You may have heard the phrase, “you have to know what the rules are before you can break them.” Well, that basic concept comes into play when one is researching history in order to throw a little magic into it. Author D.B. Jackson explains why, and how learning history mattered before breaking it in his new novel Thieftaker.

D.B. JACKSON:

Who would spend literally months doing research for a historical fantasy novel, taking every care to get right even the smallest details, and then turn around and base the entire concept for the book and series on two complete historical fallacies?

Well, if you must know, I would.

My latest book, Thieftaker, book I in the Thieftaker Chronicles, is a murder mystery set in pre-Revolutionary Boston. On the night of the Stamp Act riots in 1765, a young woman is murdered. Officials of the Crown wish to blame the rioters, but of course our hero, Ethan Kaille, conjurer and thieftaker, has other ideas and soon finds himself enmeshed in a web of magic and politics. Hi-jinx ensue…

I have a Ph.D. in history. I take the idea of historical authenticity seriously, and so when I started working on Thieftaker, I made every effort to create a physical backdrop for my story that is as accurate, rich, and compelling as possible. I read biographical essays and books on the various historical figures who interact with my fictional characters, in the hope that I would make the two sets of personalities — fictional and historical — blend together seamlessly. I took great pains to portray correctly the subtleties and intricacies of pre-Revolutionary politics.

And having done all that, I inserted these historical elements into a novel whose two key concepts are completely ahistorical. Sort of.

First — and I suppose this comes as no surprise to anyone — there were no conjurers in 18th century Boston, or anywhere else in the colonies for that matter. The spellcrafting abilities of my lead character make for fun reading and what I like to think are some truly exciting plot twists, but they are about as historically inauthentic as any literary device could be. This is fantasy after all, and so I didn’t hesitate to insert a magical element into my worldbuilding for the series.

And second, while thieftakers were common in 18th century English cities, and even appeared for a short while in the United States in the early 19th century, there were no thieftakers in any American colonial city. None. In my book, Boston has at least two of them: Ethan, and his nemesis, the lovely and dangerous Sephira Pryce, who is modeled loosely on London’s most notorious thieftaker, Jonathan Wild. But, of course, in my book, the Wild character is a woman, another historical conceit.

What makes my historical inaccuracies work, however, is that both of them address, albeit indirectly, true circumstances. There might not have been conjurers in 18th century New England, but there were witch scares going back nearly a hundred years. In Salem, not far from Boston, well over one hundred men and women were jailed as witches in the spring of 1692. Twenty were executed. And during the 18th century, fear of witches persisted throughout the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

In Thieftaker, conjurers and witches are not the same thing. Witches are the stuff of myth; preachers rail against witchery and “black magick” in their sermons in order to frighten their congregations. Conjurers, on the other hand, are real. But fear of one is conflated with the other; Ethan and other conjurers must keep their abilities secret, lest they be hanged as witches.

Similarly, while Boston had no thieftakers in the 1760s, conditions in the city were ripe for some sort of private law enforcement infrastructure. Boston had a sheriff: Stephen Greenleaf was sheriff of all of Suffolk County. But he had no constabulary force at his disposal. British troops had yet to occupy the city, and those men of Boston’s night watch who weren’t incompetent were as likely to break the law as to enforce it. So, though there were no thieftakers in Boston, it is easy to imagine how, under existing circumstances, thieftakers could have thrived.

And for me, this is the big idea. Crucial parts of my story are at odds with historical fact, but I have tried to fit the fictional elements of my worldbuilding into actual historical conditions. My goal in writing historical fantasy is not to create a perfectly accurate portrait of 1760s Boston. This is fiction, after all, and fantasy at that. I want to tell a story, and despite all my research, my first allegiances as a novelist have to be to character and narrative, rather than to historical exactitude. But while I am not set on recreating a Boston that was, I do strive to create a Boston that could have been, that is as believable and nuanced and alive to the senses as the real thing.

To my mind, history is another tool, like character, plot, setting, and voice. It has to enhance the story, and bring elements to it that would not otherwise be there. As soon as concerns about accuracy get in the way of storytelling, the history is no longer a boon to good writing. It becomes an obstacle, something that will prove to be an annoyance for writer and reader alike. Now don’t get me wrong: I would never suggest that we ought to play fast and loose with the facts. Instead, I look for a balance.

On the one hand, I draw upon history to bring flavor to my narrative, ambiance to my setting, cultural context to my characters. On the other hand, I also know when to allow my imagination to take over so that I can concentrate on spinning the most exciting and absorbing yarn possible. Because with historical fiction, as with all fiction, everything comes back to the two words that make all big ideas possible: “What if?” My version of 1765 Boston might not match what we see in textbooks, but it is a realistic portrayal of what the city would have been like with conjurers and thieftakers. And as it turns out, that’s a pretty cool place in which to set a novel.

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Thieftaker: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Pamela Ribon is one of the funniest humans I know. Much of what makes her so is not about her ability to make me or anyone else laugh; it’s her knowledge of people and how they work, even in situations where’s not necessarily a laugh to be found. Her latest novel You Take It From Here is funny and also knowing — about people, about relationships, and about the responsibilities we have to the people we make our family of the heart. Here’s my friend Pamie to explain more.

PAMELA RIBON:

You Take It From Here deals with a lot of bossiness.  Stubborn people, one-track-minded illnesses, the conviction that comes with knowing someone loves you whole-heartedly, and what can happen when you’re faced with the terrifying enormity of the unknown. It’s about the lengths we will go to for the people we care about the most, and how much we can handle in order to hang on for the ones who need us. We act like nobody knows how he or she going to die, but that’s not exactly true. Some people know. They know with utter certainty. Sometimes they even have a pretty good idea of when. When those people need you, it’s hard to say anything other than, “Tell me what to do.”

I first thought up the idea for this novel when I was on an airplane. My first set of scribbled notes has the telltale signs of a bumpy flight. I work well on airplanes – trapped in a tiny seat, facing forward, usually no Internet, trapped with strangers and questionable food choices. I find the words come freely the more uncomfortable my situation.  (This also explains why I enjoy working in television.) A friend of mine does an impression of me in what she calls my “writing stance” – doubled over at the edge of the couch in a protective hunch, attacking the keyboard in an attempt to get the words out before I pee myself.  That is exactly what I’m doing when I’m at my most inspired.

So I was up in the air when I first started mulling over the idea of one friend asking another to take over her life. I’d gone through a lengthy divorce, and for a couple of years I’d let my bossiest friends take over. I needed them to tell me what to do, how to get up, what to put in my empty apartment, what antidepressants might work for me, how to wear make-up to hide puffy eyes. As I got my life a little more in order, as I found how to dress myself and go to work and fall in love and stand on my own again, I didn’t need so much bossing around. I don’t think I weaned them properly, the bossy ones. They were a little in shock that I was no longer needing their strong guidance, that I might have some opinions and decisions I’d made on my own. I could easily imagine one of them deciding that my life had become one that was more expendable; I wasn’t having that much fun living it anyway, so why not take over theirs?  “I mean, I’m important.”

I was deciding whether it’d make a better screenplay than a novel, wondering where the story could go, when I got distracted with some deadline and dropped the idea.

A few months later I was sitting on the bleachers above the roller derby track (see: the last time I had a Big Idea) where I’d torn a ligament in my knee only the day before.  I was searching for a comfortable position with my knee brace as I watched that night’s practice for my attendance requirement, counting the minutes until I could go home and take my first, hard-earned Vicodin, when I got a frantic phone call.

I don’t use the word “besties,” but my friend would. I might use “bossy,” but she’d call it “besties,” and she’d say that bestie status would give her the right to tell me to get on a plane immediately and fly 1400 miles to her side, as her daughter was in the hospital and was “very, very, very, very sick.” My friend was past hysterical and into the shock-sobs, where the words don’t all come together into real sentences, but I was able to figure out that her daughter, who had been in the hospital for a few days with a kidney infection, had taken a turn for the worse, and was on some emergency antibiotics. “You need to get here,” my friend wept into the phone.  I made one feeble attempt at keeping my plans for the evening. “Can we maybe do this by Skype?” I asked. “If you just need someone to talk to; I’ll stay up all night for you.” She hissed back,“If your baby was in the hospital — if you ever had a baby — you know I would do it for you.”

And that was it. By the time I hobbled myself into my car and got home my boyfriend had packed a bag, secured a (not cheap) red-eye flight and hailed a cab to whisk me away to LAX. Less than twelve hours later I was in Louisiana, groggy and in miserable amounts of pain. I was greeted at baggage claim by my bestie’s hubby, who informed me that his daughter was now feeling much better, and was to be discharged from the hospital that afternoon. He looked to the ground as he stammered, “Um, that phone call might have been made after she’d had a little too much wine.”

This is what happens to best friends who love with all their hearts and wallets, but it especially to the best friends who have no babies, who are childless and therefore seemingly carefree. We are expected to book the flights to come visit, never to spend a single holiday in the comfort of our own homes. We hire the dog sitters and cat sitters and house sitters and rent the cars and find hotel rooms and pack the bags and stuff our carry-ons with presents for the kids. For without a child in your care, there’s no excuse you could give that’s good enough to miss Christmas. To skip that New Year’s gathering. To be unable to attend a fifth-grade graduation. Only: “You need to get here.”

By the end of that night, the travel and pain medication and torn ligament and lack of sleep and the exhaustion of a day at the hospital finally caught up with me at three in the morning, when I found myself trying to find a way to kneel on one leg to vomit an exceptional amount of wine into my friend’s toilet. And that is when I thought, “Yeah. There’s definitely a story in here.”

I outlined the novel on the flight home. If being in an uncomfortable writing position was all I needed for inspiration, I had reached the ultimate – on an airplane, hungover and trapped in the middle seat with a leg that couldn’t bend, unable to take any painkillers because I needed to be alert enough to have someone wheel me to the proper gate during my layover, furious that I’d just dropped more than a grand only to visit a peppy teen girl not dying of what turned out to be a urinary tract infection.

