Anyone embarking on a boat-based vacation should not expect to encounter Shannon Chakraborty on the lido deck. It’s not that she has anything against shuffleboard, per se; it’s more of a self-preservational instinct. “The idea of open ocean terrifies me,” the bestselling fantasy author explained in a call from her home in New Jersey. “I joke with my family that I will never go on a cruise. I love the water, but I have enough fear and respect for it that I never want to be out of sight of land.”

Fortunately for her fans—all around the world, as her work has been published in more than a dozen languages—Chakraborty’s imagination is not so landlocked. In The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, her inventive and exhilarating start to a new historical fantasy trilogy, the author enters full pirate mode. Her titular protagonist is a seasoned 12th-century sea captain who’s lured out of self-imposed retirement by an offer she can neither resist nor refuse. 

Amina left home at age 16 and was at sea for 15 years, becoming one of the most notorious pirates in the Indian Ocean. But after her daughter, Marjana, was born, Amina left her criminal activities behind, choosing instead to hunker down in her family’s mountainous home in southern Arabia, surrounded by jungle that protects them from prying eyes but close enough to the coast to hear the sea.

Staying in one place for 10 years has stirred up a discomfiting swirl of emotions in Amina. The time with her daughter is precious, as is the knowledge that staying away from the ocean has kept them safe. But Amina also misses the freedom of doing whatever she desired, surrounded by her crew, a loyal and talented found family that understood and reveled in the thrill of never knowing where they’d end up next. 

Thus, Amina is particularly primed to accept an unexpected offer from Salima, the uber-wealthy mother of Amina’s former crewman Asif. Asif’s daughter has been kidnapped, and if Amina can figure out who captured her and bring her home, the reward money means Amina will never again have to worry about providing for her family. And, most enticingly, it’s a chance for Amina to achieve one last impossible victory, which could boost her legacy from well known and slightly infamous to unquestionably legendary.

Amina’s powerful combination of fierce maternal instinct and undeniable ambition was top of mind for Chakraborty as she embarked on her new literary adventure, which began mere months after she concluded her beloved Daevabad trilogy with 2020’s The Empire of Gold. 

When Chakraborty began writing The City of Brass, the first book in the trilogy, “I never actually imagined I would be a published author,” she says. “I had slight hopes, but I was [writing] mostly to keep my sanity.” She was caring for her newborn daughter and working full time while her husband contended with a demanding medical residency. “I wrote as enjoyment so I could play in the historical worlds I loved,” she says, having always wanted to pursue a graduate degree in medieval history. And then, she says with a laugh, “when the books went to auction, I was like, okay, I guess I do this now!”

Although she was an established and acclaimed author by the time the COVID-19 pandemic began, Chakraborty was consumed by uncertainty when virtual schooling took over her home life. “I think we can kind of forget the doom of that first six months of the pandemic,” she says. “I just assumed I was never going to have time to write again. And it almost felt selfish; my husband was treating COVID patients and my daughter was having an incredibly difficult time.” 

But then, she says, “I pushed into that, because I wanted to write about parenthood and motherhood and talk about the points where you can love your children, they are the center of your world . . . but you can still want more. And it’s not selfish to want that.”

The thought of other mothers experiencing the same feelings led to the creation of Amina, a woman who deeply loves her daughter but is also proud of her decades of experience as a ship’s captain and the accompanying wide range of skills she’s developed, from prevailing in hand-to-hand combat to diffusing crew quarrels to navigating stormy seas. “I wanted to write a story for us,” Chakraborty says of her fellow mothers, “and talk about how that [struggle] is something that has always happened.”

Chakraborty also drew on her abiding affinity for the ancient past. “My love of history has always come before my love of fantasy,” she says. “I was one of those strange kids reading up on the Titanic at 9 years old.” That zeal for research has helped Chakraborty immerse herself and her readers in fabulous and fantastical new worlds. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi’s Indian Ocean setting is rife with danger and intrigue, peopled with memorable characters, crackling magic and supernatural creatures. “I always found the idea of these littoral oceanic societies fascinating,” Chakraborty says. “We look for land-based empires and trade routes, and we don’t really look at the ways that oceans and seas connect people. . . . You see a lot of shared cultures and storytelling, and you find very similar stories in India that you then find in Yemen and in East Africa.”

One of those common elements, per her extensive research, was a pervasive belief in the supernatural. “Magic was just considered real,” she says. “It was accepted by a majority of the population.” Chakraborty knows that this concept “could be difficult for modern readers to understand, but if you’re going to write about the past you’ve got to write about where people were coming from.”

