I'm hard at work on the first draft of the third volume of my new Archibald Lox series -- 65,000 words in, but still a long way to go! While I was beavering away on it yesterday, I had to nip back to check out some sections from the first two volumes, which reminded me of how much I've done with the story already, and all the different places I've wandered with it, which for some reason reminded me of... Hyperion.

I've spoken of my influences in quite a lot of interviews over the last few months, citing some of the books and authors that were very consciously on my mind when I was putting together the framework of the new series. (I'm sure there were plenty of unconsious influences too.) I've mentioned the likes of Diana Wynne Jones, Urszula Le Guin, Neil Gaiman and J K Rowling, but one author and series of books that I forgot to tip my hat to are Dan Simmons and his incredible Hyperion Cantos books.

The four-book sci-fi series was spread out over the course of the 1990s, beginning with Hyperion, continuing with The Fall of Hyperion, then - after a sizeable break, which also reflected a sizeable break in the storyline - conluding with Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. It's a mammoth, twisting, mind-bending story, covering centuries and involving a huge myriad of characters, plot-lines and settings. It's science-fiction at its most ambitious and finest, incredibly dense and otherworldly in many ways, but also very human and moving. It took me on a ride like no other, and was definitely in my thoughts when I began piecing together the universe of the Merge.

My Archibald Lox series is fantasy, not sci-fi, and I'm sure it won't ever hit quite the manic heights that the Hyperion books did -- I like to consider myself a nicely skilled teller of tales, but Simmons in full flow and on form is a beast of a whole different kind, and his best books (Carrion Comfort, the Hyperion Cantos, The Terror) are among the very best that the genres he works in have ever seen -- but I hope some of the scale and wonder of that series is mirrored to some degree in my own. I've aimed BIG with the Archie books, telling one boy's coming of age story on a grand scale, involving lots of locations and a cunningly structured narrative that doesn't really all come together until the last few chapters of the final Volume, and Simmons' Hyperion Cantos played a very important role in pointing me down that path and challenging me to stretch myself to my very limits as a writer... and then stretch some more.

If you haven't read the Hyperion books yet, I highly recommend you go hunt them down as soon as you can. They're winners! And hey, when you're finished with those, if you liked them, come give Archibald Lox a try -- like sprinters chasing Usain Bolt in his prime, he won't win in a race with the Hyperion books, but I like to think he'll run them a moderately close second or third... :-)

You can find out more about the Archibald Lox books here: https://www.darrenshan.com/news/shanville-monthly