You Take it From Here also explores another unstoppable, rather constant force in my life – lung cancer. We’ve lost quite a few celebrated loved ones in the past few weeks to it (Donna Summer, Kathryn Joosten, Nolan Miller, George Marino); my own family has already lost two to lung cancer this year, and it’s only June. Ten years ago my father died of lung cancer, and I still have a lot of guilt over how it all went down, and whether or not I was a good daughter to him when he might have needed me.

Cancer seems to have two speeds: unfairly immediate or tortuously slow. My father went the slow way, more than seven years of fighting, off and on. I wasn’t able to be there for him for much of it. I was in college when he went through chemo and radiation. His cancer was in remission when I decided to move to Los Angeles. I’d just finished unpacking my final box when his cancer returned, and he’d decided to refuse treatment. I will never forget that phone call, when my father said in his slow, calm voice, “So you might want to come home for Christmas, as it’ll be my last one.”

Part of this novel comes from the guilt I have that I missed a lot of time with my father as he went through his struggle. It’s not entirely my fault—Dad pushed everyone away. He didn’t like being seen as weak or helpless; he didn’t want people asking him questions or giving suggestions. Dad wanted to deal with cancer like he did all of his problems: alone, where he could ignore it without anyone getting in the way. And who’s to say if that was right or wrong? It seems unfair to those who loved him and wanted to be there, but in the end he was the only one who had to die – why shouldn’t he go out exactly how he wanted to? My father liked to be in control, and I can only assume the thing that pissed him off the most about cancer was that it was firmly in charge.

My father did a lot of rather confusing things for someone facing a terminal diagnosis, especially towards the end. He didn’t write a will. He put my mother’s name on all of his credit cards, so that someone would have to pay off his debts. He erased the hard drive on his computer. He bought a new wardrobe. He went to the eye doctor for a new pair of glasses. Soon after he died, my mom got his new drivers license in the mail.

Think about that. Two weeks before my father entered hospice care, my dad decided to stand in line at the DMV.

I used to think Dad was prepping for what he thought he’d need when he got to Heaven – a brand new wardrobe, glasses that would work for all of eternity, all debts handled and a license to drive. But now that I’m older, now that I’ve lost more people to this selfish illness, I think I get what Dad was doing in those final days.

He was stretching them out.

If you only had a few days left, filling them with friends and family and good times would turn them into a blur. But if you scheduled nothing but the mundane, the minutes could stretch until they felt like hours. Your day could seem like a lifetime. And for that moment you aren’t a guy dying of cancer. You’re just another guy in line at the DMV, taking care of a few errands. You’re not about to go anywhere. You’re sandwiched between some strangers, waiting for your turn to get your picture taken.

Although, going back to the Heaven scenario, maybe Dad thought of the DMV as a test-run for waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Wanted to see if he’d be patient enough. I honestly think he might have bailed halfway to Heaven to see if there was an open craps table somewhere in purgatory he could hit for a few decades. But I wonder sometimes if he wanted someone standing there with him in some of those lines. If, towards the end, he regretted how much he’d pushed us all away. If he had more to say, but nobody there to listen. Maybe that’s why he went to the eye doctor. Someone to talk to who wouldn’t say a single word about how he had days left to live.

This is the part where I need to tell you that this novel is mostly a comedy. It’s about friendship and history and small towns and love affairs and yes, cancer, but it’s really about that bond you have with your very best, lifelong friend, and how it can survive pretty much anything.

Perhaps because there’s no legal way to sever it. You can’t divorce your best friend. You can’t get emancipated from her. A restraining order only sends her to the boundaries of what will still be an audible yelling zone. You are stuck with each other, even if you spend years ignoring it, even if you pretend each other dead. You will still talk to each other inside your heads. You can hate each other like siblings in the back of a car on week three of a month-long family vacation, but you will still need each other like lovers reuniting at an airport. Nothing can split that bond. Not even death. Because you know that girl will find a way to haunt you. So you’d better be nice to her while she’s still around.

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You Take It From Here: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powells

Visit the book page, which includes excerpts. Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter.

When confronting the incomprehensible universe, it’s sometimes useful to have something to cart stuff around in. Simple, proletarian wisdom, or something more? Anne E. Johnson argues for “something more,” especially as it relates to her science fiction novel Green Light Delivery.

ANNE E. JOHNSON:

Sometimes life hands us things we don’t want. Things we don’t understand. But we have to deal with them anyway because, well, that’s life. We face inexplicable, nonsensical situations forced on us by destiny, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s pretty funny, if you think about it. And that’s the big idea in Green Light Delivery.

Webrid is just a guy, an everyman. He’s big, hairy, macho, and sort of lost. He has a menial job in the city of Bargival on the planet Bexilla, carting items either to deliver or to sell on consignment. But suddenly he finds himself tapped for a big job he doesn’t want. And he can’t exactly refuse it. A robot embeds a laser in his skull, and in order to get rid of it, Webrid has to take it…somewhere. If only he can figure out where.

Making Webrid a professional carter was integral to the big idea: For one thing, it helped the mechanics of the story. Webrid is being used by some entity (he doesn’t know who until the end) to transport something from one place to another. He’s accustomed to that concept because carting is his job. This helps him accept the ridiculous assignment that fate hands him. And because he doesn’t know who his client is, exactly what he’s carrying, or quite where he’s supposed to deliver it, Webrid feels like a pawn of fate, the toy of a snide universe that’s just playing with him.

Another reason I chose Webrid’s profession was for its humorous value. The ironic twist is that he doesn’t need his pushcart for this particular delivery, since the laser is stuck in his head. Yet he takes his cart with him everywhere out of habit and nostalgia, even when he travels between planets. It annoys everyone around him, but turns out to be a fateful choice. That cart is useful for all sorts of unexpected reasons.

The low-tech nature of a hand-pushed cart also appealed to me. I specifically wanted the city of Bargival to be like a major American inner city in the 1970s, not a gleaming city of the future. This isn’t the future, anyway; it’s an alternative universe, and the government is a mess. Things are falling apart. I was tickled by the vision of a big lug of a guy pushing a metal cart through streets that also had robots flying around them. And I wanted a person with no tech skills to be entrusted with one of his world’s most cutting-edge gadgets. He’s the last person anyone would expect to carry this thing.

Green Light Delivery is meant to be entertaining, but in truth, it grew from my sardonic belief that destiny is ridiculous and we are often not in control of what’s in our lives. Yet, most people persevere, which I realize on my less cynical days. Let Webrid be a lesson to us all: With a determined attitude, a strong-axled cart, and friends who can help you with the science stuff, nothing fate shoves in your face is too big to handle.

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Green Light Delivery: Amazon|Barnes & Noble

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

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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The Providence Rider: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Visit The Providence Rider’s book page. Follow the author on Twitter.

I’ve often mentioned to hopeful writers that doing something else with one’s life than just writing is often very useful for one’s writing. As a cogent and very interesting example, here’s debut novelist Rhiannon Held, talking about how the knowledge and experience gained in her day job made a material difference in how she crafted her new novel Silver.

RHIANNON HELD:

Silver started with werewolf religion. What would it be like? That question created the spark of a character for me, a werewolf who had been injected with silver nitrate, so she hallucinated…or saw the spirit realm. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be absolutely ambiguous about whether what she saw was real or not, in the terms of the novel’s world. Readers seldom have incontrovertible proof of any religious force in their own lives, so why should the characters? With that character in my mind, I started creating the details of the religion and world that shaped her.

I’ve seen werewolves linked before to female lunar deities, or more generalized Gaia-like Earth-mother figures. I work as a professional archaeologist, so my academic training is in anthropology, and that sort of generality felt vacuous to me. To use the religion of my childhood upbringing as an example, that’s like saying Christianity is based on an omnipotent force who had a son. Period. What about Esther and Solomon and Moses and the disciples and burning bushes and turning into pillars of salt and threatening to cut babies in half? What about “love thy neighbor” and “let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” So much of real religions lie in their stories, their parables, their prayers, their songs, their rituals. That’s what I set out to create for my werewolf culture.

As I went along, my academic training sneaked farther out of my hindbrain and started working on the other key aspect there: the culture. The werewolves wouldn’t just have religion, they’d have social etiquette and traditions and holidays and slang and games. There, I made another key choice that’s different from what I often see with urban fantasy creatures: I made my werewolves a species. They are only born, not turned. I made that choice for a very specific reason. Turned creatures such as vampires lend themselves more to metaphors about lifestyle choices, whether consensual or not, than cultures. That’s cool, but it’s been done, so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to offer a metaphor for people in non-dominant cultures. People like immigrants who are faced with a decision about how much to identify as part of the culture they were born into, and how much to identify with the culture they find themselves interacting with every day, as my werewolves do with humans.

Having my werewolves be a species also scratched a scientific itch for me in other ways. It bothers me in urban fantasy when the heroine happens to be the only female of her magical creature type. That’s no way to have a breeding population! Involuntary shifts to another form bothered me too. If you couldn’t hold back a shift when the mob was approaching, you and your genes would get pitchforked to death, leading to a clear evolutionary pressure for at least some control over shifting. I subjected all of my werewolf traits to the test of whether it would make sense for a species to survive when it worked that way.

Of course, working out all these details in abstract is one thing, but you have to consider how an audience will react to them. I once heard a costumer express this most succinctly. When discussing the historical accuracy of costumes in a movie, she said that sometimes you had to ask yourself: do you want your characters to look attractive to modern audiences, or do you want them to be completely accurate? You can substitute anything for “attractive”, whether it’s “villainous” or “cunning” or “naïve”. What she was getting at is that people’s modern assumptions will unconsciously influence them to read a different meaning into a historical costume than it might once have had. For my own uses, I expanded the concept to include a splash of “pick your battles”. You can counteract people’s unconscious assumptions with extensive work through the other avenues available to you, but you simply don’t have space or energy to accomplish that on every front.

