastered, renewed” omnibus edition of his sci-fi novels Reality 36 and Omega Point! Originally published back in 2011 and 2012, they’re back in this cool new volume from Angry Robot – out on the 25th May – which, as you’ll find out later, is much more than a straightforward reprint. Whether you’re already a Guy Haley fan and you want to check out some of his non-Warhammer fiction, or you’re just on the lookout for a fun SF adventure, this is definitely one to check out!
Before we get into the interview, let’s take a quick look at the blurb for Richards & Klein:
Meet Richards and Klein – the Holmes and Watson of the 22nd century. Well, if Holmes were an advanced AI obsessed with pulp fiction, and Watson a gun-toting cyborg.
When AI rights activist Zhang Qifang winds up dead, Richards has to get involved – the man set his kind free after all. What should be a simple case turns out to be anything but, because Qifang has been killed more than once. Someone really wanted him dead.
A deadly trail leads the duo across a warming globe, from New London to Colorado, Sinosiberia and beyond, for the ultimate answers lie in the virtual world of Reality 36…
Sounds cool, right? Without further ado, let’s crack on with the interview to find out more…
Track of Words: To start off, how would you pitch your Richards & Klein stories as a whole to someone who hasn’t read these books before?
Guy Haley: Near future, cyberpunk-light detective adventures with a wry twist. Reality 36 was the first novel I had published, Omega Point the third (I think, it’s a while ago now). They are effectively one story, however, and they’ve been collected together for the very first time – rewritten, remastered, renewed! – in this handsome and competitively priced omnibus.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, what can you tell us about who the characters of Richards and Klein are?
GH: Richards is a highly advanced artificial intelligence of an almost singular sort – there are only seventy or so of his kind in all of existence, after all. Like his brothers and sisters, Richards is a little eccentric, and is obsessed with 1930s pulp detective fiction. He’s cheeky, but brilliant, more human than his kin. That elevates him and holds him back simultaneously.
Otto Klein is a bionic veteran of the Brazilian War. Once cutting edge, he’s outdated and getting old. He is frighteningly competent, but mourning the death of his wife.
Together, they run a security consultancy, taking on cases ranging from detective work to small wars and everything in between both on the Earth and off it.
They are based, of course, on Holmes and Watson, if Holmes were an advanced AI and Watson a gun-toting cyborg.
ToW: What do we need to know about the world in which these stories are set, and why you chose to create a world like this?
GH: I love world building. I have a concept I call the ‘whole cloth world’ – a world that seems real. It annoys me when I encounter a fictional setting and it doesn’t seem real – like everything’s super clean and there are no inequalities and no bins. I find dreamy kitchen girls becoming princesses even less believable than dragons, to be honest. I don’t like worlds like that (personally, I’ve nothing against people who enjoy fairytale level escapism, you understand).
What I try to do is think about how things would work, or at least leave space for the reality of life, within a set of given parameters. The world of Richards & Klein is our world, a century in the future. Rampant climate change has changed things, two major pandemics and general upheaval have cut the world population almost in half, and China’s dominant. But it’s not a dystopia. I don’t believe in dystopias. Though I am very cynical, I am fundamentally optimistic as well (yeah, yeah, I know they’re conflicting character traits. I’m a complicated guy). I think humans will find a way. The future in these books, or this book, I should say, isn’t a perfect place to live, but it isn’t terrible either. Like now.
At the time I put a lot of effort into researching different technologies and trends that I thought would become prevalent in the near-ish future. I’m glad to say that I think I backed the right ones. A lot of what I wrote about ten years ago is on its way to happening now.
The original cover for the first Richards & Klein novel – Reality 36
ToW: Tell us a little about each of the books included in this omnibus – Reality 36 and Omega Point.
GH: They’re one story really. Avoiding spoilers, it starts out as an unusual murder case and turns into something rather more metaphysical. Most of the first book takes place in our world, or ‘The Real’, half of the second one takes place in a cobbled together virtuality of unknown provenance. There are a lot of odd things living in it.
