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Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Tom Perrotta

Interview by Alden Mudge

Tom Perrotta is often called a satirist. It’s a nice, neat label, as square-cornered as a pigeonhole. But it’s just not true.

"The classical definition of satire is that you’re exposing the folly of human behavior,” Perrotta says during a call to his home in the Boston suburb of Belmont. Perrotta lives there with his wife, the writer Mary Granfield, and their two teenaged children. “For me there is no position where it is possible to be a human and not be implicated in the folly of human behavior. I always feel I’m implicated in that folly.” 

Perrotta supposes he earned the satirist label from the movie Election, which starred Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. He wrote the novel on which the movie is based. “Election is one of the great satires in recent film history,” Perrotta says. “It was much more satirical than the book. Just compare Tracy Flick in the book with what Reese Witherspoon does with her in the film. The book is a comic novel but it’s not a satirical novel. The film pushes out! Because Election first brought me to the attention of most people, I’m in this box: People think of me, they think ofElection, and they think of the movie.”

Perrotta’s boldest novel to date puts a whole new spin on apocalyptic anxiety after a Rapture-like event.

Not that Perrotta has any objections to the movie. “I really loved the movie, myself. I still do. It really holds up too, and it’s been really influential in all sorts of ways. I think the success of the movie basically changed my life. I had published a few books and I was struggling to find an audience. I felt a real difference in the aftermath.

“I used to have that moment where I’d be introduced at a party and say, oh, I’m a writer, and people would say, have you written anything I’ve read? And I’d name my books and I’d get that terrible blank look. Now I could say, well, there was this movie with Reese Witherspoon, and people would light up,” Perrotta recalls. “It felt like a big difference that my name was attached to something people had positive feelings toward. The other concrete thing it did was allow me to find work as a screenwriter, which allowed me to stop teaching and really solidified my sense of myself as a professional writer.”

Still, the satire label that has trotted beside Perrotta like an over-friendly stray dog does not come close to encapsulating his estimable gifts as a writer. Or, as Perrotta says wryly, “Certainly what I’m doing now is very far away in terms of tone from that movie.”

That’s for sure. Perrotta’s early novels were set in working-class New Jersey, where he grew up and developed a passion for writing that eventually took him to Yale. But since his novel Little Children (2004), “there’s been a shift in the suburban territory that I write about” that both comically and tenderly reflects the attitudes and personal dilemmas of residents of the more affluent middle-class suburb where he now lives.

Not only that, his use of language has matured. Reminded that he once proclaimed that he wrote in the plain American English tradition of Ernest Hemingway, Perrotta laughs and says, “If you go back to Bad Haircut (1994) you’ll definitely see more of the Hemingway influence. I mean those sentences were just so short! But even then I was using that shortness for comedy in a way that Hemingway didn’t. Probably since Joe College (2000) the sentences have gotten looser and more complex in terms of syntax. So I’ve moved away from the Hemingway impulse. But I have to say that I have not moved away from the idea that literary fiction should work the way that popular fiction works, in terms of being a pleasure to read, with a story that moves swiftly.

“I have always wanted to be democratic,” Perrotta says. “My parents didn’t go to college and a lot of people I grew up with are not ‘intellectuals’ in the graduate school sense. I never wanted to write for a self-selected group of people who see themselves as literary. I want to write for anybody who is interested.”

All of these maturing impulses meld in near-perfect harmony to bring us Perrotta’s newest, most audacious and best novel to date, The Leftovers.

Set in the leafy suburb of Mapleton, The Leftovers opens on Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection, three years to the day after a Rapture-like event has caused millions of people all over the world to disappear in an instant. In reaction, some people, like Laurie Garvey, join a monastic penitential cult called The Guilty Remnant, whose members dress all in white, smoke cigarettes as an article of faith and ghost about Mapleton to remind people that the end is near. Others, like Laurie’s college-age son Tom, follow the prophet Holy Wayne, a former UPS delivery van driver, and his Holy Hugs Movements. But many, like Laurie’s husband Kevin, the mayor of Mapleton, struggle to lead normal lives and keep their children—in Kevin’s case his teenage daughter Jill—from going off the rails. The action of the novel unfolds over nine months, as the Garvey family and their friends and acquaintances struggle to make sense of a world that is in most ways much the same as before but is also profoundly different.

Perrotta, who devours literary biographies and hardboiled detective fiction rather than literary novels while he is composing his own books, admits that he was thinking about books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road while writing The Leftovers. 

“Obviously The Road was on my mind. But I think this book is almost the opposite ofThe Road. The landscape of The Road is utterly altered in the physical and in the human/social sense. What I wanted to do was create a world where the landscape wasn’t altered at all physically or socially. But psychologically it’s completely different. So whatever strangeness there is, is hard to locate, aside from the people dressed in white who are smoking, I mean. There are some changes that are visible and troubling. But in most cases it’s just much more a sense of ‘I can no longer trust the nature of the world,’ and that creates this feeling of anxiety.” 

Another huge difference between The Leftovers and The Road is Perrotta’s gift for comedy. “I certainly found subject matter that is hard to treat comically. Loss is not easy to treat in a comical way,” he says with a laugh. Yet Perrotta is such a keen observer of human psychology—and human foibles—that many moments in The Leftovers are laugh-out-loud funny. “I think the comedy in this works best when it’s organic to the situation,” Perrotta says. “There’s comedy in incongruity. This juxtaposition of almost clinical grief with this insistence on living a normal life does create certain kinds of very dark comedy.”

But Perrotta’s comedy is colored by great empathy for his characters. “Certain characters open up over time. It’s very satisfying for me as a writer to live with these characters long enough to get a fuller sense of who they are and how they fit into the story. They just seem to get more agency somehow to tell you a little bit about who they are.”

Among The Leftovers’ most appealing characters are the smart, vulnerable teenager Jill and her Goth friend Aimee. “I’ve written a lot about my own teenage years and coming of age. But with this book I suddenly realized I had to write the Jill sections from Jill’s perspective, and this time I was filtering that through my daughter and her friends, not through my own personal memories.” 

Perrotta notes, “I had this idea and it seized my mind—but for a long time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. It’s probably good for a writer to feel that way, to feel like you’re delving into messy, interesting, important subject matter without exactly knowing why. And I was starting to feel my identity was almost too solid. Like people talked about me in a certain way. Like they knew what a Tom Perrotta novel was. I wasn’t comfortable with that. You start going into the old bag of tricks too much. 

“Obviously some things in this book will be familiar—the setting and the subject matter will remind some people of other things I’ve written. But I think on the most basic ground level, I’ve forced myself into unfamiliar territory.”

It’s true. In this brilliant novel, he has definitely gotten himself a whole new bag of tricks. If you’ve never read a Tom Perrotta novel, now’s the time.

Tom Perrotta is often called a satirist. It’s a nice, neat label, as square-cornered as a pigeonhole. But it’s just not true.
Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Erin Morgenstern

Interview by Jillian Quint

The Night Circus is the story of two magicians who each select a champion to compete in a decades-long tournament that takes the form of a stranger-than-average circus. As competitors Celia and Marco match wits, and fall in love, the  reader becomes equally enamored of the complex, magical world that author Erin Morgenstern has created. We talked to Morgenstern—who describes herself as "a writer, a painter & a keeper of cats"—about the inspiration behind one of this fall's most touted debuts.

Literary/fantasy hybrids, from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell to The Magicians, are hotter than ever. To what extent were you aware of genre as you were writing?
I wasn’t even convinced it was a novel for a while so genre wasn’t something I thought about too much. I was mildly concerned that it was too literary to be fantasy and too fantasy to be literary—I hadn’t even considered hybrid territory an option—so I wrote the story the way it wanted to be told and figured I could worry about categorizing it when I was done.

Did you have the full parameters of the circus in your mind before you began, or did you discover as you went?
I began with the idea of endless looping tents with a bonfire in the center and I explored it as I went along. I didn’t have a map at all as far as what the circus was and how the world worked when I started writing. There was a lot of revising and trial and error involved before I discovered all its secrets. (If I even know all of them. Sometimes I think there are things in the circus that remain mysteries even to me.)

One of the great pleasures of reading The Night Circus is following the different time periods that intertwine throughout the narrative. Did you always intend to tell this story in non-chronological order and was it hard to keep track of what was happening when?

I always intended it to be non-linear. In early drafts it was even more so but it never really worked properly that way. It ended up too convoluted. I wanted the book itself to seem like the circus: individual glimpses of tents and pieces of story. And time is an underlying theme throughout, so it made sense to me to play with timeline and history. I did have to write out timelines to keep track of dates and ages quite a bit, but that forced me to keep everything organized.

