Benjamin Percy’s new novel The Ninth Metal is out this week from Hodder & Stoughton, the first in “The Comet Cycle”, a series of standalone but interconnected novels set in the aftermath of our planet going through the debris in a comet’s tail. Percy, who in recent times has written multiple comic books, including James Bond 007, chatted with Paul Simpson about creating a shared universe…

Where did the initial idea for The Ninth Metal come from?

There are a few different things that inspired the story. The first is I have been writing for DC and Marvel since 2014 and as much as that is a childhood dream come true, those characters and those worlds don’t belong to me. So this is, in a way, an attempt to build my own MCU or DCU, it is a shared universe.

One of the pleasures of reading comic books is that what happens in Wonder Woman might spill over into Batman, might spill over into Superman, and in that same way you see characters intertwining in the work of Faulkner and of Louise Erdrich. I’m, in a way, merging that comic book and literary sensibility into this project which consists not just of three books because what I am hoping to do was create a shared universe, something that is infinitely generative.

There’s a marketing and business impulse behind this as well: these books are not sequels to one another, they are part of a cycle, as I’m calling it. I’m contracted right now for three books but it could be six books, it could be nine books, it could be twelve. They all take place at the same moment. They’re in different parts of the world.

The trigger event for this is an age-old sci-fi concept: a comet comes streaking through the solar system, the planet spins through its debris field and new elements are introduced to the world. The laws of geology, the laws of biology, the laws of physics are upended, the geopolitical theatre is in chaos, there’s a new dawn of heroes and villains.

The first book takes place in Minnesota and concerns omnimetal. The second book takes place in the Pacific Northwest and deals with new plant life. The third book takes place in Alaska and has to do with mirror matter, dark matter.

Around the edges of these stories you have references to the global changes underway as well. Here’s what’s happening in Russia, here’s what’s happening in Iran, here’s what’s happening in the Gobi desert, here’s what’s happening in the Amazon, here’s what’s happening in a trench at the bottom of the Pacific ocean… and what I hope to do is eventually continue to expand. There are no fences here, there’s nothing caging me in, allowing me to continue to expand this into something that is constantly interweaving in the same way that we see the Marvel Cinematic Universe doing.

You say you’re not caged by anything but it’s almost I suppose the Heisenberg Principle isn’t it? The minute something’s observed, it changes it, so are you not to a slight extent, limiting yourself every time you describe something that’s happened with that?

As I map out all of these books at once – and I’m not just talking about these three books but beyond that, I have outlines for others as well – I’m having to be very careful about things that I’m seeding and hinting at. In the same way that when you watch the first Thor movie, you have no idea that we’re eventually going to arrive at Endgame, at Infinity War. You have no idea that all these infinity stones will unite into this ultimate event. So, I’m trying to think about the architecture with this in the same manner and yes, it’s a careful bit of blueprinting that’s going on.

Does that make it a lot harder, because you’ve got to do so much prep or because you know where you are so much, does that actually make the process of getting it from here to there easier?

Here’s another thing, to answer that question, that inspired me to write this. Over the past four years I’d say, and I don’t know if it’s age, I don’t know if it’s political chaos, I don’t know if it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s a combination of all of those factors, but I felt as though I was losing my capacity for awe. My nerves feel a little shredded. I guess you could say there was a numbness that was setting in, a kind of flatline feeling and I ended up pinpointing the information glut that we’re experiencing right now as one of the causes.

We know too much, I know too much. At any given moment, I can go online and know what’s happening in Rio, in Beijing, in London and it’s exhausting. If something earthshaking happens, I can watch a video within seconds of it, I can hear first hand testimony, I can listen to so-called experts hashing it out.

I realised that I needed to step back from that. I’ve stopped reading breaking news online, I only read my news now in newspaper or magazine form, to slow down and live with a little more uncertainty.

When I was writing this project, I wanted to create in myself and in my reader, uncertainty, the unknown, because in the unknown is wonder, is awe, is the sublime. So, to build a world where the rules aren’t yet cemented was incredibly appealing and exciting to me and it made the whole process of writing The Ninth Metal and the books that follow, wondrous. So all of it is a challenge for sure but in the best possible way, it’s a challenge that makes me feel a little bit more alive.

