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YA FictionYAFantasy

Ransom Riggs

Interview by Becky Ohlsen

“I guess I had a lot of peculiar people in my life growing up,” says Ransom Riggs, author of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series of novels. “Probably the most influential, and peculiar in her own way, was my grandmother.” A farmer’s daughter who became a farmer’s wife, she also went to university and was a teacher of Latin and French. “She infected me with a love of books.”

Riggs, 37, spoke from his home in Los Angeles about the upcoming Tim Burton film adaptation of his dark YA fantasy debut, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a surprise 2011 hit that spent more than two years on the bestseller list. We also talked about his new collection of short stories set in the same world, Tales of the Peculiar. Readers of the series, which includes two other bestselling novels, Hollow City and Library of Souls, will recognize that title: It’s the name of a book that the peculiar children consult for advice and comfort. Riggs says he wanted the new book to seem like an artifact from the peculiar world, an imaginary object that readers somehow discover in their real-world bookstores. 

The design of Tales of the Peculiar helps achieve this effect. Where you’d normally find the copyright details, instead there are instructions on things not to do while reading the book (whatever you do, don’t dog-ear the pages) and some unlikely production notes (“Printed in a nomad’s tent in the desert of Lop”). The foreword maintains this conceit: It’s written by Millard Nullings, the invisible boy at Miss Peregrine’s home. In it, Nullings explains why he decided to edit and annotate this edition of the Tales. The stories are not just folklore, he writes: “They are also the bearers of secret knowledge. Encoded within their pages are the locations of hidden loops, the secret identities of certain important peculiars, and other information that could aid a peculiar’s survival in this hostile world.”

On the surface, the stories are moral tales, bedtime stories designed to be read aloud. In most of them, someone behaves cruelly toward a peculiar child because of his or her peculiarity, and that bad behavior is eventually, inventively, punished. In a few, the peculiar child himself is the one acting foolishly and must slowly learn his lesson. In one story, a girl discovers she can take away people’s nightmares; in another, a beautiful princess with scales and a forked tongue spits venom at her enemies. A big-hearted boy turns into a locust. A man may, in fact, be an island.

Riggs wrote Tales of the Peculiar “for fans of the series who want to know more about the world,” he says. “It casts a much wider net narratively.”

“There are some Easter eggs for peculiars hidden throughout,” he adds. “They’re waiting for me in case I need them.” (This is as much as he will say about the possibility of future Miss Peregrine novels.)

The fairy-tale format suits Riggs’ style—each character in these simple tales is richly drawn and memorable. We sympathize with them; even their bad decisions are understandable. 

It doesn’t hurt that each tale is illustrated with a gorgeous woodcut by the artist Andrew Davidson. “I knew I wanted a classic, wood-engraving style,” Riggs says. He had admired the covers on the adult hardcover editions of Harry Potter in the U.K.; maybe something like that, he told his publisher. A few weeks later came the reply: How about the guy who did those? “Great!” Riggs said. 

Davidson was “amazing to work with,” Riggs says. “His ideas were out of this world—so dynamic and detailed.”

The engravings add to the sense of Tales of the Peculiar as a weighty, otherworldly artifact, something that was important to the author. Even as a kid, Riggs says, “I liked how big, musty old books felt and smelled.” And ever since Quirk Books published his Sherlock Holmes Handbook in 2009—he has considered himself lucky when it comes to his books’ aesthetic: “I’ve been able to make books that look like they belong on my grandmother’s bookshelves!”

Working with an illustrator also affected Riggs’ writing process. The three Miss Peregrine novels are built around old photographs the author had collected over the years. Writing them, he says, “I had a fixed number of pictures and had to find stories that would fit them.” In the new book, though, “I could tell whatever story I wanted.”

The magical world created by Riggs has just been adapted for film by director Tim Burton. “Everything they did services the heart of the story,” Riggs says.

From an early age, Riggs sought out books that opened doors in the imagination, whether that meant fantasy or otherworldly realism. “C.S. Lewis, big-time,” he recalls when asked about his early influences, and “Tolkien of course,” not to mention Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. King’s work, Riggs says, “was never just horror—it was always also about discovering another world.”

He read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a decades-spanning saga about forced-labor prison camps in the Soviet Union, at age 13. (“Intense!” is how he understatedly describes that experience.) At the opposite extreme, Riggs also loved reading James Thurber, a favorite of his grandmother’s.

Was it strange for him to entrust the world he’d created to filmmaker Tim Burton, who has an equally strong aesthetic? Not really, says Riggs: “I knew it was in good hands.” Unusually for Hollywood, the movie has only one screenwriter (Jane Goldman), and Riggs says he’s pleased with how it turned out. “I didn’t feel like they needed my help,” he says.

As always with an adaptation, certain changes were made along the way, but they’re all superficial, Riggs says. “Everything they did services the heart of the story.” He explains that the film adaptation has allowed for some “wonderful visual irony.” For example, the character of Bronwyn, a girl with super-strength, is no longer the bruiser shown in the novel’s antique photograph, but instead a comically tiny girl.

The main challenge in taking the story from book to film, Riggs says, was getting the tone right. The books have a “veneer of gothic horror,” but also bits of Monty Python and other lighter elements. “It’s a very strange balance of tone,” he says. With his penchant for the gothic as well as romantic wistfulness and visual comedy, Burton proved to be the perfect fit.

The film, which stars Asa Butterfield (Hugo) as main protagonist Jacob Portman and “Penny Dreadful” actor Eva Green as Miss Peregrine, arrives in theaters on September 30. As for Tales of the Peculiar, it was published on “Loop Day”—September 3, the same date of the 24-hour time loop in which Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children safely hides. Riggs visited several bookstores on Loop Day, and is currently on tour with his wife, the YA novelist Tahereh Mafi, whose latest book, Furthermore, was published in August.

“It’s an exciting time at our house,” he says. “It’s going to be really peculiar.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“I guess I had a lot of peculiar people in my life growing up,” says Ransom Riggs, author of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series of novels. “Probably the most influential, and peculiar in her own way, was my grandmother.” A farmer’s daughter who became a farmer’s wife, she also went to university and was a teacher of Latin and French. “She infected me with a love of books.”

Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYAFantasy

Anna-Marie McLemore

Interview by Jill Ratzan

When Miel first appeared as a sobbing girl in the ruins of the town’s old water tower, it was Sam who comforted her, even before she was adopted by Aracely, the local peddler of cures for the lovesick. It was Sam who assured her that she would never again be without the light of the moon. Since that day, they’ve never been apart. Miel loves Sam even though his body is shaped like a girl’s; Sam loves Miel despite the roses that grow and flourish, unwanted, on her wrist. But some residents of their small town have little tolerance for Sam, and others seek the magic that Miel’s roses are rumored to possess. When four local sisters threaten to reveal Sam and Miel’s secrets—many of which they refuse to face—the result might destroy them both . . . or it might bring new understanding to all involved. Morris Award nominee Anna-Marie McLemore combines Latin-American and Pakistani legends and customs, magical realism and romance in a tale of painted moons, giant pumpkins and stained glass that speaks to the inescapable power of self-awareness.

BookPage asked McLemore about the vivid details, spirituality and metaphors that characterize When the Moon Was Ours, which was recently longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Miel’s most distinguishing feature is the roses that grow from an opening in her wrist. These roses are alternately feared and coveted for their possible powers. How did you get the idea for such an unusual biology?
Miel’s roses were inspired by stories I heard growing up about lesser-known Mexican saints. I wanted to honor their stories and to honor that their miracles—whether answered prayers for rain, or flakes of metal appearing from a saint’s skin—have often been viewed with as much suspicion as wonder.

Sam, who identifies as a boy but was born a girl, repeatedly alludes to a Pakistani custom called bacha posh, in which girls dress and act like boys until marriage. Can you tell us more about this custom, and why Sam might have such a complicated relationship with it?
Many who live the practice of bacha posh understandably struggle when, as adults, they’re expected to then adopt women’s traditional roles. This becomes even more painful and complicated if an assigned-female-at-birth child who lives as a bacha posh later identifies as queer, transgender, non-binary or gender-non-conforming. And in Sam’s case, he chooses bacha posh himself; his mother doesn’t choose it for him. But his mother has the wisdom to understand what his relationship with bacha posh will become.

Taken together, Miel’s roses and Sam’s gender create a running theme about bodies that function in ways that mystify, mismatch with or otherwise unnerve their occupants. What made you decide to tackle such a complicated and potentially difficult theme?
The trans* narrative we see most often in literature, unfortunately, is one in which there’s a trans* character, and almost everyone around them are cis characters freaking out about this character’s gender identity. Vee at the blog Gay YA writes about this as “The Acceptance Narrative,” and they’ve fostered some incredible discourse about how harmful it can be. I wanted to write a story in which, instead, those closest to the trans* character love him, accept him and think his trans* identity is beautiful in its truth, even if he’s not yet ready to declare his own identity. Transphobia exists in this book, just as it sadly does in real life, but those closest to Sam—his family, his best friend, the girl he’s falling in love with—love him and his authentic self. That’s not to say Miel, his best friend and the girl he loves, doesn’t make mistakes. She does, and a lot of them come from the trauma she’s experienced to her own body and her own sense of how she’s been allowed to exist in the world. And as with Miel with Sam’s gender identity, Sam is ready to accept Miel and her history long before she is. That’s really a theme at the heart of this book: other people being ready to love you even before you can.

“That’s really a theme at the heart of this book: other people being ready to love you even before you can.”

Magic and religion coexist comfortably in the world of When the Moon Was Ours—the same townspeople who go to church on Sundays also seek cures for lovesickness from a bruja (Spanish for witch). How do you reconcile what at first seem to be such different approaches to spirituality?
I’m a Christian, and also a Latina woman who holds reverence for the practice of curanderismo [traditional folk healing], and I knew both these traditions early on. Many practitioners of curanderismo are also Christians, and often their practice is faith-based. Though many details of Aracely’s lovesickness cures are fictional, her profession as a curandera is very real. Curanderismo is so important to so many Latinx communities both because of its own merits, and because curanderas often practice where doctors’ visits either aren’t possible or are cost-prohibitive. Curanderas and curanderos hold especially important roles in communities who have trouble accessing physical and mental health services.

In your author’s note, you mention the legend of la llorona, a mythical mother who, after drowning her own children, seeks to kidnap half-Spanish, half-Native Latin-American girls. This sounds like a frightening legend indeed! Can you elaborate on how it helped inspire your story?
I’ve heard the name la llorona for as long as I can remember, though my mother saved the story’s more chilling aspects for when I was older. It’s a story a lot of us in the Mexican-American community heard growing up, and it stayed with me. When I felt drawn toward writing a reimagining of the story, I wanted to give weight both to la llorona’s own narrative, to what might have driven her to commit acts she never imagined, and also to depict the awful consequences that her actions have on those around her.  

Sensory descriptions abound in When the Moon Was Ours, especially surrounding food: Blood oranges, blue eggs and dulce de leche are cooked and eaten (and used in magic spells) in wisteria and violet-colored houses. How did you come up with such vivid details?
So many of the details in the book come from or are influenced by cultural tradition. Either my own Mexican-American heritage, which Miel and Aracely share. Or Sam and his mother’s Pakistani-American heritage, for which I owe a huge debt to the author friends who spoke from their own experiences and helped shape how I depicted Sam’s cultural identity. The things Aracely uses in her practice as a curandera, the food both Sam and Miel have grown up making, the way small details become markers of home and heritage, all felt like a natural part of the story.

