An Interview with Ian Irvine
Ian Irvine is one of Australia’s most prolific and imaginative fantasy authors, known for his richly detailed worlds, complex characters, and intricate plots. With a background in marine science, his writing often weaves in environmental themes, giving his stories a unique depth that sets them apart in the fantasy genre. Best known for The View from the Mirror quartet and The Three Worlds series, Irvine has captivated readers with his epic storytelling, blending high fantasy with elements of political intrigue, survival, and moral ambiguity. Beyond fantasy, he has also written gripping eco-thrillers and children’s books, showcasing his versatility as a writer.
We posed some questions to Ian about his creative process, the inspirations behind his intricate worlds, and how his background in science has influenced his storytelling. He reflects on the challenges of writing sprawling, multi-book sagas, the evolving fantasy landscape, and what keeps him returning to the genre after decades of publishing.
Q: What got you into writing in the first place?
I loved reading, and devoured books from the moment I learned to read. I was fascinated with knowledge and I wanted to know about everything. I still do.
I didn’t read much fantasy until my uni years, but the moment I found epic fantasy (The Lord of the Rings etc, in 1972) I wanted more. But back then there wasn’t a lot of fantasy, and little of what was available was truly epic – most books were way too short, and series were generally comprised of individual stories. It was easy to read it all, and by about 1977 I decided I wanted to write fantasy – huge, multi-volume stories.
I was also playing Dungeons and Dragons a lot (it was new then), and I started designing the land of Santhenar, making enormous, complicated maps and developing thousands of years of history, ecosystems, civilisations and so on.
But what with completing my Ph.D. research at uni, work, family and renovating a tumbledown Victorian-age house I didn’t find the time to start writing for another decade.
Q: What are you reading, listening to, or watching at the moment?
I’ve just finished re-reading Tad Williams’ massive Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. I haven’t read a lot of fantasy in decades, and it’s a real trip to read it again after more than three decades – a staggering feat of worldbuilding and storytelling.
And I’ve just started reading Fourth Wing. Great storytelling.
Q: How does your scientific background influence your world-building and storytelling?
Not in themes or topics. Mostly in imagery, and in having a logical basis for the technologies in use in the story. And in ecologies, societies, economies and so forth.
Q: What drew you to the fantasy genre, and what keeps you coming back to it as a writer?
I loved adventuring with underdogs (people who don’t want to be heroes but are forced to it to defend the people, places and things they love) in enchanting, perilous, original yet familiar worlds.
Q: Your works are known for their richly detailed worlds. How do you approach creating these worlds from scratch?
It depends. Sometimes I start with a map, as I did for The View from the Mirror.
Sometimes it’s an idea – for instance that the world of The Well of Echoes (set two centuries later) has been utterly transformed by events that concluded The Way Between the Worlds, the last book of The View from the Mirror.
When the Way Between the Worlds was opened, various intelligent, savage creatures from the void got into Santhenar and wrought havoc. Now, as Geomancer begins, humanity is losing the hundred-and-fifty-year-long war with the lyrinx, the human population is falling, the whole world has been mobilised for war and is focused on one thing, survival. Everyone and everything has to contribute to the war – nothing else matters.
Q: Do you have a favourite among your own books or series? If so, why?
Probably my favourite is A Shadow on the Glass, Book 1 of The View from the Mirror, because it was my very first book, I didn’t have a clue when I started it, but by the time it was finished (22 hard drafts later) it had changed my life.
But I think my best and most original series, with the most engaging and well-drawn characters, is The Well of Echoes quartet.
Q: Are there specific real-world events or issues that inspired certain aspects of your fantasy worlds?
Not that I can recall. As a rule I don’t write to illuminate or give my own perspective on events or issues. I write to entertain, and the story is everything. Having said that, of course my worldview and stories are influenced by all I’ve read, seen and heard, and come to believe over my life.
Q: Which authors or books influenced you the most when developing your own voice as a writer?
When I was a kid I read every story I could get my hands on, in every genre that happened to be lying around, plus from mid-primary school I was also devouring the 10-volume Newnes encyclopaedia (old fashioned but full of fascinating information on science, technology, history, myths and legends, exploration etc, often told as though the subject was a great adventure) and in my early teens the far larger and more difficult Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I’ve never studied other author’s works for their voice, and I’ve not tried to emulate or write in the style of any other author, fantasy or otherwise. I didn’t want to be influenced; I wanted my work to be, for good or for ill, my own creation. In fact, with a few exceptions, I gave up reading fantasy a few years after I started writing it, specifically so I wouldn’t unconsciously be influenced.