Katherine Dunn (author of Geek Love) called The Night Circus a fable. Do you agree? If so, what is the lesson or moral learned?
I sometimes call it a fairy tale but I hadn’t thought of it as a fable, though it may have fable-esque qualities. I do think there are themes about making choices and following dreams and defying consequences that could probably be shaped into morals or lessons. Perhaps it is several fables tied into one tale.

Though readers of the novel are very much immersed in the circus, we see very little of the actual performances. Was this a conscious decision?
Originally I had long, sprawling descriptions of the circus but I think it was better to leave more to the imagination, to provide tastes rather than full courses. There were things that I never wanted to describe in detail, like Celia’s performances, which I have a feeling would defy description. I also wanted to leave the impression that there was more to the circus. More sights, more sounds, more tents around unseen corners.

Although Le Cirque des Rêves is quite obviously a fictional troupe, it feels very rooted in turn-of-the-century history and literary tradition. What type of research, both historical and literary, did you do to prepare?
I didn’t actually do much research. I’ve always been fond of that time period in movies and fashion and literature and I think all that previous exposure gave me a decent sense of style and tone. A lot of it was built around a gut-level feeling of what worked and what didn’t, and I occasionally checked to make sure I wasn’t being too terribly anachronistic. But I didn’t want to bend over backwards to make it properly historically accurate. I wanted it to feel believable more than anything else, as I like my fantasy to be grounded in reality.

Friedrick Thiessen, the circus’ reigning expert and academic, is an interesting character. What was it like to be charged with the (rather postmodern) task of writing about a person who studies your own fictional creation?
I suppose it was easier since I sometimes forget that I had created the circus. It seemed more like something that I discovered in my subconscious and excavated rather than something I built. Herr Thiessen is very dear to my heart and I think I understood him immediately—who he is and what the circus means to him, why he feels compelled to capture something of it in prose. He’s the person, along with Bailey, who sees the circus from the outside when so many of the other characters are unable to have that perspective, so to me it was the point of view that the circus was meant to be viewed from. It is his eyes that see the sum of the parts, his words that reflect the circus back on itself. I suppose it is a bit postmodern but, given the nature of the circus as a performance space, the audience plays an important role and Friedrick is the beating heart of that audience.

You say all your work is a fairy-tale of one kind or another. Can you elaborate?  What’s up next for you?
I think everything I create, whether in writing or painting, has a strong sense of story, that Once upon a time . . . element. Otherworldly but familiar, laced with magic and possibilities, with light and dark and shades of grey. The story-ness of books and art is important to me, that intangible quality that elevates them beyond words and pictures and gives them lives of their own.

As far as what I am working on next, it is another novel, which I suppose could be described as something of a film noir-flavored Alice in Wonderland. It is still figuring out what it wants to be, but it’s developing a life of its own already, so I think that’s a good sign.

Read our review of The Night Circus.

The Night Circus is the story of two magicians who each select a champion to compete in a decades-long tournament that takes the form of a stranger-than-average circus. As competitors Celia and Marco match wits, and fall in love, the…

Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Colson Whitehead

Interview by Alden Mudge

Colson Whitehead has a problem—a big problem. He can’t stop thinking about zombies, even when he’s asleep.

“I’ve been having zombie dreams ever since I saw Dawn of the Dead in seventh grade,” Whitehead says during a call to his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. “Some people have anxiety dreams about showing up late for school or having forgotten about that big assignment. I have zombie dreams.”

Whitehead is explaining the genesis of his newest marvel, Zone One, about a zombie fighter in lower Manhattan whose post-apocalypse nom de guerre is Mark Spitz.

“I had some guests out to Long Island but I was going through something and I think I really wanted to be alone. I was wishing that my guests would leave, and I had a dream that I was going downstairs to the living room and I was wondering if someone had cleared out the zombies yet. I woke up and I thought, hmmm, that’s something you have to consider: Once you put civilization back together, what do you do with all these zombies? So the book grew from there.”

Whitehead, a highly—and deservedly—praised novelist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, says his “schtick at the moment is to try different genres. Sag Harbor is a coming of age novel. John Henry Days has a very loose structure. The Intuitionist has a very tight structure. . . . In Zone One I wanted to pay homage to the zombie movies and horror movies that I loved as a kid and still love to watch.”

Of course Colson Whitehead inhabits a genre like no one else. And his take on zombie/horror movies pays homage to the form but is at the same time startlingly original. “I have a darkly absurdist sense of humor that is part of my personality,” he admits. 

Whitehead’s main character, Mark Spitz, is a supposedly mediocre human being. “My sense,” Whitehead explains, “is that if you’re incredibly dumb, you’d probably be killed off quickly, and if you’re really on top of things, you’d probably kill yourself.” 

“I thought . . . once you put civilization back together, what do you do with all these zombies? So the book grew from there.”

But Spitz is also the consciousness through which Whitehead delivers some of his most enthralling—and sometimes hilarious—observations about modern life: “But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met the second person. The ones that keep other people out and our madness in so we can continue to live.”

Or, describing a chopper trip over Central Park: “Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.”

Although Whitehead is a native New Yorker, Zone One is the first novel he has explicitly set in the city (The Intuitionist was set in a kind of “alternative gotham”). A meticulous researcher who plans out his work before he begins writing, he notes that “about two years ago at this time, I was taking photographs of downtown New York, trying to figure out what corners would be good settings for the story. Part of the tone in Zone One is a nostalgia for your lost city and trying to get it back. I spent six or nine months before I started actually writing the book researching and plotting it out. I mean, I knew where Mark Spitz was going to be on the last page on the very first day I started writing. Some people start with a blank page and see where the characters will take them. I always feel it’s hard enough to find the right words each day. If you wake up and don’t even know what’s going to happen, it’s twice as hard. That’s my simple model.” 

Whitehead’s “right words” make Zone One not just keenly observant and funny but often downright scary. Before signing up to fight zombies in lower Manhattan, Spitz tries to escape the horror of the all-pervasive plague that unleashed the zombies by making a harrowing journey to Northampton, Massachusetts. In retrospect, as with many horror movies, a reader might laugh, but in the moment, such is Whitehead’s skill, one is more likely to cringe or even scream. Zone One is at times quite disturbing.

“Well I was disturbed when I was writing it,” Whitehead says. No, he doesn’t think that was because he was contemplating the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. “I grew up in New York in the ’70s. It was a sort of apocalyptic New York then. But certainly tackling the idea of how you come back from disaster, how you make the world livable again after it has been destroyed, how you find those reserves of strength in yourself and other people was important. I wasn’t thinking about 9/11 specifically, but it was one of the many disasters, personal or communal, that I was thinking about.”

The father of a six-year-old daughter, Whitehead was newly divorced while working on Zone One and wrote the book “camped in the corner” of his smallish new digs. “I like working at home. There’s something about being able to make coffee, watch some CNN, take a nap and go back to writing that works for me. I play loud music when I work. When I have only a couple of hours left, I put on ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince and ‘Daydream Nation’ by Sonic Youth. That’s my exit music for all of my books.”

Whitehead is justifiably proud of the final pages of Zone One. “Finally after a year and a half, you get to what you’ve been building toward. What makes a good ending is secretly encoded all along.”

And the ending of Zone One is very good indeed.

 

Colson Whitehead has a problem—a big problem. He can’t stop thinking about zombies, even when he’s asleep.

“I’ve been having zombie dreams ever since I saw Dawn of the Dead in seventh grade,” Whitehead says during a call to his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene…

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

R.A. Salvatore

Interview by Michael Burgin

In the decades since he was first introduced, Drizzt Do’Urden has become a fantasy archetype on par with any of Tolkien’s Middle Earth crew. But unlike Bilbo, Gandalf and company, Drizzt’s adventures are still being newly minted by creator R.A. Salvatore. Neverwinter, the followup to 2010’s Gauntlgrym, is the second of six planned books in the Neverwinter Saga, a series that races ahead 100 years in the Forgotten Realms timeline. With the last of his original companions gone, Drizzt must forge new bonds while facing determined, powerful foes at every turn. While it’s anyone’s guess what awaits Salvatore’s iconic protagonist, it’s certain where the book itself will go—straight to The New York Times bestseller list, where 23 of Salvatore’s earlier books have already been.

