Kevin J. Anderson stares outside a big picture window in the Colorado home he shares with his wife of 11 years, Rebecca Moesta, and her son, Jonathan. It's mid-June and an ominous smoky haze rises in the air from the Hayman wildfires, which would spread over hundreds of thousands in the next four weeks. For now, the fires rage on the other side of the peak, so their home, which sits atop a ridge in the Rocky Mountain Front Range, is safe.
"I'm sick because I do so much of my writing out hiking in the national forest—my creativity, my storytelling, my work is centered outside and in the parks," says the author of Hidden Empire: The Saga of Seven Suns, book one of a projected five-book series from Warner, a visionary space epic contemplating the cost of manifest destiny among the stars.
The soft-spoken, 40-year-old bestselling author's corporation, Wordfire, aptly describes his career's wild ascent into the stratosphere. The prolific and driven author of more than 80 solo and collaborative works—some connected to Star Wars (he worked on 55 projects for George Lucas), Chris Carter's X-Files franchise, Star Trek and, with Brian Herbert, to Frank Herbert's Dune—is having a banner year, with the publication of four books from four different publishers: Captain Nemo (Pocket, Jan.); Hopscotch (Bantam, Jan.); Hidden Empire (Warner, July); and Dune: The Butlerian Jihad with Brian Herbert, (Tor, Sept.), the first of a trilogy prequel to the classic novel. Due in 2003 is a graphic novel from D.C. Comics, Veiled Alliances, a Saga prequel illustrated by Robert Teranishi, and Saga's next installment, Forest of Stars. Anderson enjoys working for various publishers and editors and really appreciates Robert Gottlieb and Matt Bialer, his agents at Trident Media Group.
During a Wisconsin boyhood he describes as a cross between Norman Rockwellian and Norman Batesian, Anderson at age five became enthralled by SF after he saw the George Pal film of War of the Worlds on TV. The first adult novel he read was The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and an upcoming project, with the blessing of the Wells estate, is another "fantastic historical" (Anderson's own term) featuring a young Wells teaming up with T.H. Huxley to fend off a Martian "invasion."
He progressed to actually writing at age eight. When he sold (for $12.50!) his first short story to Gordon Linzner's magazine, Space & Time, he was a high school senior and considered himself "the consummate nerd." He majored in astronomy, physics and Russian history at the University of Wisconsin. After collecting numerous rejection slips and an award for "The Writer with No Future" at 25, he sold his first novel, Resurrection, Inc., in 1988 for a $4,000 advance from NAL.
Contemporary authors who've inspired him, aside from Moesta (they've collaborated on award-winning YA books), include mentor Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Greg Benford and Larry McMurtry. Anderson met Moesta while working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, one of the largest research labs in the country, where he was a technical writer/editor. There he also met Doug Beason, who became a collaborator on eight technological suspense novels, beginning with 1990's Lifeline. Anderson didn't become a full-time writer until he had had 11 bestsellers.
The lean hiking enthusiast has climbed more than 50 14,000-foot Colorado peaks, but the mild-mannered Anderson does not wear superhero attire, opting for khakis and a blue shirt flapping in the breeze when he climbs the red rocks of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs during the first half of a daylong interview with PW.
Anderson notes that there's a phenomenon called a false summit. He jumps up and draws a series of angles on a piece of paper: "If I'm climbing here, it looks like the top, and when you get there, the real summit is way over there and you slog over another four miles... you get to that top and then finally you find out that the real summit is somewhere else. Every peak has three or four of these false summits, and the only summit you can see is the one in front of your face.... I feel like a writer's career is a succession of these false summits." He continues, "Hidden Empire really got to me, and Dune is my favorite SF book, and I'm writing Dune books with Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son, based on Frank's notes—how much better can you get? Where am I now? I'm pretty much at 14,000 feet, but you've got to keep challenging yourself...."
His trilevel home is also an office where Anderson, his wife and four employees work. "I dictate my stories while I'm walking, just reciting into my recorder." His full-time assistant, Catherine Sidor, then transcribes the tapes for his future revisions.
While showing PW the ancient rock formations of the Garden of the Gods, Anderson reflects on the surreal site that inspired some of the Klikiss landscapes described in Hidden Empire. "Thin slivers of stone with cave openings in them—looks like a real alien landscape in Colorado." With the Saga books, which he feels he has been training for all of his life, he hopes readers will discover that his universe is "right in between Star Wars and Dune. It has the color, alien races, sense of wonder and space battles that Star Wars has, but it also has the pageantry and ecological themes of Dune."
A reviewer once described Anderson's style as "completely transparent prose" and did not mean that as a compliment, but for Anderson, it was. "When you're reading one of my stories, I want you to be in my alternative universe, surviving the adventure along with the characters."
