Noah Fram

FictionThriller

Prey becomes predator

Review by Noah Fram

Can you be redeemed for crimes you did not commit? Charlotte Rowe has spent her adult life trying to find out. A husband-and-wife serial killer team kidnapped the infant Charlotte after they murdered her mother. They groomed her to follow in her footsteps, teaching her to operate a furnace that burned the bodies of their victims, and were about to initiate her into their killings when the FBI raided their hideout. Charlotte has spent her entire life under the spectre of their crimes, and the suspicion of some that she was complicit in the murders.

So when a powerful corporation and its shadowy allies trick her into piloting an experimental technology that gives her superhuman powers, Charlotte must decide whether she will seek freedom from their manipulations, or use their questionable but effective means to ensure no one else will have a childhood like hers.

It is instantly clear that there are no perfect heroes in Christopher Rice’s Bone Music, and that everybody has skeletons in their closets. The thrill, and for many readers, the challenge, is figuring out what those skeletons are, how they’re related and which of the many flawed people that populate Rice’s fictional American Southwest are really the good guys.

Bone Music is reminiscent of Michael Crichton at his best, but without his occasional myopias. Rice is refreshingly frank when constructing his characters, drawing clear distinctions among them without resorting to rhetorical kitsch or overwrought stereotyping. And he is really, truly funny. Although present-tense narration can be gimmicky, Rice’s storytelling voice carries enough bite that his real-time engagement with the story is consistently enjoyable, and his frequent sly interjections are welcome breaks in what could, in a different writer’s hands, so easily be a mawkishly macabre tale.

There are moments when Rice teeters on the brink of sensationalism, a rhetorical dance that supplies its own kind of thrill. Bone Music has not been sanitised, much to its credit. Few thrillers worth their salt are. Its population of survivors do not lend themselves to anodyne platitudes or flowery syntax, and Rice supplies neither. His characters are blunt, forthright, and frequently caustic, and his writing suits them well.

Bone Music is a funny, engaging story filled with interwoven backstories and intrigue that rarely, if ever, slows down. It’s a high-energy sci-fi thriller with few pretensions, a consistently entertaining and engagingly crafted story that careens around dusty Arizona roads, glittering corporate boardrooms and anonymous corners of the internet as each of its characters search for answers, seeking absolution for transgressions both real and imagined. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Can you be redeemed for crimes you did not commit? Charlotte Rowe has spent her adult life trying to find out. A husband-and-wife serial killer team kidnapped the infant Charlotte after they murdered her mother. They groomed her to follow in her footsteps, teaching her to operate a furnace that burned the bodies of their victims, and were about to initiate her into their killings when the FBI raided their hideout. Charlotte has spent her entire life under the spectre of their crimes, and the suspicion of some that she was complicit in the murders.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Sam Hawke

Interview by Noah Fram

“I was seven years old the first time my uncle poisoned me.” The first sentence of Sam Hawke’s City of Lies lets the reader know exactly what they’re in for. A deliciously tense, well-crafted start to a new fantasy series, City of Lies follows Jovan and Kalina, two young nobles who have been raised to detect poisons and prevent them from harming the ruling family of Sjona. When their father and the monarch are assassinated, Jovan and Kalina have to protect the new ruler—their close friend Tain—from threats both within the city and outside its walls. We talked to Hawke about devising fictional poisons, creating a magic system based on emotion and the real-world parallels in her fantastic new world.

A lot can happen in the process of crafting a novel, especially when it’s part of a series. How different is the final product of City of Lies from what you originally intended when you set out to write it?
In some ways very similar, and in others quite different. I think it has stayed true to its core—that is, the main characters, who they are, how they relate to each other and the broad plot. What changed fairly dramatically over the course of editing was its structure (it was originally geared more heavily toward Jovan’s storyline, and undersold Kalina’s), some of the history of the world and the motivation for the rebellion and the active role of magic in the story.

I think the six guilds (Warrior, Craft, Artist, Stone, Theatre and Scribe) are fascinating, both because of their roles in the plot and the picture they paint of Sjonan society. How did you choose them? Was it more about plot, world building or something else entirely?
Definitely world building. The Guilds are a handy shorthand for what the society values and elevates—arts, science, learning, cultural pursuits—and what it doesn’t. There were a few extra Guilds that got cut for the purposes of tightening the cast early on, though!

Many religions use clothing as a mark of faith or status, and discrimination against members of those religions based on their dress is both a huge contemporary issue and something that turns up in City of Lies with characters like Hadrea. Did you intend to deal with or comment on those real-world parallels?
I definitely was influenced by real-world events in looking at how a dominant culture can steamroll smaller ones, whether through deliberate design or unthinking ignorance. In this case, the cultural difference is partially religious, but it’s also based on the class and geographical divide between the cities, and the land and people that keep the city fed and supplied. Where there are no racial or other physical cues to identify differences, dress custom, jewelry and other body markings can be a visual identifier of those differences and therefore the target of mockery and discrimination (or subtler aggressions such as taking the trappings of the religion and using them in a manner stripped of meaning).