If, for example, I’d wanted my werewolf characters to be sympathetic but I made their culture dismissive of human lives, I’d have had to work ten times as hard to show them as moral in other ways, to overcome the reader’s automatic reaction of “these people would kill me! I don’t like them!” I didn’t use that particular aspect for my werewolf culture, but I stumbled onto plenty of other aspects that made my first readers react differently to my characters than I’d intended. Then I had to choose whether to change that aspect or pick it as one of my battles where I worked against people’s unconscious assumptions.

So like the complexity of any real human group, my werewolf world-building started simple, but ended up expanding to many aspects of their lives and even biology. It’s my hope that that makes them feel even more real, and makes the metaphors they can provide for our own lives even more interesting.

—-

Silver: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Follow the author on Twitter.

I have a shameful confession to make: I owe Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan some books. See, many years ago, they won a Web award of some sort for Go Fug Yourself, their righteously snarky fashion blog, and part of their prize package was a couple of books from me. And I never sent them. Because, apparently, I am the worst human being who ever lived.

Somehow, the two of them managed to pull their lives together in the face of this complete neglect, and write not one but two young adult novels about the lives of Hollywood teens, the second of which, Messy, hit bookstores this week. Here they are to talk to you about it. And Heather and Jessica: Come to one of my LA area tour stops next week. I’ll totally give you each a copy of Redshirts. I SWEAR.

HEATHER COCKS and JESSICA MORGAN:

In many ways, our Big Idea was born eight years ago. By day, we write Go Fug Yourself, a lighthearted blog about celebrities’ red-carpet fashion missteps, an endeavor that lets us exorcise our pop-culture demons while referencing everything from Judy Blume to that time poor, until-recently-deaf Regina Morrow snorted coke in Sweet Valley High No. 40 and immediately died (subtle moral: don’t do drugs, kids). So when we got the itch to write fiction, it seemed smart to stick to the voice we’d spent so long honing, as opposed to glancing at the bookstore shelves and trying to copy whatever we saw. It would be a strange swerve for us to pump out a Very Important Adult Work about suburban ennui or murder most foul, and although as readers we respect and enjoy the limitless creativity in the fantasy and paranormal genres, as writers we are self-aware enough to know that is not where our strengths lie — Twilight’s sales numbers be damned.

So we stuck to our guns and set our novels, Spoiled and Messy, in a universe we’re more familiar with: Hollywood (although in its own way, this town is as otherworldly and peopled with supernatural bodies as any). One of us grew up near L.A. and the other is a transplant, so it made sense to channel our experiences into a tale that touched on a relatable emotion for both our young-adult target audience and beyond: the fear of change, and struggle to decide how that change should or should not redefine you. Doing it through the prism of gentle Hollywood parody, which is second nature to us at this point given how absurdly acquainted we are with things like Jessica Simpson’s gestational period, was a natural way to keep our books in the Go Fug Yourself family tree.

Sure, it was occasionally tough to resist the impulse to throw in a scorching hot psychic ghost centaur — at a recent author event at Torrance High School, all the kids toted books with spooky supernatural covers, rather than something like Spoiled’s cheerful makeup-centered design – but we had faith that there was room in people’s hearts for the living as well as the mythologically dreamy. Especially because epic battles can be so stressful. Sometimes, a reader needs a break from being constantly afraid a character they love is about to bleed out on the rug (oh, hi there, Gray Hairs Ron Weasley Gave Us).

Specific to Messy, our challenge was deciding between a direct sequel to Spoiled or something more anthologized. Spoiled tells the tale of Indiana transplant Molly Dix, whose mother dies right after revealing Molly’s her father is not only alive but also the world’s biggest movie star. Molly goes to live with him in L.A. and meets her flashy half-sister Brooke Berlin, and the two co-narrate their exploits while dad Brick pops off to Key West to shoot Avalanche! in front of a green-screen with as many real polar bears as he can muster (“White fur is the apex of fear. Everyone knows that”). The emotions in that scenario are universal even if the circumstances aren’t: You don’t have to have been spawned by a Schwarzenegger clone to understand what it feels like to be the new kid, or to be ignored, or to have half-hearted bangs , and we’ve all had to figure out how to present ourselves so that we can soldier forth and be happy. Molly was the ultimate outsider, and the perfect vehicle.

But the closer we got to Book Two, the more we worried that Molly’s journey might dry up a little once she stopped being a true fish out of water. People might get sick of two incessantly warring protagonists, yet bored of a pair of happy half-sisters who only fight over who gets to drive the car. How could we weave new identity struggles into this bizarre universe without it feeling like a retread?

Ultimately, we hit on the idea of a partial sequel, shifting to a self-made outsider rather than an accidental one. Messy became the story of Molly’s best friend, the green-haired misanthrope Max McCormack, whose dire financial straits lead to her taking a job ghost-writing Brooke Berlin’s fame-mongering “personal” blog. It was a way for us to wink at the Web site that brought us here, without being grossly reflexive about it (“Read this book about a girl who’s just like us!”), plus it afforded us a fresh perspective. In Spoiled, Molly is marooned without her beloved mother and her familiar surroundings; Max makes herself an island by choice.

And where Molly’s version of self-preservation is figuring out how much of herself (if any) she had to change to survive in her new life, Max’s approach is to push violently against her social opposites so that the rejection she expects from them won’t hurt her. Plus, using Max let us check in with Molly, kept us from fully resetting the universe, and let us retain the juxtaposition of opposites – and a more taut connection to Spoiled itself — by remaining in Brooke’s head for part of the book. Brooke defines who she is by what she wants her father to see, and in that sense Messy is very much a continuation from her arc in Spoiled. So we call Messy a follow-up — not a sequel, but closer than a cousin. You could suggest we ended up having our cake and eating it too, but Brooke Berlin would never endorse the public consumption of baked goods.

And as a bonus, Brick Berlin still acts like a horse’s ass, which means he’s as close to a centaur as you can be without having hooves. Huh. Maybe we’re more supernatural than we think.

—-

Messy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound

Read an excerpt. Visit Go Fug Yourself. Follow the authors on Twitter.

And now, for some perspective on the perspective of science fiction, here’s author Warren Hammond to talk a little bit about his latest novel, KOP Killer.

WARREN HAMMOND:

The big idea for the KOP series is science fiction from a Third-World perspective.

If there’s a weakness in our genre, it might be the fact that science fiction writers tend to focus on the history makers. The writer builds a vast and compelling world and focuses on the most consequential people in that world. Add in some big, impactful stakes, and you find stories of deliverance. Protagonist delivers the oppressed to freedom. Protagonist delivers humanity form a horrible disease or technology. Protagonist delivers people from threat of meteor or alien invaders or environmental collapse.

All powerful themes for powerful stories.

But I chose to go a less-travelled direction. I built an insignificant backwater planet. A failed colony world damned by a resource-poor environment and a collapsed economy. A world riddled with corruption and strangled by the cycle of poverty. A world with no future. A people with no hope.

And on this shattered world, I chose to focus on ex-cop Juno Mozambe, a man who is just as broken. He’s lost his job. His best friend. And his wife.

He’s no innocent victim of circumstance. Each of his losses was the direct result of his own actions. He wasn’t a good cop. No, he was the dirty chief’s enforcer, a master of beatdowns and frame jobs. He wasn’t a good friend when he selfishly testified against his old partner to save his own interests. And he wasn’t a good husband to the wife who killed herself.

You see, I’m more interested in failures. The wounded souls who get up every morning and put one foot in front of the other despite their circumstances. The people who strive for a better life even though they have every reason to believe they’ll never achieve it.

Juno Mozambe is one of those people.

At the start of KOP Killer, he’s a man on a mission to take back what was once his, the Koba Office of Police. But not for himself. He wants Maggie Orzo to become chief. She has the smarts, and she’s plenty tough. More importantly, she’s not dirty like he is.

She could make a difference. He needs her to make a difference.  Because despite a lifetime of violence and corruption, he has hope for a better future. Establishing an honest police force could be the first step in creating a better world for his people. He’s questing for redemption he can never obtain.

This is science fiction from a Third-World perspective, where corruption has been institutionalized, poverty is the norm, and the value of human life has been marginalized.

There are no easy solutions. In fact, there may be no solutions at all.

But with stubborn resolve and blood-stained knuckles, Juno marches forward anyway.

—-

KOP Killer: Amazon

Read an excerpt.

Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum states that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. For Shadow and Bone, author Leigh Bardugo uses and interesting twist on that idea to give the magic in her book form and shape (and rules). Here she is to explain it to you.

LEIGH BARDUGO:

Shadow and Bone began at the end of a darkened hall in an unfamiliar house. It began with my hand scrabbling along the wall for the light switch, sure that I could hear something breathing in the dark, something with too many teeth, waiting for me to inch just a little closer.

After I reined in my heart rate, talked sense to myself, made it to the bathroom and back to my bed, I lay awake thinking of what it was like to cross that hallway and I began to wonder, “What if darkness was a place?”

In fantasy, darkness usually operates as a metaphor—for evil, destruction, chaos, dogs and cats living together. I wanted to take something figurative and make it literal. And, of course, once I gave this wasteland substance, the logical next step was to fill it full of monsters, creatures just as bad as anything you might imagine lurking under your bed or slithering beneath the closet door. They would be blind from years spent living and breeding in the dark, but able to scent human prey from miles away. They’d be pure predators, with batlike wings so that they could come at you from any direction.

I could see a girl there, drawing light to her, leading a regiment through this nightmare territory. But what the heck were they doing there? What would lead our heroes to do battle in the dark? They could be after some magical object, but that felt a little too easy. So I tried the same trick again: I took something figurative and made it literal; I decided to tear a country apart.

