Tag: Interview

Interview: Ed Park, author of An Oral History of Atlantis

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The Speculative Shelf is very excited to welcome Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park to the blog to discuss his wonderful new collection, An Oral History of Atlantis (out now from Penguin Random House).

You can find our full review of the book here.

Publisher’s summary: In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters bemoan their fleeting youth, focus on their breathing, meet cute, break up, write book reviews, translate ancient glyphs, bid on stuff online, whale watch, and once in a while find solace in the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. Spanning a quarter century, these sixteen stories tell the absurd truth about our lives. They capture the moment when the present becomes the past—and are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most imaginative and insightful writers working today.

Q&A with author Ed Park:

Your work often plays with form, language, and meta-fiction. How do those experiments show up in this collection?

EP: I enjoyed finding different ways to transmit the various voices here. Three of the stories are letters (“A Note to My Translator,” “An Accurate Account,” and “The Gift”)—I love the epistolary form because the text has a “reason” to exist (i.e., someone is writing to someone else). The form envisions an audience. The most unusual structure can be found in “Weird Menace,” which is presented as a Blu-Ray commentary track on a science-fiction movie from the ’80s. I don’t know that they’re still doing commentary tracks, now that everything’s on streaming, but I used to find them pretty interesting—a whole new layer to the viewing experience.

There are some subtle interconnections from story to story: Were you purposely repeating characters and themes, or did those similarities unfold more organically?

EP: These stories were written across 25-plus years, sometimes with lengthy intervals between them, so I wasn’t always conscious of the connections. But I knew that certain names recurred, and I’d sometimes have a sense that one story (say, “Two Laptops”) might have some interesting connection with another (“The Air as Air”). Later, as I finalized the table of contents, I made a two-page chart so that I could see how these characters interacted with each other in various stories (and in fact “off the page”). I had to create rough biographies to make sure their chronologies intersected in a way that made sense—stuff that the reader doesn’t need to think about, but background that’s there in case he or she wants to probe deeper into the connections. 

I also like how the “blank space” between the stories can act like the passage of time. Hannah Hahn pops up in at least three places, in somewhat different. And Mercy Pang, the enigmatic artist in my novel Same Bed Different Dreams, actually made her first appearance in the story “Thought and Memory.” And you can trace another character from that story, Mimi, to at least two others in the book. 

When compiling a short story collection – how much thought goes into the order of the stories? Is it like sequencing an album tracklist or setting a baseball batting order – do you try to frontload your best ones? Or end with a bang?

EP: Quite a lot of thought! In a fun way.! I wanted to kick things off with “A Note to My Translator,” because it was my first published story (1998), and one that signals to the reader there’s plenty of humor ahead. In other words: This book will be fun. And I liked the idea of the title track coming at the end. The reader will have been thinking of the title through the course of the whole book, and now the “answer” will be revealed. (I also added a nod from this story back to “Note,” creating a loop of sorts.) 

Speaking of books being like albums, two—actually three—of the titles in AOHOA are taken from songs: “Bring on the Dancing Horses” (Echo and the Bunnymen), “Watch Your Step” (Elvis Costello), and “The Gift” (The Velvet Underground).  

The more explicitly speculative stories (“Eat Pray Click,” “Well-Moistened…,” the title story) are in the latter half of the book—I imagine that readers, having made it this far, are perhaps ready to go on a wilder ride. “Weird Menace”—the longest story here by far—is also something that wouldn’t necessarily work right out of the gate. 

On the other hand, I could imagine the reader dipping in at random—as one would listen to a CD on shuffle—and having a totally great experience. What if you read it backward?

There were 15 years between your debut novel Personal Days and your follow-up Same Bed Different Dreams in 2024, but it’s now been a quick turnaround to this collection? When might we see your next work? I’ve seen passing mentions of Three Tenses – a memoir “with fragments, observations, and anecdotes that form a picture of creativity in action.”  Is there anything else you can share about that?

