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.

Simon Jimenez brings emotional intelligence and a contemporary fear of lost time to his spellbinding debut novel.

From an early age, Simon Jimenez devoured genre fiction. “I loved everything that wasn’t reality,” he says. He spent much of his childhood researching which books won the major science fiction prizes each year, then seeking those titles out. But even as those iconic works were beginning to mold him as a young writer, Jimenez couldn’t escape the sense that something was missing from them: people like himself, a gay person of mixed-race heritage. 

“A lot of the science fiction I grew up reading, all the characters were straight, and most of them were white, and that wasn’t something that really represented my own experience,” says Jimenez, who is half-Filipino. “I just wanted to add whatever little I could to what feels like a growing wave of new genre.”

Jimenez’s debut, The Vanished Birds, is his attempt to better represent his own experience within a sci-fi framework, but it’s no “little” addition to the genre landscape. Diverse in both its cast of characters and the scope of its ideas, it combines satisfyingly complex science fiction concepts—interstellar travel via folding time, humanity’s future in the stars and more—with an emotional core that feels at once intimate and grand. It evokes the fate of a universe while also focusing with deft intensity on the bonds that form between lost people. 

Diverse in both its cast of characters and the scope of its ideas, ‘The Vanished Birds’ combines satisfyingly complex science fiction concepts with an emotional core that feels at once intimate and grand.

Jimenez began working on the novel when he was studying for his MFA at Emerson College. In an effort to draw his classmates into his story without burying them under piles of science fiction lore, he started in a somewhat self-contained way, composing the opening chapter of the book almost like a piece of short fiction.

“I felt like I had to prove that I could write genre with some level of emotional intelligence, and that meant writing this fleshed-out short story of this person’s life,” he says. “So it’s very grounded but in a heightened reality.”

This early approach helped to shape The Vanished Birds as a series of individual narratives that merge into a satisfying whole. At the heart of it all is Nia Imani, a woman who exists outside of time due to frequent travel through “folding” space. When she is entrusted with the care of a mysterious boy who fell from the sky, a boy whose only communication is the haunting flute music he plays, Nia finds an anchor point for her life, and the two forge an almost familial bond. As it becomes apparent that the boy’s gifts are much more than musical, the unlikely duo find themselves caught in a struggle with universe-altering stakes.

As those stakes become clear, Jimenez covers sci-fi concepts ranging from the corporate future of space settlement to the interpersonal dynamics of a starship crew. But above all these themes is the question of lost time, something Jimenez is deeply invested in as our technology-driven world rushes forward.

“I’m very much concerned with lost time, mostly just with my own life and wondering if I’m making the right choices,” he says, “if writing a book is the right decision for me right now, and if I’ll be happy by the end of my life. If I was like, ‘Well, I wrote three books and then I died,’ is that enough to call a satisfying life? With each passing year, time seems to be going quicker and quicker, and that seems to be the trend for everyone throughout the arc of their own lives, whether it’s a brain chemistry thing or just perception of time as we experience more of it. You lose more of it faster the more you experience it, and it’s a very frightening thing. And whatever you’re frightened of is very useful material for writing an entire book about.”

“If I was like, ‘Well, I wrote three books and then I died,’ is that enough to call a satisfying life?”

Certainly, The Vanished Birds reflects Jimenez’s anxieties, but great works of genre fiction cast light upon the hopes of their authors’ eras as well as the concerns, and he’s accomplished that as well. There’s a great thread of light running through this spellbinding book, rooted in the joy that comes from the family we find on our journeys, the people we choose to accept as our own.

“I’ve found the most fulfilling years of my life have been when I had agency over who I was with and who I laughed with and who I ate with,” Jimenez says. “The stories that I fell in love with were always about characters who were lost but who found love and safety in the arms of people who were at first strangers but then became so much closer, because they had active agency over the love they shared.” 

It’s this joy, the sense that we can make our own families, that makes The Vanished Birds soar.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Vanished Birds.