My early inspiration was the epic sweep of The Lord of the Rings. From the moment I read it I wanted to write epic fantasy, and stories about reluctant heroes caught up in world-shaking events – but stories set in my own unique fantasy world. And I didn’t for a moment want to write in Tolkien’s style.
Q: Your novels have been praised for subverting common fantasy tropes. Was this a conscious decision, and how did you go about crafting a story that feels both fresh and grounded in the genre?
When I started writing in 1987, most of the epic fantasy was very Eurocentric – often set in a world that either looked like Europe, or had a similar geographic and climatic setting, and ecology. Most stories had a pseudo-medieval setting, though often their economies did not seem to make sense.
Many of these stories were heavily influenced by Tolkien’s work, with other races being elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs etc, or races like them but with different names. Often the geography didn’t make sense, and the maps provided in many books didn’t seem to help.
The main theme of these stories usually seemed to be good versus evil. And, most irritating of all, most of the women in these stories were forced into irritatingly cliched medieval gender roles where things happened to them but they were able to take little action on their own.
Don’t get me wrong – in the Seventies and Eighties I devoured the works of the early high fantasy writers. But I didn’t want to write like them; at the time, epic fantasy seemed to have become fossilised. Not anymore, fortunately.
Fantasy is the broadest, and possibly the oldest, of all literary genres – we can write whatever we can imagine. So I set out to write a truly epic fantasy that wasn’t based on good vs evil, but on the Darwinian struggle for survival of four different human species in a setting called the Three Worlds. Also, I have five sisters and my wife has three, and I wanted the women in my stories to have just as many adventures as the men, and escape their difficulties through their own courage and ingenuity rather than by the intervention of some brawny hero.
I set Santhenar, the large continent where most of the stories take place, in the Southern Hemisphere because every fantasy I’d read to that time was set in the Northern Hemisphere. And I designed Santhenar to be geologically, geographically and ecologically realistic, because most of the epic fantasy I’d read featured little but oak and birch forests, deserts where there was no climatic reason for them to be, etc. I’d done science at uni and I had a strong background in geology, geography, ecology and physics.
I also wanted some of the settings to be unique, for instance the Dry Sea, which is important in The View from the Mirror and the Well of Echoes. There’s nothing like it on Earth, or in fantasy I’ve read, because it’s thousands of metres below sea level (as was the Mediterranean Sea when it dried up several million years ago), and on the Dry Sea even the air would feel thicker because of the extra weight of the atmosphere there.
Q: Do you start with a plot and build characters to fit it, or do the characters shape the story for you?
With my first book, A Shadow on the Glass, plotting wasn’t working, so in despair I started with two characters, Karan and Llian, put each of them in trouble and wrote them out of it into deeper trouble, all the way to the end of the book. To my surprise the book ended on a massive cliffhanger, and at that point I did some weeks of plotting and saw that it was going to take four books to finish the story.
These days I spend up to a couple of months developing the world and characters, and outlining the first book of a new series, before I begin writing. My outlines (scene by scene) are often 50 or more pages long, and I might do ten drafts of an outline before I start writing.
Q: The Three Worlds Cycle spans numerous books and sub-series. How do you maintain consistency across such an expansive universe? Do you have a particular method for balancing multiple storylines in a single novel or series?
I have maps, timelines, character and plot and subplot summaries. Also, when I’m planning the story or series, in my outline I include the date, location and time that each scene begins, or each event happens, and the key characters present. If I make a major story change I update the outline so I know what happened and who was involved, without having to search through the manuscript.
Also, I do many drafts of each work and pick up a lot of inconsistencies this way.
Q: A standout feature of your work is a landscape and environment that feels real and alive. Was there a specific approach you took to this aspect of your writing?
Not really – I guess it’s just the way I see my worlds.
“…as I approach the end of a story and a series, I find ways to make the climax and ending deeper and richer, and more prolonged.”
Q: How much of your series arcs were plotted from the start, and how much of it evolved as the writing took shape?
For each of my quartets and trilogies, apart from the first, I’ve plotted them out in advance and always known how they would end, even if I didn’t always know how the key characters would get to the end.