EP: Yes, Three Tenses will be out next year, which I’m thrilled about. It’s a memoir that I wrote in 1998—fairly rapidly, with an intense sense of aesthetic purpose; then I put it in a drawer. The whole thing is rather lyrical and experimental, done in fragments, each one beginning with the same word. It’s a little like David Markson, a little like Oulipo. There are also strands that are pure fiction, woven in. I rediscovered the book in 2020, literally finding it in a box. I retyped the whole thing—a really unique experience. I write quite differently now, but there’s something about that early style that I find very attractive.

I’ve got another novel in progress. I don’t know when it will be done! But it’s been a lot of fun, and there’s some Buffalo/Korea content.

We’re both native Buffalonians and long-suffering fans of the Buffalo Sabres. The Sabres are in the midst of a historically rough stretch, missing the playoffs for 14 straight seasons and displaying a level of ineptitude the likes of which have rarely been seen in professional sports. That said…what gives you hope for the future? Will they (and can they) turn things around in our lifetimes?

EP: There’s always hope, as long as the team doesn’t go to another city. (The other day I was thinking of an alternate universe in which the Buffalo Braves had stayed in town; now they’re the Clippers.) Having said that, I’m distressed that they don’t know what to do with good players. Seeing so many ex-Sabres in the recent Stanley Cup finals was painful. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to offer such great insight into your work, Ed. I loved An Oral History of Atlantis and best of luck with its release!

Interview: Kirsten Bakis, author of King Nyx

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The Speculative Shelf is very excited to welcome Kirsten Bakis to the blog to discuss her brilliant new novel, King Nyx (out now from Liveright Books/Norton).

You can find our review of the book here.

Publisher’s summary:
Anna Fort wants to be a supportive wife, even if that means accompanying her husband for the winter of 1918 to a remote, frozen island estate so he can finish his book as the guest of an eccentric millionaire. When she learns three girls are missing from a school run by their host, Anna realizes finding them is up to her—even if that means risking her husband’s career, and possibly her life.

Q&A with author Kirsten Bakis:

Did you have prior knowledge of the Forts before writing the book? What drew you to them, and Anna Fort, in particular?

KB: I learned about Charles Fort years ago, and he stayed in my mind because he’s such an interesting character. For years, he spent his days in public libraries combing through books and scientific and meteorological journals in search of anomalous events, carefully copying out quotes and citations by hand, and bringing them home to file in a special cataloging system in shoeboxes. He wrote long rambling books putting forth a variety of strange and mismatched theories about why these things happened. For example, he suggested that red rain, or blood rain—which has been recorded in various times and places throughout history—might be caused by gigantic creatures in outer space fighting and bleeding. Sometimes he claimed he wasn’t serious, but his distrust of the scientific establishment and desire to poke holes in its logic (which he didn’t do a very good job of) did seem serious.

So, initially, I thought I would like to write a book about him. But the more I learned about his wife, Anna, the more I began to think that the really interesting story was hers. 

A lot of people thought Charles was a crank, but a few—notably the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser—thought he was a genius. As a result, Charles wound up publishing several books and making a name for himself. Today, we have hundreds of pages of his rambling thoughts, and hundreds more of notes by Theodore Dreiser for a never-published biography of Charles. But much less is known about Anna, the woman who made his writing career possible by working backbreaking domestic labor jobs and basically taking care of him in every way—and yet who was pretty silent on the topic of what she thought of his books. 

Dreiser, in his notes about a dinner he had with the Forts, dismissed her as being unable to understand her brilliant husband, and characterized her as a woman who “cannot think.”

She had once wanted to be a singer, but gave that up to take a backseat to her husband’s career. I do think the two of them genuinely loved each other, that she wanted him to succeed and that he appreciated her. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what that must have been like for her, and what might have played into her decision to prioritize him and his strange, nonsensical writings, which she herself didn’t seem to buy into. What made her choose to put her own desires on hold so that he could succeed? It’s such a familiar story, such a familiar dynamic. I wanted to examine it. 

Since not much is known about Anna Filing Fort, I made up a gothic, extravagant, sort of over-the-top adventure for her—something I wish she could have had, something I wanted to give her retroactively. 

The dialogue and language choices really do a great job capturing the distinct tone and feel of the time period. How did you channel that voice?

