First, Stonehenge. Seriously, pictures don’t do it justice. Those stones are huge! And the stuff about coastal lichens being on their surfaces is true—it is weird and unexplained!
Abu Simbel is simply colossal, bigger than you can possibly imagine, and built for the same reason the men of Gondor built the Argonath in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring: to tell encroaching neighbors, “Look at how powerful we are in Egypt! Don’t even think of crossing these borders unless you can deal with the people who built this monument!” And it’s all the better that the UN rebuilt it brick-by-brick to save it from the waters of the Aswan Dam.
Finally, the Three Gorges of China. These are simply beautiful. Natalie and I visited them in 2006, solely to research this book. A side trip into the gorges of the Shennong River system (lush, green, misty, and narrow) really crystallised my mental image of the flooded rural hamlet where Wizard finds the entrance to Laozi’s trap system.
Q:What else have you been working on? How is the Contestmovie coming along?
MR:Earlier this year, I sold a TV script called Literary Superstars to Sony, who successfully licensed it to the US TV network ABC.
It’s a half-hour comedy set in, of all places, the publishing industry. I figured that after ten years in the book world, I’d acquired many funny tales, so I decided to put them into a TV show. The heroine is not an author, though, but a publicist who promotes authors for a publishing house.
The script led a charmed life through Hollywood, going from my agents to Darren Star (producer-creator ofSex and the City) , to Sony, to the lovely actress Jenna Elfman, and then to ABC. For a while there, I was flying back and forth from Sydney to Los Angeles to do meetings with studio and network executives, which was all pretty exciting. We shoot the pilot later this year, so my fingers are crossed that it gets picked up.
This has meant that I’ve put my ambitions for a Contest movie on hold for a while; after all, you have to run with the show that’s actually getting made. But Contest isn’t going anywhere.
Q:One question that many fans are asking is, will we be seeing Shane Schofield again in the near future?
MR:Yes, Scarecrow is a character that my fans really do love—especially after what I put him through in Scarecrow. And, in all seriousness, I thank my readers for allowing me to venture into other stories and write about other heroes (believe me, as an author, it is possible to get pushed into writing about the same character over and over again). When, one day, I look back on my career as a novelist, I’d like to see an array of stand-alone books and different series, from the Schofield and Jack West series, to the (current) stand alones of William Race and Stephen Swain and who knows who else.
That said, having taken a break from Scarecrow, I am rather keen to write about him again, and a new idea featuring him has started to form in my mind. So as I write the sequel to The 6 Sacred Stones (after all, I can’t leave Jack West falling down that abyss forever!), I’ll be fleshing out this idea that I have for a new Scarecrow novel with the hope that it will be the next book I write after that. I should add that I also have lots of kids demanding Hover Car Racer II!
(Oh, and for those who missed it in 2005,Hell Island —the short novel that I wrote for the Books Alive initiative—features Scarecrow and is now available again in stores across Australia and New Zealand.)
Q:Any final words?
MR:As always, I just hope you enjoyed the book; that it took you away from your world for a few hours or a few days and entertained you in the way a good rollercoaster should. And rest assured, I’m already typing feverishly away on the next one.
Best wishes and see you next time!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I’VE NEVER actually included a bibliography in one of my books before, but with this novel I thought I might since it delves into so many different fields of study (from ancient Egypt and China to the African slave trade, to space and zero-point fields, to the intricacies and history of diamonds). As an author of fiction, I have to be the proverbial jack-of-all-trades and master of none, and while I readily admit that I am no expert in astronomy or astrophysics, I do my best to read as widely as I can so that my characters can be.
I have not divided this bibliography into principal or lesser sources—some might only have provided me with information on a single point in my novel, but that makes them no less valid to my mind (after all, it might have been a big point)—nor is it in any particular order of importance. It is simply here so that readers who have an interest in certain aspects of the book might like to read further.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,The Elixir and the Stone (London: Random House, 1997).
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln,The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982; London: Century, 2005).
Ian Balfour, Famous Diamonds (London: William Collins & Sons, 1987).
Robert Bauval, Secret Chamber (London: Century, 1999).
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (London: Doubleday, 2003).
Deidre Cheetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Robert Guest,The Shackled Continent (London: Macmillan, 2004).
Manly P. Hall,The Secret Teachings of the Ages (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003; original text, 1928).
Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1995; London: Century, 2001).
Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1992).
Graham Hancock, Underworld (London: Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2002).
Stephen W. Hawking,A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Press/Transworld, 1988).