But every series evolves as I write and rewrite it, for several reasons:
- Sometimes characters make unusual choices as I’m writing, which can shift the story in a new direction;
- Often as I’m writing, or more likely editing, I get better ideas than the ones I had when I originally planned the story;
- And always, as I approach the end of a story and a series, I find ways to make the climax and ending deeper and richer, and more prolonged.
I don’t plan more than one series at a time, though. For instance, The Three Worlds Cycle consists of sixteen books (three quartets, one trilogy and an anthology of novellas and short stories) totalling almost 3.1 million words, but when planning each of these series I had no idea what would happen afterwards, or even if I would ever write any more stories in the Three Worlds.
I still don’t. There are plenty of stories still to tell, since there are whole worlds, and thousands of years of history outlined. Will I write more Three Worlds stories? Probably. Will they be multi-volume epics? I don’t know. They may be just a series of novellas or standalone novels.
Q: The Lyrinx are one of the most complex “monstrous” races in fantasy. What was your approach to making them sympathetic yet alien?
I was fed up with one-dimensional monsters and alien creatures (creatures like and inspired by orcs, for instance) that seemed designed to be as mean, nasty and violent as possible, and to have no redeeming features.
So I began by giving the lyrinx a burning need – to escape the savage, Darwinian void into which they had been betrayed and exiled thousands of years ago, and find themselves a home world in which they could survive and prosper. In The Well of Echoes humanity has made the lyrinx out to be a remorseless enemy but they didn’t start out that way; they just wanted a part of Santhenar they could call home.
But I also wanted them to have a clearly defined morality and code of honour. This is first shown in Geomancer when Tiaan, on the run, is captured by Ryll, an ostracised, wingless lyrinx twice her size, and fully expects that he’s going to eat her. Instead, he lectures her on morality, right and wrong, and the manifest failings of the human race.
Q: Rulke is a fascinating and terrifying figure. Was his character inspired by any historical or mythological figures?
Not deliberately. I didn’t want my key characters to be inspired by people from history, mythology or fiction. I don’t recall planning his character in much detail – I created him by writing about him, and showing him in action.
I do remember, however, that after I got to the end of the fourth book of The View from the Mirror (The Way Between the Worlds) I realised that I had been wrong about Rulke all along, and he wasn’t the terrible figure he’d been made out to be (the Great Betrayer), so I then went back through the quartet re-slanting his character to show what he was really like.
Q: Do you have a character that you really enjoyed (or hated!) writing?
I had a great struggle writing Maigraith, a powerful, enigmatic and greatly troubled woman from The View from the Mirror. I couldn’t get into her head, and finally, after many drafts and much analysis, I extracted every scene she featured in, analysed them and rewrite them again and again until I finally understood her.
I really enjoyed writing Perquisitor (and later, Scrutator) Jal-Nish Hlar, from The Well of Echoes and The Song of the Tears. He’s the closest to an evil character that I’ve ever written, though he didn’t start out that way – his nature was twisted by life, the endless, hopeless war against the far more powerful lyrinx, the hideous agonies and betrayals he had suffered, and the bad choices he’d made.
Q: How do you find time to write? What does your typical writing routine look like, and how has it evolved over the years?
I’m a scientist, an expert in the investigation and management of pollution, especially contaminated sediments. I set up my own specialist consulting company in 1986 and it’s still going. It’s been a demanding job with a lot of travel (I averaged about 60 plane flights a year for 40 years), field work, meetings and writing. Over that time I’ve written, edited or made a major contribution to more than 400 scientific reports, papers and articles, and many of those reports have been huge.
But, because I work for myself and chose to have no employees, if there’s no scientific work I need to do I can go to the other side of my office and write stories, and I began to do so soon after forming the company.
When I started out as a writer I had a young family and I was also travelling a lot, in Australia and internationally, for work, and I had to maximise the use of what little free time I had. I would write in airports, on planes and in hotel rooms, and even at boring parties.
Then, when I was first published I had a lot of contracts with publishers, with multiple deadlines for each book, and this was a strong motivating factor in writing and editing whenever I could. It was not unusual for me to finish a 200,000 word story one morning and begin the next book in the series that afternoon.
But after thirty-six novels, and many shorter stories and other works, I no longer feel the need to be writing fiction all the time. These days I just write when I feel like it.
Q: When writing a long series, how do you keep your enthusiasm and creativity alive?