You’ve written more than 20 novels featuring Drizzt Do’Urden. That’s a lot of books, a lot of New York Times bestseller lists and a lot of built-in and built-up fan assumptions and desires. Do you ever find your creative direction—be it for a character or an entire story—altered by the pull of reader expectations?
It’s hard to find that balance emotionally between satisfying yourself and satisfying the fans. I’ve always erred on the side of satisfying my own creative needs; I’m letting the story tell me where to go. And let’s be honest, when Wizards of the Coast decides to fast-forward the Forgotten Realms a hundred years, that forces some changes upon me that I might not have done otherwise. That’s just the reality of working in a shared world. I’m not going to be mad about it. If I don’t like it, I can go write in somebody else’s sandbox or make my own. But as far as the fans go, their reactions do have an impact.

Can you give us an example?
I wrote a book called Road of the Patriarch, featuring Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle—both villains.  Entreri has been a intricate part of the Drizzt series pretty much from the beginning. I wrote a short story [called “The Third Level” that recounts] his origin—as a child he was betrayed by a relative, by his mother, by a church, by everybody around him. At the end of Road of the Patriarch, Entreri has just burned down this temple in the city and he’s got a priest up on the ledge. He tells him to go, rebuild, stop lying to the people and to follow the tenets of his god, or Entreri will come back and burn the temple down again, this time with the priest in it. Right after that, he tells Jarlaxle, “Go away, I don’t need you anymore.” To me, that was Entreri for the first time in his life not hating himself. To me, that was a proper ending for Artemis Entreri.

Then the letters started coming in. Letters and emails from people sharing really personal stories of betrayals as children where they had been similarly abused, and begging me to keep going with Entreri. They had to see him healthy; they had to see him come through the other side of this epiphany he had in that book.

That sounds like a pretty heavy load to put on a fantasy writer.
It’s humbling. It’s a reminder that when you’re writing books and putting them up there for public consumption, people are letting you into their lives just a little bit as well. There’s no other way to put it—it’s humbling.

And how do you feel about fan fiction?
I won’t be beholden to it, but I love that people think enough of [my work] to go and do that. I’m not going to read it because that would get me in trouble, but if people want to do it, fine. If they try and sell is, they’re going to get sued, but that’s a whole different ball game.

What’s the latest on a Drizzt movie?
The good news is Hasbro really wants a Drizzt movie now. [Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns the Forgotten Realms setting.] With the Transformers movies and G.I. Joe, they’ve made lots of money in movies, so they are very interested in doing it. They are raising the profile; they are contacting people. Will anything come of it? I don’t know.

One of the things working against us? They are protecting an enormously successful and stable franchise. Every year a Drizzt book comes out, we know how many we’re going to sell. A good movie would help the franchise, but a really bad one could hurt something we all love.

You’ve written more than 53 novels in the last 20 years. That’s basically the definition of “prolific.” What’s an average writing workday look like for you?
On an average day, I get about two hours at the computer. Typically, the amount of words I can do in a day is between 500 and 2,000. Once I get over 2,000, I’ve kinda drained the battery. Every now and then, I have a 5,000-word day—usually a battle scene—but I haven’t had many of those lately. I must be getting old.

In addition to your host of writing endeavors, you’ve also been working, along with Todd McFarlane and Ken Ralston, for Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, which is releasing the open world role-playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in 2012. Your title is Executive Creator of Worlds . . .
Yes, I’m a creator of worlds—a CoW.

How does lore-building for a massive multiplayer online game compare with writing a novel?
It was very much like when I created the whole world of Corona for my DemonWars books. My job is not to design a game. We have mechanics designers—very good ones—who figure out things like class balance, the merits of fast travel versus walking or riding mounts, etc. No, my job was be the historian of the world, a world I’ve created. When a player enters the world, it has to all make sense. Why are these races where they are? Why does this particular faction hate that particular faction? Does the economy makes sense?

For the first year, all we did was world-build. I had a content team and an art team. I would meet with each team every week. At first, in the meetings with the content team, they would come in and say: “Here’s what we’re doing,” and present what they were working on. My most common response? “No. No. No.” Then I would take out the green binder that is the bible of our world, slam it down and say “How does what you’re doing relate to this? Because this is the Bible. You have to go by this.” After about three months I knew my job was almost done. Instead of “No, no, no!” I was saying, “Aw, that’s cool!” because they were getting it.

So you’re working with Todd McFarlane. You’re working with Curt Schilling. You’ve been on book tours with legends like Gaiman, Pratchett and Moorcock. Who else would you love to meet or work with?
I’d like to meet Vin Diesel because I know he’s read the books and we almost did the television series at one point, apparently. (He was interested in doing one.) I’d really like to meet him and get to know him a little bit. He’s a pretty cool guy from everything I’ve heard. I’d like to work with Ronnie Howard. If Ronnie Howard ever called me up and said, “I want to do one of your books in a movie,” I’d die on the spot because I just love his work.

How often do you have a “recognized in the street” moment?
Not often—I’m a writer. But there are moments. I was at a Renaissance Fair—King Richard’s Faire in Carver, Massachusetts, about 10-15 years ago, and who showed up but Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. They are having a blast. They are hanging out with people and are as fun as you would think from watching their music videos. All day long, people are following Tyler and Perry around like little puppy dogs, including most of the people I had come with. At one point, I’m standing outside this vendor’s stall. I’m just standing there enjoying this great October day in New England. Tyler and Perry are standing like 10 feet away from me, and for some reason they are alone. Then this kid walks out of the stall, looks over and his eyes pop out of his head. He goes running up, right past them, to me. They both looked at me, so I just kinda crossed my arms and went, “Hah!” So yeah, there are moments.

 

Michael Burgin writes from Nashville. You can find the entire transcript of his talk with R.A. Salvatore here.

 

In the decades since he was first introduced, Drizzt Do’Urden has become a fantasy archetype on par with any of Tolkien’s Middle Earth crew. But unlike Bilbo, Gandalf and company, Drizzt’s adventures are still being newly minted by creator R.A. Salvatore. Neverwinter, the followup to…

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Interview with Harriet McDougal, editor

Interview by Beth E. Williams

The day that fans have been eagerly anticipating for more than 20 years arrives on January 8 with the publication of A Memory of Light, the final entry in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

Like the progress of time itself, this remarkable fantasy series has had a long and circuitous journey. Author James Oliver Rigney Jr. launched the series in 1990, writing under the pen name Robert Jordan, and continued it until his death in 2007.

After reading a heartfelt eulogy to Jordan by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, Jordan’s widow and editor, Harriet McDougal, chose Sanderson for the difficult task of wrapping up the epic series. Working from Jordan’s voluminous notes, outlines, character lists and scenes (including the ending), Sanderson has completed the final three books in the series: The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light.

The final hefty volume, at more than 900 pages, will provide the answer that readers have clamored for: How will the Last Battle play out?

To provide a satisfying answer to that question, Sanderson was assisted by the members of “Team Jordan,” which includes Harriet McDougal, as well as longtime assistants/editors Maria Simons and Alan Romanczuk. We asked McDougal a few questions about this final chapter.

With Robert Jordan you did “curb-side editing” (editing a manuscript as it was written, chapter by chapter). How did your process work with Sanderson?
Harriet McDougal: With Brandon, Alan and Maria and I made broad-gauge suggestions and agreed with him on major trajectories, back in the spring of 2011. In early 2012, Brandon delivered a draft to us. We worked on this draft for weeks, sent revision suggestions back, doing this in bunches all spring long. In the summer of 2012 we worked long weeks on more revisions.

It was a different process. Remember, by the time of Jordan’s death we had worked together on about 20 books, Maria had been working with us for almost 12 years, and Alan for six.

It was more like working with Jordan on one of his early manuscripts. In the later books, he had already learned everything that would drive me nuts, so he didn’t do those things anymore.

What was the hardest part of seeing the series through to completion after your husband’s death?
The repeated reminder that he was no longer alive.

Can you share a favorite scene from A Memory of Light or from the series as a whole?
I have never forgotten Hopper’s death and joyful flight. Other than that, I love the whole series. And A Memory of Light as a whole.

How do you feel about the series coming to an end?
Sadness, joy and relief.

The day that fans have been eagerly anticipating for more than 20 years arrives on January 8 with the publication of A Memory of Light, the final entry in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

Like the progress of time itself, this remarkable fantasy series…

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Karen Lord

Interview by Gavin Grant

Caribbean author Karen Lord has taught physics, trained soldiers, worked in the Foreign Service and earned a Ph.D. in the sociology of religion. In her new novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, Lord manages to combine many of these experiences—along with her telling eye for detail—in the story of Grace Delarua, a mid-level scientist who has to work with a high-level refugee. Against the odds, the two begin to fall for each other. Although it begins with a tragedy, Lord’s inviting storytelling and range of voices make this novel a fascinating read, and we asked Lord, who lives in Barbados, a few questions about it.