It’s almost sounding like a semi religious experience in that sense, that revelation of wonder

Sure and I think you can see that in the mindset of [Stephen] King as well. All of his books, especially through The Gunslinger, The Dark Tower series, experience unification and not just that but a philosophical construct that unites them.

You said the laws are in flux, but have they settled once the comet’s gone across? Or are they once we’ve gone through the debris field? Or are they still changing during the five years that this book’s set over?

There’s a constant sense of discovery driving the books going forwards and part of that has to do with the possible incursion of the multiverse. I don’t want to spoil too much but as I said before, these books can be read in any order – but the third novel, which has to do with mirror matter, might reveal the actual origin of the comet. It’s not something that just slid into the solar system from the Oort cloud. This comes from elsewhere and that’s why it defies the periodic table.

So why choose this particular story to tell first? Because presumably the prologue could have come before any of them?

True. A few different reasons. This is where the electricity was, for starters. I had spent a few years studying the North Dakota oil boom…

There’s this formation known as the Bakken in North Dakota and there was a kind of contemporary Wild West atmosphere there because roughnecks from all over were swarming to the place. Prostitution and drugs were flourishing, farmers were selling the mineral rights to their land for millions of dollars and the tagline of the state for a while was ‘A millionaire a day’. I took that and transposed it onto the north country of Minnesota.

Minnesota’s where I live. I’ve lived here for about ten years and this is the first time I felt comfortable enough using it as a stage for my fiction. All of my other stuff takes place in the Pacific Northwest where I was raised, and it took me this long to feel like I knew not just the geography but the history, the culture, the politics, the vernacular, the myths.

One of the interesting things about northern Minnesota is that it’s a liminal space, it’s a borderline. The boundary waters seep into Canada; it’s never quite clear what’s US, what’s Canada, what’s tribal, what’s private, and I liked that as a backdrop especially since this involves an incursion of worlds and I love the idea of the middle of nowhere becoming the centre of everything whether Minnesota would become a kind of Deadwood. The Ninth Metal has been compared to a sci-fi Deadwood or a sci-fi Succession, even a sci-fi Godfather! I guess it’s all of those things.

When I look at the northern part of the state, it’s really interesting in that this used to be the steel hub of the world. The iron ore is rich and the taconite pellets were shipped off from northern Minnesota but it’s experienced, like so many other places in the Midwest, economic decline and so there’s this constant debate up there as to what matters more: protecting the environment, protecting these wilderness areas or protecting people’s livelihoods so I really wanted to get into that.

So I decided to make this the first book in part because of all these different factors intruding on my brain and inspiring me – but really I could have begun anywhere. I could have begun with the second book, which has to do with both a broken marriage and a broken world, it has to do with alien plant life and contagion and has an unsettling parallelism to what happened with COVID, even though I wrote it prior.

The third book is much more of a Stranger Things situation with a small town and some government labs that have been experimenting with the weather, with radar weather stations that have been blasting energy up into the clouds that may or may not have something to do with the origin of the energy blast to the comet.

You’ve got such a wide canvas to play on; are they going to be taking place around the same time or are you actually moving things on from wherever year zero is?

All of these are taking place at the exact same time and so certain characters like Thaddeus Gunn who’s… It’s hard to say “villain” because all of the characters make some very bad choices. He’s an antagonist but he slides between all of the novels and so do a few other characters.

There are characters I’d be pleased to see more of and some that I hope will get their comeuppance at some point!

To talk about other inspirations here, I was making reference to Deadwood and Succession and The Godfather but really this is a blend of science fiction and western which is often the case, those two genres bleeding into each other. If you think about it, Star Wars is a very obvious example: that’s more in the John Ford tradition, the white hat, black hat western.

I actually used to teach a graduate course called Rewriting the West and it tracked the evolution of the western from Owen Wister’s The Virginian, that seminal text, all the way up to Leslie Silko’s Ceremony. We also were studying the films, and if you think about the John Ford western and its traditionalist nature in the way that it’s shot and the archetypes that it’s presenting, I gravitate more towards the Sergio Leone model.