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Kate Elliott begins an epic new science fiction series with Unconquerable Sun, a complex and addicting tale of political intrigue that takes inspiration from ancient history—specifically, Alexander the Great. We talked to Elliott about drawing from the distant past to create a tale set in the far future, which of the book’s perspectives was the hardest to crack and why “queen” is a gender-neutral term in this fictional universe.

You’re the author of more than 10 science fiction series and numerous stories. After traveling to so many places and times in your writing, what excited you about Chaonia?
At the beginning of my career I wrote seven science fiction novels, so I might even say I started as an SF writer. Since then I’ve written 17 fantasy novels. This new book represents a return to my science fiction origins, which is quite exciting to me. I love writing fantasy with its magical worlds. And while I consider science fiction and fantasy to rest comfortably together under the umbrella of speculative fiction or the spacious tent that encompasses the literature of the fantastic, I can’t deny that it is relaxing and fun to return to writing space opera as a change of pace. Space opera can offer strong ties to the modern world, which can be evoked on the page. Its operatic sense of bombast, bold colors and vivid settings allow it to create a big, theater-filling spectacle. Sometimes theater-filling spectacle is exactly what I want to write, and to read.

“Sometimes theater-filling spectacle is exactly what I want to write, and to read.”

This book has been characterized as a gender-swapped retelling of the life of Alexander the Great. What led you to pull from the stories of mighty empires and conquerors, and was Alexander indeed your primary inspiration?
Yes, this is in fact exactly what it says on the label: a gender-swapped version of the life of Alexander the Great, set in space in the far, far future.

As a fantasy writer, I’ve long been interested in what empire is and how it functions; I’m not sure why but maybe because I grew up in an empire (the USA), so it would be natural for me to analyze and think about empire through the stories I tell.

Why Alexander? I don’t know. I’ve just always been fascinated by his story.

“I would call it a society where gender is a secondary consideration.”

The hierarchical structure here is reminiscent of ancient times, with its royals, Companions and cee-cees (Companions’ companions). What was your favorite part of crafting the relationships, alliances and tension between the different classes and peoples in Unconquerable Sun?
While the story is set in a far, far future tenuously tied to Earth, I used real history as the basic template. Part of my work was deciding which aspects of the history of Alexander the Great I would create analogs for, and what things I would make up specifically for this story. That means some of the tensions and alliances were built into the history. For example, I knew from the beginning that the Phene Empire was the enemy of the Republic of Chaonia, and that both empire and republic had a contentious history with the Yele League. In historical terms that translates roughly to the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire, the Kingdom of Macedon and the Greek city-states under the general leadership of Athens.

To make a space opera work, however, I did not want to simply turn every part of the story into a direct analog. The actual history and those governments and nations wouldn’t work “as is” in a space setting, for one thing. Also, half the fun of writing a space opera adaptation is to bend history and events and characters to make something new from it.

As for all the different classes and peoples, my foundational assumption is that people living on far distant worlds would not share exactly the same cultural landscape. Creating unique-to-their-place cultural landscapes is one of the things I most enjoy about writing science fiction and fantasy, and this project has been no different.

Chaonia is a gender-equal society, as well as a society that embraces same-sex unions. Did you base aspects of Chaonia on any real civilizations?
I would call it a society where gender is a secondary consideration. In Chaonia the term “queen” is gender neutral, like the word marshal. The leader of the republic is the highest ranking marshal (a military designation). In Chaonia, that highest rank is called “queen”—thus the ruler is the queen-marshal of the republic. The ruler doesn’t have to be a woman. For example, the current queen-marshal, Eirene, was preceded as ruler by her older brothers, who died in battle before she came to the throne.

In that same way, Chaonian marriage is about political alliances, bloodlines and business relationships, as marriage has usually been in the past and as it certainly was in the time of Alexander and his father Philip. I also made the presumption that reproductive technology will have advanced enough that any two individuals, regardless of gender, can have a child together who shares their genetic material.  