What was the genesis of The Best of All Possible Worlds?
The precursors were the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami (more women and children than men were killed in certain fishing communities); gender imbalance in countries with prenatal screening and/or family size restrictions; and the effects of female-scarcity on societies. It didn’t become a story until one day I read a blog post about the Star Trek movie reboot, commenting that from what they’d seen of Vulcans offplanet, most of the survivors were likely male . . . and what would that mean for future societal dynamics?

From there I started some postcolonial musings. What happens when an empire is suddenly wiped out? How does a society transition from wealth and widespread influence to dependency and refugee status among those once considered inferior? I thought about the British and the Japanese empires during the 20th century. I imagined a benevolent and slightly aloof paternalism deeply shaken by unanticipated defeat.

I imagined a planet, Cygnus Beta, to provide a context to highlight those issues. Founded by refugees and adventurers from all over the galaxy, it is a place where groups have mixed and blended their genetic and cultural heritages while others have tried to hold onto a certain amount of tradition and homogeneity. The full gamut of preservation, adaptation and assimilation has been played out many times by different communities. I slipped in bits of history and myth when creating some of those communities. (In one case I was directly inspired by a modern-day news article about an actor who sliced his throat on stage when a prop knife was accidentally switched with a real knife!)

I took visual inspiration from countries I’ve visited, or wanted to visit: Guyana, Colombia, Trinidad, Montserrat, India, New Zealand, Australia (or at least the opera!), Malta, Wales, Jordan, Argentina and Iceland.

What happens when an empire is suddenly wiped out?

The Best of All Possible Worlds begins with an ungraspable tragedy and moves on leaving us in the same state as the novel's characters: with the ground swept away from beneath our feet. What drew you to this beginning?
With a tragedy of that magnitude your centre is shaken, your sense of up and down is destroyed and somehow, amidst the hugeness of the tumult, mundane life goes on, expecting you to have a drink of water, or a cup of tea, or get out of bed and get dressed. It’s almost laughable, but life doesn’t stop for tragedy even when you want it to. Grief is experienced as vertigo. How do people find their ground again?

Grace Delarua, who tells the story of The Best of All Possible Worlds, is at once highly observant and, although there are other reasons for it, a little obtuse. Why can't she see what others see? Was she based on anyone you know?
I have always found people to be variably observant. There are some things they are very good at noticing and other things that pass them by completely. There are, as you say, reasons for that, including fear and denial, lazy expectations based on deeply ingrained stereotypes and lack of key information. The worst offenders are those who are convinced that they are observant, certain that they are unbiased and completely unaware that they don’t have all the facts.

Delarua’s not directly based on anyone I know, but I was inspired by something someone told me years ago. She had to briefly work with a frivolous, chatty and completely irritating woman. Then, near the end of her stint, she got to know the woman better and discovered that she was extremely intelligent, hardworking and ambitious. In fact, they had a lot in common and she thought they could have been great friends if she hadn’t been stuck for so long with her bad first impression.

Was there anything about this book that surprised you as you wrote about it?
The romance surprised me. There wasn’t supposed to be any! I was also surprised at the explanation for psionic abilities [like telekinesis or telepathy]. It was strangely fascinating and I was tempted to write pseudo-academic papers on the topic. The Elves . . . yes, the Elves surprised me by being astonishingly plausible when by rights they should have been pure farce.

The biggest shock was inventing the savannah dog, then doing research on the name only to discover that there actually is a savannah dog . . . which looked like I imagined it and is located in the real-life region on which I based the Cygnian region.

How has your life changed since your first novel was published?
I co-write research reports for socioeconomic projects but I haven’t written an academic paper in a good while. I’m certainly not famous yet. The local newspapers are learning not to misspell my last name (there are more Lordes than Lords in Barbados). This year I’m going to the Adelaide Writers’ Week, which will be my first time in Australia, and I’m really looking forward to it!

I know you read far and wide. Have you read anything recently you'd especially recommend?
I love to recommend Caribbean science fiction, [like] Ghosts by Curdella Forbes (2012) and The Rainmaker’s Mistake by Erna Brodber (2007). I’ve gained a new appreciation for short story collections. I recently read Ted Chiang’s brilliant Stories of Your Life and Others (I know, I’m late). Karin Tidbeck’s recent debut collection Jagannath is beautiful, and The Weird anthology, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, is essential reading.

 

Gavin Grant is the publisher of Small Beer Press, which published Karen Lord’s debut novel, Redemption in Indigo. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our review of Best of All Possible Worlds.

Caribbean author Karen Lord has taught physics, trained soldiers, worked in the Foreign Service and earned a Ph.D. in the sociology of religion. In her new novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, Lord manages to combine many of these experiences—along with her telling eye…

FictionFantasyDebut Fiction

Helene Wecker

Interview by Michael Alec Rose

How did debut author Helene Wecker—who just published her superb fantasy novel The Golem and the Jinni—burst onto the literary scene with such an extraordinary achievement right off the bat? When we asked her that question, the answer only made us shake our heads in further wonder.

“To be honest, this really was the first big project that I worked on. When I jumped out of college, I went straight into the corporate world,” Wecker says by phone from her home near San Francisco.

After seven years of corporate work, the urge to write wouldn’t let up. “I got to a point where I thought, I’m going to really kick myself if I don’t give the writing a fair shot.” So she went back to school: at first, night classes, then Columbia University’s writing program. In the workshop there, she was building a collection of linked short stories about her own family and her husband’s family. “I’m Jewish and he’s Arab-American. But I was too close to that real-life material. When I tried to turn it into fiction, it lost its power over me.”

Then a friend in the workshop gave Wecker the leg up she needed. “My friend said, you’re such a total nerd, you’re always talking about fantasy and sci-fi, you’re always talking about the legitimacy of bringing genre elements into literary fiction. So how come you’re not doing that?”

Wecker's remarkable debut combines two legendary beings from Jewish and Arabian folklore.

It was the right question. On the very same day, the premise for The Golem and the Jinni came to Wecker. Conceived at first as a short story, the idea expanded into a novel over the course of seven years. “It wasn’t just writing the book; it was learning to be a writer,” she recalls. “It went through so many drafts and I learned so much about how to get across what I wanted to say. This book was my crucible for becoming a writer.”

Wecker’s novel is a dream come true for any devoted reader of fantasy (and is sure to make many new ones). Everything about the tale marks it as an immediate classic. The two greatest legendary beings of Jewish and Arabian folklore are brought together in the melting pot of lower Manhattan, at the peak of the immigrant tide a century ago. The book’s fusion of golem and jinni is nothing short of epic, their encounters ever more fraught with powerful emotion and mortal danger both for the creatures themselves, and for all their magnificently varied human relations.

Being so new to writing, Wecker felt intimidated by the thought of looking into the sizable catalogue of modern literary retellings of golem and jinni stories. So she decided to start from scratch, drawing from two beautifully divergent sources: on the one hand, the old, original legends of the golem and jinni; on the other, pop-culture icons like Star Wars, “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galactica,” where “approaching-human” characters abound. “In a way, I felt like my own golem Chava was almost a cross between Data and Counselor Troi” (of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), Wecker says. “Chava can feel people but not understand them.”

Obvious question: Are the female golem and the male jinni stand-ins for Wecker and her husband? “At about a year into the writing process, the story shed that connection. The characters really became themselves,” she says. Even so, the long gestation period of the novel had its vivid counterpart in the efforts of Wecker and her husband to get pregnant during those same years, fertility treatments and all. “In one of the final editing sessions, I started to realize just how many childless people were in this book, people who wanted to have kids. And I thought, oh come on, was my unconscious really spewing onto the page like that? So I took a couple of them out.”

But Wecker need not have worried about making her story too autobiographical. The internal logic of The Golem and the Jinni is both profound and startlingly unsentimental. Its expressive content feels uncompromisingly truthful, even difficult. The book’s ironic realism—including its intensely vivid portrait of the “grit and squalor” of the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century—comes close to the spirit of fantasy masters Tolkien, Rowling and Clarke.

Another bond between Wecker and this magisterial company is the strong ethical thread running through her tale. In essence, the golem and the jinni are both potentially destructive to humanity. But they evolve through the novel, going against their own natures.

“A conscious angle of the book was this idea of humanizing, and what that means for each of them—in the Pinocchio sense of becoming a real person, but also adapting to society and learning to live with those around you and what that means on a moral level,” she says. “For the jinni, it’s having to learn to accept help, having to learn that his actions have consequences.”

Wecker also reflects on the way her monstrous hero and heroine change and grow together, bringing the process back to its source in her own marriage. But it’s not just because she is a Jewish woman married to an Arab-American man (although that in itself is worthy of a U.N. resolution).