KB: Thank you. I’m not sure how it works, exactly, but I know I spent a lot of time researching the era, and reading the works of Charles Fort and others who wrote in the early 20th century. Not so much (for this purpose) the great writers with their own precise and distinct voices, like Virginia Woolf, but more ordinary things—chatty magazine articles, interviews, and that kind of thing. But I think most of it really happens when you’re sitting down and writing and just trying to—as you said—channel something. I do think that in some way, that’s what’s happening—you’re opening yourself up to voices that aren’t exactly yours, personalities that are different from your own. I have no idea how that works. It’s something so many writers talk about. I think there may be an element of actual magic.

Was it an intentional choice to tease a big spooky mansion and then put the characters on the outside looking in for most of the book?

KB: That’s a good question! I definitely think of gothic fiction as generally taking place partly inside a big spooky mansion, and King Nyx doesn’t, for most of the book. I want to say that it was a completely intentional and logical choice, but in truth, so much of writing happens by instinct. At some point I realized that they just weren’t going to get into the house until the end. So I decided to work with that. 

I do think that it’s a story about people who don’t get to inhabit the mansion—not really. Even if some of them do live in fine houses, they’re servants, or they’re, in some way, not in the center of power, and that fact shapes their lives. They orbit men who are the center, the sun, of their own little universes, and everyone else is just moving carefully around them. That’s part of what I see the story as being about.

What’s a piece of popular media (movie/TV show/book) you could fill in this blank with – “if you like _______ , you’ll like King Nyx.”

KB: This is a hard question! It’s so hard for me to see King Nyx from the outside. Maybe to put it in more general terms: if you like gothic fiction, if you like mystery, if you like feminism, if you like stories about eccentric millionaires, and creepy dolls, and suspense, and . . . talking birds??? — then you’ll like King Nyx.

I read that you haven’t reread your breakout debut, Lives of the Monster Dogs, in the 27 years since it’s been published. Do you think you’ll keep the same distance between yourself and King Nyx now that it’s out in the world?

KB: I think I might! It can be fun to try to translate a book into a really different form, like a screenplay, for example—where you really have to make changes to make it work. So that could be a reason to revisit something. But the idea of just re-reading it again as a novel doesn’t seem interesting to me. I’ve been over every inch of it, every word and comma, so many times, and that was fun, but I feel like it’s time to go onto other things.

What’s the last great book you read?

KB: I’ve been really enjoying Tana French’s novels lately. I especially love her first, In the Woods, which I read a few months ago, and also The Secret Place. She’s so good with suspense, and just a great, accomplished craftsperson—I’ve been taking a lot of notes as I read about what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. I’ve also recently discovered Seishi Yokomizo, a Japanese mystery novelist who published a lot in the mid-20th century. Pushkin Press, in the UK, is publishing English translations of some of them now. I loved The Village of Eight Graves and Death on Gokuman Island. They’re mysteries, but they also have a kind of folk-horror feel to them, which is true of a lot of Tana French’s work as well. A mix of folk horror and mystery is something I just love as a reader. I’m currently reading Victor LaValle’s Lone Women, which is historical horror, and it’s looking like it’s going to be fantastic.

Thank you so much for taking the time to offer such incredible insight into your work. I loved reading King Nyx and I think others will too!

Interview: Lena Nguyen, author of We Have Always Been Here

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The Speculative Shelf is very excited to welcome Lena Nguyen to the blog today to discuss her excellent debut novel, We Have Always Been Here (out July 6, 2021) from DAW Books.

You can find our review of the book here.

Publisher’s summary: Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.
 
Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing—neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself—is as it seems.

1. We Have Always Been Here is a tense psychological sci-fi thriller. I found your writing to really convey tension in a palpable way. Is there anything specific you focus on in your prose/word choice to evoke this feeling?

Thank you so much for your kind words, and thank you for having me for this interview!