I should note here that I didn’t sit down and say to myself, “I’m going to write a queer space opera.” The history is already queer. King Philip was what we would today call bisexual. So was Alexander. To be sure, sexuality wasn’t seen in the same way then. The terms homosexual and heterosexual were only coined in the mid 19th-century, and they don’t represent a universal understanding of gender across time or in other cultures. But the point stands. History is already queer.

“The real world I am living in always creeps into my writing.”

What was the origin of the insanely fun and often witty chapter titles such as “Introducing the Wily Persephone and the Loyal Solomon with the Predictable Result of Their Foray into Battle”? Did they come to you while drafting, or do you wait until the book is closer to be finished to come up with them?
I love chapter titles. You can do so much with them. They can give a signal to the reader. They can tell a little story in themselves. They can hint at things to come. And so on.

In the first few drafts mostly I wanted to identify literal phrases from the chapter text that I thought would work well to highlight in the chapter titles. Then when the reader reaches that phrase in the chapter, it hits them harder because they’ve seen it before. They’re primed for it. That’s my theory, anyway.

Later, in the final revision, I made the decision to include the words “the Wily Persephone” in all the chapter titles that are from Perse’s point of view. Given her narrative voice and who she is, it made sense to me to have those chapter titles to be more pointed and even poke fun at her because it’s the kind of thing she would do when speaking of herself. The rest, as they say, is history.

What is your favorite genre outside of SFF to read?
History. I go through phases where I struggle to read fiction, but I can always read history. I’m just so fascinated by windows into the past.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Unconquerable Sun.

When writing what is, in many ways, a political thriller in space, do you try to address or find yourself referencing current political events? Or do any parallels only become apparent to you once the book is closer to completion?
The real world I am living in always creeps into my writing. The influence might be overt, a connection I intended to make, or it might be hidden in layers of the story without me realizing it. But after I finish a book I always see one or more elements that feel drawn from current events, even if I didn’t consciously intend them.

Unconquerable Sun mainly toggles through the points-of-view of three very different characters: Sun, Perse and Apama. Did you always know that you wanted to tell this story from all three perspectives, and did any one of them come easier to you? 
Persephone was the first point of view in the story. It started with her. Zizou came next, although he remains a minor point of view in the novel.

Eventually, I realized I had to include Sun’s point of view because this is her history, after all. She is by far the most difficult character to write. Her intensity and focus can feel hard to capture. Because she is who she is—unapologetically ambitious and capable—she does not display many of the usual character traits that we think of as making women “sympathetic.” That was also a challenge for me as a writer, one I knew I had to tackle because one of my goals with the story has been to write depictions of women leaders in societies where no one ever questions their right (as women) to lead.

I added Apama last, partly because I needed a point of view from within the Phene Empire and also because I needed Apama’s point of view specifically once I realized the larger outlines of the story I am telling.

Perse, Apama and Zizou were all fairly easy to write because they aren’t Sun. I “get” them.

What’s next for you and your writing? I’m sure readers would love to know what’s in the pipeline for you, Sun, Perse and Apama.
I’m currently writing book two, Furious Heaven. Saying more than that would be a spoiler.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest idiosyncratic novel leaps easily from the micro to the macro, beginning with two cryptid-hunting friends and expanding to encompass an entire alternate history of the development of life itself. Through it all, Tchaikovsky’s irrepressible wit and effervescent intelligence serve as lifelines for the reader as The Doors of Eden take them on a truly unique and fantastical ride. We talked to Tchaikovsky about crafting his latest awe-inspiring trip through space and time.

You excel at creating a tone that bounces between humor and horror. How do you strike that balance as a writer?
That’s kind of you to say. I suspect the rather appalling truth is that while I’m aware of various things that horrify others, they don’t necessarily horrify me in the same way. The human-spider interactions in the middle of Children of Time, say, or certain adventurous scenes in its sequel, aren’t written as horror, because they’re written from the point of view of the thing that horrifies, rather than the beneficiaries of that emotion. That discontinuity also tends to produce the horror, and the incongruity of the horror makes the humor, and the humor makes the horror that much worse.

