In The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons brings the epic tale of his Hyperion universe to its powerful conclusion. Spanning four novels and many centuries of real and imagined galactic history, the Hyperion saga is an astonishing achievement, overbrimming with adventure, lyricism and insight. A miracle of invention and economy, played out on a dozen and more meticulously created worlds, the tetralogy is surely one of science fiction's grandest visions of humanity's shared fate with its technology — not least because of the unforgettable character of Aenea, the young girl (and later, woman) in whose hands lies the future of humankind.

Simmons will return to his Hyperion universe once more in an upcoming novella, part of a set of stories by a select group of science fiction authors who have been asked to revisit their now-classic worlds just one more time. ("If only Herbert and Asimov were still with us," says Simmons, wistfully.) But for now, with the culmination of the preceding novels Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion and Endymion (all Bantam paperbacks) in the current volume, Dan Simmons takes time out to introduce the entire series to new readers and to share some thoughts with his avid fans about The Rise of Endymion.

BookPage: The universe of your four-novel epic is so vast and so fully realized. What was its genesis?
Dan Simmons: It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri. I first created the Hyperion universe for my students during storytelling hour, little by little, day after day. Later, I incorporated that experience into my story, "The Death of The Centaur" (from Prayers to Broken Stones, Bantam paperback).

BP: There is a deep strain of great literature running through the four novels. It's not hard to recognize the models for many of the things you write: The Canterbury Tales, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and of course, John Keats' poetry. Is it important to you that your readers make those connections? Would you like your books to send readers back to those sources?
DS: I think the readers who know that literature can enjoy pursuing those references, and that can deepen their Hyperion experience — it certainly did for me. But it's not just a game of finding literary references. In fact, when I first started writing Hyperion, I knew I'd have to deal with Keats' long poems, "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion." I really appreciated his theme of life evolving from one race of gods to another, with one power having to give way to another, as Hyperion must. But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

BP: Well, it works nicely on both levels when John Keats' persona appears as a "cybrid" artificial life form in the story!
DS: Yes, that was the idea.

BP: As I understand it, there are three mighty powers which become unleashed throughout the four novels, and which vie together and apart for the soul of humanity: the first is the church, the second is artificial intelligence and I'm not sure what to call the third — maybe the basic human freedom to choose one's own fate?
DS: That's a good way of putting it.

BP: Let's focus on the first two for the moment: do the futures which you envision for religion and technology in these books reflect a conviction on your part about where those forces are headed? Are they prophecy of a sort?
DS: No, I don't believe in prophecy. They're a story, a development of ideas. I'm very interested in the evolution of technology, and it's really the idea of artificial life which intrigues me, more than just intelligence — a new, evolving life form arising within our datasphere and coming into living relation with humanity (this is where Keats' theme resonates). As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction. It's really about what happens whenever religion and power go hand in hand. I'm not anti-church by any means; what interests me is that human beings are almost always corrupted by the control they wield over other human beings. That situation has been especially tragic for religions.

BP: I have a question specifically about the current book, The Rise of Endymion, coming out this month. To me, it's a love story more than anything —
DS: Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that.
BP: — between Aenea and Raul Endymion. It's a love story against all odds, even against death and time. "Love is a fundamental force in the universe," says Aenea over and over again. That's what she calls "the music of the spheres." How do you hear this music?
DS: Well, I think all the simple things can and do still work — holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

BP: I know what you mean. It's too bad. I teach a Beatles course at Vanderbilt and we go dangerously into that hokey territory.
DS: Well, I write that way.

BP: Well, I feel that way. And I don't know how to express my gratitude to you. I feel like I'm speaking for countless fans here. You have enriched that feeling for us beyond calculation, and way beyond "hokey-ness." It's more like holiness. It's wholeness, certainly.
DS: Thank you. It's very kind of you to say that.
BP: Thank you for creating so generously and so well.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

This BookPage Icebreaker is sponsored by Baen Books.

When one talks about military sci-fi, one has to talk about David Weber. Author of the long-running, deeply influential Honor Harrington series, Weber has been delighting readers with the action-packed adventures of his titular character since 1992. A decorated politician and soldier, Honor is a “strong female character” that is allowed to have more personality traits than simply strong and female. Clever, empathetic and dedicated to her loved ones and country, Honor has starred in 13 standalone novels, and fans have been eagerly awaiting the 14th, Uncompromising Honor.

