Barbara Hambly, Guest of Honour, Lynne Taylor Fahnestalk, Artist Guest of Honour, and Randy McCharles, Fan Guest of Honour, at the opening ceremonies of VCon 30 in Vancouver in October, 2006. (Photo by Edward Willett.)

This fall I had the pleasure of speaking with noted fantasy author and guest of honor Barbara Hambly, when I attended Vancouver’s science fiction and fantasy convention, V-Con.

How did you begin your career? Did you begin with publishing short stories and then progress to novels?

No, I started out with a fantasy trilogy. Short stories aren’t my favorite form of reading and so I write very few of them. There are people who do wonderfully well with the short story to novel format, but that wasn’t the route I took.

Barbara, you are an author that has had many years experience in more than one genre. How has the publishing industry changed since you began writing?

I have been writing science fiction and fantasy for about twenty-five years. My impression of what is happening in publishing now is that the ends of the bell curve are being cut off. As publishers are bought by multi-national corporations, the decisions are made more and more on the basis of bottom-line financial returns. For that reason, it makes sense to corporations to sell a hundred and fifty thousand copies of an author like Steven King, rather than to sell a hundred thousand copies of King, ten thousand of Barbara Hambly, ten thousand Ursula LeGuin, ten thousand Quinn Yarbro, etc. I believe the result of this concentration on the bigger names will be that many authors will turn to smaller publishers, or will find their audiences through alternative media.

This seems very disturbing. So if you see even well known authors such as yourself turning to the small press market, what advice would you offer to someone just getting started, especially someone coming from Canada?

I do not have either the experience or the expertise to begin to answer that.

A few years back there were a number of smaller presses publishing genre fiction. In the past few years most were either bought out by larger firms or went out of business. Would you predict the rise of such small presses once more in future?

Again that is a subject on which I hesitate to speak. I suspect that will happen, but I don’t know for certain. My feeling is that the industry will take on much more the appearance of cable TV rather than network TV, but again I simply don’t know.

Do you feel that a new writer needs an agent in order to get published in today’s tight market?

I have been told that most publishers will not read unagented submissions. That would indicate to me that that would be a good idea.

Tell me a bit about how your career has shifted over the years.  You began with fantasy, but you have also written historical fiction and mysteries.

I did strictly sword-and-sorcery fantasy for a number of years. Then I switched to historical murder mysteries in the Benjamin January series, which take place in New Orleans prior to the Civil War. More recently I have been writing straight historical novels, such as my one about Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. I have still been doing fantasy all this while as well, but I have changed publishers.

My latest fantasy novel called Renfield has just come out. It is a retelling of the Dracula story from the point of view of Dracula’s bug-eating sidekick Renfield. In February '07 the novel Patriot Hearts will be coming out. This is a story about Martha Washington, Abigail Addams, Dolly Madison and Thomas Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemming. And from there I have assorted future projects in mind.

We will look forward to them I’m sure. To wind up, there is one last thing I would like to tell you as a long-time fan of your fantasy novels. I have always appreciated the realness of your characters. They aren’t just flat-line jocks and babes but real people with flaws—which proves that heroes don’t have to be perfect to sell books. In Dragonsbane, for example, your protagonist is a knight who wears glasses and his lover Jenny, a mage going through menopause, puts a spell on his glasses so he won’t lose them. I loved this kind of thing and I’m sure many of your other fans do to. Your work has been an inspiration for me when creating characters for my own novels.

 It always surprises me when people comment about this sort of thing in my novels, and it surprises me even more that other authors don’t seem to do this. I haven’t had a lot of time to read much recent fantasy, so I don’t know what  fantasy is like today. As for my own writing, to me it just seems the way one should write. How ordinary people deal with extraordinary situations, that is the type of story that appeals to me, and so that is the type of story I write.

Thank you very much, Barbara, for taking the time to do this