Your choice to focus on proofers and poisoners reminded me of Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice series. Were those books something you thought about when writing City of Lies?
I love a good assassin story but I wanted to write the kind of inverse to that: the tale of the spoiled and pampered officials being targeted, rather than the tale of the assassins themselves. What I particularly love about Robin’s books, and what makes them stand out from other assassin romps, is that the poisonings and manipulations performed are never presented in a glorified or glamorous way. Fitz takes no joy in his position. He’s not a wry, unruffled or revenge-fuelled assassin. He’s not a cool loner. If anything, I was inspired by the way those books deal with the emotional cost of every decision and the consequences of a lifestyle of that nature. While my story is focused on defense rather than attack, the way that my characters think about poisonings and violence is never offhanded.

Your blog is a mix of thoughts on writing, life stories and humor (I had never considered how well I actually know the back of my hand until reading your bio), and your novel reads in a similar way, so I was curious—how much do you think you have a “writer voice” that’s different from your normal voice? You can take that to be about word selection, pacing or basically anything else you’d like.
I’m a lot sillier in real life than in fiction (at least I hope), and more conversational in my style, but I suspect the ole Samishness bleeds through into everything I do. I admire other writers who are far more elegant in their writing than I am, but I always sound like me to me. Just, with fewer rants about cheese hangovers.

You clearly put a lot of thought into the specific poisons and their effects in City of Lies. How much is all of that based on actual research into historical and current poisons, and how much of it was invented for your world specifically?
Oh, lots of both. Because the world I had created was pretty low magic, I still wanted it to feel like a different reality, and one way to do that, besides pretty significant cultural differences, was to have a lot less reliance on our world’s standard trappings in terms of flora and fauna. So while there are some recognizable “earth” type plants and animals, most are invented. I also didn’t want to be writing a manual on how to poison somebody for real, and I didn’t want to be bound by particular expectations about what certain plants do and don’t do. But having said that, a lot of my fictional poisons are based loosely on real ones to help me along! I left a few clues in the names so keen-eyed readers can probably spot some similarities.

I love that your magic is based on a kind of emotional communion rather than incantations or spells, and I’m always curious where fantasy writers get those structures from, especially when they’re as central to the conflict as yours. Can you talk a bit about building the magical and cultural mechanics of Sjona, and what kinds of inspiration you drew on for that process?
My POV characters know literally nothing about the magic in their world. I wanted it to retain a certain air of confusion and mystery and surrealism because that’s how it comes across to them. (Readers who are only into very detailed, rule-based magic systems, beware, this may not be for you.) Since the Darfri culture was the original way of life for Sjona, and is something retained in the more remote areas of the country but largely forgotten in the cities, it seemed natural to fit with an indigenous tradition of great respect for and desire to work harmoniously with the land. It made sense to have a kind of elemental magic that linked people and the land itself. Without giving spoilers, the concept of spirits bound to particular landmarks was obviously important to the plot, and I wanted there to be a symbiotic relationship between people and spirits, and for the use of magic to be tied to that relationship. As part of my personal tastes, I like reading about magical systems that are entwined with emotions rather than intellectualism (because that’s messier, and gives you loads of scope for good character moments), and that felt like a natural tie into what humans could offer to the equation.

City of Lies functions really well as a standalone story, but knowing it is the first installment of a trilogy changes the interpretation of several main storylines. How confident should we be in the way things seem to have wrapped up at this point?
Hmm, I’m not sure how to answer this without spoilers. You can definitely read City of Lies as a standalone—no big cliffhangers and the main plot threads are resolved (for the immediate term anyway). But the second book, Hollow Empire, deals with the very messy aftermath of the events in the first book and brings in new but related threats. The story will also pan out to see more of the continent outside Sjona. I don’t think I can say much more!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of City of Lies.

Author photo (c) Kris Arnold Photography.

“I was seven years old the first time my uncle poisoned me.” The first sentence of Sam Hawke’s City of Lies lets the reader know exactly what they’re in for. A deliciously tense, well-crafted start to a new fantasy series, City of Lies follows Jovan and Kalina, two young nobles who have been raised to detect poisons and prevent them from harming the ruling family of Sjona. When their father and the monarch are assassinated, Jovan and Kalina have to protect the new ruler—their close friend Tain—from threats both within the city and outside its walls. We talked to Hawke about devising fictional poisons, creating a magic system based on emotion and the real-world parallels in her fantastic new world.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

Genevieve Cogman

Interview by Noah Fram

Libraries are (obviously) always important. But in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series, a library is what keeps all of existence in balance. Tasked with keeping the peace between the noble, orderly dragons and the chaotic, untrustworthy Fae, the Librarians reside outside of time itself and maintain the balance between all possible worlds. Sometimes, this even involves stealing extraordinarily powerful books whose effect will too drastically alter the status of their world. In the fifth installment of the series, heroic Librarian Irene is summoned to solve a murder in an alternate-reality Paris before it derails a historic peace conference. We talked to Cogman about the future of her series, and which alternate-reality book she’d love to steal.