We talked to Weber about visualizing warfare in space, plotting character arcs over several novels and if his latest book is the last we’ll see of the indomitable Honor Harrington.

I know that the Honor Harrington books were reportedly inspired by the Horatio Hornblower series, but when you originally conceived of them, were there any other influences for her character in your mind?
Well actually, the inspiration for the books wasn’t Horatio Hornblower. I knew that if the books succeeded, that was who she would be compared to. So I decided to go with that motif all the way through. She’s actually much more as character inspired by a mix of Horatio Nelson, who was killed at the Battle of the Nile, and Alexander Cochrane, who is a much less well-known, at least in the United States, British admiral. And so in a sense, she and Horatio Hornblower share a historical ancestor, since Hornblower was clearly modeled on Nelson.

Now, people have asked me many times why I made Honor Harrington female. And the answer to that is that it never occurred to me to make her anything else. Not because I was making any feminist statements or anything else, but because—alright, if you follow my books in general, most of them have very strong female characters, and I would say the majority of them, probably, have female protagonists. If you look at the Safehold books, you’ve got Merlin Athrawes, who was born a woman but who had to become man by reconfiguring a cybernetic body. I write about strong female characters because I like women and I like strong people, and that produces strong female characters.

I think probably my statement on women’s rights is to be seen in the fact that nobody’s fighting about it in my books and it’s a done deal. I think that maybe near-future science fiction is a good platform for novels that emphasize the role of women and the equalization of genders. But I think if you write far-future science fiction like I do, and your female characters are still facing the same glass ceilings, the same restrictions and so forth, then you’re really shortchanging women. Because 2,000 years from now, I’d like to say the whole question of gender equality will have the burning significance to people of say, the pharaoh’s policy towards the Hittites does to us, because it will be a done deal. Half the human race, at least the last time I looked, is female. And that means that half the capable people on the planet are female. And my theory is that any society that doesn’t want to take advantage of that deserves to be stuck in the Middle Ages and probably will be.

I feel like your books take that same stance in regard to race—that we wouldn’t define race in the same way that we do on Earth once we’ve colonized a galaxy. So of course it’s going to be a multicultural society.
Actually one of my friends who is black called me up after reading Field of Dishonor and said, “The queen of Manticore is black.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “You don’t understand, the queen of Manticore is black!” And I said, “Yeah, I wrote the book. I know she’s black.” And he said, “But no one says anything about it.” And I said, “That’s what they said about it.”

Right, there you go, that’s it.
Yeah, I think that science fiction in general tends to be an optimistic genre. Even the most dystopian people at least assume we’ll have a future to be grim about, if you know what I’m saying. But I think that in general, it tends on the social side to take current problems and visualize solutions to them, whether that’s a good solution or a bad solution, and see how that plays out.

So I always stalk the person I’m interviewing online, as a matter of course. You have to be prepared. And in several of the interviews I’ve read with you, you’ve said that you see yourself as a storyteller as opposed to an artist. I was wondering if that is how you personally approach your work or do you think that is a thing that is, for want of a better word, necessitated by the genre?
I really can’t answer that question for other people. Those who write the stronger stories, for me, are those who are storytellers first, and writers second. Writing is the medium through which they tell their stories. And I think that my judgment has been that people who set out to grind a partisan ax, whatever the ax may be, I think that really weakens your work. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are usually where the entire object of the story was to be polemical, like Orwell’s 1984.

Or Brave New World or something along those lines.
Yes, exactly, exactly. And you’re in a different readership, reading for a different reason, than you are for the general readership of science fiction. And that’s not to say that there’s not crossover between the two, because there definitely is. I think that to me, the crunch point comes when your vision of yourself as a writer, as a stylist begins detracting from the story you’re trying to tell. The point at which the reader begins looking at how you’ve done it rather than what you’ve done.

My judgment is that you can learn to be a writer, but you can’t learn to be a storyteller. You either are a storyteller or you’re not. Now you can learn to tell them better. But you have to have that storytelling bug.