If you look at the opening of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly that scene says everything about what Sergio Leone hopes to do in that it presents you with this western town that has a single street. It appears to be high noon, and at one end of the street there’s one guy and at the other end of the street there’s another guy and you think you know how this is going to turn out because here’s a tumbleweed blowing, here’s a rib slatted dog wandering, here’s a stagecoach with its canvas top flapping in the wind and they start to move toward each other and knock aside their dusters and reach for their six shooters and…. instead of firing at each other, they join forces, run into a saloon and start firing at somebody else.

And at that moment, the window crashes open and you have a freeze frame moment and there’s a guy with a big turkey leg in one hand, strips of meat hanging from his teeth and a smoking gun in another and in that freeze frame moment it says ‘The Ugly’. And then he jumps on one of the horses and races off and the camera slides back inside and we see the men from the beginning dying on the floor

What I love about that moment is that it presents all these familiar elements and then completely revises them. Revises them with the camera work which is crazy compared to the steady cam of John Ford, it revises them with the wildness of the music, it revises them with all these guys wearing brown hats.

In other words, Sergio Leone is trying to present the western as something that is more morally ambiguous, that cowboys are more of an ignoble rapacious presence. That model has been ingrained in me since I was a kid because my mom was obsessed with westerns and my dad was obsessed with sci-fi. I’m hardwired that way and that sort of has led to this project in the way that I’m approaching it.

I have some archetypes here: I have the stranger riding into town, I have a family known as the Frontiers, I have, in a way, a moustache twirling antagonist. I have these things set in to play but I’m trying to reverse expectations and put it in my own genre blender.

You’ve got the straight camera and then you get a Dutch angle.

There you go.

Makes you go ‘Huh, what? Where did that one come from?’

Exactly. John Frontier, he has a plan, he comes into town with a plan and then that plan is immediately upset by his sister who’s far more conniving than he is.

Do you feel your writing style has changed since you started working on comics?

Absolutely, I think that no matter what medium I’m working in, whether it’s a scripted podcast or writing the pilot for a TV series or writing for comics, I feel as though they all feed into each other.

Certainly comics have made me a more efficient and propulsive novelist. If you look at comics there’s a strict form to them: you have five to seven scenes and twenty pages and in those twenty pages you have an A plot, a B plot, a C plot and a D plot. The B plot typically becomes the A plot of the next issue, you have a splash page that occurs within the first five pages, you have a splash page that typically ends the issue, on a cliffhanger so that folks will show up a month later at the comic shop.

You have, what I guess you could say is, a straitjacket, and the poet Terrance Hayes, when he’s talking about the difference between free verse poetry and form poetry like a villanelle or a sonnet, says, ‘It’s great if you can break dance but it’s badass if you can breakdance in a straitjacket’. And I feel as though writing comics is break dancing in a straitjacket, in a way.

I’ve learned quite a lot from the form, I’ve also learned quite a lot from the content. Consider how villains function in comics, almost always – and this isn’t limited to comics, but it’s more pronounced maybe – the villain is tied to the core wound of the character, the principle character.

The core wound of Batman is his parents died in Crime Alley. There would be no Batman without that moment. Spider-Man becomes Spider-Man not just because of a radioactive spider that bites him but because of Uncle Ben being killed by a burglar, in the comics. And so on: all of these characters have their core wound and typically they’re wrestling with that through the internal force finds itself magnified through the external force. There’s variation from that signature wound.

If you look at Batman’s rogues gallery we see instances of this. The Joker is chaos, The Joker is the opposite of Batman. Usually these villains are an opposite or a dark mirror. So, Batman is trying to bring back law and order to Gotham City, which is in constant chaos and all of that is epitomised in that initial moment where his parents die. He’s always trying to wrestle them back to life, in a way.

But then look at some of the other villains: what about Scarecrow? Every Scarecrow story is about the fear that little Bruce felt in that moment, or the moment where he fell into the cave with the bats. And he’s trying to take that fear and weaponize it against others. If you look at a Two Face story, every Two Face story should be about the central question, which is, is Bruce Wayne the man and Batman the mask? Or is Batman the real man and Bruce Wayne the mask?

Some characters like Bane are a dark mirror to Bruce; Poison Ivy is more of a dark mirror to Bruce as well because her parents died and she’s trying to bring order back to the world, the chaos of environmental destruction and pollution that humans bring about.