I love the concept for this series—two supernatural species, kept in balance by Librarians who can alter little pockets of reality and go about stealing disruptive books to keep them safe in their Invisible Library. Where on earth did it come from?
It came from a whole mix of things, really—law and chaos at opposing ends of the universe, and mysterious interdimensional libraries [of] Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman and other sources. Like a lot of authors, I pulled out the bits I liked and put them together in a new way.

The plot of The Mortal Word relies in some ways on its setting in Paris. Did the setting or the story come first, or were they in balance, as it were?
I picked Paris because I particularly wanted to use a specific location in Paris. (I’m not saying which location it is because I don’t want to spoil the story, but anyone who’s finished the book can probably guess.) So I suppose the setting and the story were mostly in balance. But Paris fit in other ways—it was convenient for the peace conference and luxurious enough to keep the participants in a good mood. I suppose the peace conference could have been held in Antarctica in an abandoned science station, where nobody would have known about it, but imagine how certain people would have reacted on being asked to accept local inconveniences.

Have you read any books that you’re surprised a Librarian hasn’t stolen? And are there any alternate reality books you’d be tempted to steal?
Well, I have a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, which I would think anyone would want to steal, but that’s not actually fiction. If we were to consider unique books which never got written in this world but might have been written in other worlds, I’d love to read a version of The Tale of Genji which actually went into how Genji died—in our world, that chapter is left blank, but who knows how the story goes in other worlds?

Each Fae has an archetype or a character that they follow, and their actions are prescribed by the nature of that character. Since they’re at war with the dragons, what do you think would happen if a Fae adopted a draconic archetype?
Unfortunately (for them), a Fae can’t actually turn into a dragon. (I’m sure it’s been tried!) It is quite possible for a Fae to adopt a noble, virtuous archetype, and in that case, they would behave in a noble and virtuous way. I’m not sure any dragon would trust them, though . . .

I got the impression that when the Fae’s stories get too many reboots, they’d turn out a bit like the Countess, with their personalities shattered and shot through with contradictions. Has that ever been done deliberately or tactically in the Invisible Library’s world?
It’s more the opposite—some Fae deliberately restrict their archetype in order to stay more focused, human and sane. Others prefer to go for the heights, and often go out in a blaze of glory. And there are always other Fae coming along after them, willing to take over the identity or imitate it on a smaller scale. There are probably half a dozen other would-be-Countesses out there, less powerful than the “acknowledged” one, lurking in their castles and dreaming of power.

I was struck while reading by the connections between the dragons’ characters and their elements, but also the connections between elements of related dragons. (For instance, Ao Ji’s affinity for ice and Kai’s affinity for water.) Are dragons’ elemental affinities tied to their personalities, or are they more hereditary or familial?
That is an interesting question to which the dragons don’t have a definite answer. It is considered fortunate for a dragon to have the same elemental affinity as one of their parents (Kai’s father also has an affinity to water), but it’s far from always the case. However, a dragon who has a strong affinity for a particular element will usually organize their life and surroundings to be conveniently close to that element—both for preference and for strategic reasons.

The Mortal Word feels a bit like an episode of a long-running serial, and the series could theoretically go on for as long as you want it to. How much more of the Invisible Library world do you think you’ll end up exploring?
I’m not sure at the moment. I do intend that the series will have an ending, and I have a rough plotline up to the end of book eight. Beyond that, I can’t be certain. (Or there is the possibility of exploring other parts of that universe—Irene isn’t the only Librarian who gets into trouble.)

There’s a reference to a Library cataloging system, in which worlds are given numbers, and one number, in particular, is very prominently mentioned. What world is Beta-001? Or is that something you can’t tell us right now?
It’s the first world that the Library has cataloged in the Beta series—the worlds that the Library considers to be magic-dominant. That may or may not be something important in the long run . . .

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Mortal Word.

Author photo © Deborah Drake.

Libraries are (obviously) always important. But in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series, a library is what keeps all of existence in balance. We talked to Cogman about the future of her series, and which alternate-reality book she’d love to steal.

