Jane Austen has been a muse for more than one speculative fiction writer, in no small part because the world she lived in can echo into the future, amplifying what the author of a new work wishes to say. So it is for Diana Peterfreund and her latest novel For the Darkness Shows the Stars, which takes its Austen inspirations in new and compelling directions.

DIANA PETERFREUND:

Post-apocalyptic Persuasion. At first, it was just a fun tongue-twister. After all, in 2009, the book publishing world was in thrall to a little mash-up called Pride & Prejudice and Zombies. But as I started thinking on it more seriously, I realized the potential for a true re-imagining. Persuasion, for the unfamiliar, is the story of a nobleman’s daughter who, in her younger days, refused the hand of an ambitious but poor young Navy officer on the advice of friends and family who thought he wasn’t her equal. Years later, her useless father’s mismanagement has left the ancestral estate in a precarious position, forcing them to rent out their family home to up-and-comers of the middle class. Into her life waltzes her old suitor, now a rich and famous captain, and certainly still angry about her rejection.

It may be the most class-conscious of all Jane Austen’s novels, and deals directly with the failure of an indolent nobility to recognize how swiftly the economic and social landscape is changing thanks to the industry and success of a rising bourgeoisie. The world is changing, getting better, moving forward – and the old guard, who’d run the world in less-enlightened times, refuses to entertain the idea. How much more post-apocalyptic can you get?

Modern retellings of Austen twist themselves up like pretzels trying to formulate a notion of class that makes sense to young American readers, who generally consider class to be fluid (we’re all going to grow up to be rich celebrities, right?). Clueless, for example, recasts the minor class barriers in that story as the cliques of a status-conscious high schooler. In my case, I got to utilize science fiction to make my class divides durable and understandable to my young adult audience.

My husband and I spent a few enjoyable evenings with glasses of wine and important questions: What caused the apocalypse? What is the makeup of the class system? Fascinated by the idea of what the future holds in the realm of biotechnology and genetic engineering, we initially played around with a class structure arranged on those lines. But Aldous Huxley had that pretty well sewn up, and it didn’t necessarily jibe with my imagery of an upper class mired in the past.

Then it hit me: I could kill both birds with the same stone. What if overeager genetic engineering was actually the cause of the end of the world, and the backwards-thinking post-apocalyptic upper class were the descendents of the people who’d denied themselves this tragic genetic tinkering through religious objections, scientific skepticism, or just plain poverty? The meek who’d inherited the Earth.

Thus were born my Luddites, the survivors of a genetic experiment gone wrong that rendered the bulk of the population of the Earth severely mentally disabled. Fiercely anti-science and anti-technology, they plunge the world into a new Dark Age.

This backstory opened up all kinds of knotty moral conundrums. The Luddites aren’t actually wrong—genetic engineering was demonstrably dangerous to the human race. To this, add the fact that their ancestors faced attack from a dying society that would rather destroy the world than let other people have it, and that they spent countless generations as the caretakers of the helpless “Reduced” people left behind. That’s a pretty hefty chunk of indoctrination and duty to set on the shoulders of my heroine, Elliot, the teenaged daughter of a feckless Luddite lord.

Elliot, like a lot of teens, is trying to define her own beliefs about the world and decide how they differ from what she was taught growing up. What parts of her heritage are true and right, and what parts should be discarded as humanity moves into the future?

By the time of the novel, there’s a growing population of healthy humans born to the Reduced who, nevertheless, possess the same low status and lack of liberty. One of these “Post-Reductionists” is her childhood best friend, the servant Kai. Her relationship with him causes her to question Luddite values and the complacent and self-satisfied caste system that disenfranchises the Posts.

Kai is unwilling to accept the social status quo, and runs away to make his fortune beyond the confines of their Luddite estate. Years later he returns, wealthy, powerful and spouting radical, revolutionary philosophies of technological progress. But though he may be angry, he hasn’t forgotten about Elliot. And Elliot isn’t the woman society expects her to be, either. Together, they could be the start of a new age, a chance to move past the devastation the world has suffered – as long as they can forgive each another.

But how to tell this story of their fraught reunion while giving proper weight to the earlier relationship that made it possible? Again, Jane Austen came to the rescue. She loved epistolary novels as much as I do , and often incorporated letters into her works (Sense and Sensibility was originally an epistolary story called “Elinor and Marianne”). Persuasion’s own famous love letter gave me the idea to create a parallel epistolary narrative.

As childhood friends, Elliot and Kai sent each other letters where they debate the nature of their society and the potential of their star-crossed romance, following in long tradition of letter-loving lovers whose correspondence is as philosophical as it is affectionate: Heloise and Abelard, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and (my personal favorite) John and Abigail Adams.

These letters from my heroes’ younger selves are interspersed throughout the novel, showcasing the character’s changing views of the world and each other, and setting the stage for the world-changing trials they face when they meet again. The story is about love and second chances, both for Kai and Elliot and for the world they live in, which is finally emerging from its long, restless sleep.