There is detective work, fights, chases, virtual world adventures, and cyborgs punching each other on top of the speeding transiberian express. Something for everyone, really.
ToW: Who or what inspired you to create Richards and Klein as characters, and to write these sci-fi detective stories?
GH: The character of Otto came from a tragic short story I wrote yeeeaaaaarssss ago about a man who loses his wife. That’s where all this started, and that story is incorporated, in vastly altered form, in Omega Point. Fun fact: Otto’s original name way back was Ortho Kline, which I thought sounded cool, until I remembered it was the brand of chair my dentist uses!
I’ve always enjoyed stories about artificial intelligence, from HAL in Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Neal Asher’s Polity books. I also really like cheeky smartarse know-it-alls, which covers off some more of my personality traits, although Richards is actually named for a friend of mine, Richard, who is a bigger know-it-all yet.
As for the detective angle, I enjoy the narrative structure of police procedural. SF detectives seemed a good hook for a story!
ToW: How does it feel seeing your debut novel re-released (alongside the sequel) ten years after it was first published?
GH: I’ve wanted to do this for a few years now, so I am really, really excited about it. It’s very hard to find an audience these days, the book market is so crowded. Richards & Klein almost, but did not quite, become a success at the time, so I am genuinely elated they’re getting a second chance.
The original cover for the second Richards & Klein novel – Omega Point
ToW: You’ve written a lot of fiction – novels, novellas, short stories, audio dramas – in the years since these books were first published. Looking back at them now, how do you think they stand up in terms of what you set out to achieve with them?
GH: Ahem. Well, although I always loved the world and the characters, and the tone was spot on for what I wanted, to be frank, they didn’t stand up.
No, wait! They do now. Hear me out. Still here? Good. My desire to see these books re-released was actually a desire to rewrite them, which I did completely. Let me explain.
I made a lot of mistakes with these books. They were my very first, so cut me some slack. Although the people that read them at the time liked them, there were some valid criticisms I wanted to address, and I learned the hard way that you really have to listen to your editor. I definitely wanted to address that.
What was wrong with them? Ready for some self-flagellation? Here we go. Although there is a definite ending to Reality 36, it is Omega Point that really concludes the story, and I had several reviews from people who were not happy that they didn’t get a definitive conclusion. Then my ideas developed between the time I wrote the first and second, so they didn’t quite marry up. The structure was a bit off. The pacing wasn’t quite right. I explained too much in some places and not enough in others. I over-complicated things. Worst of all, a large part of Omega Point was taken from another novel that nearly got published, but didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t a bad idea to use this crazy world I’d created as the basis for a virtual reality, but the way I did it was… ill-advised. Poor old Richards ended up with no agency. He became a spectator as I presented all these mad happenings that I, as a new writer, was ever so proud of and JUST HAD TO GO IN, OKAY?
Reality 36 and Omega Point were basically full of new writer’s sins. I got rid of them all. To give you an idea how much has changed, there was a moment when I was reading a section where this character was wittering on and on and I was wondering how to rewrite it, when I thought, ‘You know what? I can just bin the lot.’ So I did. All 7000 words of it.
In the end, I took out more than 40,000 words of the books, and wrote around 20,000 new ones. I reordered the chapters, and there isn’t a single one that hasn’t had at least some redrafting done to it. I took out characters, sections, replaced them with new ones. To be honest, this is practically a new book.
The result is a proper, single story, which is more balanced, more unified, very much driven by the characters. It is tense, exciting and a little bit thoughtful. It’s also funny. Did I mention that? Funny.
It’s all those things that I’ve learned over a decade of writing more than 30 novels, applied to my first born babies to bring them up to my current standards. They’re much better for it. We can look each other in the eye now at the Christmas dinner table.
So, if you enjoyed them before, they are EVEN BETTER now. If you’ve not read them yet and you like my other work, you’ll like these. I promise.