Although Miel and Sam dominate the narrative, other characters—like Miel’s loving guardian Aracely, the manipulative Bonner sisters and the perpetually lovesick Emma Owens—also play important parts. Who was your favorite minor character to write, and why?
Sam’s mother Yasmin. She values and respects her family’s traditions while also deciding the kind of life she wants, and she makes brave, hard choices for herself and for her son while also giving him space to figure things out on his own.

What was the first thing you did when you heard you were longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature?
It was early on the West coast, so I jumped up and down on the edge of the bed to wake up my husband and tell him!

What projects are next on your writing agenda?
Right now I’m working on my 2017 novel, Wild Beauty, as well as short stories for a couple of upcoming anthologies. They all involves themes of queer and Latinx identity, so I’m excited to work on them and share more soon!

Thank you so much for talking with me! 

 

Jill Ratzan teaches preschoolers through teen readers the power of stories, both traditional and new.

Author photo credit J. Elliott.

Morris Award nominee Anna-Marie McLemore combines Latin-American and Pakistani legends and customs, magical realism and romance in a tale of painted moons, giant pumpkins and stained glass that speaks to the inescapable power of self-awareness. BookPage asked McLemore about the vivid details, spirituality and metaphors that characterize When the Moon Was Ours, which was recently longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

FictionHistorical FantasyDebut Fiction

Katherine Arden

Interview by Trisha Ping

Katherine Arden conjures the spirit—and spirits—of medieval Russia in The Bear and the Nightingale, her enchanting fantasy debut. Motherless Vasya Petrovna grows up unfettered on her father’s rural estate, but once she reaches womanhood, she discovers that she has inherited the magical abilities that run through her mother’s line. As the uneasy balance between traditional pagan beliefs and the newly embraced Christianity wavers, Vasya finds herself on the front lines of a struggle to ensure the survival of her village.

Arden, who studied Russian language and literature, talked to us about the inspiration for her remarkable first novel, the harsh beauty of Russia’s winters and why she prefers the fairy tales of Pushkin to those of Perrault.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I read nonstop as a child, as most writers probably did, and my favorite part of the day was bedtime, because I would lie awake in the dark and make up stories. When I was in high school I wrote a fantasy novel with shapeshifting dragons and a sort-of-like-Iceland world of snow and volcanoes.

But I never seriously thought I am a writer or even I want to be a writer. Not the kind who writes books you find in a bookstore. I hadn’t made the connection between what I did in my own head for fun and the work of others that I read.

In college I didn’t do any creative writing at all. I studied foreign languages, wrote earnest essays and wanted to be a diplomat. But after I got my degree, I realized I was burnt out and I didn’t want to race into a career right away. So I moved to Hawaii to work on a farm. It was supposed to just be for a few months while I gathered steam and figured my life out. But I got bored on the farm, and as a remedy against boredom I decided to write a book.

I discovered that really enjoyed the writing process. I started thinking, well, I could do this with my life. Might as well try.  So I promised myself that I would finish my novel and at least try to get it published. Getting a book published is hard, and it took a lot of work to get there and there were setbacks along the way. But I just found myself getting more and more determined as the process went on.

I would say there was no moment that definitively told me I wanted to be a writer, rather a series of decisions and outcomes and realizations that cumulatively made me realize that was what I wanted to do with my life.

You weave in so many creatures from Russian folklore—a few of which are unique to the culture (I’d never heard of a domovoi!). How did you research these legends?
I took a course in college as part of my Russian degree, ambitiously titled “The Russian Mind.” This class started us off in Slavic prehistory and took us through more than a thousand years’ worth of events, ideas, and pieces of literature that shaped the thinking and the culture of the Russia we know today.

Early in the class, we studied Slavic folklore, including household spirits like the domovoi. We also examined the notion that Slavic paganism never really disappeared from the Russian countryside after the arrival of Christianity; rather they coexisted, with some friction, for centuries. I was fascinated by the tensions inherent in such a system, as well as the notion of a complicated magical world interacting so subtly with the real one. I decided that I wanted to explore these notions in the context of a novel. I did my research, as one does, in libraries and online. I have also amassed a small library of obscure academic texts on such topics as medieval Russian sexual mores, magical practices and farming implements.

"Slavic paganism never really disappeared from the Russian countryside after the arrival of Christianity; rather they coexisted, with some friction, for centuries. I was fascinated by the tensions inherent in such a system."

Were there any creatures you wish you had been able to include?
Wow, there are so many characters from folklore that I wanted to include but couldn’t! Some of them will make an appearance in future novels. There is a guardian spirit for everything in Russian folklore. The domovoi guards the house; the dvorovoi guards the dooryard. The bannik guards the bathhouse, the Ovinnik, the threshing-house. Their areas of influence are almost absurdly specific. And each creature has a certain appearance and personality, and people must do certain things to placate them.

Do you see big differences between Russian folklore and that of Western Europe?
Yes, there are marked differences between Western European and Russian fairy tales. To me the most interesting difference is between the recurring main characters of these two fairy-tale traditions. For example, the classic hero of Russian fairy tales is Ivan the Fool. He is not a muscular and martial figure like the heroic kings, princes and woodcutters that feature in Western European fairy tales. Rather, he is usually of ordinary birth, lazy and good-natured, and he gets by on his wits and native innocence.

For me, the heroines in Russian fairy tales absolutely outshine their Western counterparts, in terms of initiative, courage and interesting storylines. Vasilisa the Beautiful, for example, defeats the Baba Yaga with her cleverness and the help of her mother’s blessing. Marya Morevna is a warrior queen. Even Baba Yaga, the prototypical villain, is a powerful woman, who is sometimes wicked but always wise. For that reason, especially, I prefer the fairy tales of Pushkin or Afanasyev to those of say, Perrault, which value passivity in girls (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc).

"The heroines in Russian fairy tales absolutely outshine their Western counterparts, in terms of initiative, courage and interesting storylines."

Vasya is a truly compelling heroine. She is strong enough to embrace her differences, but she still reads as a woman of her time. How did you maintain that balance?
How does any writer maintain balance? Scene by scene and moment by moment. I brought my own modern biases, and understandings to this historical period that I was trying to write about, but also allowed my ideas and beliefs to be shaped by my best guesses about the attitudes of the time. There was a constant friction between what I wanted my main character to do, and what I believed she would be able to do, given the era, and I hope some of the tension made its way into the storytelling.

As is often the case in fairy tales, the introduction of a stepmother brings conflict to the Petrovich family. Yet the reader ends up having a great amount of sympathy for Anna. How do you feel about this character?
Anna was one of the first characters that really came into focus for me, and it is often really interesting to get readers’ reactions on her. Some people feel sympathy for her, some hate her wholeheartedly. I personally fall into the former category. I think she is a person wholly trapped in a world that allows her no choices, and she is not a strong enough person to carve out happiness for herself in those circumstances.

“What makes the evil stepmother evil?” is perhaps an old or cliched question, but it was one I felt was important to ask and to answer, to give the story depth.

The Russian wilderness—and the Russian winters in particular—are vividly described in your novel. Can you talk a bit about that and how it affects your characters?
People living in the middle ages, in an environment as harsh as Northern Russia, were intimately acquainted with the weather. Their lives literally depended on it. In The Bear and the Nightingale, the weather is pretty much a character in and of itself, personified, in a way, by the various spirits that populate the novel. Every action and event in the book is some way tied to the land: heat, bitter cold, snowstorms, fires.

Also, I think my personal experiences of Russia (I lived in Moscow for a gap year after high school, and again my junior year of college) come through most in my descriptions of weather. The Russian weather has a quick and capricious quality that really captivated me, and the sky seems HUGE. If the natural world has a powerful presence even in modern Moscow, can you imagine what it was like for people living in the wilderness in the 14th century?

"If the natural world has a powerful presence even in modern Moscow, can you imagine what it was like for people living in the wilderness in the 14th century?"

Even though her family sometimes has a hard time understanding Vasya, there is so much love and loyalty in their relationships. What was your favorite relationship in the novel?
I really love the relationship Vasya has with her older brother Sasha and her younger brother Alyosha. I have a brother, and so those relationships were the easiest for me to write. I wanted their mutual affection to be a powerful driving force, even though they don’t always understand, or agree with, each other. I think that is how families function in the best sense, where love and loyalty wins out, even though no one is perfect.

The conflict between Christianity and the old traditions is a big part of this book. What do readers need to know about this period in Russian history?
I think it’s important to realize that this period of Russian history doesn’t have a lot of primary sources. Literacy was extremely low, and the few literate people lived in cities and were mostly clergy, concerned with copying Greek religious texts. Everything was built of wood, so architectural evidence is limited as well. It gives lovely scope to a writer, because you can do your research, align all your facts, step back and say, well, how do we know this didn’t happen?

But what we do know: at this time period (mid 14th century) Muscovy was rising rapidly, buoyed by a long collaboration with the Golden Horde, which had taken power in Russia about 200 years prior. At the time, the Horde was preoccupied by succession problems (Genghis Khan had a really absurd number of descendants), and the Grand Princes of Moscow were quietly expanding their territory and bringing lesser princes into the fold.

During this period, much of Muscovy’s conflict was with other Russian city-states (notably Tver), but Dmitrii Ivanovich (who is still a boy in The Bear and the Nightingale) is the first prince who will successfully oppose the Golden Horde and Mongol dominance in Russia.

You’ve lived in so many places! Where are you now, and how long do you plan to stay there?
I’m live in Vermont just at present, where I promised myself I would stay and not budge until I’d finished my second novel! I’ve done that now, and so I am eyeing the horizon a bit. You never know. Norway next, maybe? Bali? My absolute favorite thing about being a writer is that you can live wherever you want.

We hear this is the first in a series. What can you tell us about Vasya’s next adventure?
Her next adventure, The Girl in the Tower, is written already. It covers a much shorter time frame than The Bear and the Nightingale (two months instead of 16 years) and it takes place largely in the medieval city of Moscow. It features Vasya and also her two older siblings, Sasha and Olga, who were only briefly in the first book, along with new characters from Russian history and Slavic mythology. Some you may recognize, some you probably won’t.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Bear and the Nightingale.

Author photo © Deverie Crystal Photography.

Katherine Arden conjures the spirit—and spirits—of medieval Russia in The Bear and the Nightingale, her enchanting fantasy debut.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

Confessions from the guy who screwed up the future

Interview by Cat Acree

Screenwriter Elan Mastai’s debut novel, All Our Wrong Todays, is a hugely entertaining time-travel narrative and tale of alternate reality. In a techno-utopian world very different from our own, a grieving scientist’s son travels back in time and accidentally alters history, only to return to 2016 and find himself in our reality. This novel is his memoir, and while it includes plenty of physics (although these sections are limited and brief), it’s also full of romance and provocative explorations of self.

With film rights sold before the book even published, All Our Wrong Todays offers an abundance of juicy theories and questions of consciousness and paradoxes. Here, Mastai discusses his Vonnegut inspiration, time-travel pet peeves and possibilities, and the beauty of storytelling in a far-from-perfect world.

When did you love affair with time travel begin?
Probably when I was visited by my future self with an urgent message about preventing the terrible crime I would one day commit. So, the usual way.

No, as a teenager, I read Slaughterhouse Five, an old paperback borrowed from my grandfather’s extensive collection of 1950s and 1960s science fiction. I’d never read anything like it. When Kurt Vonnegut describes how the Tralfamadorians experience time as a continuity, able to experience the past, present and future simultaneously, and how that affects their storytelling and philosophy—that was a formative concept for me. As a writer, I like to think about untapped wells of storytelling hidden inside well-worn tropes. If I’m going to ask readers to try another time travel story, I want it to have the same effect on them that Slaughterhouse Five had on me. That’s the hope anyway. Each reader will, of course, decide for themselves if I succeeded.