Going back to the social structure of the world you’ve created, something I think is unfortunately rare in sci-fi especially is a religion that is not a terrifying cult or seen as alien or prehistoric. I think there’s this idea that, when we’re talking about a society evolving beyond sexism and racism, that somehow society will also evolve beyond religion. And I don’t think I agree with that, and I like reading books like yours where that is very much not the case.
Well, I am proof in advertising. I’m a Methodist lay speaker, although my certification has lapsed. I think that the people who believe that religion has to wither away probably don’t really understand faith in the first place. And I don’t intend that as a slam, because there are people who are people of faith, and there are people who aren’t, and a lot of depends on what your own personal experience has been. I know people who are blindly religious and don’t care about any possible challenge to their beliefs. I know people who are equally blindly secular, and will admit no evidence that might challenge their beliefs.

My personal view is that religion is very unlikely to ever wither away completely. I think that for whatever reason, we as a species are hardwired to look for something beyond ourselves, something greater than ourselves in which to believe. And I think that people who claim to not be religious have, in many cases, simply expressed that need to believe in and identify with something greater toward something other than God. There’s something that they put at the top of their hierarchy. And again, I’m not condemning them for that. I think that all of us have that need, that hunger.

I have met that need in myself through my faith in God. And I try to portray religion fairly in my books. As a practicing Christian and as a person of faith, I obviously believe that religion has a place in people’s lives. As a historian, I am aware of how that need to give God a place has been distorted and used for absolutely counter purposes time and time again. And I try to show both the positive and the negative side in what I write.

And as a historian, how do you visualize warfare in space? Are there forms or kinds of historical battles that have helped you figure out how you would plot a battle in space?
Well, I must confess—I think it’s probably the worst kept secret in science fiction—that I deliberately structured the technology in the Honor Harrington books to do the line of battle of naval warfare. I designed it so they would do broad sides at each other. The elements of naval strategy aren’t going to change all that much. The environment will change. And I think that naval combat is going to be a better guide for what goes on in space combat that say, air forces are.

That would have been my first assumption, because aerial battles are more three-dimensional.
Right and see the U.S. Navy has carriers and it has submarines, so it’s already a 3-D playing field.

Oh, I didn’t think about that!
And the U.S. Navy is unique because of our carrier fleet. The Navy has to be able to practice air-to-air warfare, anti-submarine warfare, commerce raiding warfare—it has to be able to put an invasion fleet ashore. And no one else in the world has anything like that capability.

Now, in the Honorverse and in interstellar warfare, it’s going to have a lot of resonances with World War II in the Pacific. Because the islands of the Pacific were isolated points in the middle of the ocean. Once they can be isolated by your fleet, nobody could possibly reinforce them, so one way or another, the island is going to fall.

In the Honorverse, once you control the gravity well of the planet, the planet is expected to surrender under the laws of war. Because if they can’t keep you from dropping rocks on them, you’ll eventually control the planet. And the Honorverse has the equivalent of the 18th-century, 19th-century laws of war that very clearly specify when a besieged city is supposed to surrender, what happens if it doesn’t surrender, etc., etc. And those grew out of the Forty Years War in Germany, which was just incredibly brutal. So they evolved a code of recognized practices of war.

I write military stories, and they tend to be about combat. Combat is absolutely horrific. And as a writer, writing about it, you have a responsibility to not sanitize it. I tend to be more of a believer in that you deal with the personal costs in terms of grief or guilt, and just every so often, you whack the reader in face with a scene that tells them how horrific it was. The hardest scene I think that I have ever had to write in the Honorverse was from Honor of the Queen. When Honor is dealing with the ensign who survived the mass rapes and the atrocities at the hand of the Masadans. And figuring out how to tell that critical part of the story without being overly graphic on the one hand, without dismissing it on the other.

And I think that the way I did it works. And I’ve had many women tell me that it works. It’s basically that you don’t actually see the assault at all. You’ve got this woman who’s obviously been shattered by what happened to her, trying to hang onto her sanity long enough to tell her commanding officer what happened. And then you have the commanding officer’s reaction to it. And I personally feel that that was a more effective way to handle it. Because you’re dealing here with what did it actually cost the human being involved.

So with such a long-running series and a character that’s been with you for so long, how do you approach plotting out a character arc?
With Honor, I knew a whole heck of a lot more than I told the reader in the first two books. If you read the first two books, you are introduced to this young, very focused, cool, calm collected person, and there’s truth to that. But it’s not until she meets Paul Tankersley and is forced to deal with things that she had suppressed—that had turned off one entire side of her life—that you begin to see that the Honor you met in the first two books is only a part of who she is.