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Arkady Martine

Interview by Noah Fram

One of the most dazzling new settings in science fiction, Arkady Martine’s the City, capital of the Teixcalaan Empire, is a giddily complex combination of the Byzantine empire and Mesoamerican civilizations spread out over the vast expanse of an entire planet. Martine’s debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, strands novice diplomat Mahit Dzmare at the center of the City without the benefit of an imago-line—the memories and experiences of her predecessor, accessed via a brain implant. Now totally lacking the mysteriously deceased Yskandr Aghavn’s guidance, Mahit must investigate his death and advocate for her small mining station home’s independence.

We talked to Martine about faster-than-light travel, the joys of creating a complicated naming-system and which historical figure’s memories she’d like implanted in her brain.

Your background as both a historian and an apprentice city planner really shines through in A Memory Called Empire, especially in your beautifully complex depiction of the City. What were your inspirations for it?
The City—the Jewel of the World, the heart of Teixcalaan—is an oecumenopolis, a world-city: essentially a planet that has been fully urbanized aside from its oceans and its natural reserves. City-planets are quintessentially space opera for me—Star Wars’ Coruscant, for example, but also any number of others. I love the visual of the idea. All that architecture, a planet that would glow like a jewel, lit up with glass and metal and lights. But cities aren’t just visuals. They’re real, complex, messy places, and a planet-size city would be complex to the point of near-ungovernability . . .

Which of course is where the algorithm-driven subway system and other city-ruling algorithms and artificial intelligences that I created for the Jewel of the World come in. And because I study history, and because I work in city planning, I knew when I began thinking about those algorithms that they were going to be biased, be about panopticon control, be about making citizens of Teixcalaan visible to policing and governing forces . . . and making noncitizens either invisible or singled out for persecution. Because that’s what algorithms tend to do, because algorithms are written by human beings.

The other deep inspiration for the City comes from the fact that I’m a New Yorker, in that deeply obnoxious sense of being a New Yorker who thinks there aren’t any other real places in the world, if you’re asking me honestly. (Yes, yes, I know.) But also I love my city very passionately. And I have also studied Byzantium’s capital, Constantinople, and been very aware of how similar the concept of city-as-center-of-the-universe was for Constantinopolitans as it is for New Yorkers, so I wanted to play with that as an element of how my characters related to their setting.

How did you come up with the Teixcalaanli naming system?
The number-noun naming system of Teixcalaan is a direct reference to the naming practices of the Mixtec people of Oaxaca, who, like many Mesoamerican peoples, were named for the day in the 260-day cycle of the year on which they were born: a cycle of 13 numbers and 20 signs (animals, plants and natural phenomena). For the Teixcalaanli names, I have a very extensive document of “how to do a Teixcalaanli name correctly,” but the simplest version is as follows.

Each Teixcalaanli personal name has a number part and a noun part. Both parts have symbolic meanings. The number part of the name is a whole integer (i.e. no negative numbers, no decimals or fractions, and irrational numbers like pi or e are only for jokes). The range of numbers is almost always between one and 100, with lower numbers being more common. (Numbers over 100 are a little like naming your kid “Moon Unit” or “Apple.” Except that “Apple” is a perfectly normal Teixcalaanli name, and “Moon Unit” is only a little weird. . .)

The noun part of a Teixcalaanli name is always a plant, an inanimate object or a concept (in order of likelihood). No animals and no self-propelled inanimate things—i.e. “boat” is an acceptable noun, but “self-driving car” is not. (Honestly, though, both “Boat” and “Self-Driving Car” are names that Teixcalaanlitzlim would laugh at.) A lot of plant names are flowers and trees, including some unusual ones, like “Cyclamen”; object names tend to be related to the natural world (“Agate”), astronomical objects or phenomena (“Solar-Flare”) or common objects, often ones that can be held and manipulated. Tools are highly represented, like “Adze” or “Lathe.” Occasionally object names refer to architecture—“Five Portico” is only a little bit odd as a name. (Something like “Two Paving-Stone” would be odd, but no odder than a kid named “Winston.”)

This is probably more information than you wanted to know. I went deep on the world building on this bit because it was so damn fun.

Where did the jumpgates come from?
So, wormholes (or “hyperspace”) as a solution to faster-than-light (FTL) travel are a classic sci-fi trick, and the jumpgates are functionally wormholes. If you imagine a wide-bore needle that pokes through a piece of fabric and then picks up a different part of the fabric on the other side, and holds them together, that’s what a jumpgate does. You can go in either direction, but you can only get from point A to point B or vice versa at each individual jumpgate, and point A and point B have no actual contiguous bits except the jumpgate. This produces a kind of patchwork of interstellar travel, where System X and System Y might be hundreds of light-years away but very well connected through jumpgates, and thus part of the same political and even cultural unit, but System X and System Z could be only three or four light-years away but not connected through jumpgates, and thus very divergent in politics and culture.

In the Teixcalaanli universe, there isn’t any FTL that doesn’t involve jumpgates. They can go pretty fast! But not faster than light. And the physics of it all is pretty normal—they experience relativistic effects when traveling near light speed, so really they want to take jumpgates as much as possible.