Unlike many authors, I love editing. I really enjoy the process of taking a rough first draft and turning it into a rich and polished final draft. But I’m also a confirmed optimist and I never give up. I’m also constantly analysing my work and trying to make it more exciting, original, revealing of character or whatever the story requires, and it’s this creative problem solving, and the knowledge that each new draft will be a bit better than the one than came before is what keeps me going through a series that often takes years to complete.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring authors, particularly those interested in fantasy?
Be aware of the market but don’t write for it, because it changes all the time. Write the kind of book you’d love to become totally immersed in reading.
Q: What changes have you seen in Australian speculative fiction since you started writing?
The changes have been massive. When I began in 1987, and for some years after, none of the mainstream publishers in Australia were publishing SF or fantasy for the adult market, only as books for children.
Publishers at that time had no interest in investing in Australian spec fiction authors – they saw more profit in importing the books of US and UK authors and selling them for enormous markups. Yes, this is true – in the 1980s and early Nineties, the Australian sticker price of a UK import was often three times the UK price converted to Australian dollars. Sometimes four times!
The only way to get mainstream published was via US or UK publishers. This was a difficult and demoralising experience for most, including me, posting a 1 kg manuscript to the other side of the world and often not hearing anything for a year. Though a few authors, such as Garth Nix, succeeded.
Everything changed in the early-to-mid-1990s when a few Australian publishers took what they saw as a risk on local spec fiction writers, including Sara Douglass, Traci Harding, Kim Wilkins, Caiseal Mor, Sean Williams, myself and a few others, and had great sales.
By the turn of the millennium, more than forty local authors had been published to critical or commercial success, or both, and many of these authors were also published internationally and often had great sales. Orbit Books in the UK, particularly, made a lot of money by publishing many Australian authors whose books had been rejected by the British head office of their Australian publishers.
This Golden Age rapidly came to an end between 2010 and 2013, partly due to the collapse of Borders and Angus & Robertson, who were great promoters of spec-fic and had about half of Australian sales, partly due to the rise of discounting overseas internet retailers like Amazon and the Book Depository, and partly due to easy publication of eBooks and print-on-demand books.
Until eBooks became a significant force, the number of titles in print in English tended to be fairly stable at around a million or so. But since eBooks, and more recently print on demand, nothing ever goes out of print and writers can easily bring back their out-of-print backlist, so the number of titles available to buy is rising at more than a million a year (Amazon currently has about 16 million English language book titles). Sales of the average published title fell dramatically and publishers dropped many thousands of mid-list authors.
So in traditional publishing, with sales of the average book falling, it’s become much harder to get traditionally published. Publishers have to cut costs, and one of the biggest costs is editing, so most titles get only minimal editing, usually by inexperienced (cheap) editors. Also, advances and royalties are a lot lower, print runs smaller, and publishers ensure that authors can never get their rights back by keeping the eBooks available.
On the other hand, the new publishing paradigm offers opportunities for energetic authors who are willing to invest a lot of time and money in self-publishing, and many authors who could not get traditionally published have self-published to great success. Also to authors who feel they’re getting a poor deal from their publishers.
If most sales are eBooks, and the author gets about 17% of the ebook price from the publisher, after their agent’s cut, there’s a strong incentive for those authors with a good following and the energy to self-promote, to self-publish and get 70% of the ebook price from Amazon, Apple etc.
Q: What is the biggest difference between writing a novel in 1995 and writing one in 2025?
It’s no harder to write a novel now than it was then, or when I started writing in 1987. But because of the explosion of fantasy publishing it’s a lot harder to write an original story. And harder to get traditionally published, and get good sales.
And now AI means that people who don’t have a creative bone in their body can write professional looking novels.
Q: Looking back on your career, is there anything you would have done differently in your approach to writing or publishing?
I would have started earlier. I was about 37 when I started writing, though much of the development on my fantasy world had been done in my late twenties.
I was very busy then, what with Ph.D., family, work and renovating a lovely but decrepit old Victorian house, but I could have started a few years earlier.
Q: Is there any work you have coming up that you would like to speak about?
I’m currently a little way into a fantasy crime thriller set in the inner west of Sydney in 1973, near Sydney Uni, where I lived for a decade or two. I haven’t written crime before and I’m enjoying working on a different kind of story. It’s called – Kill, my Darling! – said in a rather creepy voice. I’m hoping to have it finished by the middle of 2025.