I did that deliberately, because I knew that the character was going to grow and change over the course of the series. I wanted something that I could unpack for you as the reader. I wanted to be able to unwrap pre-existing parts of her that you didn’t know about to maintain that revelation process. I always knew that she was going to wind up with Hamish and Emily. That was really the only nailed-down part that I had.

So what’s coming up next for you?
The next Honorverse novel is A Call to Insurrection, which I am working on with Tim Zahn and Tom Pope. The next solo novel in the Honorverse will almost certainly be about Honor’s father and will be the story of his marine service. And Through Fiery Trials, the next Safehold book, is coming out in January.

I don’t know when/if there’s going to be another Honor-centric novel. One of the problems I had was that she was supposed to die in At All Costs, and she didn’t. And that’s fine! I love Honor, I’m glad she didn’t die, I’m good with that. The problem was that she was supposed to die at the pinnacle of her career. So here I have this woman who’s the commander of the grand fleet, and she’s this and she’s that—you can’t send her on death rides anymore! She’s too senior to be interacting with any junior officers. So the analogy I use when people ask me about this is that Honor will probably become Lessa from the Pern novels. Lessa and F’lar in the later novels are the senior leaders and not going out doing any of the crazy stuff. They are still central characters tying everything together, but they’re no longer the focus of the action.

Sponsored by Baen Books.

One of the pioneers of military science fiction, David Drake has drawn on his combat experience in Vietnam and his education in history and Latin to create fictional worlds that feel vitally, immediately real. His latest series, Time of Heroes, takes the classic characters of Arthurian legend and transports them to a chaotic universe where humanity is attempting to build a better, safer future. The Storm, Drake’s second installment in the series, follows the heroic and goodhearted Lord Pal as he embarks on a quest for his missing mentor. We talked to Drake about his favorite fictional world, his ideal library and more.

Which fictional world would you most like to live in? Which fictional world would you most hate to live in?
The world of Clifford Simak’s The Big Front Yard in which like-minded members of many—perhaps infinite—universes form a community of positive, problem-solving people.

The world of Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, in which the people of overpopulated Earth live and die in human Habitrails in which there is no hope for a different future.

For you, what is the most difficult aspect of world building?
Finding the world I want to use as a template. I almost always start with a place that is or has been real.

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
I guess Ned Beaumont, hero of The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett. Beaumont is very smart and competent, but he’s not trying to run anything. He’s completely loyal to his boss—even when the boss is willing to sell him out.

He leaves when he’s treated badly enough, but he remains loyal—saving the boss as his final act before leaving.

Beaumont is a man of principles and sticks to them even when those around him fail him and fail themselves. That’s their business; he’s responsible for himself.

What do you need to get into the zone while writing?
Ideally I have a photo or drawing of the setting for the current scene laid out beside my computer.

What is the ideal snack/drink to pair with your latest book?
Pal, the hero of The Storm, is a kid from the sticks. He has simple tastes. He prefers ale to lager, and either to wine, which goes to his head.

The author is from Iowa and avoids alcohol because things went badly for those of his ancestors who were not abstainers. This book was written on tea.

Which books were your gateway drug into science fiction & fantasy?
The Angry Planet was the first real SF I read at age 11. It’s a YA, but the themes were utterly adult. Kids stow away on their uncle’s spaceship to Mars. They find a battle between good and evil, which they join on the side of good.

Evil wins, completely and horribly.

This showed me that SF is capable of thinking the unthinkable.

What is the hardest passage you have ever had to write?
A scene in which the viewpoint character of Igniting the Reaches confronts a pair of men who have betrayed him and his friend, and reaches a friendly accommodation without violence.

I came back from Vietnam with a great deal of anger. Describing a man who is well used to violence stepping away from it was very hard—but I knew it was what I needed to do.

Which of your characters would you most like to get a drink with?
Pal, of The Storm. He’s a decent and polite man who isn’t trying to run other peoples’ lives.

Describe your ideal library.
A lot of classical texts—the Greeks in translation.

A lot of memoirs, many of them military. Relatively few biographies. Some secondary history, but mostly those that are memoirs by participants.

Lots of classic SF and fantasy, including magazines.

What’s the first fictional world you came up with as a kid?
Oh, I don’t know about world exactly, but a jungle place with vine-covered ruined cities. Lots of exotic animals.

Order The Storm now from: B & N | Amazon | BAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author photo by Karen Osborne.