The Shadow Fold (as my wasteland came to be called) would stretch from north to south across the country of Ravka. It would act as a kind of reverse blockade, separating eastern Ravka from its only coastline, leaving it landlocked, cut off from its ports and harbors. To trade with the outside world, to obtain finished goods and the weapons and ammunition needed to defend its borders, Ravka would have to find ways to cross the Fold and fend off its monsters, risking life and treasure every time. In this way, the Fold became not only a physical obstacle, but a way for me to put an entire nation in an economic chokehold and squeeze. (Don’t worry, I’m perfectly pleasant at dinner parties.)

People always ask me why I chose Russia as the cultural touchstone for my world. The easy answer is that I wanted to build atop something other than the familiar high fantasy bedrock of Medieval England. But there’s a bit more to it than that. I remember standing in a used bookstore, flipping through a Russian Imperial atlas, perusing trade routes and military campaigns. At the time, it felt like something just clicked. But looking back, the choice seems obvious: a kingdom on the brink of collapse, an incompetent monarchy squandering its resources, the failure to industrialize, an ill-equipped army of conscripted serfs. That’s a lot of tinder just looking for a spark, and it felt like a perfect fit for the broken world I was looking to create.

I also knew early on that I wanted changes in military technology to play a role in the story. Confession: Some little voice inside me always wondered why someone didn’t just muggle up and shoot Voldemort. In truth, I think Rowling sets up plenty of prohibitions against something this simple in her world building. But I did start to wonder what would happen if you brought a gun to a magic fight.

If your magical system is largely unconstrained, then that question gets boring really fast: I conjure a gun. You conjure a bigger gun and so on. Ravka is defended by the First Army, who fight using traditional means, and by the Second Army, a magical elite known as the Grisha. For the threat of modernity to be real for this country, I needed to constrain that magic, so I decided to bind it (loosely) to molecular chemistry. The Grisha practice the Small Science, the manipulation of matter at its most fundamental levels. They can’t create or animate matter. They can summon combustible gases like methane or hydrogen from the atmosphere, but they still need flint to start a fire. Similarly, Grisha steel or corecloth (similar to modern body armor) isn’t endowed with some kind of opaque spell that gives it wizardy goodness. It’s the result of the Grisha ability to hone a blade at the molecular level, and to create modern alloys and polymers through means that to us would appear magical.

To me, the impossible feels so much more possible when it’s bound by rules. Of course, once you make them, it’s sort of delicious to find ways to break them, to ask what happens when taboos are broken and barriers transgressed. It leads you to the kind of rupture that might create a wasteland peopled by monsters.

Shadow and Bone is my first book and my first foray into high fantasy. I’d be lying if I said I fully understood the alchemy of how worlds get made. Reading over this post, it all seems quite logical, quite orderly. The truth was far less tidy. At some point, the discrete elements of the story—the magic, the politics, the science, the tech—began to inform each other so that it’s hard to remember where one thing ended and another began.

I think it’s also worth saying that as I built this world, assembled the skeleton, gave it flesh, the heart always lay with the characters: two refugees raised in the dusty rooms of a Duke’s abandoned dacha, drafted into the army and headed for the Fold, that girl standing alone against a flock of monsters, and the boy she sought to protect. They were what brought me back again and again, what made me wade through piles of index cards, unwieldy translations, paralyzing doubt. They helped me find my way in the dark.

—-

Shadow and Bone: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Contrary to what the Beatles once said, love is not all we need. But it’s still high up there on the list. What does this have to do with No Going Back, the latest science fiction novel by Mark Van Name? Quite a lot, actually.

MARK L. VAN NAME:

I never set out to make a particular set of points in a book. If anything, I rather studiously avoid worrying about a novel’s themes, because my proper focus is to tell a story; I could no more prevent the themes from asserting themselves than I could stop the sun from shining. Instead, over time a story grows in my mind and my notes, bits and pieces coming from here and there and everywhere, and then I tell it. Afterward, though, it’s impossible to avoid noticing the notions and concerns that gave rise to the work.

For No Going Back, the big idea sounds so clichéd that I’m almost reluctant to type it: each of us deserves love.

For many people, probably most people, this concept is a gimme, a statement as obvious as the sun’s light.

For some of us, though, it is, very sadly, almost impossible to believe. Survivors of abuse, for example, may spend much, sometimes all of their lives fighting against a deep-rooted belief that they do not deserve love, that something in them is so very wrong, so very broken, that what they deserve is what they got: the abuse of those who should have been protecting and loving them. These people can work for decades to try to learn a simple lesson that is immediately obvious to anyone not in their situation: it was not their fault. Many never succeed.

Victims of abuse are not the only people who may have trouble with even the concept that they deserve love. Joining them are many veterans and police officers and EMTs and others who have had to deal with horrible situations and sometimes do things that most others would find horrible. When you’ve committed violence, even in a good cause, even if to protect others, even if only to survive, the stain it leaves inside you can make you wonder in the dark moments before sleep and the darker dreams that follow whether you are worthy of anyone’s love.

Attacking this idea in a far-future SF adventure may seem a bit odd. Doing so in a book whose protagonists, Jon and Lobo, are a man who is the only successful human-nanomachine hybrid, and a large, incredibly intelligent machine built to kill, may seem odder still, but science fiction is nothing if not an incredibly flexible medium for exploring the human condition.

The notion may also not seem to lend itself to the structure and pace of a page-turner of a thriller, but it can, it really can. The story winds a crooked path through the rescue of kidnapped children, the protection of a pop star, a raid on the home of one of the most powerful men alive, and a confrontation in the barren outback of one of the least hospitable of the planets humanity has settled, but the emotional fuel propelling it, though sometimes invisible, is always there.

After all, in the end, few quests are more powerful than those for love.

—-

No Going Back: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

For the big idea in her novel Silver Moon, author Catherine Lundoff looks at lycanthropy in the context of a “coming of age” story. What makes it unusual? Which age the protagonist of the story is coming into.

CATHERINE LUNDOFF:

Women have always been monsters.

From Lilith to Carmilla to the femme fatales of the silver screen, beautiful women are shown consuming men, and sometimes other women, as prey. Female monsters are thin and beautiful, ageless, if not actually young, the embodiment of seduction and desire: vampires, succubi, sirens, demons.

Against this backdrop of feminine monstrosities, depictions of female werewolves are rare. It makes some sense, given werewolf mythos. Werewolves are out of control, ferociously strong, unbelievably dangerous. They are, therefore, almost universally assumed to be male. Female werewolves simply aren’t sexy enough.

In a 2006 MTV interview about the Underworld films, actress Kate Beckinsale said that there were no female werewolves in the movies because “…that could be really horrifying. Hairy, thuggish women.”

That well-thumbed health reference, the InternetHealthLibrary.com, lists amongst the signs of menopause: “Psychological instability” and “Violent mood swings” and “…hair growth on the face, which is quite unlikely for a woman.” Or hairy and thuggish, if you prefer.

So I began with the impossible and the horrifying: a woman who is neither young nor thin nor beautiful who is wrestling with both psychological instability and hair growth. Lots of hair growth.  A woman who has become a monster in her own eyes, but is otherwise like your mom or your friend’s aunt or perhaps one of your elementary school teachers: familiar, comfortable and ordinary. For a werewolf of “a certain age.”

Like female werewolves, there are very few middle-aged female protagonists in science fiction and fantasy.  When middle-aged women appear at all, they are generally background players, secondary and tertiary characters in the flow of a larger tale. Always the monster food, never the monster.

But then, as my protagonist Becca Thornton says, speaking for herself, “Seems to me that when you go looking for monsters, that’s all you see. And sometimes you miss much scarier things.”

What’s scarier than monsters? It depends on your fears. Monsters are relative (and sometimes related, but that’s a different story).  You can find them hiding in a graveyard waiting for dark, lurking in an alleyway on a lonely night or sharing your bed. For some people, gay, lesbian and trans people are monsters, to be stopped at any cost, whether that’s killing or conversion. Those people are the models that I used for my werewolf hunters. They don’t care about orientation or gender, but they do care deeply about changes they can’t control. Deeply enough to try and cure the local werewolf pack of being what they are: a Pack of middle-aged women from very different backgrounds, united by some common experiences.

The werewolves of Wolf’s Point are called into being by the ancient magic of the place where they live.  It picks and chooses which women will serve as the valley’s protectors, deciding who will change and who will not, based on a logic all its own. Sometimes, it makes mistakes.

Becca thinks she might be one of the latter; it must have meant to pick someone else and somehow got her by mistake. But then, she thinks that about a lot of things. In this respect, Becca was a hard character for me to write. Like her, I’m a middle-aged woman just entering menopause. Unlike her, I’m not terribly introspective or insecure about what I’m doing. Of course, I’m also not dealing with the changes she’s wrestling with.

That, really, was what I was hoping to capture in this novel: the experience of change, both physical and psychological, that is absolutely earth shattering. I wanted to examine what an ordinary woman does with those kinds of events. Menopause is a time in a woman’s life where her body feels like it’s transforming into something else, something alien, and potentially monstrous. Not unlike changing into a werewolf, only less fun, at least from my perspective.

There’s an element of wish-fulfillment in that aspect of the book. The thrill of being something much bigger and stronger with fewer aches and pains, at least once a month, is pretty appealing to my middle-aged self. Apart from the whole uncontrollable killing-machine aspect of lycanthropy, who wouldn’t want that in some form? The werewolves of Wolf’s Point have some things that a lot of us might envy: a sense of purpose, of belonging, of newfound power at a time of life that can feel most disempowering.

Given that, I think Becca’s right; there are much scarier things out there than monsters. Perhaps monsters are more familiar than we realize. And maybe we’ve all got a bit of one inside us. It’s what we do with it that counts. Welcome to what I do with mine.