“It’s drawn from my experiences of being in a long-term relationship and growing up with someone,” she says. “You’re not fully formed when you’re 18 or 20. Being together for years and learning to adapt to each other and with each other—that’s a feat of endurance and of empathy, and it’s really, really tough sometimes. That’s what I was trying to bring across. I wanted the golem and the jinni to have a real relationship.” The fact that each of them is the only living being in the world capable of seeing exactly who and what the other one is—that’s terrifying to both of them. And it’s the essence of any true love.

There’s a thrilling spiritual challenge, too, at the heart of Wecker’s tale, embodied in the communion of two creatures from completely different cultural traditions.

“It’s the idea that there could be many truths, all coexisting, none of them negating the others,” she says. “My question is, does that point to something larger? Is each truth a facet of a larger whole? That’s the question I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to answer. But it’s really fun to turn over.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our review of The Golem and the Jinni.

How did debut author Helene Wecker—who just published her superb fantasy novel The Golem and the Jinni—burst onto the literary scene with such an extraordinary achievement right off the bat? When we asked her that question, the answer only made us shake our heads…

FictionHistorical FictionFantasy

Yangsze Choo

Interview by Becky Ohlsen

Plenty of girls daydream about their future weddings. Usually these dreams include, at minimum, another human being. In that sense, the first marriage proposal in Yangsze Choo’s debut novel, The Ghost Bride, is a little unusual: It comes from someone who’s been dead for months.

Set in the 1890s in Malaysia (or, as it was known then, Malaya), this decadently imagined, elaborately romantic novel delves into the world of the supernatural in colonial Chinese culture, including the tradition of “spirit marriages.” Historically, spirit marriages were a way to appease the ghosts of young people who had died single, so they wouldn’t be lonely in the afterlife. The novel’s heroine, Li Lan, receives an offer of marriage from the wealthy family of Lim Tian Ching, a young man who died suddenly of a fever. It seems the young man carried a torch for Li Lan while he was alive, though she was intended for his cousin (unbeknownst to her). The cousin now stands to inherit the family fortune and get the girl, which drives the petulant ghost of Lim Tian Ching crazy.

We know this because the ghostly groom visits Li Lan in her dreams, explaining the situation and making ominous threats. Soon thereafter, Li Lan herself gains access to the realms of the dead, and it’s here that the novel takes a unique and wonderful turn.

Ordinarily, an unmarried young woman in a Malaysian port city in the 1890s would not be permitted to wander around unescorted. But due to some unfortunate circumstances (which I won’t give away), Li Lan happens to be more or less invisible, caught between the physical world and the ghost realm. Though distressing for her, this is excellent for the reader, because it gives us a sharply observant and entertaining guide to both the city and the spirit world. We see not only the vast banquet halls and embroidered silk clothing and sumptuous meals of the historic city, but also the afterlife’s terrifying ox-headed demons, floating green spirit lights, unnaturally aged courtesans, silent puppet servants, enormous predatory birds, hungry ghosts and many other wonders.

Perhaps unusual for a story so fantastical, the novel began as Choo’s senior thesis at Harvard. “I wanted to write about Asian female ghosts,” she explains by phone from her home in California, where she lives with her husband and two young children. After receiving a degree in social studies from Harvard, Choo worked in various corporate jobs before writing The Ghost Bride and landing an agent for the novel through an unsolicited query letter. She’s been surprised and delighted by the early accolades the book has received.

Choo grew up in Malaysia, but her father, a diplomat, was often posted abroad, and she traveled extensively with him. She speaks English in a very proper-sounding British accent. “Everybody and their uncle has some ghost story,” she says of the Malaysian inspiration for her novel. “And I realized the worst ghosts were all women! I thought, why is that?”

Choo theorized that the misogyny historically inherent in Asian culture was to blame for the fact that the scariest ghosts were all women: “Maybe this is a subconscious, underlying way it’s showing up—people feel guilty,” she says. Describing a few particularly awful examples—including a “female ghost that’s just a head flying around, trailing placenta”—she adds that the prevalence of female ghosts must have “some sort of root in the sense that women were historically oppressed, and only after death could they seek their revenge.”

All of which she’d intended to explore in her thesis. “But,” she says, “I didn’t write it.” Worried that she wouldn’t be taken seriously in academia, she instead submitted a “boring thesis about industrial townships,” and that was that.

Some time later, while working on an early novel (one she now calls an “absolute disaster” with a “massively complicated” plot), Choo was doing research in the archives of her local newspaper in Malaysia and came across an offhand mention of the fact that “ghost weddings” were becoming increasingly rare. She was instantly intrigued.

Digging around, she found “many manifestations of this [tradition], weird, weird permutations and local variations.” Research on ghost weddings led her back toward the other ghosts that populate her homeland.

“Because my book is set in Malaya, which is kind of a melting pot, there are many different kinds of ghosts there that you wouldn’t get in China,” she says. For example, there’s an Indian ghost that specifically haunts banana trees; people who believe in it studiously avoid them. Malaya’s traditions and stories were brought there from several very different places and gradually mixed together, Choo explains. “It’s all a big mishmash.”

One product of those blended traditions in The Ghost Bride is Li Lan’s foil and possible romantic interest, Er Lang, who looks like a man but isn’t precisely human. He keeps his face hidden beneath a bamboo hat, frustrating our curious heroine: “Perhaps there were no features beneath his hat at all, merely a skull with loose ivory teeth or a monstrous lizard with baleful eyes,” she speculates. He turns out to be something entirely unexpected, an irresistible invention of the author drawn from several different myths.

Then there’s Amah, Li Lan’s nanny, who worries nonstop about bad luck entering the household. She is typical of a certain kind of rural Chinese person, Choo says, even today. “Many Chinese are extremely superstitious,” she says, adding that the dozens of rules and precautions Amah uses to ward off bad luck probably spring from an urge to control a chaotic world.

“I have my own theory about this,” she adds, laughing. “I wonder if the first person who did all this was kind of OCD.” Choo tells a story about a friend of her father who, for years, wouldn’t use the front door of his house because a fortuneteller had told him it was bad luck. This was inconvenient for him and his family and guests, but there was no ignoring the fortuneteller’s advice; he believed it.

Choo says she doesn’t have such superstitions herself, though she was amused to notice recently that Los Angeles is peppered with signs advertising psychics, evidence of the same instinct.

Meanwhile, the author is recording the audio version of The Ghost Bride and working on a new novel, “another subplot out of my gigantic mistake.”

Plenty of girls daydream about their future weddings. Usually these dreams include, at minimum, another human being. In that sense, the first marriage proposal in Yangsze Choo’s debut novel, The Ghost Bride, is a little unusual: It comes from someone who’s been dead for months.

Set…

Science Fiction & FantasyFiction

Deborah Harkness

Interview by Stephenie Harrison

For most mere mortals, a position as a full-time historian and tenured professor at the University of Southern California would be sufficiently demanding. But not for Deborah Harkness, who has also managed to squeeze “best-selling novelist” onto her list of already impressive credentials.

In an apt parallel to the alchemists she studies in her scholastic life, Harkness appears to have created literary gold from an unlikely mixture of ingredients. The All Souls Trilogy is an addictive blend of history, science, romance and fantasy that chronicles the complicated relationship between a witch named Diana Bishop and a vampire named Matthew de Clairmont. The two embark on a quest for Ashmole 782, an enchanted manuscript believed to contain the secrets of their species’ origins.

The first book in the series, A Discovery of Witches, was published in more than 30 languages; its sequel, Shadow of Night, was even more popular and debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

“I don’t know if you can even imagine what it’s like if you haven’t done it—to make stuff up and for people to take it into their hearts.”

For someone whose prior experience with the publishing world was limited to academic works, the success of the series has been astounding. “I don’t know if you can even imagine what it’s like if you haven’t done it—to make stuff up and for people to take it into their hearts,” Harkness tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “When I write scholarship, people take it into their heads. With this [series], I had a woman in her 80s say to me, ‘I had better not die before I find out what happened to my friends!’ That was amazing for me.”

Happily, fans need wait no longer to discover the thrilling fate of their friends. With The Book of Life, Matthew and Diana return to the present day after the time-travel adventures of Shadow of Night for the last leg of their fraught journey to uncover the secrets of Ashmole 782.

For readers who have spent the past few years living in the All Souls universe, this end of the series is highly anticipated, but also heralds the end of an era. Harkness herself has mixed emotions about closing the book on Matthew and Diana after six years in their company.
“It’s a bit strange, actually. I really have been living with [these characters and books] for a while, and it is kind of strange to wake up in the morning and to not immediately start thinking about [them],” she reflects. “But at the same time, I’m really pleased that we managed to deliver three books in a fairly reasonable timeframe.”