What’s your greatest time-travel pet peeve? Favorite time-travel possibility?
My pet peeve is that time-travel stories typically behave as if the Earth is stationary. You open a door in time, walk through it, and you’re in the past. But of course the Earth is constantly moving. And fast. Like, really fast. Our planet spins on its axis at up to 1,000 miles per hour, while orbiting the sun at around 67,000 miles per hour, which itself moves within our galaxy at 1,300,000 miles per hour. So traveling back in time also means transporting yourself across vast distances—millions, even billions of miles—and precisely landing on the spinning outer crust of the planet, rather than up in the atmosphere or embedded inside the planet or at the bottom of the ocean or in the vacuum of outer space. Since any of these possibilities would make for a short, gruesome end to the story, most time-travel tales just ignore it.

My favorite time-travel possibility is the most obvious of all: a second chance. Time-travel stories are usually stories about regret. We all have regrets. We all have pain, loss, humiliation, error. The chance to fix our mistakes. To erase the worst of our decisions and replace them with better, wiser, less hurtful or more graceful choices. It’s impossible in life. But not in fiction.

Talk to me about Tom. Was his voice always so forthright in your mind? Particularly when he discovers his new timeline in our 2016 and starts to learn more about himself, he’s so honest about the realization process, about his failures and why he tells the story the way he does. Why do you think he’s so straightforward with his audience?
I had the idea for this novel many years ago, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to tell the story. One summer day, I was walking my dog down the street and it occurred to me that I could write it as a first-person narrative. That might seem evident, but my background is as a screenwriter and movie scripts are always written in the third person. And in Courier font. I’ve spent so much of my life staring at Courier font. As soon as I realized it could work in the first person, the opening sentence of the book popped into my head in Tom’s voice. I stopped on a bench and wrote it down, then the next sentence, and the one after that, until I’d written the first chapter, while my dog whined to continue her walk. Her name is Ruby Slippers and her whine is extremely high-pitched, so the fact that I endured it to keep writing tells you how strong and clear Tom’s voice was right from the start.

I think Tom is so candid because he wants what we all want: to be understood. For who we are, in spite of our many faults and blunders. The novel is written as a memoir, but really it’s a confession. In the beginning, he’s honest because he has nothing to lose. In the end, he’s honest because he has so much to lose.

The male characters seem to be driven by the pursuit of greatness or the love for a woman in their life. Therefore, the men’s actions drive the plot, but the women determine its direction. (And it should be noted, the women here are all brilliant, and quite a bit more impressive than the men, even the genius ones.) Was this something you intended to explore with this book? (Is there a personal connection here?)
My mother was a brilliant and impressive woman. She was an art critic, a curator and a museum director, until she died when I was 26. My father followed her across the world to start a new life in Canada, where I was born. Is there a personal connection? Yes. But I also like to write about the kinds of people I like to spend time with, regardless of gender. Smart, complex, shaded women. And men, too. As a first-person narrative, all the characters are presented through Tom’s point of view. But since he’s a man—and one with a lot to learn about a lot of things, particularly how he relates to the women in his life—it was important to me to craft rich female characters that suggest vivid lives beyond the frame of Tom’s perspective.

“What I like about books is that sometimes you’re told things you don’t want to hear by people you’ve never met. That’s how you change your mind.”

Tom’s world is arguably better than ours in every way—except when it comes to stories. It’s a staple of utopian worlds for stories, art and music to lose their power, and while socio-economic disparity has been mitigated in through your utopia’s power source, there’s still death (even sudden, horrible deaths, at that), and so there’s still a mortal drive to create art. But why did you decide this techno-utopia would change how we experience novels?

Well, I love books. So any alternate reality worth thinking about begs the question: Sure, OK, that’s cool, but what are the books like?

Tom’s world has no war, no illness, no poverty, no prejudice, but also no books. Not the way we have them in our world. Instead of books or movies or video games, it has storytelling media based on brain scans that port your personal psychology into a narrative framework, like a waking dream. It’s not about an author exorcising their demons or beguiling their angels. It’s all about you. Your fears, your kinks, your longings. I imagined Tom’s world as a technological utopia based on the social outlook of the 1950s. So postwar consumerism thrived, while antiauthority skepticism never took hold as it did in our version of reality. I saw this storytelling technology as the result of a certain kind of egocentric consumerism that tells you there’s nothing more important than what you want. What I like about books is that sometimes you’re told things you don’t want to hear by people you’ve never met. That’s how you change your mind. In Tom’s world, nobody thinks they need to change their mind.

One of my absolute favorite moments in the book is when Greta (who is amazing, by the way) goes off on a hilarious rant about trying to control our world. “It just pisses me off,” she says, “these f_cking sci-fi allegories where, you know, if we just stick with the plan, we’ll fix it all and live in a futuristic paradise. When, actually, our one chance at saving our only home in the universe is quitting the plan.” But Tom’s choice is much more complicated than that. If you had Tom’s choice, would you try to fix the timeline you broke?
I love Greta. It’s funny because she’s the one character I didn’t plan for before I started writing the book. When she shows up in the story, it was actually the first time I’d even thought of her. She just kind of asserted herself as absolutely necessary. But I have two sisters and I can’t separate who I am from the experience of growing up with them. When I was establishing who Tom is in our world versus the one he’s from, Greta became the key to figuring that out.

We break timelines all the time, in the choices we make and the consequences we endure. If I could change certain decisions I made in the past, I would. But I can’t. It’s out of my control. In Tom’s case, he has the power to change history because of the time machine. Except, as Greta’s rant suggests, the power to control is often a delusion. Controlling a person. Controlling a country. Controlling a planet. Does the history of humankind tell us that usually works out? Fiction is the respite. In fiction, I can revisit my mistakes and search for better choices. Sometimes I find them.

What’s the main gripe you expect about your time-travel physics, and what’s your response?
Probably that my model of time travel requires a form of radiation, what I call tau radiation, that is theoretically possible but doesn’t actually exist. Or at least hasn’t yet been discovered! My response would be that I’m pretty sure the physics bear out, but time travel would definitely be more difficult without tau radiation to provide a breadcrumb trail through time and space. Also, I’d suggest the griper relax a bit and enjoy the speculation, since actual time travel would likely be a disaster for humanity.

Is there a visual component of this story that you’d especially love to see in the movie?
Well, kind of the opposite. In the book, the reader can picture what things look like based on their imagination. Despite hundreds of pages spent inside his point of view, I never describe Tom’s physical appearance. I like that the reader can picture him however they want. It’s the same with all the characters. Unless there’s a specific physical trait that’s relevant to the story, I intentionally left their appearance open to interpretation. But a movie is specific. Tom will be played by a particular actor and his face will forever be Tom’s face, not just in the movie but for a lot of potential readers. Likewise all the characters. I’m in no way complaining about having a movie made from my novel. Far from it. But that’s one of the things you give up in the adaptation.

What’s next?
I’m currently working on the movie adaptation of All Our Wrong Todays and writing a new novel.

Read our review of All Our Wrong Todays.

Author photo credit David Leyes.

Screenwriter Elan Mastai’s debut novel, All Our Wrong Todays, is a hugely entertaining time-travel narrative and tale of alternate reality. Mastai discusses his Vonnegut inspiration, time-travel pet peeves and possibilities, and the beauty of storytelling in a far-from-perfect world.

Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYA

Laini Taylor

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

A vital element of Laini Taylor’s sweeping, dramatic, exciting new novel is travel in many artfully rendered guises, including flights of imagination via books in an amazing library, a grueling but thrilling road trip to a forgotten city and nocturnal tours of people’s dreams.

Journeys near and far have been central to Taylor’s own story as an author as well, with the wonders of travel first opening to her through her father’s job as a naval officer.

“It definitely had a huge impact on me,” Taylor says during a call to her home in Portland, Oregon. “I was so lucky to be able to live in Europe as a kid. . . . I wish everyone had the opportunity to see the world from different perspectives at a young age.” She adds: “As an elementary school student, I went on field trips to Pompeii! We were living in incredible places, and I had a blessed childhood.”

“I had to honor the darkness I’d created, but still make the story a place readers enjoy being. Kissing helps!”

Taylor’s literary career began in 2004 with the graphic novel The Drowned, followed by the Dreamdark series, the National Book Award finalist Lips Touch: Three Times and the New York Times bestselling Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy.

That’s a lot of writing over the course of a decade, and Taylor’s work certainly doesn’t tend toward the spare. She creates highly detailed, multilayered worlds populated by complex characters engaged in grand-scale endeavors.

She’s at it again with Strange the Dreamer: 500-plus pages of poetic prose, finely crafted fantasy and oodles of adventure, peril, romance, redemption, gods, royals and warriors. It’s a fantasy lover’s delight, with ever-higher flights of fancy brought crashing to earth and then soaring anew as the pages turn and the characters journey on. It all builds toward a shocking ending—and maybe, a beginning. Fans will be happy to hear that it’s the first book in a duology.

Readers meet Lazlo Strange, orphaned during a war in Zosma and adopted by monks. Around age 5, Lazlo became fascinated—obsessed, really—with the lost city of Weep, a faraway land with a mysterious story. At age 13, he begins work at the Great Library, “a walled city for poets and astronomers and every shade of thinker in between.” (Be warned: Taylor’s descriptions of the place are sure to awaken a great longing in avid readers.)

Just when life is starting to seem a bit routine, Lazlo learns that a man known as the Godslayer has come to town, and he’s leading a band of people with special skills to Weep. Lazlo leaps at the chance to join them, and so begins a journey to a beautiful, damaged place where strange contradictions abound: Beautiful temples and a “cityscape of carved honey stone and gilded domes” share space with “butcher priests . . . performing divination of animal entrails.” It’s a setting of great mystery and wonder, where it becomes clear the travelers’ challenges have only just begun.

In the meantime, Taylor introduces us to some of the residents of Weep, including a beautiful young woman named Sarai who has a most unusual ability (she can enter and manipulate dreams), a decidedly untraditional family situation and jewel-toned skin. She is one of the children of gods, left behind after a long-ago war between gods and men. And she lives in secrecy with her siblings (also in possession of singular talents) in a giant citadel that floats in the sky miles above Weep.

With such a marvelous backstory, it’s easy to see why, at first, Taylor intended to begin the duology with Sarai’s story (and there’s so much more to it than we’ve touched on here). When she first began work on Strange the Dreamer, Taylor thought about “children of war, like children of soldiers left behind in Vietnam, and their struggles.”

But as she tried to write Sarai’s story, about someone “living someplace where they look down on the population but aren’t part of it,” Taylor says, “I knew I wanted to enter [Weep] through the eyes of an outsider.”

Lazlo was that outsider, Taylor explains. “He totally took over the story. All of a sudden, after weeks and weeks of struggling, I had a lightning bolt: His nose was broken by a falling book of fairy tales—and I had him! In that moment, it was his book, and everything shifted. I fell in love with the librarian.”

Speaking of love, fans of Taylor’s work will be happy to hear that there’s romance to be found amid the trauma and fear in Weep. “[A kiss] is a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption to the mundane,” muses one character.

That’s exactly what Taylor says she was going for when she imbued this often dark tale with the lightness and joy of new love: “It was a hard lesson to learn [as I became an author], that I had to honor the darkness I’d created, but still make the story a place readers enjoy being. Kissing helps!”