Writing suspense and tense scenes has always been a balancing act for me. Typically, I tend to focus on making sentences very fluid and stream-of-consciousness, sort of scattered in subject, in order to replicate how fast the character’s thoughts must be moving in those heart-stopping moments. I also employ a lot of structural interruptions—such as sentences that are cut off in the middle of their train of thought by sudden action—as well as a lot of rapidfire internal questions. Park, the protagonist of We Have Always Been Here, has a habit of thinking about a million things at once in order to make sense of her situation, even as someone is chasing her down a hallway or menacing her with a gun; so the narration is peppered with a lot of How could this be happening? What about the security guard? Did the killer get him already, or—

That kind of rapid movement and pacing really helps ramp up and maintain the tension of the scene, I think—though you have to be careful to avoid getting so hectic and frenzied that readers lose track of what’s going on!

2. Your story jumps back and forth between Dr. Grace Park’s present and past, as well as a mysterious viewpoint told through video log transcriptions — how did you decide on this structure? 

That’s a good question! Skirting spoilers as much as possible, I think playing around with space and time (and dreams and reality) is a large part of the book’s main conceit as well as a driving factor of its horror. The patients aboard the ship begin to have difficulty distinguishing between their waking states and nightmares. Park has difficulty making sense of the physical space of the ship; corridors seem to meld together, or turn into spaces that they shouldn’t, and you’re not really sure if this is due to her bad sense of direction or something else. Similarly, time begins to fold into itself in asymmetric ways: Park’s past and present (and future) become interconnected and hard to distinguish from each other, and you start to see in a very visceral way how her relationships with characters in the past are informing her relationships in the present: with her friends, android companions, adversaries, and even love interests. Eventually, past and present timelines get creased into the very same chapters or paragraphs as each other, instead of being clearly divided between “standalone” flashback chapters and present-day chapters—so the narrative structure of the book starts to reflect the overall progressive blending of space and time. I really wanted it to be this way from the start, partially to reflect what the characters themselves are experiencing on the ship, and partially because I knew that exploring Park’s past would be an important part of uncovering the mysteries that are plaguing the ship in the present.

As for the video transcripts, I’ve always been a big fan of the “found footage” genre of horror films. There’s an added layer to “found footage” in text and prose that really interests me—there’s something about the transcript format that leaves even more room for the imagination, subtext and space for the things unseen and unsaid. It allows you to fill in the gaps for yourself in a way that straightforward prose with an actual narrator doesn’t always allow. With a narrator, you have someone—even an omniscient, third-person observer—telling you what’s going on, laying out the scene for you, giving subtle shape to the narrative with their perspective and what they’re drawing your attention to. With “found footage” or the video transcripts, it’s more distanced, neutral: you are limited to what the “camera” records, what footage has survived, and you’re left to draw your own conclusions about what it’s all capturing (and not capturing). With the video transcripts in the book, you don’t initially know where or when all of this is taking place, who or what you’re embodying as the viewer, or the connection between when the videos were filmed versus when they were discovered versus when they were actually watched… It was another cool way to play around with space and time, alongside what was going on with Park!

3. Grace is one of two psychologists aboard the ill-fated Deucalion mission, which includes twelve other humans and a bevy of androids. What made you want to tap into Grace’s perspective?

Sonny from I, Robot (2004)

I feel like, in a lot of android media, we’re very preoccupied with the android characters’ journeys to becoming more human. We focus a lot on what happens to an android when it’s dropped into a human environment, how it adapts and learns and reacts to what’s going on around it. (Think Sonny in I, Robot.) And I was very interested in exploring the dynamic from the other way around: what happens to a person when their developmental stages are influenced very strongly by machine intelligences and android understandings of the world? How does that change them, alter the course of their personalities and even lives? Does it at all?

So the character of Park started with that question: what would a naturally introverted character be like if she was raised by androids? What would her thought process entail? I wanted to capture the comfort and security she might feel, surrounded by friends and family who are literally bound to never leave or conflict with her—but who still challenge her in certain ways, especially with their shortcomings. Vice-versa, I wanted to capture the alienation and skittishness she might feel about the unpredictability of human relationships and interactions, as opposed to the stability and safety of her android companions.