Sticking to her three-book goal wasn’t simple, however. “As it turns out, a trilogy is not an easy thing to write!” Harkness says. “When you set out to write a series, you are able to keep pursuing new plotlines and new characters and just let it organically resolve. But when you set out to write a trilogy, you have to be fairly disciplined. There were moments when I got frustrated because I wanted to introduce a new character or develop a side plot, but couldn’t. I had to be really mindful about tying things up.”

Not that she hasn’t had the space to do so. The Book of Life is the shortest installment of the trilogy, but at 576 pages, it’s still no lightweight. At a time when attention spans are dwindling and even the most dedicated readers have countless demands upon them, it’s a bold move to offer up such a hearty book. Yet Harkness insists that the length of her novels is actually part of their allure.

“You can curl up inside the world. They are so lush, so rich, and they don’t spare details,” she explains.

“There’s nothing like knowing all day that after dinner you get to go back to bed with your big book.”

It’s safe to say that fans of the series agree, and the sparks that fly between Harkness’ prickly protagonists have proven to be particularly captivating. Despite their otherworldly allegiances, their relationship is “real in all of those emotional ways that aren’t really handled in mainstream fiction,” as Harkness puts it.

“I have always found the traditional ‘will they, won’t they?’ arc really boring,” she confides. “Obviously they’re going to get together. So why not just cut to the chase and then say, ‘OK, now what?’ That’s when it gets complicated.”

That question of “now what?” will surely plague fans after they’ve raced to the end of The Book of Life. When pushed as to whether this is truly the end for this universe, Harkness says, “Whatever else may happen with the world of the Bishops and the de Clairmonts, we’re certainly not going to be returning to Diana and Matthew falling in love and establishing a family. That story is now told and I’m happy that that’s the case.”

Disappointing news for some, certainly, but take heart: Harkness won’t be disappearing from bookstores. Although it’s too early for her to divulge the details, she assures us that she has ideas for at least five different projects. “People can count on seeing new titles come out from me. Maybe not in six months, but certainly soon. Right now I don’t have any plans other than to sleep!”

With a book tour on the horizon, sleep may have to wait. Lucky for Harkness, once The Book of Life hits bookstores, she’ll be in good company—more than a few readers will be pulling all-nighters to find out whether Diana and Matthew live happily ever after.

 

Canadian writer Stephenie Harrison blogs at 20 Years Hence.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For most mere mortals, a position as a full-time historian and tenured professor at the University of Southern California would be sufficiently demanding. But not for Deborah Harkness, who has also managed to squeeze “best-selling novelist” onto her list of already impressive credentials.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Nick Harkaway

Interview by Matthew Jackson

British author Nick Harkaway is known for his ability to fearlessly blend genres in novels like The Gone-Away World. In his third novel, Tigerman, he mixes parenting, superheroes and geopolitics in the story of Lester Ferris, a British Army sergeant sent to a remote island outpost on what is supposed to be a simple assignment. But Lester refuses to ignore the shady goings-on in Mancreau, and his growing relationship with a native street kid complicates things further. We asked Harkaway a few questions about superheroes and being a dad.

Tigerman is not a typical superhero story, but it does feature some of the classic superhero tropes, as well as a boy who’s obsessed with comic books. Have comic books always been part of your reading life?
Not always—I came to them comparatively late. I vaguely remember reading some 2000AD before then, but I never really followed comics until I saw Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen around the time I was 18. But I don't think I was really into comics until my 20s, when a couple of my friends started feeding me the weird and alarming stuff Grant Morrison was doing, and then someone gave me some Warren Ellis . . . it all flows from there. I love shiny, fun things, but what I really love is shiny fun things that also turn out to be brilliantly clever and intelligent. That's the brass ring. (I must look that up. I don't know what it means.) (I just have. That's really interesting.)

"Superheroes are for the most part inherently conservative. All they want to do is fix the status quo, which when you think about it is shocking." 

You’ve described the island of Mancreu as a kind of modern Casablanca, a place where secrets and dark deeds can be conveniently dumped. Why do you think a place like Mancreu worked better for you than, say, a crime-ridden metropolis like Batman’s Gotham City?
Well, first up: the superhero notion isn't the only or even necessarily the primary one I'm working with in the book. This is a thriller with themes of parenthood, and it so happens that one of the things the main character does is put on a supersuit. But he can't fly or whatever, he's just a guy trying to do the right thing in a situation that's completely insane. Gotham City, in the Batman story, is a freakishly dangerous place full of lunatics. Lester's solution in Gotham would not be Batman's, because he would see immediately that whatever is wrong with it is completely unfixable. Batman is in this losing battle to make it less hellish, but it is never, ever going to be Metropolis no matter how much money Bruce Wayne pours into it. 

Mancreu isn't like that. There's nothing inherently dysfunctional about it. In fact if it hadn't been abused and broken by people who didn't care about it, it would basically be a really nice place. So Lester is not in a war, which is important because he understands war. He's trying to win the peace—and that, as we're all painfully aware right now, is much harder.

I couldn’t help but notice that the first comic book mentioned by name in Tigerman is Warren Ellis’ Planetary, a book that filters a lot of complex cultural ideas through a superhero aesthetic. Tigerman does a similar kind of filtering, in a way. Did you draw on any particular comic book inspirations, while writing this book?
I love Planetary. I just think it's brilliant. I also love the original Authority run, which is part of where I got the idea that superheroes are for the most part inherently conservative. All they want to do is fix the status quo, which when you think about it is shocking. The Justice League can beat cosmic bad guys, figure out how Sporflompty Zigguratifiers can save the planet from death rays, but they can't fix corporate malfeasance because, what, it's beneath them? (I mean, the real reason is that superheroes basically came of age when we were in a war mentality, they fight enemies you can punch. But increasingly we realize that punching people doesn't really solve anything. They wake up angry, as you would.)

Aaaanyway. I tend to believe that all pop culture either plays with or exemplifies whatever is going on in society. If it's completely unselfconscious, you see reflections of whatever people are scared of as the villain—others of some sort, but what sort? Invasion of the Bodysnatchers comes out of the1950s. In the 1980s you had these huge world-ending threats. After 9/11 you get all these stories about infiltration and destruction. So you don't have to filter: the whole system of pop is a filter, a distillate. The stuff that is conscious, like Ellis's work, is like an elixir, and it's amazing. The stuff that is—to my taste, anyway—basically not very good, is still interesting.

But I didn't really lean on anything in particular while I was writing this. I'm a magpie, which I think is what most authors are. Part of the original inspiration was Chabon's book, The Final Solution, which was itself a Sherlock Holmes riff. But then obviously there was a big Batman thing happening, and a lot of people have picked up on Graham Greene, which I didn't really think of but now I think "oh, right, of course.” And Casablanca. And . . . it just goes on and on.

"I tend to believe that all pop culture either plays with or exemplifies whatever is going on in society."

I read that the idea for Tigerman hit you in 2010, but other writing projects and becoming a father meant that you didn’t finish the book until three years later. How did it evolve from that initial concept?
Oh, it changed but it stayed the same. The big change was that I took out this totally stupid twist I had in it. Everyone hated it, and I was like: "But the twist completely changes everything!" And then I realized that, hey: yes, it did, and I didn't want any of those things to change. Those were the things I needed to have stay the same and everything else could change. I've actually just had the same thing with the book I'm writing now. I was completely screwed, I couldn't make it work, and suddenly it's like: oh, if I turn the whole thing on its head but leave the important stuff right way up, now everything feels as if I meant it that way." It's writing. It's just how you live.

You’ve said that the book is, despite all the other ideas being explored in it, at its heart a story about fatherhood, and you were coming into your own role as a father while writing it. How much did your own attitudes about being a parent transfer over to Lester?
Everything. Everything everything. Lester is driven by love. That's his heart. He wants to love and be loved and he's somehow missed out, and here, in this totally messed up place, he's got the shot and he doesn't know how to take it.

I was much luckier than he is. I had it all in front of me and it was—is—great. But I know exactly how that sense of bewilderment feels, because there was a moment in my life where I just had no idea how I was going to get from there to here. And then suddenly there was this amazing woman who is now my wife, and everything was obvious again. But parenthood: there is no one who knows what that will be until they do it, in whatever way. If you adopt, if you foster, whatever, you are a parent. I'm not being all essentialisty exclusivy here. I'm just saying it is a thing that, until you take it on, you don't know what kind of lunatic it will make you. Because it will make you some kind of lunatic or you are not doing it right. It could completely make you into a person who dresses up and fights crime because your kids need you to do that. Of course it could. Have you seen the insane things people do for their kids? That Liam Neeson movie? Taken? That's a documentary about the emotions of parenthood. It's like: there is a threat?! IT MUST BE DESTROYED. WITH FLAMES. 

