Australian author Garth Nix is preparing to publish Massif, his first adult science fiction novel, more than 30 years after his debut and following worldwide sales of about seven million books.
The novel, due out on 8 September, moves Nix from the children’s and young adult fantasy readership that made his name into a darker, military space opera set in the 24th century.
In Nix’s imagined future, humanity travels between planets aboard enormous, sentient mountain ranges known as massifs. Earth and Mars use the extraordinary vessels to establish colonies and wage an intermittent intergalactic war, but the purpose of the mountains remains unclear.
When the crew of the corvette Sassafras begins asking questions about the massifs and their mysterious avatars, a routine military mission develops into a struggle over the future of humanity. The story also takes a stranded soldier into the depths of space as conflict grows over ownership of distant worlds.
“I wanted to tell a good story,” Nix said. But the novel’s devastated future Earth also reflects his concern about the environmental crisis facing the real world.
“At the back of my mind I was thinking about the current environmental situation we’re facing when I was writing about this future Earth that is a horrible mess,” he said. “I mean, we’re headed in that direction.”
Garth Nix draws on military experience for Massif
The book’s military detail is informed by Nix’s own time in the Australian Army Reserve. He joined at 17 and spent five years in an assault pioneer platoon during the first half of the 1980s.
His training included exercises in which he spent nights in state forests being pursued, captured and interrogated. He also remembers the fear caused when a sergeant accidentally dropped a box of detonators from the back of a truck.
“Luckily, they didn’t explode, but I still remember that flash of being petrified about what was about to happen, and not being able to do anything about it,” he said.
Nix, 63, has long been interested in military history, and says the concentrated experience of fear and adversity has proved useful when creating characters under pressure.
His route to becoming a successful novelist was less direct than the scale of his fictional worlds might suggest. Before writing full-time, he worked as a bookseller, marketing consultant, editor and literary agent, including a role with Curtis Brown in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
He rejects the idea that his publishing connections secured his first book deal. At the time he sold Ragwitch, his debut children’s fantasy novel, he was working in academic publishing and submitted the manuscript in the usual way.
“Most of them rejected it or didn’t even reply,” he said.
Nix initially left his job in 1998 to write full-time, but found himself producing nothing for six months. He returned to work part-time as an agent and continued writing around a demanding schedule.
“Of my 42 books, the first 15 were written when I had super busy day-jobs. It’s totally possible,” he said.
He wrote on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons before eventually making writing his full-time occupation in 2002. He now works regular hours from an office near his Sydney home, alternating between a standing desk and a conventional workstation.
The author’s early fascination with invented worlds began long before publication. As a schoolboy in Canberra in the early 1970s, he once led classmates across a sports oval in an imaginary expedition through an Egyptian pyramid, complete with a resurrected mummy and a frantic escape.
He later became an enthusiastic early player of Dungeons & Dragons, usually taking the role of dungeon master. The impulse to construct worlds and guide others through them has remained central to his work.
Nix has written 42 books, ranging from the Old Kingdom fantasy novels and the Keys to the Kingdom series to young adult science fiction and collaborations with Sean Williams. His books have been translated widely and have built a loyal international following.
Although Massif marks a significant change of audience, Nix has no plans to abandon fantasy. He has already delivered The Even-Handed Booksellers of Edinburgh, the next instalment in his booksellers series, for publication in October 2027, and is writing another young adult fantasy featuring dwarves, elves and dragons.
He has also tried writing stories set in the contemporary real world. They rarely remain realistic for long.
“It’s just what I do. It’s my natural instinct,” he said.
For years, Nix retained a possible alternative career through his minority stake in Curtis Brown. Becoming an agent again was once his back-up plan if writing failed.
“I guess that’s potentially still a possibility,” he said, before adding with a grin: “But, you know. Less so.”