A meditation on power and trauma wrapped within the irresistible framework of an action-packed monster hunt, Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning was one of the most acclaimed science fiction novels of 2018. After a climate apocalypse, one of the only safe places in North America is Dinétah, a former Navajo reservation where mythical gods and monsters have awoken and now affect the lives of the region’s inhabitants. But in Roanhorse’s sequel, Storm of Locusts, supernaturally gifted monster hunter Maggie Hoskie will have to leave the relative safety of Dinétah to find her partner, Kai, who has been kidnapped by a mysterious cult leader called the White Locust.

We talked to Roanhorse about what her characters would be doing if the world hadn’t ended, why trauma is so central to clan powers and why her second novel is lighter and funnier.

One of the things I love about your characters is how rooted they are in your world—it’s hard to imagine who they would be if the world wasn’t ending. Where do you think Maggie, Kai and the others would be if the world hadn’t ended?
My first reaction is that Maggie would be in jail, lol. But if I think about it a little more, if the Big Water hadn’t happened, none of the terrible things that happened to Maggie would have happened either. Her grandmother would likely still be alive, she would have never met Neizghání. So maybe she would have finished high school and gotten a job or moved to Phoenix. I still think she’d be rowdy, though. Okay, so maybe jail after all.

Kai would be a regular college student. Both his parents were professors and he’s got the temperament to be a scholar. He maybe would have gone on to get a Ph.D. and be an academic.

Rissa would have taken over the All-American for her mom, and she still may. But she would have done it with a business degree and a CPA or something. And Clive would have moved to New York or LA, met a good man, settled down, had kids. He’s a nurturer at heart. Of course, their dad and brother would have still be alive, so who knows? So many people were lost with the Big Water and the things that came in their wake; it changed lives.

Clan powers so far seem to complement the character of the person they belong to. Do the clan powers shape the person or the other way around?
Both. People can be the same clan but if the circumstances of their power manifestations are different, the powers will tailor themselves to the need. And, of course, once the powers manifest, people begin to rely on them the way Kai, for example, relies on his to get him out of trouble. Or Maggie relies on hers as a profession.

How was writing Storm of Locusts different from writing Trail of Lightning? Was there any part of the process that surprised you?
It was a completely different experience. I wrote Trail of Lightning over a period of two years, and then a third year editing before I queried it. I wrote Storm of Locusts under contract in nine months. I also wrote Trail of Lightning during the Obama administration and Storm of Locusts under Trump’s, so my needs as far as the emotional tone of the books were different. Storm of Locusts is somewhat lighter and funnier because I needed light and funny. I didn’t want to explore trauma and abuse like I did in Trail of Lightning. For Storm of Locusts, I needed healing and female friendships.

Do you think that if Maggie or Kai saw a way to get rid of their clan powers that they would?
Kai, no way. He likes his powers. But then he just takes more things in stride, even the terrible things. Maggie? I think she would give anything to go back and be "normal", but that would require the entire world to change. I don’t think she wants to be in this world and not have her powers, particularly as she begins to see them as not just a weapon for death but as a way to protect those she is growing to care about. Kai always understood that his powers could be used for good or evil. Maggie is still learning.

One of the recurring themes in both Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts is trauma. What led you to make trauma so central to how clan powers are awakened?
A lot of the modern Native experience deals with trauma, both intergenerational and personal. This is, to me, a Native story on various levels, so I wasn’t not going to talk about trauma. But I also wanted to explore the transformative nature of trauma, for better or worse. The old adage “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” was one I really clung to as a child, although now I’m more fond of Zora Neale Hurston’s quote, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” But that first adage, that’s what birthed the idea of clan powers coming from life-alerting trauma. But I also am intrigued by the idea of receiving a power that served you in your time of need, but that years later you have perhaps outgrown and now only holds you back. We’ll see how that plays out throughout the series.

Is there anything you can share about what we have to look forward to in book three?
Oh, there’s a lot! Book three is going to take Maggie and Kai to the Burque, which is what is left of Albuquerque after the Big Water. It’s now a collection of city-states run by powerful water baron families that are descended from the old school land grant Hispanic families that exist in New Mexico. They’ll bring a new twist and new magics to the story. And, of course, the various Pueblo tribes that border the Burque will play a part, as well. And you’ll get to find out a lot more about Kai and his story and see him in his element. It should be a lot of fun.