So, too, do those fairy tales: The book that bonks Lazlo on the nose contains the kinds of narratives that have long fascinated Taylor. “The only books I have in my office are folklore and fairy tales!” she says. “Reading folklore from other countries is a great way to expand your imagination. One line of a folktale from a country you don’t know about could be the seed of an entire novel.”

Certainly, Lazlo’s dedication to reading and research helped expand his mind beyond the walls that surround him. As for Sarai, Taylor says she travels through peoples’ dreams into greater waking consciousness for herself. “She could learn more about the people she’d been taught to hate when she sees their dreams and nightmares. How could she not feel for them?”

There’s much to ponder and relate to in Strange the Dreamer—in addition to simply enjoying (and marveling at) the fantastical fruits of Taylor’s imagination. It’s a compelling, engaging mix of super-fun adventure and timely allegory. As for how to pass the time while awaiting Taylor’s next book, The Muse of Nightmares? Well, there’s always reading and traveling . . . and dreaming.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Ali Smith.

A vital element of Laini Taylor’s sweeping, dramatic, exciting new novel is travel in many artfully rendered guises, including flights of imagination via books in an amazing library, a grueling but thrilling road trip to a forgotten city and nocturnal tours of people’s dreams.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Deborah A. Wolf

Interview by Lily Norton

Deborah A. Wolf makes her epic fantasy debut with The Dragon’s Legacy, the first novel in an ambitious trilogy about the Zeeranim, a tribe of fierce female warriors determined to protect their desert homeland. One of the brave young warriors, Sulema, is stunned to learn of her long-hidden connection to the powerful Dragon King who rules in a neighboring land. The novel traverses the sands of the Zeera desert and beyond as readers encounter dream-shifting shamans and terrifying mythical creatures.

Wolf has personal experience with wild landscapes and ferocious creatures, since she grew up in an Alaskan wildlife refuge. We asked her for some insight into what she calls her childhood as a “barbarian warrior”—with all its bumps and bruises—and how those experiences translate onto the page in her thrilling new novel.

How did you decide to create a matriarchal society like that of the Zeeranim? These characters pack some serious girl power. Are there any women in your life who should be ruling the world?
One of the things I’m having fun with as I write The Dragon’s Legacy series is trope-flipping. Desert tribes are overwhelmingly portrayed as male dominated and repressive of women and women’s sexuality, so I wanted to write that backwards and see what emotional impact it might hold for my readers. Also, I grew up in the middle of Alaska, and the women in my village were for the most part powerful and admirable, whether for their skills at hunting and fishing, jobs on fishing boats and in the oil fields, or for their abilities in providing for and raising families in a dangerous and awesome environment. My Granny should have ruled the world. It would be a much kinder place today had she a voice in making policy.

The Dragon’s Legacy is filled with all sorts of strange (and scary) animals. How did you come up with the creatures in the novel? Are they combinations of your favorite animals, your least favorite, or just animals that you think would look interesting blended together?
I grew up on wildlife refuges, so the natural world informed my development from an early age. I enjoy worldbuilding as far as imagining ecosystems and the life forms one might find, especially on a world born of a dragon’s dreaming.

World building is an incredibly difficult undertaking. Can you tell us how your experience as an Arabic linguist and your love of different cultures contributed to your talent for creating new worlds?
I can’t imagine how much more of a struggle this would be if my upbringing and early adulthood had been more homogeneous. Exposure to and appreciation for cultures different from my own have imbued me with a fascination for the breadth of the human experience; we are so strange, so wonderful and odd and funny and frightening as a species. Sulema is an intriguing and unique character. She is brave to the point of recklessness, fierce and strong.

Is there a little of you in Sulema? In a perfect world, would you like to live your life like hers?
There is a lot of me in Sulema, which is probably why I’ve had knee surgery, cortisone shots and some hearing loss. I regret nothing. Sulema is a good kid, and people who knew me as a young soldier will recognize many of her personality traits. That being said, I’m probably more like Hafsa Azeina [Sulema's adoptive mother] at this stage of my life.

If you woke up tomorrow as any mythical creature—including ones of your own invention—which one would it be and why?
A dragon, of course. Even the least of dragons inspires us to awe.

Which came to you first, the plot or the concept for the world of The Dragon’s Legacy?
The concept came first, though it was in the beginning a much simpler story, meant to be a quick sword and sorcery in the desert tale of Sulema’s journey to meet her father and create her destiny. Writing is much like parenting; you conceive a child and love it immediately with all your heart, and then kind of sit back and watch in awe as that child defies all your preconceived notions and grows into something more wonderful than you could have imagined. The novel has so many unique castes and occupations, from dreamshifters to First Mothers to vashai.

Was there any real-world or historical inspiration for the hierarchy and cultural structures in place?
I am an avid reader of histories, biographies and faerie tales, and at any given time you might find me engrossed in a National Geographic magazine or BBC documentary. So the short answer to this question would have to be “Yes, all of it.” History, current events, and a big dose of ‘what if’. What if China had interfered with Roman expansion? What if Atlantis had sunk down into the earth instead of the ocean? What if the threat of earthquakes in California is actually a result of a restless dragon stirring in her sleep?

Elaborate a little about the connection between issues in the book regarding indigenous peoples and their struggles to find and keep their place in a violent world. What has been your real-life connection to this topic, and what do you hope the reader comes away with?
I grew up in a mostly Native village on the Kuskokwim River, and have seen firsthand the social issues that directly result from imperial expansion and cultural genocide. These observations were not from the viewpoint of a seasoned adult with preconceived ideas and a view of the Other, but as a child whose friends’ lives were (and are) directly impacted by forces outside any of our small spheres of influence. I hope that the reader might come away with the ability to see indigenous peoples as people, ordinary people, rather than as savages or museum displays or quaint, backwards societies in need of enlightenment.

How did growing up in Alaska influence your development as a writer?
Because I attended high school in McGrath, Alaska, I was blessed to have come under the tutelage of English teacher Deane O’Dell, who (because she has the patience of all the saints) was able to imbue the reluctant mind of a young barbarian with an unlikely love of culture and literature. Alaska is huge, it is limitless and ancient and powerful, and it is deadly. Alaska will put you in your place and teach you the meaning of insignificance. Alaska taught me to love this world, and hope for its continued existence.

Also, the fishing is superb.

Who inspires you as an author? Are you a longtime reader of epic fantasy, and if so, what are some of your favorites in the genre?
I grew up reading such greats as Katharine Kerr, Katherine Kurtz and of course Anne McCaffrey; I wanted to be a Dragonrider so bad, you have no idea. I used to hunt for fire lizard clutches on the beach. More recently, favorites and inspirations include Pat Rothfuss, Robin Hobb and George Martin. This is a short excerpt of a very long list. I feel fortunate to live in such times, and humbled to be published in such august company.

Can we have a few hints about the forthcoming books in the trilogy?
Keep an eye out for spiders, and trust no one—especially not the author.

Deborah A. Wolf makes her epic fantasy debut with The Dragon’s Legacy, the first novel in an ambitious trilogy about a desert tribe of fierce female warriors.
Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYAFantasy

Holly Black

Interview by Justin Barisich

Holly Black has played in the world of faeries for as long as she can remember. When she was a child, her mother would enchant her with ghost stories, convince her that their house was haunted and even set up scavenger hunts for her to find little indications of faeries around their neighborhood.

“I grew up with a great deal of belief in the supernatural,” Black says during a call to her home in western Massachusetts, where it’s a damp, misty day. “It seemed very possible that the faerie world was always just around the corner. And when you really believe, it seems a lot scarier.”

Black went on to read, fall in love with and draw inspiration from the original folklore and art of faeries—which are far darker than most people realize. Faeries are “often seen as kind of Tinker Bell-y in that pastel, friendly way,” Black says. “But the original folklore is pretty brutal.” Some faeries might “steal people, trick people, lead them astray, off cliffs and into the water where creatures will eat you.” These are the kinds of darker faerie characters that Black explores in many of her bestselling faerie novels, and more deeply than ever in The Cruel Prince, the first book in her new Folk of the Air trilogy.

As The Cruel Prince opens, human twin sisters Jude and Taryn get their first introduction to the creatures of Faerie by way of Madoc, their mother’s first husband and the bloodthirsty grand general of the High Court’s armies. Though he knocks on their door and slaughters their mother and father right in front of them, he is not without honor. He not only takes back his biological, half-faerie daughter, Vivian, who’d been “stolen” from him, but he also agrees to adopt her half-sisters—Jude and Taryn—and return with them to Faerie and raise them as his own.

Ten years pass as Jude and Taryn grow up in Faerie, learning the inner workings of this strange land while being treated like members of the court. The downside to this, however, is that they must attend classes with Prince Carden, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King. But the faerie king will soon abdicate the throne and pass down his crown to one of his many children. This transition of power could unravel the entire, delicate fabric of Faerie—to the advantage of those ready to pounce on any sign of weakness.

Jude and Taryn are determined to carve out a place for themselves. But as Jude digs deeper into Faerie’s dark corners—all the while spying and learning of long-running political intrigues, power games and rivalries—the faeries she meets along the way only further demonstrate how cruel this place can be. As Jude transforms into someone who’s more than just a simple pawn, readers see the intimate duality of her struggle for place and power.

“It seemed very possible that the faerie world was always just around the corner. And when you really believe, it seems a lot scarier.”

Fans of Black’s faerie realm will recognize this tale as new territory: “Most [faerie] stories are set in our [human] world and are about a kid from Faerie who was switched,” Black explains, but The Cruel Prince “isn’t about just one person stumbling into a faerie situation and maybe learning their own magic.” Set almost entirely in Faerie, with human characters who were raised there and therefore know all the rules, this story reveals greater depth and detail of Faerie than ever before. Black’s characters are no longer playing the game without knowing the consequences, and to her, “that idea of having to rely on your wits and on cleverness, when everybody else has magic, is really interesting.”

Black unfolds this sweeping, twisting narrative with the fine-tuned understanding of someone who’s spent nearly her whole life poking around the depths of Faerie. It’s just what fans expect from the beloved author, whose various faerie books have sold over 2.5 million copies. To date, she has published more than 30 novels, and her Spiderwick Chronicles, co-crafted with Tony DiTerlizzi, were made into a feature film. But for all her critical acclaim and reader appreciation, it was her 2014 Newbery Honor for Doll Bones that engendered the greatest transformation in how she viewed herself as a writer.

“I grew up seeing those stickers on books and knowing those were ‘the good books,’ ” Black says. “When you’re a person who writes fantasy, you’re usually thought of in a different way—as a genre writer—and genre writers are often seen as not serious. So it really was a big shift in my view of my own writing to think that it could be seen as a serious work, as something that was objectively good.”

To put it mildly, The Cruel Prince is definitely good. The singular reading experience continues in the upcoming second book in the planned trilogy, which finds Black’s characters in a much larger political arena within Faerie. As Black gleefully explains, we’ll get to watch with bated breath as her cast of human and faerie characters learns “how everyone wants power for their own reasons—and how much harder it is to keep that power than it is to get it.”

 

 

Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Sharona Jacobs

Holly Black has played in the world of faeries for as long as she can remember. When she was a child, her mother would enchant her with ghost stories, convince her that their house was haunted and even set up scavenger hunts for her to find little indications of faeries around their neighborhood.

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionFantasy

Matt Haig

Interview by Savanna Walker

“I don’t think time heals all wounds, but occasionally it can let us accept those wounds.”

Matt Haig’s new character, Tom Hazard, looks 40, but due to a rare genetic disorder, he’s nearly 400 years old.

