Tell us about you new Buffy novel, The Wisdom of War.
The Wisdom of War is an idea that I had a very long time ago, and it sat in my computer awaiting the next opportunity to do an original Buffy book that included the whole cast.
How can I describe this? As usual there’s a new bit of hell in the Hellmouth. This time, coming from the oceans. Bizarre things are happening, boats are sinking, people are turning into things that aren’t quite human, and California sea lions are coming up on to the beach in droves, terrified of something that’s in the water.
Everybody in town feels unreasonable dread that seems to spring from nowhere. It’s very much a Lovecraftian Buffy, and meant to be. With a grain of salt, it’s still very much Buffy, but it’s heavily Lovecraft influenced, on purpose.
This was so much fun because The Wisdom of War was about what happens when monsters appear in Sunnydale that Buffy’s not quite certain she should kill. Which isn’t to say that they’re not doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, that she doesn’t need to stop them, but, are they really something she needs to kill? Why are they here?
It’s also about, without going into it too much, a conflict between Buffy and the Council. And a conflict between the Council and another group called the Order of Sages, which is introduced here for the first time.
Tom Sniegoski and I wrote the Buffy video game, and for promotional purposes, we wrote a prologue novella of 100-odd pages that leads into the game. The Order of Sages also appears in that novella. It’s actually a Spike and Dru novella, leading into the game.
In any case, the Order of Sages are similar to the Council in a way, they’re just a little bit more... did you ever have Wild Kingdom over here?
Er, we don’t think so...
Wild Kingdom with Marlon Perkins was a show in the US about capturing [animals]. They would tag the animals and study them. The classic line from Marlon Perkins was, [whilst] he and Jim, who was his sidekick, would be observing the animal, [would be: "while Jim approaches the tiger, and drags it down to tag it, I’ll remain here at safe distance."
And that’s the Order of Sages, in a way. They catalogue and study and examine, to try to understand the pre-human species. They’re not out for slaughter, necessarily. They think that there’s a better way. That doesn’t mean that they’re better than the Council, just that they have different official motivations. But what ends up happening in the story is that their philosophy about what to do with these creatures is at odds with the Council’s, and the Council gets very upset with Buffy as usual.
And let’s just say that there’s a great deal more at stake than you at first realise, because Buffy quickly finds herself trapped between two species of monsters running around Sunnydale.
So it’s a great deal of fun, and I get to use Faith, which was great. There were a number of characters that I wrote in book form for the very first time in this book. I got to write Tara and Willow as a couple. I had never written Tara in a novel before before and I got to write them as a couple which was great, because they’re probably the most in love of the couples you see on the show. I got to write Dawn for the first time, which was fun. I got to write for Anya, and Faith.
And actually Chapter One is a piece that I really enjoyed writing because it’s Xander, Anya, Willow, Tara, Dawn and Buffy jammed into a car on the way to the beach. And it’s a lot of talk about how Buffy, she’s been to the beach twice in the entire time that she’s lived in this beach community. And it was just great to have the interplay of all these characters particularly because I had never written them as a group before. It was so much fun to write, really.