What are you most excited about in speculative fiction right now?
The diversity of voices. Women and BIPOC have always been part of the genre, but now I can easily read books and short fiction from so many diverse voices it’s almost an embarrassment of riches. 2018 was great, but 2019 is going to be mind-blowing. I’ve already read at least a half dozen novels that I think should be on the awards ballots. It’s just fantastic. I saw someone mention this was a golden age of SFF and I can’t agree more. Just happy to be a part of it, and happier to be able to read it all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Storm of Locusts.

Author photo by Stephen Land Photography.

The hype for Tamsyn Muir’s debut, Gideon the Ninth, started early. (Look at that cover. Enough said.) Now that Gideon has made her blood-spattered, metal as all hell debut, we talked to Muir about necromancy, the surprising influence of boarding school stories and what comes next.

Did any real-life muses who inspired the characters of Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus? Your characters are composed of such complex layers that I have to wonder if you encountered some real-life magical swordswomen in your travels.
God, I wish! No, Gideon and Harrow are not real people, except I guess in that every character an author writes is to some extent built from bits of people she’s met. I do think Gideon, more than Harrow, shares some rudimentary DNA with people I have known: my swords adviser for the book in particular, who I know thankfully finds that a compliment rather than anything else. They’re not even particularly me, although each of them shares a couple of my bad habits. Gideon’s love of dick jokes is, sorry to say, inherited from her creator, and Harrow has picked up one or two quirks that won’t really become apparent until book two.

“The problem with necromancy (I mean, there’s a lot of problems with necromancy, but).”

What is your favorite genre to read? What drew you to write a book that encompasses the genres of dark fantasy and space opera?
Early 20th-century girls’ boarding school stories. This isn’t a joke. When I am left entirely to my own devices, that is the genre I always find my way back to. There is a connection, in that my very earliest concepts for Gideon actually had it as much more of a classic school story, albeit a grim space school with bones and blood, and that’s what I’m acknowledging early on in the book when some of the characters are also expecting a classic school story and are disappointed not to get one. I do love both dark fantasy and space opera, but I didn’t start out by picking two genres and trying to splice them together. It was the story that gave me the genres, not the other way round. Gideon had to be dark fantasy because it needed to have both swords and necromancy, and it had to be space opera for plot reasons that I can’t really talk about yet.

This is your debut novel, and it’s bone-chillingly haunting, beautiful and funny at all the right moments. What places and times would you like to travel to through your fiction going forward?
Thank you so much! And, wow, that’s a big question. I’m more interested in places than times. I don’t have a particular urge to write a book set in a specific period of history, for example. Time is important to Gideon, but it’s not so much time when as time how long, if that makes any sense at all. On the other hand, there are a couple of places I very definitely want to visit. I’ve already written a short story set in my native New Zealand, “The Woman in the Hill,” which came out back in 2015, but I have nowhere near exhausted the possibilities of NZ as a setting and I’d love to return to it. And I also want to write something set in England, where I’ve lived for the last five years, because . . . well, there’s a very specific story I want to tell and I’ve come to the conclusion it can only be told in England. I hope that’s cryptic enough for you.

Let’s talk necromancy. What inspired your special brand of the craft present here, where humans are the puppet masters or colleagues of the undead?
The problem with necromancy (I mean, there are a lot of problems with necromancy, but) is that a lot of the time it doesn’t go any further than “raising the dead.” That’s not actually something my story needs to happen—in fact there is only one character in the whole book who can literally bring dead people back to life, and he doesn’t do it any more. Harrow’s specialty is skeleton-raising, but even she’s not raising the dead in a traditional sense—she’s building puppets or constructs that follow her orders and she’s just using bone to do it. Harrow’s skeletons are really more like robots she assembles on the spot out of human parts.

I knew from very early on that I wanted a really broad conception of necromancy, so my magic-using characters could do a whole lot of different things while still counting as necromancers. I guess I may have been partly inspired by Diablo II, where the Necromancer can do everything from flinging bones around to making some monsters hate other monsters. But again, it was a matter of thinking first “What do people in my story need to be able to do,” and then building a system that made all of those things possible within some kind of semi-coherent framework.