Having studied comics so deeply, hundreds of them at this point, that has become part of my creative arsenal. And absolutely I was applying it to this series.

What would you say epitomises a Ben Percy story now then?

I would say that I’ve always been interested in occupying a kind of borderland between what people would perhaps unfairly identify as so-called literary fiction and so-called genre fiction.

I’m someone who loves the work of Margaret Atwood and Kate Atkinson and Susanna Clarke and Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy, the writers who are trying to build three dimensional characters and to produce subterranean themes and to make their metaphors glow, but who are also building a plot that is propulsive, that makes you turn the pages so swiftly they make a breeze on your face.

I read and I watch and I listen to everything. I don’t distinguish between so-called high and low art. I don’t belong to any school of snobbery. A Spider-Man comic is as essential to me as Tolstoy’s War and Peace…

Albeit slightly shorter.

(laughs) That’s the weird stew of my brain and that seems to be my signature aesthetic in a way. Where do I belong in a bookstore? Sometimes it’s not easy for people to tack a label on me. Where does Cormac McCarthy belong in a bookstore? All the Pretty Horses is a western, The Road is post-apocalyptic, Child of God is horror, No Country For Old Men is crime… anyways it doesn’t really matter.

But here’s another thing I would say: over the past four years I feel like I’ve lost just a little bit of my tolerance for horror, in part because I was living through what felt like horrifying times. I still love the genre and I’m still going to write horror, but this book was a necessary escape for me. I really found myself hungry for sci-fi and I think it has everything to do with escapism – and the occasional dose of Ted Lasso just because it makes me happy.

What have you learned from writing this one that’s altered how you’re going to write, or if you’ve already written, re-edit two and three?

This is a book with a sprawling cast and one of the things I wanted to do with the second book is make it stand apart from the first. I’m accomplishing that by setting it in a different location of course and dealing with a different sort of alien matter that’s introduced but I’m also narrowing the cast considerably in that it’s a bit of a two-hander. If you’ve read the novel Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff or if you’ve seen the show The Affair, you know that they have a his and her perspective: here’s what he thought happened, here’s what she thought happened.

That’s the framework of the second novel. It’s about a broken marriage and it’s also about a broken world and a lot of it has to do with alien plant life, a lot of it has to do thematically with symbiosis, and so you go from a he/she ultimately to a they over the course of the book – and that is analogous to what’s happening with a kind of hive mind fungal spread, as well.

I guess you could say that this is wildly expansive as so many westerns are and that there’s a sense of this town with all these different figures. The first book is expansive in that it’s opening up this whole new world, the second novel is much more constrictive in a fishbowl scenario by comparison.

Which did you enjoy writing more? The expansive or the close up? Very different muscles I would have thought, writing those.

Different muscles. I think that you get a more profound emotional experience sometimes from the constrictive but I think the epic always appeals to me and more of my novels tend to have that quality. From Red Moon to The Dead Lands to The Dark Net, the cast that comes together in surprising ways even though they’re all disparate at the beginning and a quest that might occur over the course of the story. That’s the stuff of The Stand and It and Game of Thrones and The Wire and everything else that has these concentric circles that come together and finally narrow. That tends to be my wheelhouse.

What can we expect in the next one and why isn’t it out now?

As part of the marketing proposal for this I took a cue from comics: a comic comes out as a $2.99 floppy, five issues later is collected into a trade paperback, later on it becomes a hardcover, maybe an omnibus later on even still, with bonus material and that just works. Cheap wide distribution builds word of mouth.

It doesn’t make sense to me why in the book industry we put out a hardback collectors item, essentially, upfront that costs $27 to $36. If I, somebody who’s a giant nerdy reader and who is inside the industry, sometimes hesitate to buy a hardcover, what do other people feel like?

And so my proposal was not just the story itself but the way in which it was released. All of these will be paperback originals and then come together at a later date as an omnibus edition with bonus material, ancillary short stories and illustrations. So, the roll out too is swift, six months apart. The next book The Unfamiliar Garden releases in January.

The Ninth Metal is released on 10th May by Hodder and Stoughton