You dreamed up a menagerie of beasts both small and large for this book. Did you scrap any concepts for other life-forms from the great beyond? Care to share any?
There’s the whole of evolutionary creation to plunder. I’d have liked to do more with anomalocarids and other Cambrian explosion fauna, because a real seed for this book was Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life, which includes a detailed description of the mainstays of that fossil biota. And I leave large gaps—there’s about a hundred million years of dinosaurs I never touched, mostly because dinosaur speculative evolution is one of the more common areas of thought. And it might have been fun to depart further from current evolution—have some wild card rise to dominance in a later era, such as a tertiary invertebrate, or late birds or fish. Most vertebrates are teleost fish after all and there’s no reason why they couldn’t have a resurgence. However, having a narrative that follows each “new” group from when it made its grand mark in the fossil record is probably easier for the reader.

“. . . to expand the mind with grand ideas is a great thing.”

The relationship between Lee and Mal anchors the book. What characters or people did you draw from, even informally, when shaping their relationship?
I think I drew a little from a lot of people to construct the pair of them. Mal is very much based on an old live-action role-playing friend of mine, plus a few other people. Overall, they are each about 50% made up and 50% stitched together from many, many friends and acquaintances.

Julian’s character shows the potential effects of understanding more than we ever wanted to. Do you think most of us are unready or unwilling to have our worldviews totally turned upside down?
I think most of us would be just as lost as poor Julian is, but you can never know until it should happen. A lot of portal-fantasy/science-fiction characters, having gone through the mirror, display a sang-froid about the whole business that I know I wouldn’t. I can certainly think of a few people of my acquaintance who I feel would be absolutely in their element if they woke up in another world.

A phrase that kept playing in my mind while reading was the phrase "a sense of wonder." Does that phrase ring true to you when thinking about this book?
Absolutely, yes. The whole book is kind of a background hymn to the wonders, not of any particular imaginary world, but the actual real world, past and present, which we so often take for granted. Life (back me up, Sir David Attenborough) is so varied and so intricate and so beautiful, and we waste a great deal of it. And beyond that, yes, I think a sense of wonder is an integral part of a certain kind of science fiction—to expand the mind with grand ideas is a great thing.

I found myself completely riveted by the interludes from the fictional book within this book, Other Edens. How did these fit into your plan for the story? Did you want to use such a structure from the beginning?
Honestly, I had to practice a great deal of discipline to bring them down to just what’s in the book! The interludes and their thought experiments are absolutely the inspiration for the book, without which it wouldn’t exist. And of course, many of them provide the useful background on what is going on, which would be cumbersome to try and insert in the actual text, but many others are just there for the hell of it, to show the myriad variety of the worlds I’m presenting.

In a lot of ways, The Doors of Eden challenges us to think about what we don't know or see in the world around us. What frontiers in science do you think hold the most promise for opening our eyes to something important that was there all along?
If we achieve anything like a real artificial intelligence (not just a complex algorithm that can learn how to fake being people) then that should show us a great deal about how we ourselves think, and might also find a lot of priceless but unintuitive solutions to other problems we have, in that way that computers sometimes can. Similarly, if the recent discoveries on Venus lead to the discovery of actual extraterrestrial life, that would teach us so much about the possibilities of evolution and biology in very non-Earthlike conditions (or in the buried oceans of Europa, say, or some other place within the solar system—or even an exoplanet, although that has its own raft of practical issues).

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Doors of Eden.

When you think back to writing this book, are there passages that you remember writing more vividly than others?
The museum sequence, frankly, was an absolute bear. I rewrote it several times over, and ended up breaking it up a lot between the characters to try and tame it. So, I remember that vividly enough, for all the wrong reasons. Beyond that, my chain of evolutionary logic that led to immortal giant trilobites is something I’m pretty damn proud of. . .