I also wanted to touch on the meticulous level of detail in your naming conventions of settings and people. Was this a deliberate move to incorporate numerology in addition to necromancy and the occult?
Here is a terrible confession: at one very early stage in writing the book, I hit on the idea that every character’s name should have the right number of syllables to match their House. This worked great for, like, the Fourth and Fifth Houses. It was just about manageable for the Second House. It was totally horrific for the Ninth House. And which House is the most important one in the book? Oh yeah, huh, the . . . Ninth House. An afternoon’s brainstorming of nine-syllable names, which ended up with me just trying to cram in extra syllables anywhere I could, made clear this was not going to work. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is still only eight syllables!!

The number-themed names were a way to keep my beloved gimmick, that you should be able to tell someone’s House just by looking at their name, while making my life slightly easier. Although, as it turned out, not that much easier, because I still ended up stuck for suitable words. I thought I couldn’t use “Sextus” because it had “Sex” in it, until a friend convinced me to just roll with that and turn it into a joke.

Your novel incorporates a romantic subplot as well as adventure and intrigue. When writing, did you craft the structure of your novel as a thriller, or did you always suspect that Gideon might find some romance along the way?
You know, I’m so glad you mentioned that, because while I would definitely not characterize Gideon the Ninth as a romance, its romantic elements are incredibly important to the whole thing. Gideon and Harrow’s romantic feelings for various people are crucial to the story, and have been ever since I thought it up. It wasn’t that I started writing a thriller and then thought “Hmm, actually, what if the main character had a crush . . .” The book is in a very real sense about who feels what about whom. It’s just hard for them to work out what those feelings are, because they keep having to fight duels and solve bone puzzles instead of actually talking about anything. Insert joke here about solving bone puzzles.

The contest for the Lyctorhood displays the greed for power at its worst. Did you see this as commentary on the state of the world today, or was there a more medieval inspiration for the setting and characters?
Wow, I hadn’t even thought of a medieval connection! I think that stories are good for showing humans at their best and at their worst, and there’s a pretty good argument that we’re at our very worst when power is involved. But I hope that no one in Gideon comes across as a straightforwardly evil person. Everyone who makes a bad decision during the book—and almost everyone makes at least one bad decision during the book—does so because they’re afraid, or proud, or paranoid, or desperate, or they feel they’ve been lied to or betrayed or somehow mistreated. Often when we want power what we actually want is safety. We want to feel we have control over our own lives and nothing can hurt us, and building a big castle to live in can seem like the best way to secure that.

“Gideon’s not cut out to be a lone wolf; she needs to be part of something bigger than herself.”

Gideon’s origin story brings to light the trauma of losing a family and orphanhood, as well as the joy of a found/chosen family. She’s a true survivor, but also craves the basic human needs of companionship and belonging. Concerning Gideon and Harrow’s temporary “family” of Lyctorhood-competitors, who was your favorite to write? Do you map out the characters’ traits and actions from the start, or do you see where the writing takes you and them?
One of Gideon’s problems, as you correctly point out, is that although she’s a survivor, she’s not a sole survivor. Gideon’s not cut out to be a lone wolf; she needs to be part of something bigger than herself, which is why the dream that’s kept her going all this time is being a hero in the Cohort rather than some kind of solitary swordmaster.

I enjoyed writing every single one of her temporary allies, because generally I can’t write a character unless I find a way of enjoying them. Isaac and Jeannemary, the Fourth House teens, were a lot of fun, and I’m extremely grateful to my editor Carl Engle-Laird for letting me keep their trick of talking in a very small font, which I was worried wouldn’t survive into the book. I also have a soft spot for poor, grizzled, long-suffering Colum Asht, a man who has been dealt a terrible hand and plays it grimly. But I think my favorite non-Ninth character to write has to be Camilla Hect. Camilla is not an expressive or an exuberant character, and operating within her incredibly limited range (watching impassively; stabbing people; rolling her eyes heavenward behind her necromancer) was always a source of deep joy to me. Oh, and also Teacher, who is literally my favorite character in the book.

The work of actually mapping out each character was made easier by the fact that in this book each character does emblematically represent some core aspect of their House: the Second House pair are basically as Second House as it is possible to be, and so on. No one is a bizarre outlier, except maybe Gideon. So having designed the Houses, it was really just a matter of thinking “what ways might people brought up in this House be likely to turn out?” For example, the Third House loves money, parties and being popular, which can produce a charismatic babe with great hair (Corona) OR a sneaky, double-dealing power-broker (Ianthe).