But none of that answers why. The why is: I wanted to mimic the communication and travel difficulties of a medieval empire, while having my empire be In Space. And the jumpgates essentially function as mountain passes: narrow places that only a little bit of an army can go through at a time. It creates real constraints on how, where and why an empire can expand . . . and that’s what I wanted to be able to play with.

So basically, I made up some very complex physics so I could reproduce the situation of a Byzantine army trying to get into the Armenian highlands in 1054 CE. ☺

The threat of an alien species is a major part if A Memory Called Empire’s plot, but you don’t describe any other encounters with actual nonhumans directly. How do you think any contact between humankind and alien species would go? Would any of them be amicable, or would they all be like the ones with the three-ring ships?
I think it depends very much on the aliens. I can imagine there are aliens we can talk to, and aliens we can’t; aliens who we think we can talk to, and we aren’t really communicating with at all; and aliens who we simply don’t have anything to say to, don’t share any resource concerns or desires with.

I hope the first set we meet are kind and smart and savvy, and also mammals who breathe oxygen and have hierarchical structure, because otherwise we’re going to not be able to figure out how to say anything useful and understandable, and if they’re not kind, they may decide they’re better off without us.

Humans have some growing up to do before I’d trust us with interstellar negotiation, basically.

If you were part of a historical figure’s imago-line, who would it be and why?
This is genuinely the hardest question anyone has asked me recently, because it’s so hugely self-revelatory. Um. I’d be honoured to be the recipient of James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon’s imago, and I think we’d be a surprisingly good match on aptitudes, but also I’d be scared as hell to take on a personality that is as strong and unique as hers. I love her work though, and it’s an enormous influence on mine.

For a more historical figure, I’ll be grandiose in my ambitions here and go for Börte Ujin, the Grand Empress of the Mongols, first wife of Temujin a.k.a. Genghis Khan, who ran the court in the center of the Mongol homeland. She was one of her husband’s closest advisors and a powerful ruler in her own right, a civilization builder and a politician. I’d like to be in the imago-line of her successors: a whole sequence of people who know how to create and manage a culture at a time of profound change, and did it through relationships and connections.

There’s one question that is explicitly raised in the book but never answered, so I thought I’d ask: How are the Sunlit made? Or is that a trade secret?
I am sorry to tell you that that is absolutely a trade secret, and you must stay tuned to find out. But you wouldn’t be wrong if you started thinking about those subway algorithms, and other ways of being a shared mind . . .

What’s next? Will there be more stories about Teixcalaan, or in Teixcalaan’s universe? Or something completely different?
There is a direct sequel to A Memory Called Empire, titled A Desolation Called Peace, coming out in 2020, which is a book about unwinnable wars, incomprehensible aliens and apocalyptic violenc—and also space kittens, unwise kissing and interstellar mail fraud. It’s the second part of Mahit’s story, and I’m very excited to be telling it. I absolutely don’t rule out writing more Teixcalaan books, either—the universe is enormous, and I love it quite desperately and have lots of ideas for books I could write. We’ll see how these two books are received and what my publisher is interested in!

But I’m also working on two other non-Teixcalaanli, novel-length projects. One is a “science fantasy” co-written with my wife Vivian Shaw, which contains, in no particular order, a post-nuclear war desertscape, mass-concentration-inducing minerals, a dead city that talks, a political romance, a pre-fab imperial colony town, a steppe kingdom with a city on a mountainside, a possibly alien or possibly magic local king and a geologist/mining engineer who ends up becoming a cartographer (among other things).

The other is the novel I’m currently calling “the one about drought politics, the Santa Ana winds and arson investigation,” because I’m terrible at titles. That one is my cities-and-climate-change novel, and to my fascination and despair, it seems to be about Los Angeles. As a New Yorker, I find this a bit distressing. But that’s what I get for really thinking about how Raymond Chandler books work, and whether they could fruitfully be combined with Peake’s Gormenghast and Tana French’s The Trespasser.

I’ve also got some plans in the works for a nonfiction book wthathich is about narrative-making, Byzantium, politics and possible futures—stay tuned, that’s a 2021 sort of thing.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of A Memory Called Empire.

Author photo by Karen Osborne.

We talked to A Memory Called Empire author Arkady Martine about faster-than-light travel, the joys of creating a complicated naming-system and which historical figure’s memories she’d like implanted in her brain.

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

J.S. Barnes

Interview by Noah Fram

J.S. Barnes takes readers to fog-choked Victorian London in Dracula’s Child, which imagines what happened after the events of Bram Stoker’s iconic Dracula.