Soon to be adapted as a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, How to Stop Time leaps back and forth from the 16th century to present-day London to eras in between, revealing the story of a man haunted by the pain of his past and the uncertainty of his future, who nevertheless searches for a reason to keep living.

How to Stop Time shifts dramatically in timing and setting. How did you ensure that structure would make emotional sense to the reader?
The book darts all over the place, but Tom is telling the story from the present, from his perspective now. Each of his memories has helped shape him. They each add to the whole.

There’s always a temptation to have a character like Tom meet all sorts of famous people, but the figures he runs into are well placed and vital to the story. Why did you pick the people you did?
Some of them were there purely to serve the story—Captain Cook and his crew are there for the sheer reason that I wanted Tom to get out of England. I did not want to write 500 years of history in the same country. Shakespeare is there because he was alive when Tom was born, and is still such a big part of our present. Shakespeare’s wisdom on time shaped the book to an extent. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a little bit of an author indulgence. I simply enjoyed writing about him.

You’ve said that Tom’s psychology is inspired by your own experiences with depression, and his mental state after 400 years is a “nightmare version of mindfulness.” Why did you extrapolate your own experiences to this character?
The whole idea came about when I was recovering from anxiety and depression. After three years of continuous mental illness, you actually feel as if you have lived for 400 years. And the questions you face during that time—the point of life, of going on, of the desperate search for hope—would be the same for someone who was alive for centuries.

What do you think Tom misses most about the time period he was born into?
Well, apart from the first love of his life—Rose—I think he misses the old London. The theaters, the inns, the absence of cars and where social life happened on the streets, not on the internet.

What are you most excited to see in the movie adaptation?
It will be incredible to see Benedict Cumberbatch bringing Tom to life. That intensity of centuries. Also, it will be fun to see the South Pacific and his adventures there.

Given enough time, do you think Tom would ever get over the hardships he’s experienced? Can time really heal all wounds?
I think Tom is reaching the point in his life where that is beginning to happen. For centuries, he has been struggling, but now he is reaching a real point of change. Despite it all, I feel optimistic about his chances. I don’t think time heals all wounds, but occasionally it can let us accept those wounds.

What part of How to Stop Time was the most difficult to get right?
Well, the Elizabethan stuff, I think. For one thing, it took a lot of research. A lot of social history. I have a degree in history, but political history and social history are totally different things. I wouldn’t have known before, for instance, that children would drink beer because it was safer than water. New York in the 1890s took a lot of research, too, and early 20th-century Arizona—even though it is only one chapter—required quite a bit of study.

It was hard also because it is tempting to treat those time periods as the past, but at the time, it was the present. It was modern.

And of course, Shakespeare himself. Putting words into Shakespeare’s mouth risks hubris. But I wrote this book with a rare (for me) spirit of courage. I was determined to go precisely where the story wanted to go. I wasn’t going to hide from hard stuff.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How to Stop Time.

Author photo by Ken Lailey.

Matt Haig’s new character, Tom Hazard, looks 40, but due to a rare genetic disorder, he’s nearly 400 years old. Soon to be adapted as a film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, How to Stop Time leaps back and forth from the 16th century to present-day London to eras in between, revealing the story of a man haunted by the pain of his past and the uncertainty of his future, who nevertheless searches for a reason to keep living.

FictionLiterary FictionFantasy

Madeline Miller

Interview by Trisha Ping

Madeline Miller’s second novel, Circe, tells the story of a secondary character from Homer’s Odyssey, the classic Greek epic. After being exiled by her father for transforming a nymph into a sea monster out of jealousy, Circe hones her witchcraft on an isolated island. But chance encounters lead her to reconsider her past and seize control of her fate.

We asked Miller, who won the Orange Prize in 2012 for her first novel, The Song of Achilles, a few questions about the power of myth and the allure of immortality.

Your novels are tricky to pin down by genre. They take place in the past, but have elements of the supernatural. How do you think about your own work?
I think of my books as either literary adaptation or mythological realism. Or just plain old fiction! Genre is such a permeable and changeable thing—Homer is considered some of the most literary literature there is, but if the Odyssey came out today it would probably get shelved in fantasy.

Other than the Odyssey,​ what sources did you have for information about the legends surrounding Circe? Why did you choose to tell her story?
Circe has always been fascinating to me because of her power and mystery; we know she turns men to pigs, but why? To say that it’s because she’s evil by nature isn’t interesting—nor is it true. After she and Odysseus become lovers, she’s one of the most benevolent deities he meets, and I wanted to dig into the reasons behind all of that.

Circe’s also interesting because of the way she relates to so many other famous myths—she’s Helios’ daughter, the Minotaur and Medea’s aunt, Prometheus’ cousin and more. Finally, I loved that she’s the first witch in Western literature. She was born a goddess with little status or power, but finds a way to carve out an independent life for herself by literally inventing something new in the world. I wanted to tell the story of such an interesting and complex woman in her own words, rather than filtered through the male protagonist’s perspective.

In terms of sources, I used texts from all over the ancient world and a few from the more modern world as well. For Circe herself, I drew inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, Vergil’s Aeneid, the lost epic Telegony (which survives only in summary) and myths of the Anatolian goddess Cybele. For other characters, I was inspired by the Iliad, of course, the tragedies (specifically the Oresteia, Medea and Philoctetes), Vergil’s Aeneid again, Tennyson’s Ulysses and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Alert readers may note a few small pieces of Shakespeare’s Ulysses in my Odysseus!

“I loved that she’s the first witch in Western literature. She was born a goddess with little status or power, but finds a way to carve out an independent life for herself by literally inventing something new in the world.”

Without giving too much away, Circe’s encounter with Odysseus pokes some holes in the heroic identity that he is given by Homer. Can you talk a little about what it was like to present Odysseus from a different perspective?
Odysseus was one of my favorite characters to write in The Song of Achilles, so I was excited for the chance to revisit him from a different character’s perspective, and at such a different stage of his life. Odysseus is one of the most storied heroes out there—he has been rewritten and reimagined thousands of times. He’s been pretty much everything: beloved trickster, scheming puppet-master, treacherous supervillain, pompous gasbag, wise philosopher among savages, petty bureaucrat, master artist, victim of the fates, courageous leader, cunning thug and on and on. So poking holes in his heroism is definitely a time-honored tradition, even in the ancient world! When we speak of heroes today, we use the term to mean people who have moral courage and integrity. The ancient world didn’t use the word the same way. Their heroes were bold and larger than life—with equally larger-than-life flaws (see Achilles, Agamemnon, etc.).

In the Odyssey, Odysseus beats his men when they argue with him, his greed often gets him in trouble, and it is his own boastfulness that brings the Cyclops’ wrath down on his head. In the Iliad, he ruthlessly kills enemy soldiers in their sleep, as well as a spy to whom he’s promised mercy. I think we’ve come to love Odysseus because he’s the “smart” one, because he’s suffered so much and because he deeply loves his wife and family. That’s all true to the myths, but so is the fact that he’s a violent, compulsive liar who’s cheated on his faithful wife at least twice. I was interested in how both of those perspectives might be true at once.

As for my own Odysseus, I have always seen pragmatism as one of his core traits. He believes that the world is a brutal and dishonorable place, and if you want to thrive you have to be willing to set aside the traditional ideas of honor and get your hands dirty. He’s definitely an ends-justify-the-means believer.

Despite the myriad goddesses in the pantheon, there’s a broad streak of misogyny that runs through classical mythology. What was life like for women in Greece at the time the Odyssey was being told?
This varied depending on location, time period and class, but the general answer is: not great. Women in the ancient Greek world were controlled by a man throughout their lives. As girls, they were under their father’s control, which then passed to their husband and finally to their son. Some of these fathers would of course have been more sympathetic to their daughters’ wishes than others, but even the most doting ones were still having the final say. A woman’s duty was clear: marry so as to provide her father with a good alliance, then produce good heirs for her husband.

Women in ancient Greece were often considered to be creatures of a lower order—bestial in their lust and appetites and untrustworthy, as opposed to intellectual and enlightened men. They were usually not taught to read or write. An exception to this were the hetairai—high-class prostitutes/escorts that have some similarities to geishas. These women were able to attend the fancy, all-male intellectual dinner parties called symposia. They were expected to be learned and artistic, able to discourse wittily on poetry and myth and display other artistic talents. But they were of course also sex workers with little social status, who would never have been allowed to marry one of the men they escorted.

Circe leads an isolated life but still manages to cross paths with some of mythology’s best known characters, like Hermes, Athena, Daedalus, Prometheus, Medea and the Minotaur. Was there a personality you were particularly eager to bring to life?
So many of these characters were fun to imagine, it is hard to pick just one! I loved writing Pasiphae, Circe’s sister. She’s outrageous and vicious—but she has reasons for her behavior. Daedalus, the master craftsman and artist, was another favorite. And perhaps most of all: Penelope, Odysseus’ loyal wife who is as brilliant as he, if not more so.

The Greek gods are immortal, but few use their eternal life spans to seek wisdom, choosing instead to be ruled by their passions and pursue pleasure. It’s almost like a state of eternal adolescence. Do you think mortality inspires us in some ways to become better people? Why or why not?
I think mortality and pain can inspire us to be better—our own struggles can teach us great empathy and give us the push to help others. But I think it can also go the other way—that people who have suffered want to make others suffer. Humanity is always double-edged, and it is all of our responsibilities to encourage our better natures.

Also, as a teacher of high school students, I’m going to defend adolescents! I would take a teenager running things over a Greek god ANY day. Teenagers have big emotions, but those emotions are often positive ones—a passion for experience and learning, a desire for justice and improving the world, and a knack for sweeping away the old cobwebbed compromises and hypocrisies of the generation before. Setting aside a few exceptions (Prometheus, Chiron, etc.), Greek gods don’t feel empathy and only care about themselves. In my mind, they are more like narcissists.

Humankind has long been drawn to myths and legends. What do you think they teach us, or reveal about humanity, that other forms of narrative can’t?
I think there is something in the outsize nature of myth that speaks to us. The dragons and monsters, the angry gods all allow us to work through powerful emotions. None of us has actually met a dragon, but I think most of us have had moments of extreme hope, terror and adrenaline that feel larger than life and need some kind of epic expression. Imagining ourselves into myths provides an outlet for that. Myths let us be the valiant, suffering, flawed and clever heroes of our own lives.

If you could have one supernatural power, what would it be?
Circe’s power to communicate with animals would definitely be up there. Can I have Achilles’ superspeed as well?

What is a typical writing day like for you?
My writing schedule has changed since The Song of Achilles. Back then, I was also teaching and directing plays full time, so I tended to binge-write on weekends, vacations or in the summers—I would do total immersion for days or weeks at a time, then take long breaks. Now I have two young children, which means that I don’t have those nonstop binges, but I do write every day. I usually start around 8:30 a.m. or so, jumping right into a new scene. Then I work on older scenes, then back to the new scenes. Somewhere in there I work out, or at the very least take a long walk. Movement is vital to my writing—I work through lots of writing problems while I’m working out. It’s a great time for my brain to chew over solutions.

What are you working on next?
Two projects are drawing my eye. One is a piece inspired by Vergil’s Aeneid (one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time), and the other is inspired by Shakespeare’s Tempest (Shakespeare is the other great intellectual love of my life). I have no idea which one is going to pull ahead first!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Circe.