Her occupation as the ship’s psychologist stemmed from all of that. I feel that, in many ways, Park’s upbringing has made her into an observer of human activity, an outsider looking in, and her career in human psychology has been part of her effort to overcome that barrier. You see that persisting in her job on the Deucalion, as she’s tasked with observing what the other crewmembers are doing, always watching but never fully participating or understanding. That’s the perspective I wanted to tap into. She wants badly to understand, it’s a psychologist’s job to understand, but because she was brought up in such a different way, she faces certain obstacles that, say, a combat specialist or a pilot wouldn’t. Much of this book is about understanding, and what Park herself can or can’t comprehend, and her role as the ship’s orbiter and psychologist reflects that.

4. There’s a cinematic quality to this story and I think a film adaptation should surely be in order! Is there a film or TV show out there, sci-fi or otherwise, that you could say, “If you like X, you’ll like WHABH”?

Haha, thank you so much! When I was writing the book, a lot of the scenes played out in my head like cinematic sequences from a movie, so it would be an honor to see the story adapted for the screen!

The primary films that influenced the atmosphere and tension of We Have Always Been Here were Alien; I, Robot; Ex Machina; and Event Horizon, which are pretty much all science fiction murder mysteries or space horror films in some way. I think if people enjoy the book, especially the thriller aspects of it, they’ll definitely like those movies. (I mentioned I, Robot before, but the character of Sonny was a big influence in how I wrote Jimex, so that deserves another mention.)

I also thought a lot about how Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining as a way to envision the disorientating and sometimes accordioning architecture of the Deucalion, so readers might enjoy the otherworldly, spatial impossibilities and claustrophobia there. I also think films like Arrival and Annihilation have ushered in a very cool age of sci-fi aesthetics that readers of We Have Always Been Here might enjoy.

Finally, I’m a big video game player, so some SFF games made their way into my writing of the book. For fans of We Have Always Been Here, I’d recommend checking out Detroit: Become Human, Dead Space, and Mass Effect.

5. What was the last great book you read? What are you reading now? What is next on your to-read list?

I’m a huge lover of fantasy, so everything I’ve read in the last year or so has been fantasy. I recently read two series that had a huge impact on me: the first would be the Daevabad trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty, starting with The City of Brass. The second would be the Chronicles of the Bitch Queen by K.S. Villoso, which starts with The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. Both series feature fascinating, complex, and flawed heroines (a little like Park, though I admit Nahri and Talyien are more badass); very lovely supporting casts; and spell-binding worldbuilding influenced by the magic of real-world cultures (Islamic and Filipino, respectively). I’m in love with both!

I am eagerly awaiting the next book in the Fire Sacraments series by Robert VS Redick, this latest offering being called Sidewinders. Robert is one of my favorite fantasy authors of all time, and Sidewinders releases on the same day that We Have Always Been Here does! So I’m very much looking forward to that!

6. Can you share what you’re working on next? Have you left the WHABH universe for good?

Right now, I’m in the earliest draft stages of my next novel, an apocalyptic fantasy I’m calling The Land of Salt and Bone. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s actually something like speculative fantasy, science fantasy, dieselpunk, or something else entirely… Basically, it’s Mad Max crossed with X-Men. There are assassins, gunfights, car chases across an apocalyptic and sometimes radioactive desert, the ghostly ruins of an advanced civilization, and mutant superpowers with very fun quirks and costs. The story mainly follows two assassins: one who accidentally picks up a pair of mutant twins in her bid to escape her past, and the other is a mercenary hired to kill the first. It’s very flashy and action-packed—different from the claustrophobia and darkness of We Have Always Been Here, but you might see a few subtle nods to characters from the Deucalion if you squint.

I always planned on We Have Always Been Here being a standalone story, but I know by now that you can never say never. As an undergrad, I wrote a novel set during the period of the Comeback—some hundred years before Park’s era in We Have Always Been Here—that I may revisit someday: that one’s about the plant armageddon and carbon pirates, both of which are mentioned in WHABH. So I might get back to that someday, or even visit other places in that universe, or even take a look at the Deucalion itself…

For now, though, I’m satisfied with how the pieces fell in Park’s story, and I think I hear the desert—both my home and The Land of Salt and Bone—calling my name.