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Silver Moon: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

Kim Stanley Robinson has created such amazing futures in his Mars books and others that it’s sometimes difficult to believe he doesn’t have a direct line to what comes next — a crystal broadband line, rather than a crystal ball. But as Robinson explains in this Big Idea, today’s present changes the future even for him, and for his latest and in many ways most ambitious novel, 2312.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON:

My new novel 2312 began with an idea for a romance between a mercurial person and a saturnine person. Matching these two character types would make for quite an odd couple, I thought, and since all couples are odd, it seemed like the story might have wide appeal. That the two people should actually come from Mercury and Saturn is my kind of joke, in other words lame, but I like both those planets, and recent robotic space missions have given us a lot of new information about both of them.

However, having people call Mercury and Saturn their home requires some kind of solar system-spanning civilization. Thus the three-century time scale. This also put the story somewhere beyond the end of my Mars trilogy, and allowed me to return, not to that particular future history, but to that general story space: Humanity In the Solar System In the Next Few Centuries! I love that story space, one of the most exciting in all science fiction, so it was a pleasure to get back to it.

But so much about the future has changed since I last visited it. So much that I never believed possible is looking like it might happen anyway.But always in ways that to me seemed very unlike what all the other stories have been saying. I had a different vision of most of these startling new possibilities, and I found on reflection that I needed or wanted to retell the whole Matter of the Solar System.

That was fine, but also problematic. The big stories are hard to tell; you need special tricks, often lifted directly from Sir Walter Scott. I was forced to use the Kitchen Sink Theory of Novel Construction—again, of course—indeed, more than ever—but it was necessary, because the future is going to be a wild place, a recombinant multiplicity of clashing elements, a real mess. To do justice to realism these days, the kitchen sink is really nowhere near the end of what needs to get tossed into the mix.

So: terraforming (on purpose or not); living in space; genetic modifications in all living things; brain implants; artificial intelligences; gender manipulations; space travel; longevity treatments; big sea level rise on a hot sad old Earth; new forms of economics and governance. Sex, politics, art, revolution; and always, no matter what, human subjectivity. Our streams of consciousness. Because we read fiction to experience telepathy; we want to get inside other minds, and hear how other people think.

So my original two characters still carry this story, they struggle in their strange new world, making their way as best they can. In their travels they see the solar system from the Vulcanoids to Pluto; they body-surf the rings of Saturn, deal with some desperate moments on Mercury’s brightside, and cope with the icy dangers of frozen Venus. The plots they are caught up in are an important part of the history of their time, and just as messy and dangerous as history always is. And the romance’s end has a (spoiler alert!) surprise setting.

Writing 2312 was great fun. I got a lot of gentle but electrifying help from my editor, Tim Holman. His combination of stimulus and aid made a huge difference to the book, in both conception and execution, and I am grateful to him. Thanks Tim! And it’s been a pleasure watching his whole team at Orbit produce and promote the book, I’m happy to be part of such a high-powered team. I’m also grateful to all the people who helped me with various aspects of the book, from Chris McKay and his colleagues at NASA/Ames, to Pamela Mellon and all my other friends at UC San Diego, and all the rest who helped me (see acknowledgments at the back of the book).

I was also inspired by the performance art of Marina Abramovic, the landscape art of Andy Goldsworthy, and the novel technique of John Dos Passos. Goldsworthy and Abramovic have become simply genres in my future world, their names common nouns for what lots of artists do. I think that will happen. And it took the model of Dos Passos’ great USA trilogy to suggest to me the best form that could be used to portray a complicated culture in a novel. John Brunner used Dos Passos’ format for his Stand On Zanzibar quartet, and now I can see why; it’s not only useful, it’s lively. I hope readers will feel that way about 2312, and if so I will be happy, and grateful, because it’s the readers of a book who bring it to life.

—-

2312: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound

Read an excerpt. Visit the book’s site.

This Big Idea post made me tear up a little. It’s partly because I’m a parent. But it’s mostly because of how Michelle Sagara explains how the understanding and kindness of the very young informed her new book Silence.

MICHELLE SAGARA:

This book is about its dedication:

This is for the girls:

Callie
Katie
Caroline
Molly
Alexandra
Rada

With thanks, with gratitude, although admittedly they might not understand why.

I am, as I often do, getting ahead of myself.

When I set out to write my first YA novel, I wrote it on spec. This came about because my Luna editor asked if I happened to have a finished YA novel just lying around (this is almost an exact quote). As I had two books due that calendar year, I emphatically did not have any finished novels, mostly finished novels, or even partially finished novels on my figurative desk.

But I had an idea for one that I’d been mulling over for some time. It was even a contemporary, which meant I had some hope of writing a novel that was short (for me). I’ve always been drawn to stories about grief, loss, and the ways in which people deal with both. I wanted to write a ghost story, from the point of view of a young woman who had just lost the first love of her life.

So I sat down to write Silence. I had some idea of who the protagonist was, but I often discover nuances of character while writing. The prologue and the first chapter were exactly what I envisioned. The second chapter started in the same smooth vein.

And then chapter two took an abrupt detour, veering in a direction that I hadn’t planned. I wrote:

At 8:10, at precisely 8:10, the doorbell rang.

“That’ll be Michael,” her mother said.

You could set clocks by Michael. In the Hall household, they did; if Michael rang the doorbell and the clock didn’t say 8:10, someone changed it quickly, and only partly because Michael always looked at clocks, and began his quiet fidget if they didn’t show the time he expected them to show.

Books have tone. They have voice. And I realized, as I paused at the end of that last paragraph, that I was about to veer wildly off-tone if I continued; that my careful, little paranormal would have an entirely different feel.

But I also suddenly understood where this new book was going. I understood, at that moment, who Emma was, and what had kept her moving during the almost crippling months of grief.

I knew that if I wrote this unexpected book, I was no longer writing a book that would be guaranteed to speak to the market – if any book can be said to do that with certainty – but I wanted to write this book. Because I could see the dedication, from that point on.

Let me explain why. I’ve had some experience with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) as a parent. I’ve experienced the difficulties school can cause – even an incredibly supportive school, which we were lucky to have. I witnessed firsthand my oldest son’s inability to parse social cues, and to miss simple things like people saying “hi!” with enthusiasm – an enthusiasm that waned when he all but ignored them. He didn’t hear; they didn’t know he couldn’t.

We are terrified, as parents, for our children; we are terrified that they won’t fit in, they won’t find friends, they’ll be made fun of, they’ll be isolated. Because my oldest son was diagnosed ASD (Aspergers at the time) I was prepared for this, but not less terrified, and it broke my heart to know that my son was terribly lonely when I could see the children in his class trying very hard to make connections with him. If I was present, I could point them out – but I wasn’t going to be present for most of his school day.

He struggled through two years of kindergarten with some limited success, and then came the full day of grade one. And in grade one, he met the girls. Yes, those girls – the ones to whom the book is dedicated. The teacher treated my son as if his behaviour was normal for my son, and at six, children’s ideas of normative behaviour are very flexible. The girls took their cues from his teacher that year, and perhaps with a different teacher they would have picked up different cues. I don’t know.

What I do know is this: My son hated the noise of the stairwell and his class was on the third floor, so he was required to use the stairs. He almost always entered dead last, when the stairwell would be mostly empty. On this day, (half-way through the year) he was trudging up the stairs, and the stair monitor, a woman of middling years, shouted at him.

He failed to hear her, so she marched up the stairs and shouted in his ear. And he still failed to hear her; he pretty much tuned out all the noise until he left the stairwell. I started to approach the stair monitor to tell her as much, and stopped as a young girl with platinum blond hair caught her by the elbow.

“He can’t hear you, you know,” she told the woman. “He’s daydreaming. He always daydreams when he walks up the stairs.”

She was six years old. She was six years old and entirely fearless when it came to correcting a much older and much larger authority figure. And she had done so without prompting from anyone. My son, of course, didn’t even notice. But I did.

She was part of a group of friends, and they kept an eye out for my son. They also came to his birthday parties from grade one through grade six, although by that time three of them were no longer in the same school.

When my son was in grade three, we took karate together. Karate made us late, and one night there was a school open house, so we went directly from the dojo, in our gis, to the school. We entered his classroom and found two girls there, and my son approached one of them – in his karate outfit – and started to talk.

The other girl said, with a sneer, “As if we care about your stupid karate.” This is the type of reaction I feared, as a parent, especially given that ASD children can go on for an hour about any topic that engages their interest.

But the first girl turned to her friend and said, “Well, I do care.” And proceeded to talk with my son about his karate progress. She was, of course, one of the six.

Did they spend their whole days doing nothing but babysitting my son? No, of course not. They spent most of their time socializing with each other. But they continued to keep an eye out in all the little ways that made my son’s life easier. I’m not even certain, these many years later, that they would remember the incidents that I remember so clearly and so gratefully.

Michael appeared at Emma’s door at exactly 8:10 in the morning.

And I thought: Why not these girls? Books are written about shy outsiders or social outcasts all the time; books are written about mean girls just as frequently, and often books are a combination of these two extremes. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But why not these girls? Girls who were best friends and who supported each other (often by phone even in the early years) and who, while having lives entirely of their own also had the compassion to keep an eye on an awkward ASD child? It’s a paranormal, it’s contemporary, but why can’t the story be about girls like these?

Silence is that book.

—-

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Not every book has a predictable genesis. Indeed, A Confusion of Princes, the latest novel by Garth Nix, is one of those whose beginning is best described as a series of detours, resulting in a book. Come, walk with Nix as he retraces his steps to get to the published work.

GARTH NIX:

I’m not sure any of my novels have any one big idea. I like the concept of a humongous idea striking suddenly, after months or possibly years of lying around doing not much at all, allied with the popular belief that post-lightning all you have to do is retreat to a darkened room and bash out the words, a kind of a minor bureaucratic tidy-up after the brilliance of the lightning bolt.