Photo credit Nina Subin

We asked Madeline Miller, who won the Orange Prize in 2012 for her first novel, The Song of Achilles, a few questions about the power of myth and the allure of immortality.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Melissa Caruso and Rowenna Miller

Interview by Savanna Walker

The Raverran Empire is like Venice, but with same-sex marriage and fire warlocks. Galitha City is a bustling metropolis on the cusp of revolution where you can buy a charmed dress to make you lucky in love. Melissa Caruso’s The Defiant Heir and Rowenna Miller’s Torn have some of the most beautifully realized settings in fantasy, places where courtly intrigue and gowns matter just as much as magical powers and threats of invasion.

The second book in Caruso’s Swords and Fire trilogy, The Defiant Heir, follows Lady Amalia Cornaro and the powerful mage Zaira as they try to prevent a cataclysmic war between the empire and the Witch Lords of Vaskandar. Miller’s heroine, Sophia, finds herself in a similar position in Torn, as she balances the demands of her firebrand reformer brother and noble customers as tensions in the city approach a boiling point. We talked to Caruso and Miller about living vicariously through world building, putting their characters in danger and fighting in a ballgown.

You both have fantasy worlds with several different nationalities that intersect with each other in such interesting ways. Where did you go for inspiration about culture when you were writing your books?
Melissa Caruso: The setting of the Swords and Fire trilogy is loosely based on the Venetian Empire. I’ve wanted to write a book set in a fantasy version of Venice ever since first visiting that magical and unique city, and it provided the inspiration for Raverra, the city in which much of the first book is set. It also doomed me to many hours researching 17th-century Italian cuisine and salivating over delicious food I can’t have! (Uh, and other research, but the food may have made the greatest impression.) Some of the other cultures in the series are less directly inspired by the real world, most notably Vaskandar, which you see a lot more of in the forthcoming second book, The Defiant Heir. I wanted Vaskandar to have kind of a dreamy, dark fairy tale feel to it, but to also have a bit of a strange and alien flavor as well, so I combined familiar elements like gothic-looking spooky castles and long black coats with made-up stuff like jagged, asymmetrical embroidery and designs.

Rowenna Miller: Like Melissa’s books, there’s a combination of history and fantasy and folklore in the setting of Torn. The strongest influence on Galitha is 18th-century Europe. Lots of little details of city life in that era gave me ideas to populate a bustling city, from ballad-sellers singing in the streets, to migrations of people of other nationalities, to fishmongers with carts of wares. The “Cries of London” sketches by several artists from the 18th and early 19th centuries, like Francis Wheatley, gave me a shot of lively inspiration when I started to flounder a bit on the flavor of my city. While the higher-level political systems and socio-economic realities are important to the bones of world building, I keep coming back to everyday, ordinary people for inspiration. It’s the history nerd in me—I can get enough inspiration from one image, diary entry or newspaper story from the past to write for days!

Rowenna, you re-create and research historical textiles. Did the idea behind Torn spring from that work? And how did your knowledge of these techniques help you create Sophie’ s magic?
RM: In a lot of ways, crafting clothing is magic. You have a simple length of fabric and through the process of draping and stitching, it becomes a gown or a jacket or even a simple petticoat. I was actually researching the evolution of jacket styles in the late 18th century (nerd alert) when I got the idea for a charm-stitching seamstress—so the two are very much intertwined. Knowing how intimate and hands-on the process of hand-sewing a garment is, as opposed to working with a machine, it seemed almost natural that a magical practitioner could utilize needle and thread to cast a charm. There are places in the process where the work can be very collaborative but also places where a charm-casting seamstress could work on her own.

Something I admired about Torn was that Kristos is only able to spend his time writing and protesting because he relies on the financial and emotional support of Sophie, which undercut the Les Mis-esque fantasy that depictions of rebellion can often fall into. Rowenna, what drew you to the more neutral and practical character of Sophie? And why do you think we so rarely get stories of people like her?
RM: Writing a politically neutral character is hard, and it was a real challenge to keep Sophie from reading as boring or passive rather than passionately invested in what she does care about—her work, her personal ethics and her family. So much of spinning a good story is the tension between what a character wants and how other characters, the social system they live in, a very large bear in the woods, whatever, are preventing them from achieving that goal. A character like Kristos has a much clearer, more black-and-white goal and conflict. I think we often prefer to write and read a Kristos because there’s some wish fulfillment there. There’s a thrill in imagining we could abandon the other facets of our lives to be in service to A Cause.

But I wanted a story centered on Sophie because there are so many historical characters like her—people motivated by love of the quiet but also vitally important things like family and livelihood, and by the fear of losing those things to outside political conflicts. Most of us are probably Sophies at least some of the time, balancing all the things we care about, often in conflict with one another.

What type of charmed garment would you each want Sophie to make you?
RM: I would want something I could wear frequently—charms don’t come cheap, so I want bang for my buck! Perhaps a lightweight short cloak or mantelet (it goes with everything), charmed for your basic go-to good luck.

MC: I’d want her to make something for my kids, with good luck to keep them safe and out of trouble! Definitely something they could wear everywhere, but not something small like a handkerchief because they’d lose it. My teen would probably like a stylish jacket, and maybe a nice shawl or scarf for my younger daughter.

What is your favorite era of clothing?
MC: Ooh, that’s a tough one. One of the things I love about fantasy is that you get to mix up the fashion a bit in terms of real-world era and gender (though of course you have to be good about keeping recognizable themes that unify the fashion for your world so that it feels coherent, even if you’re cheating). So for instance, I think 17th-century men’s coats and jackets are cool because they have swashbuckling flair and gorgeous embroidery. I made it acceptable (though unusual) for women to wear them in my books because I wanted my main character to have them (uh, basically as wish fulfillment). I don’t know if I’d pick 17th-century Europe as my favorite overall, but I do think it’s generally underappreciated (so long as you stay away from cartwheel ruffs).

The 18th century is fun for the sheer, ridiculous, over-the-top factor, and I do like a good old Renaissance doublet. I also want to continue to learn more about non-European historical clothing, because there are a lot of cultures out there with incredibly rich fashion histories full of gorgeous fabrics and beautiful patterns and embroidery. And frankly much more comfortable-looking clothing.

RM: I know, it’s so hard to nail down just one! Fantasy is fun for allowing more of a mélange, or for introducing elements that didn't show up historically. When I research historical clothing I can get very, very picky—if I'm recreating clothing for, say, a woman in Virginia in 1780, I have to ask myself if that French fashion plate or Swedish museum piece is something she would have had. In fantasy, I can remove some of those barriers and set clothing norms that accept or reject some historical realities.

My overall favorite is the late 18th century—roughly 1770 through 1790. The over-the-top Rococo stuff was waning, and clothing had this more restrained, tailored aesthetic while still being sumptuous and elegant and doing truly incredible things with draping and design. Not just for the wealthy, either—the lower-class gowns of the era make me really happy, too. There’s this pragmatic insouciance of “This skirt hem is in the way, I’m rucking it up,” and BAM, it’s a fashion statement. I also love the bustle era of the Victorian period—the draped skirts and tailored bodices are just scrumptious—and for actual real-life wearability, I’m a sucker for the 1930s.

Melissa, something I’ve really enjoyed in your novels is watching characters use social events and relationships to raise their own standing, conduct diplomacy or levy threats. How do you get the subtext of that sort of courtly maneuvering across in your writing?
MC: I love writing those kinds of layered court intrigue interactions! I think there are two keys to getting the subtext across: the setup and the reaction.

For the setup, I try to make sure that I’ve already given my readers all the information they need to understand the significance of what might otherwise seem like a simple social interaction. For instance, once you know fire warlocks can destroy entire cities, you’ll instinctively understand the power dynamics of bringing one as a guest to your rival city’s party without me needing to spell it out.

Then the reaction works on much the same principle you see in stage fight choreography—it’s the person getting hit that sells the punch. It’s the reaction of other characters to hearing Amalia’s mom’s name that tells you what kind of reputation and power she has, and it’s where characters pause or wince or buy time with a sip of wine that mark the points in a barbed political conversation.

Fantasy has often portrayed noble characters as detached from reality at best, and completely villainous at worst. But both of your books have upper-class characters that are deeply concerned with the welfare of their subjects, and who grapple with their own privilege and limitations. What do you find so compelling about those characters?
RM: Most people, in my view, want to be decent. They see themselves as invested in positive systems and worldviews. Few people wake up one day and say, “Hey, I’m going to exploit and abuse people because being evil is fun!”

I envisioned my politically advantaged characters as very dutiful, responsible people who perhaps only half understand the extent of their privilege. It’s uncomfortable for them to be challenged as the “bad guys” in a revolution that accuses them of hoarding power and wealth because they didn’t see themselves as withholding these things but rather using them for everyone’s benefit. Of course, we as outsiders can see that it’s not really possible to have all the systemic power and not benefit from it, regardless of one’s intentions, and I find that compelling. What do not-bad and even pretty good people do when presented with evidence that they’re benefiting from a corrupt system?

MC: I think an utterly corrupt fictional ruling class can lead to some wonderfully fun stories, but I agree with Rowenna that in reality, most people view themselves as trying to do good. In the Swords and Fire trilogy I wanted to write stories with court intrigue and dilemmas about the exercise of power, both political and magical, and to me, that’s much more interesting when the players in the conflict aren’t just out for personal gain. Everyone has something they’re trying to protect, and what’s putting them into conflict isn’t that they don’t want to make the world a better place, but that they have very different ideas about how that should be done and what they’re willing to sacrifice to do it.

Also, satisfying as it can be to read a classic overthrow of an evil regime (and let’s be clear, I love that trope), in this series, I wanted to show characters grappling with how to preserve the good in a system while challenging its flaws and standing up to power while still respecting the rule of law.

Torn is set in a traditional, fairly patriarchal country whereas the Swords and Fire trilogy is set in a progressive society with same-sex marriage and gender equality. How did you each decide what type of fantasy world to create?
MC: I think that we need both kinds of stories, and some of my favorite books have characters who struggle against (and triumph over) a system biased against them. (For instance, I really enjoy how there are so many women in Torn who find ways to have power even in a society that doesn’t want to grant it to them.)

But as a writer, I love imagining characters that haven’t had real-world prejudice weighing them down and are free to just be their awesome, badass selves. Fun as it can be to build a fictional patriarchy and then smash it, I find the building-the-patriarchy part to be too depressing. Besides, I don’t want to build rules into my fictional world that will in any way restrain me from writing as many women leaders and warriors, happy gay couples and so forth as my brain cares to generate!

RM: Like Melissa, I love both kinds of stories and agree that we need both. Both explore and reveal questions and problems we grapple with in our world either by mirroring it or by rejecting the mirror. For me, and for this particular story inspired in no small part by a real-world age of revolutions, I wanted to spend some time with women who are strong within the confines of a society that doesn’t give them many options. They create their options.

And I think this is important to work with, lest we ignore some of the strength and dignity of women both past and present. When we talk about “cool women in history,” we usually talk about the ones who rejected traditional feminine roles, which starts to walk an iffy line of condemning women who worked within the confines of their society to do good work. For instance, we talk about Deborah Sampson, who dressed as a man and fought in the American Revolution, not the Philadelphia Ladies’ Association, who raised a bunch of money that the army desperately needed for socks (and other stuff, but an army needs socks, people). So, this time, I wanted to play within those constraints. Next time, maybe not 🙂

Melissa, you had a fantastic thread go viral on Twitter that explained how a character could actually fight quite well in a ball gown. How well could Sophie fight in one of her voluminous skirts and cloaks? And what sort of clothing do you put Amalia, Zaira and your other female characters in when they know they could be in a fight?
MC: Well, my biggest concern for Sophie’s ability to fight in the kind of clothes Rowenna describes is probably the super-stylish jacket she wears to impress the nobles she wants to sell her work to. That sounds really tailored, and I’m betting she’d probably have to rip the seams of her beautiful work to get decent arm movement, which would just be too tragic.