What inspired you to revisit Dracula?
I’ve always loved the book, ever since I first read it as a boy. I’ve enjoyed versions of the story in other mediums, of course, but it’s the book to which I’ve always been drawn back. It’s often struck me as odd, however, that Stoker never wrote a sequel, when it seems to me that there are clear seeds planted in plain sight for just such an undertaking. I reread the novel about five years ago, and the scope for continuation seemed to leap out at me. It was almost inevitable, then, that I should start my own homage to it, a real passion project.

Who is your favorite character in Stoker’s original novel?
Probably Renfield, the lunatic who acts as a weird kind of barometer for the Count. There was no way to bring him back for this sequel, however, given his fate in the original! Out of the characters whom I’ve had a chance to write myself, I’d have to go with Mina Harker. Unflappable and determined in Stoker’s account, she’s grown even tougher and more watchful in the years that have passed before we meet her again in Dracula’s Child.

If you were to pick another horror or fantasy classic to revisit, what would it be and why?
Wow, there are so many to choose from! I’m actually working on just such a project at the moment—a sequel to a seminal work of late 19th-century horror. More on this as soon as we can announce it! But I’d also love to revisit many others—Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories in particular!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dracula's Child.

Why do we continue to be fascinated with vampires?
Even as trendier monsters come and go, vampires keep on speaking to us. Both scary and sympathetic, they represent simultaneously what we dread and what we long for. They change according to the times in which they’re written—each generation’s version of the vampire myth is different—while also, at their core, staying the same.

When writing Dracula’s Child, did you aim to address any current-day issues? Or were you more focused on reviving Stoker’s original mood and setting?
The aim was very much to channel Stoker’s voice. That said, it’s impossible not to be influenced by the times in which you’re writing, so I’m sure that there are moments of applicability here to our own era. After all, so many of the concerns and dilemmas of Stoker’s time are still with us in some form or another.

J.S. Barnes takes readers to fog-choked Victorian London in Dracula’s Child, which imagines what happened after the events of Bram Stoker’s iconic Dracula.

What inspired you to revisit Dracula?
I’ve always loved the book, ever since I first read it as a boy.…

Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical Fantasy

Nghi Vo

Interview by Noah Fram

When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby entered the public domain in 2021, it became free game for adaptation. But unfortunately for any future reimaginings of the iconic Jazz Age novel, it’s going to be hard to top Nghi Vo’s historical fantasy, The Chosen and the Beautiful.

Shifting narrators from Nick Carraway to Jordan Baker, Daisy’s best friend and a fan favorite, Vo adds even greater power to Fitzgerald’s depiction of the haves and have-nots of American capitalism by making Jordan the adopted Vietnamese daughter of a rich, white couple. We talked to Vo about Jordan's idiosyncratic allure, the dangers of Hemingway and more.

The Chosen and the Beautiful is a stunning book in its own right, but I’m essentially obligated to ask: What led you to adapt The Great Gatsby and why did you choose this particular genre?
Well, I'm absolutely a fantasist, so of course I was going to write it as a fantasy, and plus, it's just too much fun to miss. The ’20s were wild to begin with, and the temptation to imagine people drinking demon's blood cocktails, trading faces and chasing ghosts was far too strong for me.

The idea of writing something like The Chosen and the Beautiful has been in my mind since I read the book in high school, but it didn't leap to sharp focus until I was chatting with my agent Diana Fox, and she asked if I had any projects I might like to tackle in the future. I told her about what I would do with The Great Gatsby, she told me to stop writing what I was writing to work on that story instead, and that's how Chosen came about.

One of the challenges of adapting a widely known work of fiction is creating something new and vital on a well-established canvas. How did you go about finding spaces to add intrigue, twists and surprises, especially since your readers will most likely be familiar with the events of The Great Gatsby itself?
So in writing The Chosen and the Beautiful, I more than doubled Fitzgerald's word count. This actually makes a lot of sense to me because when I went back to read The Great Gatsby, what I found from a mechanical perspective is that Gatsby is a brick of a book in disguise. Fitzgerald doesn't spell things out so long as the reader walks away with the general point. There are a ton of spaces to explore in the original. The ones that stand out most significantly to me are the secret conversations Jordan Baker is canonically having with Jay Gatsby, the ones that actually set the whole thing into motion, but those are far from the only ones! (cough, lever scene, cough)

"This is one memorable summer in what is going to go on to be a very strange but excitingly entertaining life."

The Chosen and the Beautiful is an exquisitely researched book. Is research a typical aspect of your writing process? And how did you go about it in this case?
Well, I started by reading The Great Gatsby a few times and highlighting everything I didn't understand, every throwaway reference and every sentence that made me wonder what was going on. Then I went after that specific thing, and usually what that did was open the door to a better understanding not only of what Fitzgerald was doing, but of the era itself. One good example is Daisy's casual mention of the twilight sleep when she gave birth to Pammy—I had no idea what the twilight sleep was, and looking it up sent me down a rabbit hole of reproductive rights, medical history and period views on childbirth, motherhood and the rights of women. In general, I find that the more granular my research gets, the better off I am.