Maybe it does work like that for some writers. But for me the ideas are more like sparks of static electricity. Mostly small, and myriad, and occasionally annoying. They are also not random, but generated by the act of writing (in which I would include daydreaming, note-jotting and open-mouthed musing to say, the neighbourhood cat). The writing generates more ideas, in turn inspiring more writing, which generate more ideas and so on.

In the case of A Confusion of Princes, it would need the psychoprobe of classic science fiction to identify and separate all the ideas and the seeds for those ideas. This is because it took me a long time to write this book, while I was also writing other books, so I can’t remember. (To tell the truth, even when I write a book quickly I find it difficult to identify the genesis of any particular idea. Usually I just make something up that sounds plausible.)

It also got complicated because something unusual happened with A Confusion of Princes. Typically when writing a novel I start very thinly with a half-seen character and a clouded situation, and some ideas about the setting. I will then write a bit of prose that makes my initial thoughts more concrete, and leave it for a few months, sometimes longer. Occasionally, like a chef returning to a dish, I will drop back and stir things around, make some notes, maybe write a bit more. Six months or a year down the track I will write an outline for the rest of the book, an outline that I will not actually follow, but that I need to write in order to be able to depart from it later on. It is a zen outline, the act of writing it being of significance, rather than its content. When all that is done, I will write the book, a chapter at a time, revising backwards as I go along, until it is done.

With A Confusion of Princes I got sidetracked after the initial phase, in which I had written a prologue (which never made it into the book) and nothing else. It seemed an excellent idea back in 2007 that I should take that bit of prose, and the few notes of setting I had already worked out, and expand upon them to create the background for a massively-multiplayer online game that I was developing with my old friend and fellow game design lunatic, Phil Wallach, with whom I have worked on a number of overly-ambitious games. After all, I thought, the game would in due course help promote the book.

Over the next three years or so, Imperial Galaxy drank up vast amounts of our money, time and the imaginative energy that I would have otherwise invested in the novel, ultimately with what might charitably be called very limited success, possibly making it the most expensive and least-useful piece of marketing for a book ever. (But we enjoyed it, and if we could afford to, would do it again. Though I might keep the next game design separate from a novel in progress . . . )

But what of the ideas? This is after all, not a “Dumb Idea” piece, though some (i.e. my accountant) might think being diverted into the game was exactly that. What I set out to write was a book about power, and the corruption of power; the nature of Empires and rulers and the ruled; of growing up in a Galactic Empire; falling in love and the redemptive powers of being loved; and what it means to be human and superhuman, when being superhuman might also mean being subhuman or indeed non-human. I also wanted, as per usual, to write the kind of book I liked to read when I was 16 and 32 and 48 (right now), and in this case, I wanted to write a science fiction adventure with more than just the adventure, like the books I loved and still love by Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton, amongst others.

When I read one of the early reviews, in Kirkus Reviews, I thought perhaps I had managed to do that, at least for that reviewer, who finished their piece with the following: “Space battles! Political intrigue! Engineered warriors! Techno-wizardry! Assassins! Pirates! Rebels! Duels! Secrets, lies, sex and True Love!  What more can anybody ask for?”

Well, I guess you could also ask for a complete game based on the book. But lacking that, you can still play the beta version of a portion of a fragment of the game, at www.imperialgalaxy.com — where you too can be a Prince of the Empire.

—-

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Zombies are the chocolate. World War I is the peanut butter. In By the Blood of Heroes, Joseph Nassise is the guy who puts them together. How does it taste?

JOSEPH NASSISE:

I always swore I’d never write a zombie novel.

I mean, come on, seriously. Rotting corpses with minimal intelligence endlessly wandering around with a taste for human flesh? What’s the point? What kind of villain is that?

No, I wasn’t going to write a zombie novel. No way, no how. What I wanted to write was a Dirty Dozen kind of story, a near-suicide mission-behind-enemy-lines kind of thing, except I wanted my version to be set World War One instead of World War Two. I could add lots of steampunk gizmos and gadgets to give it a unique flavor as well.

But as I began to write, I realized that something was missing. My villain, the Baron Manfred von Richthofen, just wasn’t cutting it. He was too…average…and what I needed was a villain that made the reader sit up and take notice. I dug through my notes, looking for a hook that I could use to make him a bit more sinister in the overall scheme of things.

Noting that, historically speaking, Richthofen had been shot down and killed in April 1918, I asked myself how the war would have changed if that hadn’t happened. What if he had lived? What if he had continued to add to his amazing streak of victories, bringing his confirmed kills to well over his historical total of 82 enemy planes? Would that provide the oomph I needed?

I didn’t think so. But the pump had been primed and other ideas began to flow as a result. What if he’d been shot down but lived through it? Even better, what if he had died but then rose again to continue fighting?

My pulse kicked up and I knew I was on to something. Richthofen gets shot down but rises again, the undead enemy ace determined to win the war for the Kaiser. That sounded pretty cool; I could work with that.

I just needed to come up with a plausible reason for it.

The idea that Richthofen was a vampire occurred to me but was just as quickly discarded. After all, Kim Newman had already done that, and done it extremely well, in his classic The Bloody Red Baron. Besides, I was almost as tired of vampires as I was of zombies. Making Richthofen a werewolf wouldn’t work either; can you imagine him going through a Dog-Soldier-style transformation while in a wood and canvas biplane fourteen thousand feet in the air? Not a pretty sight.

Ghosts. Ghouls. Spectres. Warlocks. All were considered. All were just as quickly cast aside. Still, I knew I was on that right track. I could feel it. There had to be something…

Since I wasn’t having any luck, I decided to look at the problem from a different direction. Instead of worrying about what kind of undead creature to make Richthofen, I thought about the mechanism I needed to make him into whatever-it-was he was to become. I pictured him there in the middle of no man’s land, his Fokker triplane crumpled around him, his blood leaking into the earth. What was already on that battlefield that I could make use of?

Mud. Corpses. Rats. Barbed wire. Trenches. Gas.

Wait a minute, I thought. Gas.

A quick dig through the various books on my desk told me that the first use of poisoned gas on the Western Front was by the Germans during the Second Battle of Ypres. 5700 canisters containing 168 tons of chlorine gas were released toward the Allied lines at sunrise on April 22 and the yellow-green gas was so effective that it surprised even the German troops sent to follow up on the breakthrough it created.

I knew right then and there that I had my mechanism. What if the gas the Germans had invented had not been chlorine or mustard gas but had been corpse gas instead? What if the gas worked only on inert tissue, bringing the battlefield dead back as – dare I say it? – zombies? (Or, in the parlance of the story, shamblers.)

Everything fell together from that point forward. The gas would resurrect the dead, reinforcing the German army after every battle, promoting the Allies to begin burning the corpses of friend and foe alike in giant bonfires that filled the air with ash and soot. The swelling ranks would give the Germans the extra push they needed to force the Allies back almost all the way to Paris. The world would not just be fighting for freedom from tyranny but the very survival of the human race.

There was only one final detail to set it all in motion. What if one out of every ten thousand resurrected corpses came back with their faculties intact? Not just intact, but improved a hundred-fold? The newly resurrected dead would be smarter, faster, and able to withstand more pain and injury than a normal human being? What if Richthofen had died in that crash, only to rise again as one of these revenants? How would his increased drive and ambition, never mind loyalty to the homeland, impact that war around him?

And that, dear readers, is how I ended up writing not just a zombie book, but an entire series with zombies as a chief element despite my vow.

—-

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The Mongoliad, Book One (there will be two more) was put together by what could only be called a supergroup of seven science fiction and fantasy rock stars, including Hugo-winning authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. But it’s often hard enough getting just one writer to figure out where a tale is going; what happens when you try to wrangle seven writers at the same time in the service of a single story? Mark Teppo, co-writer and chief writer wrangler for The Mongoliad, gives us insight into the process (hint: It may involve bladed weapons).

MARK TEPPO:

Sure, The Mongoliad trilogy started out as the justification the writing team used to explain why they hit each other with swords as often as possible in the name of research. (Yes, there is a team; it is comprised of Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, E. D. deBirmingham, Cooper Moo, and myself.) And what better way to justify this research than to collaborate on a rip-roaring adventure epic that posits a secret history of medieval Europe? We invented a martial order–Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae, the Knights of the Virgin Defender—and we set out to make them as real a part of history as the conspiracy theories regarding the lost Templar gold of the 14^th century. We wanted to bring back the joyous pulpiness of weekly serials while accurately portraying the very rich history of Western martial arts.

That was the basic plan, but along the way, we formed a company whose goal was to realize a new paradigm in publishing methodology, and to promulgate an argument that transmedia empires could be built using small, highly agile teams that could shift direction quickly and efficiently based on customer need and reaction. Do more of what the fans like; less of what causes them to make the ‘meh’ noise. It got very Big Picture very quickly, as you can imagine, and getting lost in that landscape was entirely likely, but we kept our heads down. We never lost sight of one simple—yet very central—narrative question: “What happens next?”

I’m ostensibly in charge of the writers’ room, but as anyone who has spent any time in the company of writers knows (especially when writers have been given the “go!” sign to make things up), being in charge means I’m the guy who makes sure the coffee pot is full and there are enough snacks. Sure, sometimes I would dangle a shiny plot point for someone to glom on to, but mostly, it was like directing a cattle stampede. You spook them in one direction, and then get the hell out of the way. I make it sound chaotic and terrifying, but it’s really quite glorious to watch. The room turns into a self-perpetuating machine that spews ideas out on a logarithmic curve.