Gideon’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes was one of my favorite aspects of this book. Did you always intend to write Gideon as an outcast? Or was there a point in your process where she was in better circumstances starting out?
Gideon has always been on the bottom of the heap. Her childhood was just complete shit—you find out a bit more about it from another angle in book two and it’s if anything even shittier. She had a Bad Time. To be fair, no one in the Ninth House had a good childhood, but I needed to make very clear from the start that Drearburh is not a place Gideon associates with rosy memories and happy songs. If it had been, a lot of the choices she has to make later in the book would have become much easier.

Do you anticipate any House characters making an appearance for Halloween? Who would you dress up as if given the opportunity? What House would you see yourself in?
To my completely horrified delight, more than one person has already donned Ninth House robes and paint. At WorldCon in Dublin I got a very excited text from a friend during the evening disco, saying “There’s a Gideon in the middle of the dance floor!!” and there’s been a couple of incredible cosplays on Twitter.

I’m not sure any of the other Houses would work quite as well as Halloween costumes, although I confess I would love to see someone rock the Second House white-and-red.

I personally think I’m not allowed to be in any of the Houses because they are all cool and I am lame, but I’d probably end up in the Ninth myself, alas. You’d find me haplessly tripping over the skeletons, or hiding in a crypt niche eating Toffee Pops I procured on the black market somehow.

“Gideon spends about as much time thinking about being gay as she does thinking about being ginger.”

Gideon’s sexual identity is introduced to readers early on and is displayed positively throughout the narrative. What do you hope readers will discover about the world or themselves after reading your book?
I’ve already got a very funny mixture of reactions to Gideon’s sexuality in early impressions of the book. Some of my readers are unhappy that I don’t make a bigger deal of it—they want Gideon’s lesbianism to be a big thing, a topic that gets discussed and that Gideon herself spends a lot of time thinking about or emphasizing. And then other people have specifically reached out to tell me how much they liked her sexuality not being a big thing; Gideon spends about as much time thinking about being gay as she does thinking about being ginger.

I’ve had the luxury of being able to write a world with no homophobia, a world where no one’s going to call Gideon names or tell her there’s something wrong with her because she likes girls, and so it’s just not something she ever needs to think about. If I’d given her lots of internal monologues about her own gayness, it would have been presupposing a level of resistance to that idea that doesn’t exist in the book.

What I really wanted was to write a wlw book where its lesbian credentials were not based on a lot of the stuff I had to read as a kid, i.e. lesbianism characterized as suffering or one single couple shacking up and nobody else is queer. I genuinely think there is nothing wrong with writing wlw suffering (it exists; we all have to exorcise those ghosts) but I wanted to write queerness more how it was with me and my community when I was in my early twenties (to be honest, the gay credentials in my book lie in there being two enmeshed girls who aren’t hooking up but have such an entangled relationship that you wish they would and stop ruining each other’s relationships, and girls obsessed with older girls in an unrequited love affair, and girls obsessed with older girls in a possibly actually requited love affair, etc., etc., everyone goes home to watch “The L Word”).

Obviously, Gideon would be triumphantly smug if reading about her incredible biceps helped anyone discover that they, too, were gay, so if you read my book and realize you’re gay please don’t tell Gideon, she will be insufferable. Having another baby butch in the book admire her guns was bad enough.

What’s next for you and your writing? The book ends on a devastating cliffhanger (I won’t spoil anything here!), and I’m sure readers would love to know what’s in the pipeline for you, Gideon and Harrow.
Well, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that what’s next for Harrow is book two, since it’s called Harrow the Ninth. It’s already written and in production—I got some first page layouts to look at just the other day— and scheduled for a Summer 2020 release, as far as I know. Book three, on the other hand, I haven’t even started writing yet. I have a novella I’m writing for Subterranean Press at the moment, about a princess and a tower, and then my calendar for October says in big block letters “START BOOK 3.” So that should keep me occupied into 2020, I think.

After that there’s a lot of stuff in the pipeline, but I don’t want to spill any beans just yet. I’m writing a narrative game project for Fogbank Entertainment, which is giving me a crash course in a completely different way of approaching the business of telling a story, and I have plans for at least two more novels that have nothing to do with the Nine Houses. Much fewer bones in these, I promise. I’m pretty confident I’ve already hit Peak Bone.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Gideon the Ninth.

Author photo by Vicki Bailey of VHBPhotography.