If you could dream up another Earth, a unique paradise just for you, what would it look like?
I wanted to make some cheap joke about having lots of legs and a warning that it contains spiders, but honestly I think what my perfect paradise would have would be variety—multiple viewpoints, multiple minds, complexity built of diversity. And not in danger of being extinguished by monstrous short-sighted greed, for preference.

Fantasy author Stina Leicht makes her science fiction debut with the rollicking Persephone Station, which follows a crime lord with a heart of gold and a mercenary who team up to protect a pacificist alien species from a ruthless corporation. We talked to Leicht about making the shift between genres, how she devised the unique characters that populate her world and more.

Persephone Station is your first science fiction novel. What inspired you to switch from writing fantasy and what did you enjoy about sci-fi? Was there anything from fantasy that you missed?
My editor asked me if I had any ideas for a science fiction novel. No, really. That’s the whole story. I’ve been into SF since I discovered Star Trek at age 4. Now, ask me why I didn’t start with science fiction.

The Boys Club.

After decades of hearing that women can’t write science fiction and all the snide comments about “hard” versus “soft” SF . . . *eyeroll* well . . . the prospect was unappealing. I might even use the word intimidating. So, I wrote fantasy first. Of course, when I think back on it now, I don’t know why I thought SF would be more terrifying than writing about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Fear doesn’t have to make sense, I guess.

What I enjoy most about SF is the optimism—the thought that humanity will still be kicking in 300 years or whatever. I love thinking that we’ll come up with some way to stop killing the planet and, thus, ourselves. I want to believe that we’ll solve hunger and the problem of unequal opportunity and provide education for everyone. If everyone gets a shot at living up to their potential, we all benefit. And I guess you know why Star Trek is my favorite. Mind you, I enjoy the action/thriller stuff too. Clearly.

"I didn’t want the aliens to be perfect victims—no one is a perfect anything."

Anyway, writing SF versus writing fantasy isn’t that different. Technically, they both fall under surrealism. You have to focus on getting different details right, of course. For that reason, there’s nothing to miss. It’s not like I can’t go back to writing fantasy. I even indulge in horror sometimes. Having range as a writer is a good thing.

Do you plan to write a sequel, or more science fiction in general?
In my experience, sequels depend upon the publisher and how many copies are sold. I’d love to write more novels and stories set in this world, but I have to wait and see how Persephone Station does. Mind you, I’m already working on a new science fiction novel. I think I’ll be hanging out in this end of the genre pool for a while.

How did you come up with the idea of the Emissaries?
When I sat down to write Persephone Station, I wanted to write something feminist. The setting, the characters, the aliens—I wanted them all to mean something. I like building layers into stories. I’m a rereader, and it’s fun to find something new in a story that I like. That’s why I prefer to craft the surface parts (action, characters, dialogue) that make the story fun and, then provide the more cerebral bits that a reader can get into. But you don’t have to pay attention to the thinky parts to enjoy the story.

So I gave the aliens stereotypically feminine qualities. Their purpose for existing is to serve as mediators and peacemakers. They’re strongly discouraged from aggression. (If you don’t think these are feminine qualities, I invite you to observe a women’s martial arts class. Instructors often struggle to get the average woman comfortable with hitting another person.) A majority of women’s labor is unseen, unappreciated and unpaid, including house cleaning, care work, cooking, laundry and so on. Historically, men have taken credit for women’s creations, too. Finally, as a teen girl, I felt all this pressure to transform myself into whatever it was the male in my life desired. Boyfriend is into country music? Listen to country music. Boyfriend is into tabletop games? Be into tabletop games. I didn’t give much thought to what I wanted for the longest time. The young men I was with weren’t interested in what I wanted either.

I didn’t want the aliens to be perfect victims—no one is a perfect anything. So I made the Emissaries powerfully passive-aggressive. Because I live in the South and passive-aggressive is peak femme.

Your characters have such a jovial sense of fellowship to them, and the pacing of the story feels like a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons. Was this intentional? Do you play tabletop roleplaying games?
Ha! I learned from the Sir Terry Pratchett school of character and dialog. So I didn’t have RPGs in mind at all. I do play and have for decades, but the pacing should be standard action/adventure pacing because that’s what the plot is based on. But that’s just me.