For my female characters, it really depends on their role and the situation! Some of them are soldiers and would be wearing uniforms designed for battle. Amalia, on the other hand, has to dress appropriately for the social occasion even if she expects to be jumped by assassins, so she might wear anything from her preferred loose-fitting coat and breeches to a court gown that gives her free movement in the shoulders and has enough clearance that she won’t be tripping over her skirts.

Zaira always wears skirts, which are great for hiding things, and if she’s going into danger, she dons a corset with enchanted stays that protect her from blades and musket fire. Because there’s no reason not to be fashionable AND battle-ready!

If you could place yourself in your fantasy world, where would you want to live and what would you like to be?
RM: This is always such a difficult question because of course, the worlds we usually write aren’t comfortable ones at the time we’re writing them. I’d love to visit Galitha City during the social season as a guest of Lady Viola, but in the midst of a dangerous revolution? No, thank you! It doesn’t make it into the book aside from some dialogue, but the agrarian regions in southern Galitha would make for about the calmest, least likely place to get run over by a mob. I’d set up shop in a small village—as a seamstress, of course!

MC: Well, I couldn’t pass up the chance to have magic, but I wouldn’t want to be forced to join the Falcons either. So I think I’d want to be a minor vivomancer living in some nice little villa in the countryside not too far from Raverra, so I could make day trips into the city and host occasional parties. I would use my vivomancy (life magic) to collect way too many odd pets (I want a raven! And a fox!).

I love that both Rowenna and I are clearly thinking to place ourselves in some safe, quiet location where we could happily putter away undisturbed by the dangerous adventures we put our poor characters through. Sorry, characters!

 

Caruso photo credit Erin Re Anderson. Miller photo credit Heidi Hauck.

Melissa Caruso’s The Defiant Heir and Rowenna Miller’s Torn have some of the most beautifully realized settings in fantasy, places where courtly intrigue and gowns matter just as much as magical powers and threats of invasion. We talked to Caruso and Miller about living vicariously through world building, putting their characters in danger and how to fight in a ball gown.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Bryan Camp

Interview by Matthew Jackson

Bryan Camp’s stunning, spellbinding debut novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, is a tale set in a post-Katrina New Orleans full of gods, monsters and magic. We asked Camp about the book’s inspiration, his thoughts on magic and what’s in store for its sequel.

You’ve said this book began as you and your family were evacuating before Hurricane Katrina hit. What was the initial seed of the idea? Was it an image? A wish? Something you lost that you were hoping could be magically found?
The initial seed for this book was a homework assignment, actually. I was in my last semester of undergrad at Southeastern Louisiana University, taking a fiction workshop with Bev Marshall. As a class exercise, she had us describe a room, and as we wrote, she called out senses to focus on, aspects of the room to incorporate. Since I was also taking a detective fiction class at the time, what came to my mind was a seedy backroom poker game, smoke in the air and the snap-shuffle of cards and a bunch of crooks. The last thing she said was to add something that didn’t belong, so I made one of the players a literal angel.

Our homework assignment was to take those few paragraphs of description and incorporate them into a short story. Mine was due the next week, and the storm hit that weekend. Having grown up in Louisiana, I figured Katrina would be like all the other storms I’d experienced: Since we were fortunate enough to have the means to do so, we’d evacuate, be gone for a few days, and then come home. And since my story would be due when we came back, that’s what I was working on in the backseat of my parents’ car as we drove to stay with my aunt and uncle in Florida.

That card-room description stayed exactly the same through every draft and revision of the novel except the last one, when it got rearranged. But the core idea and the wording is basically the same as what I wrote in a feverish 10-minute writing exercise all the way back in 2005.

New Orleans is a city that’s already been heavily mythologized in fantasy fiction of all kinds. In creating your version of it, what did you learn about this beloved American city that you cherish most when you look back on the book?
I don’t think New Orleans is only a myth in fantasy fiction, I think it’s a myth in the popular imagination as well. From the reasoning behind placing a city in this particular crescent-shaped bend in the river, to the “French” Quarter (which burned down and was rebuilt by the Spanish), to the lies Iberville told the English at English Turn, to the narrative that slavery was somehow “better” here, to the images of brass bands and gumbo and Mardi Gras, everything about New Orleans is some kind of myth, be it a story or a con or a full-on lie. Sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.

And that’s what I love most about this place, that I am—just like everyone else who lives here, who visits here, who reads about it in a book—constantly creating my own version of this city, one that’s simultaneously “the real” New Orleans and also nothing like the one you picture in your head when you think of it.

What aspects of New Orleans, whether real or fantasy, were you most excited to introduce to readers that you felt other writers hadn’t highlighted?
There’s a scene in [the TV show] “Treme” where one of the characters runs into a handful of tourists who have obviously been drinking all night in the Quarter, and he tells them that if they go a couple of blocks over, they’ll find the Clover Grill, this really great greasy spoon kind of diner. As they walk off, thanking him, he mutters, “Well [expletive deleted] now where am I gonna have breakfast?”

That’s such a quintessentially New Orleanian moment, because the things you want to show people when they come here are usually not the things they came here for, and then once you share them, you almost wish you’d kept them to yourself. Everywhere my characters eat and drink, for instance, isn’t just a real place, it’s a real place where you might run into me if the timing was right.

I’m certainly not the first writer to try to capture this side of New Orleans, but it was important to me to show parts of the city that weren’t just the Quarter and the cemetery and the mansions on St. Charles.

Jude is a fascinating character, simultaneously embodying certain aspects of the reluctant fantasy hero and subverting other aspects. Was the book always so firmly rooted in his journey through this world he thought he’d left behind, or did he take the story over in the writing of it?
The book was definitely always centered on a demigod with the magical ability to find lost things, but the core of the character shifted and changed throughout the various drafts of the book. That was partly me growing as a writer, but mostly me becoming more aware as a person. I still struggle to overcome the toxic aspects of my masculinity, and the earliest versions of the character, written in my 20s, were filtered through the lens of aggression and misogyny through which I saw the world. It took me a while to realize that not only was that not the way I really wanted to interact with the world, it also wasn’t the kind of hero I wanted to embody in my fiction.

Jude’s still a bastard, in every sense of the word, but those subversions you mention are deliberate, my way of actively turning my back on the kinds of violent, impervious, morally superior “heroes” I was taught by popular culture that I ought to emulate.

The particular assemblage of gods at the poker game that jump-starts the novel is an intriguing and somewhat surprising group, though their individual reasons for being at the table become clear as the novel progresses. Was there ever a version of that game featuring other various deities? Did another Egyptian god sit in Thoth’s seat at any point, for example?
Well, without getting into the spoiler territory of explaining why this particular group of gods is at a game like this, I can say with certainty that no, Thoth was always Thoth from the very beginning. It could only have been him.

In terms of different characters inhabiting chairs at the game meant for other deities, the seat filled by the Fortune God of New Orleans, Dodge, was once occupied by Coyote from the folklore of various Native traditions. I don’t think I even made it through the first draft before I swapped him and Dodge, though. For one, I was finding it difficult to separate my first attempt at this novel from the work of Charles de Lint, whose work loomed large in my mind, and who wrote Coyote better than I ever could. Mostly, though, I moved away from using that figure because I simply didn’t know enough about the traditions—the active faith of living people—to feel comfortable that I wouldn’t cause harm. I’ve read the stories, but that’s not the same thing as knowing the culture, and to just take something I didn’t feel like I understood is basically the definition of appropriation, which I did my best to avoid.

Also, there was once another player at the table, a faerie, who was removed and not replaced.

You wrote a fantasy novel set in New Orleans and made one of your major characters a vampire. Vampire stories set in New Orleans have been dominated for decades by the work of Anne Rice. Was that ever something you worried about, and what in particular did you find fascinating about your portrayal of this powerful New Orleans blood-drinker?
Yeah, to be completely honest, I originally wanted to write a novel without vampires at all, and because it was New Orleans I just couldn’t do it. Remember, a lot of the foundational thought for this book happened in 2005, so it wasn’t just Anne Rice I was up against, mentally, but also Stephenie Meyer and Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. All those brooding, glittering, sex-god vampires. I don’t say that in a derogatory sense, just in a sense that there was a well-trodden path that I hoped to avoid.

And yet, I kept coming up against the folklore of New Orleans. The Casket Girls. Jacque St. Germain. All those stories that inspired Anne Rice to create Lestat in the first place. As much as I didn’t want to write the popular-culture vampire, I couldn’t ignore that the myth was woven into the larger myth of the city.

So I turned to the folklore. I wrote the monstrous, demonic avatars of hunger and lust that humans of every culture have imagined through their fears of death and their own vulnerability. I think the fascinating thing about Umberto Scarpelli is that he absolutely loves being what he is. There’s no remorse, no hesitation. He’s a monster who likes to play with his food. It was the only way for me to address the well-deserved shadow that Anne Rice casts over New Orleans fantasy fiction without pretending I didn’t notice it.

In your world, particularly as Jude explains it, magic is a somewhat mutable force, and magical texts are often viewed as guidelines rather than rigid systems, while much of fantasy fiction is dominated by extremely structured frameworks for the use of magic. What inspirations did you draw from in crafting the magic in your novel, and what, in your mind, is the secret to effectively and believably using magic in fiction?
This is a hard question for me to answer succinctly. I think that what you consider “magic” says a whole lot about you as a person, about where you come from and how you see the world. I was raised Catholic, for example. I was taught that in the middle of the mass, the bread and wine on the altar are literally transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of a man who died 2,000 years ago. When you’re kneeling in the pews, that’s a matter of faith. But to someone not raised in that tradition, that sounds like magic. And then you look at things like quantum entanglement or the fact that time works differently depending on gravity, and those things sound like magic to me, too.

So when I was thinking about gods and myth and the way we interact with our world, instead of making magic a kind of science the way some fantasy writers (myself included, in other settings) do, I considered magic to be simply an imposition of one’s will upon the world. The world just listens to some people more than others.

In terms of having magic be believable, whether it’s a structured, pseudo-scientific magical “system,” or just “he snapped his fingers and the door opened,” the trick is to always be consistent. What I mean by that is that magic should never solve your problems as a writer. If you’ve established a world where magic is on about the level of our current technology, say, and you realize that you’ve written yourself into a corner where you need a character at point A to be at point B, you can’t just say, “oh, well, there are teleportation spells now.” That’s violating the contract you’ve made with your reader to solve your own problem. Fantasy readers are great—they’ll follow you down any road you want to go down, so long as you play the game straight from the beginning.

You’re already at work on a second novel in the same “Crescent City” universe. What can you tell us about that, and what inspirations are you drawing from the second time around that you didn’t the first time?
Well, I’m still waiting to hear back from my editor on it, so I can’t go into too much detail, but it follows one of the characters from The City of Lost Fortunes. She’s a psychopomp (one of the spirits who guides the recently dead through the Underworld) who shows up to collect a soul only to find that he’s not there. She pretty quickly learns that he’s not just missing, but is part of a bigger plot that involves storm deities and destruction gods, the guardians of the seven gates of the Underworld, and the delicate balance between the living and the dead. Searching for this lost soul leads her to the depths of the Underworld and then to the worlds of the Afterlife beyond.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The City of Lost Fortunes.

Bryan Camp’s stunning, spellbinding debut novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, is a tale set in a post-Katrina New Orleans full of gods, monsters and magic. We asked Camp about the book’s inspiration, his thoughts on magic and what’s in store for its sequel.

Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

R.F. Kuang

Interview by Chris Pickens

R.F. Kuang’s superlative fantasy debut, The Poppy War, follows ambitious orphan Rin as she enters prestigious military academy Sinegard, attempts to survive her crushing workload and vicious fellow students, and discovers her shamanistic powers—as well as the ability to communicate with the gods through hallucinogenic drugs.

The Poppy War enthralls readers with a textured, well-crafted world inspired by both 20th-century and Song Dynasty China, before growing steadily darker and more mature as Rin and her companions encounter the brutality of war outside the classroom and Rin tries to come to terms with her destructive power. We talked to Kuang about discovering her inner editor and creating a heroine that represents her worst impulses.

Since this is your debut novel, what were the greatest challenges you encountered in the writing or editing process that you might not have encountered in writing workshops or during school?
I actually hadn’t taken received any formal writing training when I finished The Poppy War. That was weirdly liberating—I wasn’t aware of all the things that could possibly go wrong, so I just had a good time writing a story that I enjoyed. But that’s not a sustainable path to improving your craft, because it means you remain ignorant of your own faults. After The Poppy War and its sequels sold, I went first to the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016 and the CSSF Novel Writing Workshop in 2017. That’s when I developed some serious imposter syndrome and second book syndrome. All the techniques that felt so intuitive and effortless to me when I was writing my first book now seemed impossible (I always compare this to Lyra of The Golden Compass and her alethiometer). It took a long time for me to trust my writing voice again. But now I have a confident writing voice and a harsh inner editor, which is a good place to be.

The Poppy War draws inspiration from Chinese history. What periods of China’s past resonated most with you when writing? What resources proved the most helpful?
The book draws its plot and politics from mid-20th-century China, and its aesthetic from Song Dynasty China. I read all the standard Western historical works—Spence, Fairbank, Dikotter, the Cambridge History of China series, what have you. On the Chinese side I was reading historians like Ray Huang. I also drew heavily from Iris Chang’s work. Her historical analysis has been challenged by many historians since The Rape of Nanking was first published in 1997, but it touches on many themes—outrage, intergenerational memory and trauma, nationalism and erasure—that are defining features of the study of the Rape of Nanjing today.

The island nation of Mugen seems to reflect World War II-era Japan with its military might. Does The Poppy War seek in any way to reflect on Chinese-Japanese relations throughout history?
The Poppy War has deliberate parallels to Sino-Japanese relations during the 20th century. (So deliberate, in fact, that whenever I describe the world I just say “faux China” and “faux Japan.”) The map in the hardcover looks almost identical to the East China Sea! The similarities aren’t just aesthetic. The Poppy War’s plot is mirrored almost entirely on the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II). You see a deeply militarized, westernized society invading a comparatively backward, huge but fragile empire. You also get a fantasy version of the Rape of Nanjing, the experiments of Unit 731 and the Battle of Shanghai. And the themes of the book are, of course, intergenerational trauma and cycles of violence—extremely important topics in Sino-Japanese relations today.

There’s a great deal of detail and care given to the scenes in Sinegard, where Rin and her fellow students learn the ways of war. What was it like to write about student life? Did you find yourself feeling nostalgic or reliving your own experiences as a student?
I am still a student, so I wouldn’t say that writing about student life was nostalgic as much as it was cathartic. I like writing about the high-pressure academic rat race. I don’t think that many fantasy books explore the ways that students develop their own kinds of addiction to success and external praise. That mindset can ruin you. We should talk about it more.

As the war continues, Rin and her compatriots discover scenes of increasingly monstrous acts committed by the enemy. Was it difficult to conceive of and write some of the more intense scenes of brutality that your characters witness?
It wasn’t difficult to conceive. It’s never difficult to conceive of inhuman brutality—you just have to open a history book. But many scenes were very, very difficult to write. Parts one and two flew by during the drafting process, but parts three and four took me much longer because I could only write a few paragraphs at a time before I had to step out and take a walk.

In many ways, The Poppy War can be seen as an examination of the effects of suffering. Physical, psychological, mental and spiritual trauma informs the identities of many characters. Was this by design? Did the suffering these characters experience make for better or different decisions in your writing process?
Yes, The Poppy War was intentionally a study on pain, sacrifice, vengeance and trauma. There are two separate themes to tease out here. The first is pain as a necessary sacrifice for power. Rin has to give up so much, has to suffer so much, for where she ends up. She self-mutilates. She has a hysterectomy. She puts herself through brutal torture, both mental and physical, to keep her place at Sinegard. Was it worth it?

The second theme is the question of whether past trauma ever justify future atrocities, even if it explains them. The Poppy War explores this on both an interpersonal and international level. Take Altan. He’s been through so much shit, but he takes his inner issues out on others in a way that is inexcusable. What do you do with that? Do we forgive him for being both emotionally and physical abusive towards Rin just because his childhood was a string of horrors? Then take the Nikara Empire and the Federation of Mugen, who have been abusing each other (and Speer) for centuries. When your foreign policy decisions are motivated by national trauma, when does the cycle of violence ever stop?

Rin is a flawed and fascinating heroine, and the beating heart of this story. Do you see yourself in any part of Rin's character? How are you different from her?
I think Rin and I are quite different! I’m generally quite positive, and she’s generally quite . . . not. I just want to become a professor, settle down with my boyfriend and live a happy life with our two corgis (we don’t own them yet, but we will). Rin wants to . . . burn cities, I guess.

That being said, I think Rin represents my worst impulses, exaggerated to the extreme. I get angry. Rin rages. I’m ambitious. Rin is addicted to her ambition. She’s impulsive, furious, vengeful, over-the-top angry. These are all the things that I try to rein back in myself.

What was your favorite part about constructing a universe full of gods and shamans? What other fantasy worlds gave you inspiration?
My favorite part by far was writing about psychedelics. It’s impossible to take a scene seriously if everyone in it is tripping balls. I haven’t seen this particular mechanism used as a magic system in other fantasy works before, so I wouldn’t say I drew magical inspiration from any fantasy worlds. It all comes from history. I’ve been obsessed with the Opium Wars for a long time, and it’s interesting to entertain a world where opium is not just a source of Chinese debilitation and humiliation, but also of unfathomable power.

When you reflect on the time you spent writing, what passages or sequences do you remember most vividly?
The chapter about Golyn Niis–that chapter–was extremely difficult to write. I remember that week very vividly. I did my research in the morning, took a mental health break, wrote in the afternoon and took another mental health break. I cried a lot. I was getting so depressed that my roommate made me stop working on the manuscript for a few days.

On the lighter side, I love the scene where Rin and Nezha fight back to back during the battle at Sinegard. It’s such a pivotal point in their relationship. It transforms from a petty schoolyard rivalry to something bigger.

Can you give us any information about the next installment in Rin's story?
Only that a draft of book two has been finished and you can expect it around a year from now (:

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Poppy War.

The Poppy War enthralls readers with a textured, well-crafted world inspired by both 20th-century and Song Dynasty China, before growing steadily darker and more mature as Rin and her companions encounter the brutality of war outside the classroom and Rin tries to come to terms with her destructive power. We talked to R.F. Kuang about discovering her inner editor and creating a heroine that represents her worst impulses.

Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYAScience Fiction

David Arnold

Interview by Hilli Levin

David Arnold is one of my favorite authors to run into at a Nashville literary event. Although he left Tennessee for the bluer grasses of his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, he’s still a regular face around town, and he’s often the most genuinely excited author in the room.

On the day of our chat, which is sadly via phone instead of at one of our favorite local record stores like I’d hoped, we’re exactly one month away from the publication of his third novel, The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. When I ask how he’s feeling, I’m pretty surprised by his answer: “You know what’s funny about that?” he says. “I’m less excited and nervous with each book, and I’d say that’s a good thing. You have to move on. I feel very strongly that whenever someone asks what’s your favorite thing that you’ve written, it’s always the newest thing. I feel very strongly that Noah is my strongest novel. Noah is my most personal book in a lot of ways. I have never written an autobiographical character, and I don’t really plan to, but Noah would be the closest thing to that I’ll ever write.”

You might be a big fan of Mosquitoland or Kids of Appetite, but Arnold’s latest, with its sci-fi-tinged explorations of time and reality, is easily his most ambitious to date.

Sixteen-year-old Noah Oakman seems to be living a pretty typical suburban life, even if it feels like his trajectory is a bit out of his hands. He’s a star swimmer being courted by college scouts (although he’s faking a back injury while he dreams of a life outside athletics), his parents are almost annoyingly in love, his doting sister idolizes him, and he’s so set on living a life of predictability that he has a self-imposed wardrobe—jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with David Bowie’s face.

Noah’s starting to feel like he’s outgrowing aspects of his life, so he retreats into the things that bring him comfort: “Gilmore Girls” and YouTube rabbit holes. The only person who can pull Noah out of his reverie is his half-Puerto Rican gay best friend, Alan (whom Arnold admits is lovingly modeled after his own best friend, fellow author Adam Silvera). When Alan and his twin sister, Val, convince Noah to let loose at a high school party one night, Noah has a few too many drinks and lets a mysterious man hypnotize him. When Noah wakes the next morning, he finds himself with more pressing issues than his first hangover. Key details of his life have changed, and everything he’s accepted as fact and reality is turned upside down.

“In 2010, my wife and I went on a cruise, and there was a hypnotist on the ship. When you’re on a cruise, you just go with it,” Arnold says with a laugh. “I remember him asking for volunteers, and thinking, what if someone went under and when they came out, everyone in their life was completely different?”

The seed may have been hypnosis, but Noah’s story began taking shape when Arnold and his wife moved from Nashville to Lexington. “We lived with my parents while we were looking for a house, so I literally wrote a chunk of this book where I did my homework in high school,” Arnold says. “So of course I’m going to write a story about a kid who looked like me when I was that age. Of course I’m going to write a . . . book about change when that’s the predominant thing going on in my life at the moment.”

“In high school, I remember feeling like I was changing and no one else was.”

Much like Noah, Arnold struggled with some existential angst during his teen years, although he had to figure it out without the added wrinkle of hypnosis and altered reality.

“When I was a senior in high school, I remember feeling like I was changing and no one else was,” Arnold says. “The great secret is that everyone felt that way. That’s sort of what this book is about: a kid who feels like he’s changing, but no one else is, and no one else could possibly understand what he’s going through. Over the course of this one night, everything gets flipped. It’s almost a mirror image: Everyone in his life has an actual, physical change, and he’s the only one who hasn’t.”

Although The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik is propelled by a surrealist mystery that asks heady questions about how each of us experiences our own reality, Arnold keeps it all grounded by reminding readers that Noah’s most pressing struggle is simply growing up.

“I did feel very strongly that I wanted to write a character whose struggles were completely internal. When the book opens, [Noah’s] feeling this low-frequency dread, and you’re kind of like, why though?” Arnold says.

With whip-smart dialogue, fun pop-culture asides, endlessly endearing and fully realized characters and a hypnotic mystery, it’s no surprise that Paramount has already secured the film rights for The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. This fan, for one, would love Arnold to write the screenplay.

“I would not be opposed to taking a crack at writing it . . . but if I had my preference, I would rather someone who knows what they’re doing do it,” Arnold says with a laugh. “Becky Albertalli [author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda] is my critique partner, and I’ve been able to see what she’s gone through. If it’s in the ballpark of Love, Simon, I’ll be thrilled.”

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

David Arnold is one of my favorite authors to run into at a Nashville literary event. Although he left Tennessee for the bluer grasses of his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, he’s still a regular face around town, and he’s often the most genuinely excited author in the room.

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