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For Darkness Shows the Stars: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Read a prequel story (pdf link). Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

The “bad guy”: Essential for many plots, fun to write, and fun to read. But what goes into making a bad guy bad? Is it more than malfeasance on the mind? In The Providence Rider, the latest Matthew Corbett book, set in colonial America, Robert McCammon brings the bad guy out to play. Here’s why, and how it makes this novel fit in with the rest of the series.

ROBERT McCAMMON:

I wanted to write about the “bad guy.” In essence, what makes a perfectly respectable and unassuming human being crack, and in cracking birth from himself an evil force that revels in power and will never—can never—go back to what he was before. I had introduced the character of Professor Fell first in The Queen of Bedlam. He keeps to the shadows in the next Matthew Corbett book, Mister Slaughter. But in the new one, The Providence Rider, he emerges from the darkness onto center stage…or, to be more precise, he always brings his cloak of darkness with him, but here he presents a picture of his past and how—as he puts it to Matthew: “You have seen part of my world. What I have achieved. And me…from academic beginnings. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

Matthew has to agree that it does.

I have embarked upon a journey of ten books. The first “Matthew book,” Speaks the Nightbird, wasn’t meant to be the beginning of a series. It was the story of an earnest and intelligent young magistrate’s clerk in the year 1699, who finds himself acting as the champion of justice for a woman accused of witchcraft in a small Carolina colony town. I had no intention of taking him forward. I was going to do something entirely different next, and yet…

I left the ending of Speaks the Nightbird open. Matthew was out upon the world, facing “the century of wonders,” and who might know what he would find there? Well…how do these things happen? How does walking, or sitting on a balcony bench, or lying on a grassy hill watching the clouds move help create the magic that makes an idea work? I suppose it’s in the stillness. It’s in that inner realm all writers know…the mystic place where things from childhood and a hundred thousand memories and desires merge. And then you say, “Oh yes, I understand now.” And you may think you fully understand but you don’t, because nothing is born without effort and some books are kind to their creator and some are near killers, but suddenly you have an idea and a purpose. A challenge, too. And a whole lot of hard road to travel.

But…you know you have something that calls you, and pulls you, and in a way commands you. You can’t turn away from that. You must follow where it leads.

So…I’ve done four in this series and working on the fifth. I’m approaching the halfway point. I suppose my Big Idea is the series itself. There’s a larger story arc that connects all the books, and I’m hoping that when I’m done it will read as smoothly as one long book. It’s a challenging task, keeping up with so many characters, names and such…and the research is tough, too, but very rewarding. I know there’s an expert for everything under the sun, and you’ll be told very quickly when you make a mistake…but I’m trying to keep the series as historically “valid” as possible while having fun with it. No boring history lessons here! Trying to make them exciting, funny, suspenseful, sexy, wicked…but never boring!

And I suppose there are other Big Ideas at work here as well. I always like having a “motif” for my books. In Speaks the Nightbird, it was the idea of finding a place for yourself in a hostile world. In The Queen of Bedlam it was the creation of order from chaos. In Mister Slaughter it was the juxtaposition of civility and brutality. In The Providence Rider it is the hierarchy of predators. And in the Matthew book I’m working on now, The River of Souls, it is the flow of comedy into tragedy and back again. Kind of like a river, I suppose.

I intended the series to offer a respite from the modern world. Someone recently pointed out to me that, in spite of the fast-forward motion of progress and the subsequent quick-dating of modern novels, the Matthew series will never become “dated,” since it’s already set in the past.

I like that. I also like the idea of taking a break from cell phones, instant messaging and the frenzied pace of modern life. The Matthew series is a door to the past, and one I particularly like opening and living in for awhile. I couldn’t survive very long in that era, for sure, but it is fun to go visit.

Professor Fell makes his first physical appearance in The Providence Rider but of course there’s more to come. Actually, the seed of what the entire series is about is planted in this book. I am getting so much pleasure out of doing this. I don’t work from an outline, so the books occasionally surprise me in the direction they take and the choices they offer. I think that’s as it should be.

I am pleased to be able to offer a visit to another world. Neither supernatural nor science fiction, but a vastly different and strange world all the same, with that intriguing juxtaposition of civility and brutality at its core.

One thing I’m doing that’s particularly fun for me is…since my series is about one of the first “problem-solvers”, I’m dropping in each book the names of various fictional detectives. Some are out there for everyone to see, some are more hidden. But another Big Idea behind Matthew’s story is that it is my bow to the authors of the great detectives of history, and of one of my first loves…the mystery novel, starring the stalwart and indefatigable detective who never gives up until the last clue is deciphered and the case solved.

I hope I and Matthew can do our parts to carry that tradition into the future, even working as we are in the past.

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