I sometimes find myself talking or writing in the tone of whatever I just read or my current long-term project, even in unrelated contexts. Early 20th-century prose is so distinctive, especially that of Fitzgerald, so I’m a little curious: Did it bleed over into other things you were doing as well?
It did! I went to read Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates to fix myself up afterwards. I'm a deeply susceptible writer, so I have to actually regulate my reading when I'm in project mode. A poorly timed dash of Hemingway can be disastrous.

Jordan Baker is often thought of as an accessory to the core tragedy of The Great Gatsby, but in The Chosen and the Beautiful you’ve given her a tragedy all her own. What drew you to fleshing out that character in particular?
I think one of the cool things about The Great Gatsby is that Jordan absolutely has something going on in the background. Nick doesn't see it because his eyes are full of Gatsby and the glory of the American Dream turned pyrotechnic, but Jordan's living her own life already in the book. She has her own motivations and her own agenda, things that are murky in the original text, so when I sat down to figure her out for Chosen, it was a lot like working backwards to find her. And then, you know. I added a magical Vietnamese heritage.

"Jordan wears her identities with defiance because to do otherwise is to disappear, and she won't have that."

This book tackles a variety of issues, but seems to keep coming back to questions of agency, especially in communities that lack it. What were the broad themes you were considering when writing this book, and what made this format—a literary adaptation, yes, but also historical fantasy more broadly—so well-suited to that task?
One of the posts that I wrapped this narrative around was the idea of being a foreigner, of being othered so often and so rigorously that it became an identity all its own. Jordan wears her identities with defiance because to do otherwise is to disappear, and she won't have that. There's what Jordan wants, what Jordan has resigned herself to and the emerging realization of what she is capable of. It seemed like the liberation and modernization of the ’20s combined with the shadows of World War I and the Spanish flu would be a great place to explore those ideas!

In some ways, The Chosen and the Beautiful lives in multiple genres at once. How do you think about where this book fits alongside other fantasy novels? Were there other books or writers that served as inspirations, other than The Great Gatsby?
When I think about literary inspirations for The Chosen and the Beautiful, I inevitably come back to Angela Carter, most specifically, her work in Nights at the Circus. In that novel, it never mattered what was real or true—what mattered was the story. You didn't have to decide whether or not to believe it, whether it could have happened or not. You're just along for the ride, and that's what I hope for with Chosen, that it's good enough people will come along for the ride.

Fantasy writers (and reviewers, truth be told) can obsess about magic systems, which is part of why I found it so remarkable that your magic is as indistinct and varied as it is. What kinds of inspirations did you draw on for it? Or more generally, where did it come from? 
This is one of the joys and challenges of writing in a first-person perspective and from the perspective of a person who's as strong-willed and canny as Jordan. Jordan exists very hard in her world, and through a lot of effort, she makes it look effortless. To me, that meant that I absolutely had to know how Jordan's world works, but since I'm writing as Jordan, I have to be entirely blasé about it. It's a fun balance to strike, and the moments where it does come out, in Daisy's water witch abilities, in Gatsby's own skills, felt enormously validating.

About halfway through the book, Jordan talks about how much space and air men could take up. That talk crystallized the theme of female agency running through The Chosen and the Beautiful and the historical pattern of male heroes in fantasy. You’ve talked in previous interviews about the importance of point of view when writing historical fiction. Did those considerations change at all for you while writing a historical fantasy?
This would have been a very different story if I had chosen to write it from anyone else's point of view! Jordan's lens allows me and, by extension, the reader to look where Jordan looks. It's at once wonderful because we're suddenly at right angles to the original narrative, and at the same time, it's maddening because Jordan doesn't look like a historian or an anthropologist might. She doesn't even look at things like a storyteller does. If anything, I hope I succeeded in creating the impression that this is one memorable summer in what is going to go on to be a very strange but excitingly entertaining life.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Chosen and the Beautiful.

I won’t get into specifics so as to not spoil anything, but I love the ending of The Chosen and the Beautiful. It is profoundly moving, and it changed the way I interpreted things from earlier in the book. When did you decide on the ending, and its connections to the flashbacks from Jordan’s past?
Okay, I had that ending in mind from the moment I decided to write this. It's there because of a specific line in The Great Gatsby, and it felt so natural that I keep forgetting other people aren't in on it. It was like something falling into place, and I'm still so pleased with that ending and how it feels to me.

What advice would you give to other writers setting out to adapt canonized literary classics or existing historical narratives?
Whatever it is, just start out by loving it. I'm the last person to tell you that you can't write out of spite, but when it comes to adapting someone else's story and putting your mark on it, loving it or being able to find something to love in it is going to get you through a lot more than anger.