Chakraborty is constantly thinking about the disparity between historical reality and the false impressions people draw from what is taught in school or gleaned from popular culture. “Not everybody is privileged to go to college and take undergraduate and graduate courses on history, so a lot of what we understand of the past is very much determined by fictional presentations of it,” she says. “And when we have discussions of the medieval world in particular, especially in the West, we often have this very grim, dark idea that Europe was [completely] white, we talk about the Dark Ages when everything was miserable for women . . . but you have to peel back and say, well, where did those ideas come from? What work are we highlighting?”

The author provides suggestions for further reading on her website, hoping to stimulate such questions in pursuit of a more critical discourse. “By being able to show my receipts and my historical work,” Chakraborty says, “I’m [encouraging] my readers to look at the past a little differently.”

Another shift in perspective that Chakraborty is passionate about is her certainty that fantasy has room for exciting, inspiring stories about women who are no longer in their 20s. She says, “Adventure doesn’t stop when you’re 22 years old, and so much fantasy is focused on this extremely narrow age range. . . . But you still don’t know what you’re doing at 40 or 50, you still make mistakes, you’re still trying to have fun and take care of your family.” 

“I also feel like life experiences do matter and time does matter,” Chakraborty adds. “It would be completely unfathomable to me that Amina’s crew would be able to work on this mystery if they hadn’t been at sea and sailing and learning and thieving and poisoning and researching for the past 20 or 30 years. You need those talents, and they take time.”

Having a middle-aged woman as a protagonist also allowed Chakraborty to explore complex themes of faith and growth. “I wanted to write a story about a character who deals with struggle and hardship in a way that comes back to her faith,” she says. “Amina is a devout Muslim, but she’s also someone who is very open about the ways she has failed, particularly in her early life. She’s a pirate, she’s a criminal, she was a thief and murderer, and she’s still coming back to religion and to God in ways that I felt we don’t have a lot of stories about—people who fail and then find their faith later in life.” 

“As someone who is religious myself,” she adds, “it speaks to an idea of mercy and compassion about God and about faith that I don’t think we see enough or talk about enough.”

Readers curious about how this new series will diverge from Chakraborty’s previous books will be interested to know that “whereas the Daevabad trilogy was told from the point of view of magical creatures, this book is very much from the point of view of the humans who have to deal with them.” She also says that “there are lots of Easter eggs, and a character from Daevabad does show up.” 

After all, Chakraborty says with the sort of enthusiasm that any bibliophile will recognize, “All of history is a story. It’s how we understand the world, how we understand the past, how we put facts together, how we describe anything. Everything is story. . . . I think it’s probably one of the most profoundly human things we engage in.”

Picture of Shannon Chakraborty by Melissa C. Beckman.

In their high-octane and highly entertaining update of Water Margin, a classic Chinese novel about a band of noble bandits facing off against an oppressive government, S.L. Huang evokes the joyous spirit of classic martial arts films.

The characters of Lin Chong, a combat instructor who eventually joins the bandits, and Lu Junyi, one of Lin Chong’s aristocratic students, feel like they are in conversation: One strives for big change and the other strives to be a model minority. Did you conceive of them as two sides of the same coin from the start?
It’s somewhat unusual for me to plan a character arc to this extent, but yes, that was 100% planned. In the real world, I’m frequently frustrated by a sort of “flattening” of people who are in marginalized spaces; we’re frequently perceived as a monolith who must all have the same views and make the same choices. In reality, there are plenty of difficult intracommunity conversations.

I wanted to portray real-feeling people who cannot be easily “purity tested.” Lin Chong has had to fight and claw to achieve an unusual job and status for a woman, but is determined to keep her head down so as not to lose what she’s wrought for herself. Lu Junyi has more high-flying ideals, but she can also afford to: She’s wealthy and insulated, and her social progressivism is more of an academic than a lived variety. Both are good people on the whole, and both are somewhat frustrated by the other’s politics.

Without giving too much away, I wanted their arcs to, in a way, reflect and cross—and for both of them to fall toward a messier gray area where they have to acknowledge hard truths about themselves and their society.

What do you think Lu Junyi would have been if she could have chosen for herself?
Hm, I think it depends on what life experiences she’s faced with. If you plopped her in modern times, she’d probably start off as the type of annoying college student who thinks she knows exactly what all the correct and moral answers are, and is a little bit judgy of people with other opinions. (Lots of us were like that in college!)

On the other hand, she’s open-minded enough that more and more exposure to people different from her would start to expand and complicate her worldview, just as it happens in the book. Although, hopefully less painfully for her.

Eventually, if she were born in modern-day America, I think she’d probably end up doing some pretty amazing media work for a nonprofit she’s passionate about! Elsewhere in the world, she’d probably be doing something similar, though perhaps with slightly more danger to herself . . .

