Background
Max Walker Gladstone was born on May 28, 1984, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. He grew up in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Max Walker Gladstone was born on May 28, 1984, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. He grew up in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Max Gladstone graduated from St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Sewanee, Tennessee. At school, he made the first steps on the path of writing. He studied at the University of the South but left in 2002. Then he went to Yale University where he studied East Asia and acquired Mandarin Chinese. Gladstone received there a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2006.
After graduating from Yale University, Max Gladstone moved to China. There he worked as a translator at a car showroom in Beijing, as a clerk at the headquarters of a large Chinese network of fitness clubs, but his main activity was participation in the Yale-China Association - from 2006 to 2008, he taught English as a representative in the secondary school of Huangshan City.
Upon returning to the US, Gladstone worked for a year at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, where he studied China's Internet policy, Internet censorship mechanisms, and the fight against it. In 2009, he began working in the Aberdeen Group as a business analyst. In parallel, he finished writing his first novel and was engaged in the search for a literary agent, which took quite a long time. When the agent was found, it took only two months to sign the contract with the publisher Tor Books.
After the debut book was released in October 2012, Gladstone retired from his main job and became a professional writer. The first book was followed by Two Serpents Rise in 2013, Full Fathom Five in 2014, Last First Snow in 2015, and Four Roads Cross in 2016, all part of his Craft Sequence. The sixth novel of the sequence, Ruin of Angels, was published by Tor.com in 2017.
Gladstone also wrote Bookburners, a weekly urban fantasy serial. Since 2016 he is also part of the team of writers working on George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards anthology series. The Highway Kind, a fantasy road trip novel, was published in 2018 by Tor Books, followed by Gladstone's first space opera in 2019.
(From Max Gladstone comes a smart, swashbuckling, wildly i...)
2019(Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working t...)
2019(Three nights after Thea’s brother left for the revolution...)
2014(In Bookburners: The Complete Season 4, everything falls i...)
Max calls Robin McKinley and Roger Zelazny the writers who influenced his work the most.
The idea of writing a fantasy novel on legal material was born to the author during conversations with his mother-in-law, a practicing lawyer when the bankruptcy procedure reminded him of the necromancy ritual.
Quotations:
"When I was a kid, I wrote everything longhand, then typed, which is a beautiful and restful way to work, but takes a while."
"All things considered, I think it’s best to need very little when you write. The more “special” your setup, the harder it will be to achieve and maintain. The less you need, the more you’ll be able to write."
"The real power of science fiction and fantasy, for me, lies in their use as tools to interpret the world around us and investigate aspects of our lives that are too complex, too implicit, too subtle to tease out with the limited toolset of realistic fiction."
"Games are at least in part a cognition hack. Our brains like activity, change, and problem-solving. They like the world to shift around them. They don’t like to remain idle. A gamer exists in a kind of tuned reality, designed to provide meaningful simulation, solvable problems, and a range of dramatic possibilities from failure to success."
"Writing fiction is hard. Publishing fiction (which I assume you want to do based on this question) is harder. It’s a long and sometimes lonely road to walk, and you will lose so much time and health if you start walking that road in a direction you don’t love."
" I love my name, and I have absolutely thanked my parents for giving me such an awesome one."
Max Gladstone is married.