The boy is a fascinating character, in part because he’s an intriguing combination of very openly exuberant and a little mysterious. How, if at all, did your own children influence the character?
Not at all! Because they're not there yet. The boy, like the sergeant and all the others, he's mostly me through a filter. It's the tie between them that I borrowed from my sense of being a dad.

If circumstance forced you to become a superhero vigilante, who do you think you’d become? Would you pick a pre-established character or dream up your own persona?
I'd have to make something up. I cannot think of anything worse than being a writer occupying someone else's character in real life because you didn't have the confidence to make up your own crazy identity. But actually I'd be different from most of the characters you see. I'd be the guy who shows up and does something really unrelated at the very beginning, like drop a piece of paper on the bar, and when the whole thing is in full-bore showdown with everyone ready to fight, someone's going to pick up that piece of paper and written on it is the exact right thing to change what's going on for the better.

Which I realize is impossible, but it's what I've got right now. I don't want to think about what I'd become in real life, because that involves thinking about whatever appalling trauma would put me there.

It’s been 76 years since Superman first appeared, and everyone’s got their own theory about why superheroes continue to endure. What’s yours, and did it change at all during the writing of Tigerman?
I think I got to say it all in the book. Superman is faith and hope. He derives from the same American pop culture pot as the cowboy, the virtuous one. He comes, he saves you, he goes. He doesn't become the government. He doesn't make rules. He just operates on a personal basis. Capra's movies have a lot about this—that's one half of the U.S. self-perception, if you like, the other half being rule-driven and codified. If you're missing the heart, you go to the heartlands—where Superman comes from. A character like Batman is the other guy, the one who was shot a bunch of times and came back. He's about self-reliance: there's always enough left in you to claw your way back. It's dustbowl stuff, and it's universal. 

What are you reading lately?
My list of to-reads is endless. I carry some stuff around with me—Borges, Lem, some other things. I'm mostly writing, though, and I find it can get in the way.

What are you writing now?
Ahhhh, well. That would be telling. But let's say it's got six main characters, alchemy, semiotics, time travel and Greek politics.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Author photo by Chris Close

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tigerman.

British author Nick Harkaway is known for his ability to fearlessly blend genres in novels like The Gone-Away World. In his third novel, Tigerman, he mixes parenting, superheroes and geopolitics in the story of Lester Ferris, a British Army sergeant sent to a remote island outpost on what is supposed to be a simple assignment. But Lester refuses to ignore the shady goings-on in Mancreau, and his growing relationship with a native street kid complicates things further. We asked Harkaway a few questions about superheroes and being a dad.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

George R.R. Martin: History is written in blood

Interview by Cat Acree

Without question, Tolkien set the standard for worldbuilding. Readers of epic fantasy aren’t content with a few generations of kings mentioned in some measly footnotes; they want a world so vast and detailed that it could be real. With Tolkien’s template in mind, George R.R. Martin addresses fans’ demands for a truly epic history.

While fantasy readers have long immersed themselves in Martin’s mega-best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” introduced thousands more to his world full of dragons, magic and brutal murders of (spoiler alert!) everyone. At the risk of further delaying the author from writing the sixth book in the series, BookPage called Martin to talk about his new encyclopedic history of Westeros and beyond, The World of Ice and Fire.

“The [Song of Ice and Fire] world is full of stories, just as our world is,” Martin says. “Because I’ve been writing about this world for so many years now, the world has become very real to me, and I can see all these other stories, and part of me wants to tell them, too. . . . If I had all the time in the world, I could easily write novels about the reign of Aegon III or Aegon IV, the Dance of the Dragons or the romance between King Aerys I and his queen. There are a lot of stories there to be told.”

Talk about an understatement. Martin’s novels are brimming with references to untold history and legends, and if he pursued every tangent, we’d never get to the end of the story. Even The World of Ice and Fire, which is intended to be the definitive historical volume for the Seven Kingdoms, can only briefly touch on the wealth of tales here. The storytelling possibilities are limitless—which is the reason why Martin is still charmingly enthusiastic about this world, even after inhabiting it for the last 20 years.

The Eyrie, copyright © Ted Nasmith. Reprinted with permission of Random House.

In response to fans’ constant requests for extended genealogies and fleshed-out, panoramic histories, Martin announced in 2006 that he would begin writing this companion book. “There’s a great thirst on the part of some of the fans for more and more details about the world,” Martin says. “But I didn’t want to get too close to the so-called present day of Westeros, because I don’t want to give away any of the developments in the coming novels.”

The full history of the Seven Kingdoms exists in Martin’s brain—a magic trick if there ever was one—but even the author’s vast imagination needs some help keeping it straight. Elio M. García and Linda Antonsson, founders of the fan site Westeros.‌org, have been studying (and fact-checking) the details of Martin’s world for years. As co-writers, they pored over 10,000 pages of novels, pulling out all references to history, myths and legends. After they organized and formed the book’s structure, Martin stepped in to fill in the blanks.

This is far from a complete and infallible account, however. Where Tolkien was concerned with myth and languages, Martin is fascinated by history—and the challenges of retelling it.

The narrator of The World of Ice and Fire is Maester Yandel, who acknowledges the difficulties in composing this book, though he insists his multitude of sources has provided a mostly complete narrative: “[E]very building is constructed stone by stone, and the same may be said of knowledge, extracted and compiled by many learned men, each of whom builds upon the works of those who preceded him. What one of them does not know is known to another, and little remains truly unknown if one seeks far enough.”

As in our own world, history is written by the victors, who often skew truth toward more flattering legend. In an attempt to condense hundreds of years and to represent disparate cultures’ beliefs while coming to some sort of truthful conclusion, Maester Yandel has presented a history that is undeniably distorted. These far-off places and long-dead men refuse to give up all their secrets. For example, Valyrians insist they descended from dragons, and Ironborns believe they come from fish, but these elements of “history” are born out of religion. Where did these people actually come from? Often the answer is only speculation.

Perhaps the book’s greatest strength—and Martin agrees—is the sumptuous illustrations that bring these stories to life. The author collaborated with Random House on choosing the fantasy artists featured in the book, and the artwork ranges from paintings to digital images, from portraits of kings to gory, blood-soaked battle scenes. Martin especially enjoyed working with Ted Nasmith to create the definitive representations of castles such as Winterfell and Casterly Rock. “We went back and forth to get the look of all those castles exactly as I imagine them,” Martin promises.

One question remains for fans who might hope to find clues in this ambitious companion book: Does history repeat itself? Martin’s cheeky answer: “A resounding yes and no. A bit of maybe.”

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Without question, Tolkien set the standard for worldbuilding. Readers of epic fantasy aren’t content with a few generations of kings mentioned in some measly footnotes; they want a world so vast and detailed that it could be real. With Tolkien’s template in mind, George R.R.…
YA FictionYAFantasy

Daniel José Older

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

For 10 years, Daniel José Older worked as an EMT in Brooklyn, and he blogged each day about what he’d witnessed the night before: tragedy and joy, blood and bandages, dead people and living people—and people who hovered somewhere in between, their fates as yet undecided.

“It’s part of how I became a writer,” he says during a call to his home. “It’s the roots of my fiction. It helped me just tell the f__king story. That became my motto as I went on to become a writer and realized it’s so easy to get caught up in head games.”

His motto worked, and write he did. He left his ambulance-based career in 2013 and has published three books in the last three years: 2012’s Salsa Nocturna, a collection of noir ghost stories; Half-Resurrection Blues, the first book in the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, which debuted in January; and now his new YA urban fantasy, Shadowshaper.

It makes sense that this Boston-to-Brooklyn transplant who’s undergone a medic-to-author metamorphosis could so capably and creatively write a story about the transformation of teenager Sierra Santiago, who herself undergoes some major life changes and astonishing shifts in perspective right after school lets out for the summer. 

In fact, Sierra goes from newbie muralist to spirit wrangler in a matter of days—and she’s surprisingly adept at working with both paint and dearly departed ancestors. But why isn’t her brother surprised by this? Just what has her family been keeping from her? And what does her abuelo, speech strained by his recent stroke, mean when he warns her about “shadowshapers”?

The notion of spirits among us, of people who may not be alive but aren’t quite dead, is something Older has considered a lot in his own life, not least because, like Sierra, he’s Latino and accustomed to “the idea of history being present with us.”