Historically, there’s been a dearth of middle-aged protagonists—especially middle-aged women—in science fiction and fantasy, but that has begun to change in recent years. Why did you decide to center this story around older characters?
Partly because there HAS been such a dearth of such characters—I’m always drawn toward writing what I don’t see.

But also, for the story I wanted to tell, I needed characters who had some amount of life experience. I didn’t want this to be a story of only young prodigies; I wanted this to be a story that included people who’d had time to build extensive pasts, histories and baggage.

Many scenes—and characters!—are equal parts humorous and deadly. How did you strike that balance, and why was it important to you to bring it to the forefront?
The light but true answer is that I grew up on action-comedy movies! I love action, and I love it even more when it’s lightened by humor.

As much as I tried to treat the themes of The Water Outlaws deeply and seriously, I also wanted it to be escapist and fun.

In addition to your work as an author, you’re also a Hollywood stunt performer and professional armorer. Your love of choreography definitely shines in The Water Outlaws, as does your love of wuxia, the Chinese historical fantasy genre that focuses on martial artists. What originally drew you to those worlds?
Honestly, I think the same thing that draws a lot of us to sci-fi & fantasy—a hunger for adventure and a love of imagination.

I’ve said before that I think I ended up doing stunts because it’s basically extreme LARPing, ha. I guess I never grew out of yearning for that immersive experience of living the stories I grew up with. And my favorites were always the ones with swords!

How did you approach translating the fantastical brutality of wuxia onto the page?
I tend to write my action in what I like to describe as a “cinematic” way, in that I want it to feel both real and also slightly larger than life. This fits very well with wuxia, which tends to have a similar feel—think, for instance, of martial arts movies that engage in fantastical wire work without any acknowledgment of special powers.

It’s always important to me to engage with the harm and consequences of physical violence—but equally important to me to write glorious, imagination-spanning sword fights!

We don’t see a lot of magic in the early parts of the book, but it’s always hovering on the edges of your world. What was interesting to you about taking this understated approach to magic?
This was very much informed by my love of wuxia! Supernatural elements are often extremely understated, or an accepted part of the world that only comes up when it comes up. It’s not an approach I see a lot in European-derived fantasy—where the magical world building is often a central focus—and I was very interested in writing in that paradigm.

Classical Chinese literature also tends toward this approach to the supernatural, that it’s an expected part of the world and not the focus of the narrative. This includes Water Margin, which was the direct inspiration that I was reimagining in this book!

You have a beautiful, poetic way of describing gender and bringing the nuances of gender fluidity to life. Why was it important for you to explore this territory in The Water Outlaws?
Well, it’s personal to me and to many of my friends. My day-to-day life intersects with a lot of queer spaces, so the gender diversity of the bandits is simply a reflection of my reality! 

(Although I adjusted the terminology and dialogue about it for my fantasy world, as I didn’t want it to feel exactly one-to-one with how any modern culture talks about it today.)

Was there anything in Water Margin that you wanted to put in The Water Outlaws that just didn’t fit? And was there anything you were happy to leave behind in your own retelling?
There was so much that didn’t fit! In particular, three of my favorite characters—Hua Rong, Dai Zong and Wu Song—don’t appear in the main narrative. Hua Rong I managed to add into the epilogue as a master archer, but Dai Zong’s main ability, Taoist powers of traveling magically fast, was slightly too story-breaking to introduce. And Wu Song’s tale, which is full of tiger-fighting, adultery and revenge, was just far too large and expansive to do justice along with all the other pieces I was already focusing on.

Hopefully I can add some of them if there are sequels!

In terms of what I was happy to leave behind, there was plenty of that, too. I love Water Margin to death, but part of the reason I wanted to do a genderswapped version in the first place was that the original is such a highly male-centric and misogynistic tale. So that was first on my list to turn on its head in my retelling.

In particular, one of the bits I was pettily excited to cut was the marital fate of Hu Sanniang, one of only female bandits out of the 108. Despite its misogyny, the original rarely has our ultra-violent heroes engage in sexual violence or coercion, thankfully. But unfortunately, the reason for this feels a lot less like a knowledge that it’s wrong, and much more like a scorn of anything having to do with carnal desires. The bandits have a single member who shows strong desire for women, which is somehow equated with him carrying off women by force—and the leader stops him by “finding him a wife,” i.e., marrying him to one of the only three female bandits.

That female bandit is Hu Sanniang, an amazing fighter who is capable of beating most of the men, and one of the best characters in the original novel. I strongly object to how done wrong she was by this piece of the original book, and I took great delight in giving my Hu Sanniang a backstory of escaping an undesired marriage and cutting her would-be forced husband entirely.

Photo of S.L. Huang by Chris Massa.