Lastly, what’s next on your plate? Do you have any more projects coming up?
More Singing Hills, more dead people, more people who should be dead, and oddly enough, a lot of weaponry!

Nghi Vo takes The Great Gatsby on a dizzying, magical joyride in her new historical fantasy, The Chosen and the Beautiful.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Zoraida Córdova

Interview by Noah Fram

In The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, the acclaimed young adult and romance author Zoraida Córdova takes inspiration from her Ecuadorian heritage to create a family saga that’s more than worthy of its comparisons to works by Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. An instant classic, Córdova’s tale is complex but ceaselessly compelling, and features some of the most beautiful writing to be found in any genre this year.

You’ve won acclaim for your YA and romance novels, and Orquídea is your first adult fantasy. Who did you write Orquídea for? Was it for a specific audience, or more of a story you felt you just needed to tell?
Every book I write is for myself. My YA is for my teen self, who hungered for magical stories. My middle grade is for the painfully shy kid I once was, one who wanted adventure. My adult romance is for the version of myself that denies being a romantic (though I am). The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina is for the person I am now. It was always meant to be an adult novel, though its inspiration came from a short story I wrote for the YA witch anthology Toil & Trouble. The more I explored the characters, who’ve changed quite a bit from the short story source, the more I knew there was no way this book could be YA.

Many of your previous novels have belonged to series or collections. Do you envision Orquídea as the start of a new series?
No, the story of the Montoyas was always going to be a standalone. I’m starting to become very partial to standalones. There are a lot fewer rules to keep track of from book to book.

“I wanted to pose the question, ‘What price would you pay for survival?’”

All of the names in the book have meanings that are important to the plot, but you only explicitly explain some of them. Where did you get the inspiration behind the names you chose?
As with all my books, I reach for family names first. Orquídea’s name [which means orchid in Spanish] was originally Rosa, but the more I wrote her backstory, it didn’t feel right. As for Marimar, Orquídea’s granddaughter, I borrowed the name from “Marimar,” my favorite telenovela starring Mexican superstar Thalia. I spend way too much time on names and will sometimes fill entire pages with a character’s name, plus alternates, until it looks, sounds and feels right when I speak it.

How did the story change between when you started writing it and when you finished?
This book taught me how to slow down. Young adult editors tend to give suggestion notes like “cut for pacing” quite a bit. When it came to Orquídea, my editor at Atria gave me breathing room and space to explore the heart of the story. Every editorial round was another layer of a large house, but that house needs a strong foundation.

There’s an amazing amount of detail in your characterizations! How did you go about deciding which details mattered and how to weave them into the final book?
I wish I had a better answer than “I write for myself first.” But I do. I’m a visual writer and spend a lot of time thinking about what a scene looks like. Smells like. Sounds like. I need to want to live there first. Then, my editor comes in and tells me when I’ve gone too far or not far enough.

You draw on your own family stories throughout the novel, but were there other key inspirations behind the fantastical elements of this book?
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina is perhaps the first time some readers are going to read about an Ecuadorian family. That is both exciting and terrifying. Exciting for obvious reasons, but terrifying because it’s hard to encompass all the experiences of any one place. I pulled from my own family stories for inspiration. For instance, when I was a little girl, my uncle had a visible scar on his belly, and he told 5-year-old Zoraida that he’d wrestled a crocodile in the river. I don’t know if that actually happened, but that was the inspiration for the River Monster that Orquídea meets. It was also important to me to include bits of history about Guayaquil, Ecuador, which is why I set pivotal scenes on the Cerro Santa Ana, the birthplace of the city, as well as La Atarazana, which is where I grew up. I hope readers enjoy those details.

How did the need to incorporate both English and Spanish impact your writing, especially with a story that’s in conversation with classic Spanish-language magical realism?
Spanish is my first language. When I was in junior high school, I was embarrassed to speak it because there were a few kids who made fun of me. We’re also living in a xenophobic climate where we see videos of Spanish speakers getting screamed at or accosted for speaking something that isn’t English. I’m proud to speak two languages, and when I write a Spanish-speaking character or family, it’s only natural that Spanish should be incorporated, even if it’s in small phrases. Magical realism, as a literary movement, sprung from Latin America, which is another reason why I didn’t pull back from any instance where a character speaks Spanish.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina.

Do you think of the magic in your book as an intrinsic part of the world you built or as a foreign entity?
Absolutely intrinsic. The magic is a part of Orquídea’s journey and the very thing that gives her the ability to transform and survive. I did want to balance the magic with the contemporary world. I wanted to pose the question, “What price would you pay for survival?” The answer is of course extrapolated into the magical.

Author photo by Melanie Barbosa.

Zoraida Córdova’s first adult fantasy is an instant classic.

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