The following contains spoilers! Click to show.

What do you do to find inspiration? Do any of your characters have a fun story behind their inception?
I’m a big fan of observing and experiencing life. Long walks with my husband are great—he’s extremely funny. Travel is inspiring too. Listening to ordinary people chat with one another. That kind of thing. I love wandering through junk shops and thinking about what the people who owned the things there were like. I also study how other writers write characters. I like people. I suspect you have to if you’re going to write about people. Sometimes I borrow qualities from people I know—no character is 100% anyone I know in real life. That wouldn’t be right. And I only use names and qualities from people I like. I don’t believe it’s ethical to put anyone you dislike into a story. It feels creepy, you know? Comedy is another influence. My favorite films contain snappy dialogue. Have you seen The Thin Man? Good stuff.

The way my imagination works is I start with a person and then I follow them around in my mind. It’s the same thing as daydreaming. Usually, they’re happy to tell me all about themselves. That’s great until you end up with a tight-lipped character or a character that behaves a certain way and refuses to explain why. For example, when I wrote Of Blood and Honey, Mary Kate kept apologizing about the baby. It made no sense. None of what happened was her fault, but she wouldn’t stop apologizing. So I paused the scene in my mind and asked. And that was when I found out that she’d been pregnant before. That was amazing.

Do you typically write in long, protracted sessions or in quick bursts? Or another way altogether?
Each story or novel is a bit different. I’ve written shorter works all in one go. Last Drink Bird Head was like that. Usually it happens in chunks. Five hundred words here. Two thousand words there. Writing requires persistence.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Persephone Station.

How have you been holding up in the pandemic? Has it affected your writing process?
Like everyone, it’s affected how much bandwidth I have for creativity. In spite of the mythology around the creative arts—people who are in insecure situations with tons of drama do not do their best work. Creativity requires safety and security. It has to be OK to make mistakes. If you’re worried about whether or not you’re going to eat or be homeless, you’re not going to be very creative because you’ll be under too much pressure. (And that’s why turning a hobby into a profession can sometimes kill your love of it.) I’m super lucky. I’ve a stable home life. My husband rocks. We’ve been married for 19 years and we get along great. That said, anxiety takes up a lot of headspace, and I’m an Olympic-class worrier, but you have to push on.

What are you looking forward to in 2021?
Honestly? The vaccine. I can’t wait until everyone gets the vaccine. Being able to write in a coffee shop again would be amazing. I miss bookstores and movie theaters more than just about anything. Traveling would be lovely too. But above all else—I’m looking forward to there not being hundreds of thousands of deaths in the news. I want everyone to be safe, healthy and happy.

Everina Maxwell’s debut novel, Winter’s Orbit, takes the marriage of convenience trope and flings it into an intergalactic web of intrigue. Hedonistic Prince Kiem of the Iskan Empire and his new husband Jainan, the devoted ruler of one of the empire’s vassal planets, forge a tentative partnership while investigating the somewhat mysterious death of Jainan’s first husband. We talked to Maxwell about how the forbidding and wintry environment of the planet Iskat functioned as a symbol and the freedom of a "queernorm" speculative world.

Do you prefer one genre (romance or science fiction) over the other, as a reader or writer? If you had to name your fusion of romance and science fiction, what would you call it?
The genres of my heart are sci-fi and fantasy; they were what I read growing up and what I borrowed piles of from the library. But I also read fanfiction, which prizes character and relationships above all else. Published romance was a later—delightful!—discovery that hit many of the same beats, and I loved its commitment to happy endings. I call Winter’s Orbit a “queer romantic space opera,” but in fact it’s just the type of book I wanted to read: an imaginary second world, with that sense of wonder and discovering new things, but a story centered on two characters overcoming their past and finding happiness.