However, at the end of the session, we’ll always come back to the basic rule. What’s the story? Where does it go next? Planning ahead was a sucker’s game because with a team like this, plans change. A lot. It’s like micro-managing a vacation getaway down to every minute that you’re away, and then never getting out of your home airport because some heavy weather has rolled in. All that work gone to waste. But it wasn’t the planning that was wasteful. It was the time spent planning. Time you could have spent writing the story—the next page, the next scene.

Once upon a time, during the traditional visit to the local bakery after a rousing morning of banging metal sticks together, Neal offered the following during a lull in conversation. “I have this idea,” he said, “A monk walks into a bar . . . ” And he went on from there for a few minutes. When he was finished, there was a pause, and then someone asked: “And then what?”

Neal mulled that over for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess we should find out.”

That was two and a half years ago. In that time, we’ve produced a nice door-stopper of a trilogy; we’ve strewn story seeds across two thousand years of narrative; we’ve written a screenplay, two game narratives, and an entire iconography that we’re stealthily inserting into every era of history.

At our most recent writers’ meeting, I pulled the rug out from under the team. After the usual hour of kibitzing and waving swords around, I quietly erased the chalkboard and wrote two numbers: “4” and “5.” I got the room’s attention and said, “Everything you’ve been working on for the last few weeks is now on hold. We’re changing direction.” I wrote some explanatory notes on the board as I talked; then, I put the chalk down, dusted off my hands, and offered them a smile as I got out of the way. “Now, let’s talk about what happens next.”

For the next two hours, the room was a raucous cacophony of ideas. And they’ve only just gotten started . . .

—-

The Mongoliad, Book One: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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It’s not a joke when I tell you that the first time I met Alethea Kontis, she reminded me of a fairy-tale princess. It had to do most immediately with her Disney-esque hair and eyes, but the resemblance went more than skin-deep as well, as her personal wit, charm and gumption — all characteristics of the species — quickly showed. Now, Kontis isn’t a fairy-tale princess (or if she is, she is of the “self-rescuing” sort), but it turns out she does have quite a fascination with fairy tales, which shows up in her debut novel, Enchanted. Even more fittingly, that fascination with fairy tales has its start in her real world.

ALETHEA KONTIS:

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Alethea who dressed like a fairy tale gypsy, befriended trees, and had really big ideas.

That little girl was me.

I was supposed to be a New Year’s baby. Instead, I showed up almost two weeks late and ruined my mother’s ski trip. Encouraged by three hours of resentful snowshoeing, I popped out on the morning of January 11, 1976. It was a Sunday. I am a Sunday’s Child. Blithe and bonny and good and gay.

I’ve always hated that stupid nursery rhyme.

Who wants “blithe and bonny and good and gay” as a quality? My life goals were to be weird and mysterious. I wanted to walk the fine line between good and evil, constantly plagued by the very sexy dark side. I wanted to write disturbing and real prose inspired by my tragic upbringing.

But noooooo, I had to be a freaking Jedi raised in a Norman Rockwell painting. Darkness took one look at me and threw in the towel. My parents named me TRUTH, for gods’ sake. Hopeless. Completely hopeless. I was a stuck up stick in the mud with two goody shoes that craved adventure like Lorelei Lee craves diamonds, but I was always too damned scared to do anything about it.

So I read, a lot, about all the impossible adventures I wanted to be part of. And when I’d burned through all twenty library books and my two weeks weren’t up yet, I wrote to fill the gap. I wrote everything: myths and stories and comic strips and greeting cards and anti-drug pamphlets and poems–rotten amounts of rotten poetry that’s cute when you’re ten and pathetic when you’re in high school. No one told me what I could or couldn’t do, so I just did it all.

And every night when that first star came out in the darkening sky, I wished for a ship. This magical ship was going to show up out of nowhere and take me on the fabulous adventure that had been chomping at the bit waiting on me to arrive. I wanted the fairy tale. And not in the Julia Roberts way.

I chose to take the whole writing thing seriously in 2003. The moment I did, two very influential people popped into my life: Orson Scott Card and Andre Norton (best fairy godparents ever).  Uncle Orson taught me that I’d had the power all along to take these goody two shoes (Ruby slippers! Who knew?) wherever I wanted to go. Miss Andre taught me that even the smallest things were magical to someone. They both brought home the idea that writers–these architects of adventure I had worshipped forever–were people too. The only differences between them and me were a few decades and an unprecedented amount of Butt in Chair.

In the spring of 2004, I got my first book contract (AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First) without even really trying. In fairy tales, this is usually where it skips to the “…and she lived Happily Ever After” bit. Oh, those tricksy Grimms and their “good parts” versions. Such is the way of the storyteller. Keep your audience hooked all the way to the end, even if you have to skim over certain less-interesting facts.

That’s never been enough for me.

Why did the frog prince stay with that princess? Sure, he needed out of that spell, but she was a bitch who lied to get what she wanted, went back on her word, and then tried to kill him so she wouldn’t have to fulfill her promise. Were Cinderella and Prince Charming really in love? He saw a pretty face across a room and danced with her three nights in a row, yeah. She obviously made such an impression on him that when he came calling later with shoe in hand, he rode away with the wrong sister twice before getting it right.  I can make a daisy chain, but how does one realistically weave a shirt out of nettles? And how does a sweet, innocent girl like Snow White grow into someone who takes pleasure in maiming her stepmother in front of her entire wedding party?

My dad is a storyteller. I know how this works. I know how to listen between the lines for the hyperboleless truth. Maybe these folk tales and nursery rhymes really did happen a long time ago, and over countless dinner tables they’ve boiled down to “good parts” versions so small that what’s left are reductions open to billions of interpretations.

The world of Enchanted is my interpretation. I took all those tales and rhymes you know and love (and some you’ve never heard of) at their word, and I rehydrated them. I filled in some blanks, came to some logical conclusions, and fit them together like John Nash puzzle pieces. You’d be surprised at how snugly they fit.

For example, it makes sense to me for most of these tales to have originated in one large family–Woodcutters, naturally–with a penchant for storytelling. “Cinderella” works for me if the girl and the prince have met before, and the ball is simply a ruse to bring them together beneath the radar of warring families. Perhaps they originally met…when the prince was a frog. And so on. And so on. The more you know about old-school fairy tales, the more you will enjoy Enchanted. I stand by that promise, no frog-throwing.

Once upon a time, there lived a girl who was the daughter of a stern mother and a storytelling father. She liked to write things in her spare time that she thought no one wanted to hear.

That girl is Sunday Woodcutter.

Enchanted is her story.

—-

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Paolo Bacigalupi has made a name from himself — and garnered a shelf full of awards including the Hugo, Nebula and Printz — by taking a hard and not always comfortable look at the logical progression of today’s conditions into the future of our planet. In The Drowned Cities, the follow-on to his award-winning YA novel Ship Breaker, Bacigalupi looks again at the world we are creating today with our words and actions, and what it means for what we leave to those who come after us.

PAOLO BACIGALUPI:

When I started writing The Drowned Cities, I hadn’t planned to write about politics. Typically I write about environmental issues such as global warming or energy scarcity or GM foods, but as I was working on the book, our increasingly divided political dialogue and government paralysis intruded.

These says, I can’t help noticing how much time we spend busting unions in Wisconsin or warring over contraception in universities, or checking people’s citizenship papers at traffic stops, while our geopolitical situation and future prospects change for the worse. As I’ve watched this dysfunction deepen, I’ve started to consider other aspects of where we might be headed.

As much as we invoke Rome and its fallen empire as a metaphor for our present American circumstance, I’m more interested in Greece, and the failures of prototype democracy. I can’t help but notice how easily demagogues and rhetoric sway our citizens these days, and how we turn on any leader foolish enough as to tell us that the shadows on the wall are false–whether that’s the dream of endless American prosperity, or the mirage of American exceptionalism, or the fairy tale that taxes will never be raised at the same time as our military will never be trimmed.

Democracy is fragile. It takes people working together in good faith to make it function. And yet, these days we celebrate people who profit from undermining it. We bathe ourselves in the rhetorical flourishes of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity (and no, Keith Olbermann doesn’t float my boat much either), and it seems like you’re either a patriot or a traitor to your country. Environmentalist just want to kill jobs. Democrats are out to make America weak. The left is stupid, and the right is crazy. The Christians are trying to create a theocracy, and the socialists are hiding under every rock, just waiting to take over the government.

Division. Distrust. Contempt. Hatred.

Ironically, the demagogues who work so hard to deepen our divisions are getting rich at the same time. They hack away at their fellow citizens, and encouraging others to do the same. They devalue half our population’s humanity for the entertainment of the other half–and they make massive amounts of money. Rush Limbaugh alone makes $38 million a year from poisoning our political dialogue.

Almost all of my writing asks the simple question: If this goes on, what does the world look like? For The Drowned Cities, I asked: If everyone we disagree with is a traitor, where does that take us? If we can’t figure out how to cooperate, and if we always demonize one another, what sort of world do we hand off to our children in terms of politics and prosperity? The Drowned Cities is about the world after Rush Limbaugh and the rest of our talking heads have boarded their private jets and left the wreckage of the country behind. It about a world where we didn’t solve the big problems because we were focused on the small schisms.

In The Drowned Cities, warlord factions fight over territory, scrap, religion, and recruits. Two young children, Mahlia and Mouse, have been orphaned by the civil war and fled to the jungle outskirts. They’ve both lost their families and Mahlia has lost a hand to the war’s brutalities. Now, in the village of Banyan Town, they’ve found shelter, thanks to the protective influence of a humanitarian doctor. But even this fragile safety doesn’t last. War is coming Banyan Town. Soldier boys are in the jungles, sweeping the swamps with hunting dogs, searching for something that only Mahlia knows about. Something that the soldier boys will do anything to find, and something that Mahlia can never let them have, no matter what it costs herself, the doctor, or the town.

