SFBC's Edith Cohn talked with Steven Erikson recently about his novel House of Chains. (I'd call it "his new novel," but it isn't -- it's finally coming out in the US, but it was first published in the UK back in 2002.)

Anyway, here's the first question of that interview:

Q. I read that you originally developed the Malazan world with Ian Cameron Esslemont as a role-playing game. What made you decide to put it into a novel?

STEVEN ERIKSON:

A: There were probably a number of incentives at work. First off, we were creating games that reflected what we wanted to see in fantasy fiction, but with a few exceptions we weren’t finding it (Glen Cook’s Black Company series and his Dread Empire stuff were notable exceptions). At the same time, both Cam and I were in a writing program at the University of Victoria, which each of us would continue on into Master’s degrees, me at Iowa and Cam in Alaska, so we were both writing fiction. At some point, we began co-writing feature film scripts, and one of those formed the core of Gardens of the Moon. Shortly thereafter, as our interest in fiction writing developed, it was obvious that, ultimately, so much of what we gamed was already intrinsically novelistic, in structure and narrative (the spell-check just went "huh?" with "novelistic" but I’ll keep it anyway), and the transition seemed obvious. My adaptation of the FF script of Gardens forced an expansion of the basic story (the film occurred entirely in Darujhistan) and the introduction of innumerable new characters and sub-plots. While we’re good at co-writing scripts, we decided at the very beginning that for novels we would tackle those individually. And that is what we have done.