Many thanks to Lena for her thoughtful, in-depth responses.

Order We Have Always Been Here on Bookshop.org

Interview: E. J. Beaton, author of The Councillor

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The Speculative Shelf is thrilled to welcome E. J. Beaton to the blog today to discuss her outstanding debut novel, The Councillor (out March 2, 2021) from DAW Books.

The book follows Lysande, a scholar plucked out of an academy at a young age to work for the Iron Queen of Elira. When the queen is killed by an unknown assassin, Lysande is thrust into a leadership role in the kingdom, with little support and only her wits to guide her. You can find our review of the book here.

DAW Books is hosting a giveaway for 3 copies of The Councillor (Age: 18+, US residents only) – you can enter here.

1. The Councillor is labeled “Machiavellian fantasy” — How would you describe this subgenre as it applies to your novel?

The Councillor has a bit of a dialogue with Machiavellian thought. Lysande confronts the consequences of persecution and class inequality, and considers who has historically paid the price for leaders’ choices – as a less privileged person, she’s aware of the allure of power yet also critical of it.

Machiavelli famously described the practical moves that a leader can make to establish their power. His best-known treatise, The Prince, explains how a feudal leader can rule effectively. But he was living in a divided Italy during a time of widespread chaos and pillaging, and he was calling on a leader to unite and stabilise the country. He had one eye on the realities of politics, yet simultaneously, he hoped for a better world.

That’s how I’d describe the main character in The Councillor, too. Lysande has a realistic understanding of power, and she’s studied political history. Yet she also sees the need for structural change and hopes that society can change for the better. The question that remains is whether she’ll be committed to achieving that justice herself, or whether the allure of power will be too strong for her to resist.

2. The Councillor features multiple unique cultures that feel lived-in and well-developed. Were any of these modeled after real historical world cultures?

Thank you for the kind comment! Multiculturalism was an essential part of the world-building in the novel. None of the cultures directly adapt real-world cultures or are intended as a faithful representation of any country, but some of the places I’ve visited inspired a few creations.

The city of Rhime is partly inspired by the places in Italy I’ve visited, including Rome, the Vatican, Cinque Terre, Florence, and the Tuscan countryside. The decoration of ceilings with elaborate sculptures and trompe-d’oeuil paintings in the novel, for example, are based on some of the Italian churches and buildings I walked through. The land that Lysande travels through in Rhimese territory is inspired by my travels in Tuscany, including the special quality of the light and the vibrant colours of the environment.

The use of city-states was partly inspired by my reading about Renaissance Italy – I was intrigued by the concept of a range of different rulers co-existing, sometimes chaotically, within the one country. On the other hand, aspects of Axium are inspired by English history, and Axium’s values are linked to the values taught historically in the English-based curriculum. Lysande comes to question those values over the course of the novel.

I’ve travelled a fair bit in Asia and Europe and have worked in Cambodia, so there are bits of things that I’ve observed from a range of countries and shaped into my own creations, but less concentrated in one city. It’s probably more of a subtle tribute. Being Australian, I had my own country’s varied nature to consider, too: I tried to create a multi-climate land where you could find desert, jungle, temperate land and snow-capped mountains all within the same country.

3. Lysande, your main character, becomes addicted to ingesting a powdered dragon scale, of sorts. Drug addiction is not something I see much of in modern fantasy. Why was it important to include this difficulty in Lysande’s journey?

I was hoping to show the lived experience of overlapping mental and physical struggles – the combination of those two things at once can be very dangerous, and Lysande has learned to keep her struggles a secret. She’s a high-performing person who manages to conceal a lot of her emotional life. It was important to me to show the toll that these kinds of problems take on the body and mind at once, and how denial and shame work to keep that pain hidden.

The effects of chimera scale are based on effects that I experienced in my own struggle with illness. Mentally, Lysande’s scale use is calming, but physically it acts as a stimulant. This was modelled on an unhealthy cycle of behaviour I experienced where those two things – physical stimulus and mental calm – would be happening at once. I hope that by showing Lysande’s struggle with damaging behaviours, I can help someone else out there to feel a little less alone. That’s something I found, myself, from reading or watching stories about similar health struggles: I felt better after experiencing those stories, even if they were emotionally tough.

