He has been a panelist and demonstrator at fantasy conventions including Norwescon and WorldCon, speaking as an expert in worldbuilding, linguistics, swordsmanship, hand to hand combat, and military tactics and strategy. He has also lectured on fantasy writing and independent publishing at schools and colleges across the Northwest.
His first novel, Dragon’s Trail, became a Kindle Top 100 Bestseller in four countries in 2017, reaching #1 in Epic Fantasy in the U.S., Australia, and Canada and #1 in Sword and Sorcery in the UK.
A veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, Joseph lives in the Pacific Northwest along with his wife and their two dogs. He serves in the U.S. Army Reserve and is a member of SFWA.
What kind of books do you write?
I wrote a fish-out-of-water fantasy series that does for knights in armor what The Hunt for Red October did for the nuclear submarine. While there is magic—it is fantasy, after all—the mundane aspects of the fantasy world where the characters from Earth find themselves are functional and even plausible, from the phases of the moon to the slivers in the floor. My goal was to create a magical fantasy world as realistic and believable as possible, threading a needle between suspension of disbelief and plausible deniability.
The biggest thing that sets my work apart, I think, is that I accomplished this by doing all my characters’ stunts, so to speak. If I needed to know it to create my fantasy world, more often than not I’ve experienced it hands-on in some manner. I’ve studied swordsmanship, horsemanship, blacksmithing, stunt work, martial arts, mountaineering, and much more. I’m in the States, but I’ve traveled to the UK and France to pace off castles and ruins; I built a language for the elves in my series and learned to speak and write it; and so on. You’ll find a lot of this worldbuilding information on my blog.
I demonstrate all this at fantasy conventions across the country. This gets a little strange because in the course of a weekend, someone might see me demonstrating rapier fencing and knife throwing, speaking Elvish fluently, and teaching a class on using celestial navigation on an alien planet. As a result, I’ve had readers contact me demanding I tell them where the portal is, absolutely sure I’ve been there myself. Understandable mistake, I guess.
Can you describe your writing why?
My mother was a writer, which is how I got the bug initially, I think. In my late teens, I wanted to read the kind of fantasy I now write, and nobody was writing it. Thirty years later, still, nobody else has done it. I don’t know that they could. If you started today, it would take you ten or fifteen years just to learn what you’d need to know. You can always research worldbuilding online—everyone does—and there are plenty of fantasy authors who have some sort of hands-on knowledge. For instance, there are a ton of medieval weapons and martial arts buffs who write military fantasy. But creating an entire fantasy world from the foundations up using an experiential knowledge base is something that, as far as I know, no one else has ever done. And it created a new kind of fantasy novel, with a completely different feel and in which the plot turns on a series of technical details that most other fantasy authors either get wrong or don’t mention. (A pivotal element in my debut novel, Dragon’s Trail, centers around Viking-age steelmaking technology.)
Share with us your favourite passage from the book you enjoyed writing the most
The first hundred words of my second novel, The New Magic:
Tell us about your latest project
Thanks. I just finished the final draft of the first book in a new series, with the working title Stonelands. It’s a portal science-fiction novel about a modern-day American Special Operations team exploring the fantasy world of my bestselling first series. It’s fun for me because it’s been an opportunity to show that fantasy and science fiction can simply be a matter of perspective. The characters in Stonelands are soldiers and scientists who view the fantasy world as an alien planet. They don’t see elves; they see beautiful, pointy-eared aliens. They don’t see castles; they see pre-industrial fortifications. They beat their brains in looking for scientific explanations for the magic they witness.
Stonelands follows a storyline similar to Jerry Pournelle’s 1979 novel Janissaries—soldiers from Earth exploring a medieval-era alien world—adding elements of Dances with Wolves, and updating both concepts by addressing intersectionality issues of the modern American elite military professional: the hurdles facing women seeking combat roles; the struggles of LGBTQIA troops serving openly; racism; ableism; ethical concerns over resource exploitation and neo-colonialism (examined through the eyes of a combat-disabled half-American Indian protagonist from the same tribe as my mother and stepfather); interservice rivalries; and the mindsets of the “old guard” colliding with a younger, progressive generation of leadership. I’m career military, and these are all current issues in the American Special Operations community that I don’t see anyone else talking about.
The flip side of this, though, is that Stonelands ties into real-world Special Operations tradecraft and Department of Defense policies, so it’s currently at the Pentagon undergoing security review and being scrubbed for potentially classified information. My understanding is that Stonelands is the first science-fiction/fantasy novel anyone in their office can remember needing to undergo a full security review. The process will take about a year, so Stonelands will likely be out in 2022.
I’m about to start a structural rewrite of the finale in my first series, called Coin of the Realm, removing the military aspects that link it to Stonelands so it doesn’t have to go through the same process. I hope to have a final draft of Coin of the Realm by summer, which would make it available for pre-order by Christmas.
What is your favourite cake?
Boston Cream Pie. The classic, please: yellow cake, custard filling, chocolate icing. I could eat my bodyweight in Boston Cream Pie.
Also, filling a Boston Cream Pie with white frosting instead of custard is an abomination and should be outlawed. There are stores here in the U.S. who do exactly that and still call it a Boston Cream Pie, and there’s no way to know until you’ve brought it home and cut into it.
Thanks for the interview! This was great.
Connect with Joseph here:
Website: www.josephmalik.com
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Claire Buss is a multi-genre author and poet, completely addicted to cake. Find out more about her books on her website clairebuss.co.uk. Join the discussion in her Facebook group Buss's Book Stop. Never miss out on future posts by following me.
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