ToW: If fans of your Black Library writing are coming to these books as their first taste of your original fiction, how would you say they compare in terms of tone, style and the type of stories they are?
GH: Okay, so you’ve read my BL stuff. Imagine the lighter-hearted bits of Cawl, Flesh and Steel, that little bit of Wolfsbane that touches on the Space Wolves’ less serious side. They’re that kind of tone. But they are not silly adventures. They are not out and out comic fiction. I’ve always loved SF for its philosophical side. I try to bring that into my Warhammer work. It’s in evidence here too. Besides that, there’s plenty of action in them, I’d say Warhammer levels of it, and some great characters.
ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of these books by the time they’ve finished them?
GH: I really hope they’ll feel entertained. At the end of the day, that’s what I set out to do.
ToW: If readers want to check out more stories set in this world, where would you suggest they look?
GH: I can answer that with alacrity, sir! My book, Champion of Mars, is set in the same universe. It’s got a different tone, but events on Mars referenced in Richards & Klein are taking place in Champion.
There were also a couple of R&K short stories. The novella The Nemesis Worm I’ve taken off sale because I want to rewrite that as well. But the story Ghost is still available on Amazon.
ToW: Have you got any plans for further Richards & Klein stories in the future?
GH: I’ve always wanted to write more about these chaps, but it all comes down to the money. I’m glad to say that if this omnibus is successful, then Angry Robot are interested in a sequel, so go out and buy it! Tell all your friends! There’s life in Otto and Richards yet.
ToW: Can you tell us anything about what else you’ve got coming out or recently released, or what you’re working on at the moment?
GH: Well, I’ve got a very full slate. I’ve stepped back a bit from my Games Workshop work a touch, just to have a bit of a break. Rewriting Richards & Klein was the start of that.
There’s nothing sinister behind it, it’s only that I’ve written a lot of books about Space Marines and primarchs in rapid succession over the last three years, and I needed a change. Once upon a time, I used to release a piece of original fiction every year and that cleared my palate, but all that fell by the wayside, so I’m trying to get back on that particular horse.
Do not be alarmed. It does not mean no Black Library fiction, I’m committed to writing two novels this year, one of which I’ve nearly finished and will have handed in the final draft by the time you read this. You’ll probably actually get three, for complicated reasons. Of course, I’m still working on Dawn of Fire, and I wrote one of the Hammer and Bolter episodes. There are other projects, short stories and the like for BL that you’ll also see. And of course in the not too distant future the rewritten Dark Imperium, Plague War and the final book in the Dark Imperium series, Godblight, will be released [in fact they’re available right now! – ToW]. Just don’t expect me to write five 40k novels this year!
Outside of BL, I’m working on a new shared world setting with some other authors that I can’t say much about yet. I’m developing a film script with one of my brothers, another film script with a production company, and I’m going to complete a follow-up to my book Crash that I started a couple of years ago but was buried by Black Library work. Some, all, or none of these things may come to fruition, but at least I’ve got the time at the moment to experiment a little!
Anyway. Richards & Klein. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks, as ever, for reading.
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Guy Haley is the author of over thirty novels and novellas – he’s lost count of the actual number – and so many short stories he never bothered counting in the first place. A prominent member of the Black Library’s Warhammer fiction writing team, he has contributed multiple novels and tales to the millions-selling Horus Heresy series, is one of the writers on the highly anticipated Siege of Terra, and is lead writer on the epic Dawn of Fire.
His original fiction includes Crash, Champion of Mars, and The Emperor’s Railroad. He is the author of the Gates of the World fantasy series under the name KM McKinley, and was for many years an editor and journalist for SFX, Death Ray, and White Dwarf magazines. He lives in his native Yorkshire with his wife, son and a Malamute called Maximus.
Follow Guy on Twitter to keep up with all the news.
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Massive thanks to Guy for chatting to me for this interview, and for taking the time to give such a great overview of this cool new (old) book!
Check out my review of Richards & Klein for more details!
See also: all of my other reviews and interviews with Guy Haley.
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