4. How do you think your experience as a poet influences your approach to writing a novel?

The aesthetic possibilities of language really open up in poetry. I think language is beautiful, and there’s a power in a writing style that can speak to the senses and to the deeper emotions. My approach to writing inherits something from my love of poetry, although I do feel that writing is a constant learning process, and I’m always trying to improve my writing.  

One aspect of poetry that has influenced my prose is the search for more specific words, whether that’s nouns, adjectives, or verbs – words that say exactlywhat I want to say and aren’t just the first ones I grab for in my mental bag. I’m also a fan of combinations of words that suggest rather than tell. For example, saying that someone has a knife-like smile or a dangerous smile is different to saying that they have a mean smile.

Poetry also makes me conscious of rhythm: what a short sentence can do, what a long sentence can do, and how alliteration or other techniques can create different rhythms. It helps me to think about the beat of my words, and how that can match the action of a scene. A character’s slow observation has a different rhythm to furious warfare, for example, and the accumulation of insight has its own particular and peculiar rhythms.

5. What was the last great book you read? What are you reading now? What is next on your to-read list?

I really enjoyed Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Circe by Madeline Miller, and The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. Those three books seemed beautiful and powerful at once; they all feature elegant prose, but they also have emotional journeys that leave a lingering ache.

I’ve just started reading Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. As in his debut novel, he writes with such beauty about difficult and painful things.

Some fantasy books I have my eye on to read soon are Aliette de Bodard’s Fireheart Tiger, Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, and when it comes out, Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Son of the Storm – I’m very impatiently awaiting that one!

6. Can you share your plan for any future installment(s) in the world of The Councillor? 

I’m working on the sequel to The Councillor at the moment, and wrangling with the story. Some of the tension between two characters boils over in the second book and there are consequences, both personal and political consequences. Lysande is also grappling with a question about her identity and trying to make sense of who she really is. If all my scenes make it through edits, then these words should give some hints: book, rope, fire, birth.  

Many thanks to E. J. for her thoughtful responses.

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Interview: Rod Duncan, Author of The Map of Unknown Things series

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Duncan-CoverThe Speculative Shelf is excited to welcome Rod Duncan to the blog today for a discussion about his upcoming book, The Fugitive and the Vanishing Man (out January 14, 2020) from Angry Robot Books. It’s the third and final book in The Map of Unknown Things series. This trilogy closes the chapter on the Elizabeth Barnabus saga, which began in Duncan’s award-winning Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire trilogy. I’ve reviewed all six of the books here on the blog and I think you’ll really enjoy this final chapter if you’ve been following this wonderful alternate history series. Many thanks to Rod for taking the time to answer my questions so thoughtfully.

Hello Rod, thank you for joining us here today! Let’s jump right in:

From a process standpoint, how much preplanning do you do when writing a series like this? When you started penning the first book, did you know how this final book would conclude?

I began writing the first book – the Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter – without much idea of what would follow. Indeed, at the very start, I thought it would be a short story.

9200000084559751But, from your question, I’m guessing you’ve spotted various connections between book one and book six, The Fugitive and the Vanishing Man. The most obvious perhaps is the motif of Elizabeth’s pistol with the emblem of the leaping Hare inlaid in turquoise on the stock. As well as being a weapon, it is an object resonant with meaning for her, being the last gift from her father. It symbolizes that ideal of family life, which was taken from her and against which she measures her present reality.

I knew that her recollection of the past and what it meant would eventually be challenged. If you re-read the Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter, you’ll find more clues layered in. Chapter 9 begins with a quotation that mentions the switching of guns in a conjuring trick, hinting that there may be an exact replica of Elizabeth’s pistol. Twins are mentioned twice in the following pages. All this was quite deliberate.

But don’t take that to mean the series was planned out. I knew about certain plot strands and story beats. But I didn’t know the story itself. By this, I mean, I did not understand the emotions – which are the foundation of the whole thing. Elizabeth would be confronted by her past in this final book of the trilogy. But how would she feel about it – this I did not know.

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