One day, when Sierra is up on scaffolding, painting a mural on an abandoned building, she sees that a face in another nearby mural has shed a single real tear. She’s weirded out, but she doesn’t panic and fall off the scaffolding, which might be the reaction of someone less spirit-friendly. And when a creepy zombie-esque guy crashes the first party of summer and seems to know her by name, she’s scared—but also determined to find out what’s going on, and fast.

 “Sierra walks in both worlds, and she has to get used to that,” Older says. “[For anyone who] grew up Latino, they probably had some ghosts around. So it’s not that big a shock to her. . . . She gets through that pretty quickly because she’s already been preparing for that moment, in a way.”

Five years ago, Older was initiated into the Lucumí (also known as Santería) priesthood. “It was an intense process,” he says. “Shadowshaper, which I wrote in 2009, became a totally different book when I rewrote it that initiation year. . . . [My religion plays a] huge part in my understanding of spirituality . . . [and] of spirits and ancestors being part of daily life.”

"If death wants to win, it will win. And that’s also not necessarily the worst-case scenario.”

Harking back to his time as an EMT, he adds, “As a paramedic, you’re walking on the line between life and death constantly. It takes some of the freakiness out of it because it’s a regular occurrence, and there’s also more respect because if death wants to win, it will win. And that’s also not necessarily the worst-case scenario.”

These concepts come forward, then drop back, then surge forward again in the pages of Shadow-shaper, as Sierra’s understanding and fear grow apace. She roams from the subway to the Columbia University library, Bed-Stuy to Coney Island, dank basements to dark beaches, in her attempts to unravel the history and mystery of the shadowshapers. In addition to everything else, her neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying and everyone’s feeling unsettled; her awful aunt won’t stop spouting racist nonsense; and her handsome new artist friend doesn’t seem unfamiliar with the shadowshaper concept.

Older’s Brooklyn is beautiful and dangerous and busy and ever-changing; his love for his adopted hometown is evident. His characters are friends with people their age, older and younger; they speak different languages and have different backgrounds; their families are sometimes loving, sometimes not. It’s a refreshing (and, to anyone who’s lived in Brooklyn or a place like it, realistic) mix of viewpoints and ways of moving through life, for better or worse.

That ability to share his Brooklyn—to tell it like he sees it—has been cathartic for Older, though he’s far from finished. “So many black women on Twitter [saw the cover of Shadowshaper and said], ‘That’s me!’ It’s so powerful, because urban fantasy has failed people of color in general as far as representation goes, so for that to happen, it really moves me,” he says.

“We [authors of color] all want to be picked up by a big publisher but fear the corruption of our voices, the clipping of our wings. It’s a story heard over and over—not an idle fantasy or fear, but what has historically happened in publishing. I went in prepared and was pleasantly surprised. Both houses I work with, the editors are open, accountable, honest, admit things they don’t know. All I—all we—ask is that we work with people who will hear us out, trust our voice. . . . I’ve been really blessed to find the people I have found. That’s the miracle.”

For readers who’ve long been hoping to see themselves represented on a book cover or in its pages, Shadowshaper may well feel a bit miraculous. Older makes the historical elements seem as cool as the artistic ones, but there are plenty of scary and exciting action sequences as well—not to mention hilarity (see: a dog named Cojones). 

And ultimately, the most powerful presence in Shadowshaper is the Puerto Rican teenager Sierra. There are no wizened, white-bearded wizards here. Older says, “I think most people will be excited to have a Latina heroine running around doing magic stuff.”

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For 10 years, Daniel José Older worked as an EMT in Brooklyn, and he blogged each day about what he’d witnessed the night before: tragedy and joy, blood and bandages, dead people and living people—and people who hovered somewhere in between, their fates as yet undecided.
Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasyDebut Fiction

Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

Interview by Amy Scribner

Joseph Fink claims he’s calling from a New Jersey beach. I prefer to imagine that his spotty cell reception is actually because he’s calling from a dark bunker in an undisclosed location. That somehow seems more appropriate for a co-author of Welcome to Night Vale, the new novel based on the wildly popular podcast of the same name.

In case you’re late to the Night Vale party, here’s a quick recap: Fink, along with Jeffrey Cranor, created a podcast called “Welcome to Night Vale” in 2012. A traveling live show based on the podcasts came a couple of years later. Night Vale is, as Cranor describes it, “in the non-specific American southwest desert, where ghosts and government and angels are commonplace and people go about their lives.” 

The Night Vale podcasts are presented as a radio show hosted by a guy named Cecil Gershwin Palmer, who shares news about the town in a soothing, friendly and NPR-ish voice. Slate named the pilot episode as one of the best podcasts ever. 

The shows are somewhat in the vein of “A Prairie Home Companion,” only completely weird and surreal. In a recent episode, a sentient patch of haze with a wicked Midwestern accent, Deb, comes on the air with Cecil to bring a message from sponsor Jo-Ann Fabrics. Also, the highway department presents a public service announcement, read by Cecil, in which they remind Night Vale residents to buckle up, then hunker down, then forget everything, remember everything and open their eyes to what is really going on. 

“Time doesn’t work in Night Vale,” someone says in the book. And they’re right. The podcasts are unsettling, funny and deeply addictive, and the novel is a pitch-perfect spin on them.

But back to the phone call with Cranor, calling in to talk with us from New York City, and Fink, calling in from a secret location that we all know was not really on the Jersey shore. Though the two have written together for five years—they wrote and performed a play in the East Village of Manhattan before they started Night Vale—they say co-writing a novel based on a beloved podcast was an exhilarating challenge.

“We just trusted each other,” Fink said. “We would build on what the other person was writing.”

“At the very get-go, it was a completely different medium than the podcasts or live shows, where all our writing goes in someone’s ear,” Cranor says. “Once I recognized that challenge, it was a lot easier. There is a nice benefit of having built the Night Vale world already. There is some shorthand. So when [Fink] says, ‘Let’s have a scene take place here,’ I know where that is. We decided early on how we would explore the town—new and old characters—and give them a life not from Cecil’s point of view.”

In the novel, Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro, who has been 19 as long as she can remember, is handed a piece of paper by a stranger. The paper reads, “KING CITY.” Jackie has no idea what to do with this paper or what it means, and despite her efforts to wash the paper down the shower, throw it away or burn it, it keeps returning to her hand. 

Even after an accident requires Jackie to get a cast on her arm, she knows the paper is still there. “When this comes off, I’ll be holding a paper that says ‘KING CITY,’ and I’ll keep holding it for centuries, not growing old, not growing at all, still in Night Vale, like I always have been,” she says in the hospital. “I’m never going to get my life back. I’m never going to get a life. I’ll be 19-year-old Jackie Fierro, no purpose, one slip of paper, forever.”

Jackie finds herself obsessed with finding out the meaning of the note. At the same time, in the same town, Diane Crayton is a single mom struggling to raise her son Josh, who is a teenager and—of course—also a shape-shifter who likes to become, say, a spider while driving. Josh begins searching for his birth father, and ultimately, Jackie discovers a connection with Josh she never imagined.

Diane was a character who popped up in early podcasts as a throwaway, but Cranor wanted to explore her story more in the novel. “She just sort of stuck with me,” he said. “I just wanted to think more about Diane. Does she have kids? She’s definitely on the PTA. She’s a character who would be hard to develop just through Cecil. I gave her more breadth.”

Fink, on the other hand, wanted to explore Jackie. “She has been in my head for quite awhile,” he says. “Originally she was just a very creepy idea.”

Don’t worry; there’s still plenty of Cecil and some of the other characters that podcast fans know and love and obsessively follow. Night Vale’s popularity has spawned many Tumblr sites and volumes of fan fiction, all of which the authors deeply appreciate, and none of which they read.

“I’m super thrilled that it exists,” Cranor says. “As a writer, I just don’t want that in my head. It’s an expression of love to build a fan canon, but it would conflict with my own ideas. I need to make sure I’m not muddying my own ideas.”

The fans of Night Vale are as eclectic as the town itself.

“We have all sorts of fans,” Fink says. “Teens come [to the live shows] with their parents and grandparents, and that’s a really cool thing when they all enjoy it for a different reason.”

Welcome to Night Vale lives up to the podcast hype in every way. It is a singularly inventive visit to an otherworldly town that’s the stuff of nightmares and daydreams.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Joseph Fink claims he’s calling from a New Jersey beach. I prefer to imagine that his spotty cell reception is actually because he’s calling from a dark bunker in an undisclosed location. That somehow seems more appropriate for a co-author of Welcome to Night Vale, the new novel based on the wildly popular podcast of the same name.

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