The birds of Iskat are mysterious—and frightening—omens that complement the planet’s frigid and frozen exterior. What inspired you to add this element?
Part of it is character-based: Iskat is strange and hostile because Jainan, a foreign diplomat, has always found it that way. But it’s also beautiful, and to Prince Kiem, this landscape is his home. A minor arc of the story shows Jainan’s feelings about the landscape and wildlife gradually changing. Also, to be honest, I found the marital argument over “what is a bear” funny, and I firmly believe SF is improved by adding jokes wherever possible.

"[M]y goal was to write the joy in healing, even when it’s been so hard, and even when there’s so far to go."

Kiem and Jainan’s experiences with the Iskat government, the media and more allow you to explore corruption and greed, from blackmailing reporters to the suppression of the vassal planets. Did you see this as commentary on the state of the world today, or was there a more fantastical inspiration for the setting and characters?
This is a tricky question to answer. Winter’s Orbit isn’t about a specific political event, and I wouldn’t class it actively as commentary. But of course speculative fiction is directly influenced by the real world, and any attempt to write galactic politics is necessarily drawn from, or in conversation with, the recent history of our own planet. After all, it’s the only model we have for systems affecting billions of people with access to technology. I tried to keep this in mind while writing.

Relationships in Winter’s Orbit range from monogamous to polyamorous, and the choosing of certain tokens in Iskat culture represent binary or non-binary gender expression. And obviously, same-sex marriage and love is displayed positively throughout the narrative. What do you hope readers will discover about the world or themselves after reading your book?
The planet of Iskat is a “queernorm” world, which just means it’s a world where the acceptance of queer identities is background radiation, not a plot point, and no more remarkable than the existence of buildings or drinking water. As a queer person myself this was just a pure joy to write. Many people, both queer and straight, have family or friend groups where they already experience this, so all this book says is, what if that was everywhere in the future? What if you never needed to worry about defending who you are? What if you could use that brain space for something else?

Winter’s Orbit doesn’t stand alone here. You can find queernorm worlds in a growing body of recent(ish) SFF. It’s thanks to the people who came before us that we’re in this place: Queer authors wrote coming-out stories and academic essays and polemics for decades so we could be here, claiming a space where queer identities can just exist. And although at the moment we have to imagine that space, imagining it gets us one step closer to realizing it.

Jainan’s journey to becoming an open, communicative partner while also dealing with grief was a wonderful, healing element of this book. How did that aspect of the book evolve for you while writing?
Jainan’s arc is very much at the core of the story. He’s had some difficult experiences in his past which now lead him to second-guess both other people’s actions and his own worth as a person. My aim with his arc was to show the slow, bumpy healing process, while avoiding “magical” transformations where everything is suddenly okay because he’s fallen in love. Jainan still has a lot to work through by the end of the book, but my goal was to write the joy in healing, even when it’s been so hard, and even when there’s so far to go.

Were there any real-life muses who served as inspiration for Kiem and Jainan? How about the delightfully no-nonsense character of Kiem’s secretary, Bel?
Kiem and Jainan feel like they just turned up in my brain one day, but in fact, like the other characters, they’re almost certainly snippets of various real people and literary influences. A large part of Bel is defined by how she does her job, since we mainly see her at work—I’ve done Bel’s job myself, so she’s fairly close to my heart!

What other intergalactic places and times—or types of planets—would you like to travel to in your fiction going forward?
I’m fascinated by far-future science fiction where it’s not totally clear how humanity spread across the stars from Earth. It provides an infinite sandbox and an almost fantasy-like air of discovery: One book deals with a solar system over here, and the next deals with a planet on the other side of the galaxy. Space is infinite! I love that.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Winter's Orbit.

What’s next for you and your writing?
I’m working on a sort-of-sequel-but-not-really, which is set outside the Iskat Empire but in the same universe. It stars two queer characters who are even bigger disasters than Kiem and Jainan and includes more about the Remnants, the quasi-magical alien artifacts that briefly turned up in Winter’s Orbit. I’m very excited for this one.

Author photo © Richard Wilson Photography.