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N.K. Jemisin is has been on a hot streak for the last couple of years; her novel The Kingdom of the Gods was nominated for the Nebula Award this year, and its predecessor The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo. That being the case, it’s not entirely a surprise that her latest novel, The Killing Moon, the first of two “Dreamblood” titles, is garnering starred reviews and other praise. So it might surprise you that the original idea behind The Killing Moon was maybe just a little silly. But as Jemisin explains, it’s not always just the idea, it’s what you do with it, and where it takes you.

N.K. JEMISIN:

I’m supposed to talk about the idea that touched off the Dreamblood duology here, but if I talked only about that, this would be a really short post. That’s because it wasn’t a very big idea, at least at first; really, I just wanted to write about ninja priests. Nothing grand or revolutionary, nothing especially thought-provoking, no gods or universes at stake. Just shadowy figures who would creep into people’s rooms in the dead of night and… I dunno, bless them to death or something. “Missed you at confessional today, Bob.” “Wha — AGCK!” That was how all this began.

But that’s the punchline of a bad joke, not a story, and fortunately the image that popped into my head to accompany it was considerably less silly than the idea itself. I envisioned a man — tall, shaven bald, remarkable in his stillness both physically and spiritually — standing at the foot of a bed and contemplating the person who slept there, whom he meant to kill. This man, this priest, would work only at night; indeed, night would be a holy time for him. And the clincher of his character was that he wouldn’t be doing it for some paltry material reward or to satisfy a bloodthirsty god; he would be doing it because he cared. He would intend only the best for his victims; indeed, he would be trying to save them from a far worse fate. He would love them. And what could be more effective — or relentless — than an assassin motivated by love?

This was the Gatherer Ehiru, protagonist of The Killing Moon, who spun himself in seconds from subconscious nothingness into conscious near-completion as a character. Once I had him, though, I had to begin the much more difficult work of figuring out what sort of society would harbor a man like this, and consider him an asset rather than a monster.

From the beginning I envisioned this story taking place in a land of warmth and water. I had a vague idea at first of placing it in pre-Columbian South America, possibly a fantasy analogue of the Incan Empire — but the place in my head felt much older, relatively speaking. It would be a society weighed down by tradition, I felt instinctively, and wealthy enough to support a large, powerful priesthood. It would be a civilized place, full of sprawling cities and temples, with an enormous populace and monuments huge enough to inspire awe… kind of like ancient Egypt. Since at the time I knew squat-all about ancient Egypt beyond what I’d picked up from many bad movies, I started researching it, and that only confirmed my choice. Egypt was perfect.

Next I tried to figure out why Ehiru — his name popped into my head too — would be sneaking into someone’s home to kill them. Obvious answer is obvious: for mercy. To ease pain or a lingering death. But that seemed too easy. Lots of societies have had to wrestle with how to care for their dying elders or deathly ill; none that we know of have evolved a cadre of mercy-killing priests. That suggested to me that there had to be something more involved. Something that would give the whole nation a stake in not only allowing but encouraging this priesthood’s activity. What could a priesthood provide that would benefit every citizen so much that they might be willing to sacrifice their sick and old…?

Health and longevity, of course, for the rest.

There are some obvious real-world inspirations here. Gujaareh is in many ways a land out of a Sarah Palin nightmare; every older citizen’s final days are decided upon by a literal “death panel” consisting of both priests and the person’s own relatives. Also, as an American I live under the constant shadow of worry that I will fall ill or get hurt during a time when I’m without insurance. For most of us that means bankruptcy at best, homelessness or a terrible death at worst. This fear peaked for me a few years ago, when I took time off 9-to-5 life to write the last two books of the Inheritance Trilogy — just as the housing crisis triggered the Great Recession. So although in day job life I’m a career counselor who’s never previously had much trouble finding employment when I needed to, I did that time. Oh, I had insurance via the Freelancers’ Union, for the “affordable” price of $400/month. (If I hadn’t lived in New York, where there’s a critical mass of freelancers [including writers], it would’ve been $1100.) But as my “writing year” ticked into 15 months, then 18, my savings dwindled first to dregs, then fumes.

I was lucky: I found a job about a month before I would’ve had to cancel my health insurance. But I know many, many people who haven’t been so lucky. And while in theory the Affordable Care Act might alleviate some of this fear (if it’s allowed to stand by the Supreme Court)… it’s not really a solution to the problem, just a small and ill-fitting band-aid.

But Gujaareh, the Egypt-esque land in which Ehiru plies his trade, has found a workable solution. In Gujaareh every citizen contributes to the system: they are required to make monthly tithes of dreams. In the hands of skilled narcomancers — the priests of the Goddess of Dreams — these dreams can be used to generate a kind of supercharged placebo effect, accelerating wound-healing and boosting immune response to nearly every disease. Wet dreams can be used to encourage abnormal growth — the regeneration of lost limbs, for example — while nightmares stop abnormal growth, such as cancer. But the most powerful dreams, which can ease the most debilitating mental or physical pain and extend life itself, is obtained only at the moment of death. That’s where Ehiru and his fellow priests come in… and that’s when I realized I had a real story on my hands.

I also had to figure out Ehiru himself, and the circumstances that drive him to kill people out of love; the priesthood that supports and controls him like a family, and the theological cosmology behind it; the political and economic pros and cons, and the kinds of hard choices Gujaareen citizens have to make; and most importantly I had to figure out all the ways this whole system could go horribly, horribly wrong. But I don’t want to spoil any more.

So I guess we’ll have to see which part of the story attracts more readers: the adventure and conspiracy? The magical examination of socialized medicine and its consequences? Ehiru, the loving killer? His companions: Nijiri the killer-apprentice, Sunandi the nation-killer? The magic system rooted in psychodynamic dream theory, the medical system based on the collective unconscious? The promise of a sequel which will come out in just another month?

‘Course, if it’s the ninja priests that intrigue you, I won’t judge. That’s what did it for me, too.

—-

The Killing Moon: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read the first three chapters. Read the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

This is a Big Idea whose author I have a great deal of pleasure introducing to you, because the debut novelist you are about to meet, Arthur Salm, is a dear friend of mine — the book editor at the San Diego Tribune back when I was an but an intern there, more than two decades ago (the paper later merged to become the San Diego Union Tribune, where Arthur continued in that role). After years of reviewing and talking about books, Arthur’s gone to the other side and written Anyway*, a coming-of-age tale that’s getting some lovely reviews (Publishers Weekly calls it “sweetly comic”) and aims to capture the essence of being twelve. How to do that? By treating the main character Max — and the readers — in a certain way. Here’s Arthur to explain.

ARTHUR SALM:

My Big Idea started out as No Idea At All.

Four years ago I left my job as Books editor and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune and sat down to write a novel. I hadn’t the vaguest wisp of a story in mind, but I had the tone down, I tell you, down: This was to be an antic, dark comedy, because … well, it sounded like fun.

Problem was, I’d never written fiction. I had, in fact, spent 20+ years trying not to write fiction, what with being a journalist and all. So on Day One, after arranging the cat on my lap (she’s still there, or rather, here), I thought I’d take a test drive: a short story for my then 12-year-old daughter. Just to see if I could make stuff up.

Right away Max, my 12,-almost-13-year-old narrator, started coming up with asides and tangential comments. I remembered that when I reviewed David Foster Wallace’s essay collection “Consider the Lobster” I peppered the piece with 30 of what I hoped were fun and funny footnotes (Wallace was, of course, Master of the Footnote) and that it was the best time I ever had writing anything. So I started putting Max’s meanderings into footnotes.

After about four hours I leaned back in my chair and screamed at the ceiling, “NO! I do not want to write a *%^#$&^ children’s book!”

Because I don’t read, and have never read, children’s books. I don’t collect stamps or listen to opera or watch football, either. Nothing against any of them. Just not interested.

But now I was writing a children’s book … without a clue as to what children’s books are “like.” Which is when I got what I hope will pass for a Big Idea. Or a Large-ish Idea, at least.

Here we have to detour back to the newspaper biz. People were always asking me, “Is it true that newspapers are written on a sixth-grade level?” It’s one of those modern myths (e.g., “Everyone should drink eight glasses of water a day”) that make no sense if you think about them for two minutes, but are generally accepted because most people don’t think about anything for two minutes. Anyway, one of the preposterous notions attendant to the “sixth-grade level” myth is that reporters are able to calibrate their prose to the reading level of the average American 11-year-old. (Copy editor kicks story back to reporter: “You’ve got two eighth-grade vocab words in the fourth graf, and the sentence structure in the lede is fifth-grade at best.”)

Not having a clue, then, as to how to downshift my writing into middle-school gear, I made up my mind not to. They’ll get it, I told myself. Just write the story. The only concessions I made were 1) no super-complex sentences that wander off into a maze of subordinate and sub-subordinate clauses, because eighth-graders just don’t sound like that; and 2) keep an eye on the vocabulary: no “plangent” or “purblind” or “peripatetic.” Aside from that, just write the story.

Because what “Anyway*” is about, really – as much as a book is “about” anything, another argument altogether – is that fleeting netherworld in which one is neither a little kid nor a teenager, but a (semi)-independent being balanced precariously, giddily, gloriously in between. It’s about that feeling: Max is intensely aware of (and ecstatic about) no longer being a little kid, and he knows that the social and chemical assault of teen-hood lies dead ahead. So he’s fiddling with his identity … and when he goes to a week-long summer family camp, he sees a chance to re-invent himself. Nobody there knows him. He can be anything, be anybody he wants to be.

Consequences? Yup.

That kind of a story, that kind of sensibility, can’t be conveyed by writing down to what we imagine to be a kid’s level of sophistication. It’s grown-up stuff, if you will. And here’s my Big (Large-ish!) Idea: This is exactly, but exactly the point in life when people start to GET stuff. They’ll get it. Twelve, 11-, 10-year-olds will get it.

And so, I hope, will 20-, 31- …maybe even 62-year-olds.

—-

Anyway*: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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