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Alix E. Harrow
What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?
Oh, so many! I was just re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, one of my all-time favorites. It strikes me now as an inversion of a classic epic fantasy – instead of battles, there are diplomatic talks; instead of the young princess, the protagonist is a middle-aged advisor; instead of claiming power, the final climax is resolved by an act of surrender.
For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?
The thing fantasy does best is exaggerate. I mean that sincerely – it has the ability to work on a scale that makes things that are invisible or intangible (love, power, hunger, fear, desire) visible. A woman’s agency can become literal witchcraft; the sins of our past can become literal ghosts.
What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in Starling House, or other titles?
Anything I do well I’ve stolen from better books – I’m a much better reader than I am a writer. But I sort of like the feeling that I’m intentionally echoing the authors that were formative to me. In Starling House I got to do a sentient house, and I liked imagining all the other magical houses I’d grown up loving – Howl’s Moving Castle, the Abhorsen’s house, every castle in every retelling of Beauty and the Beast. I know we celebrate fantasy as a genre of endless invention, and it is, but it charms me how often we invent the same things, in each other’s footsteps.
Your novel, Starling House, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?
Oh! I guess, compared to my other stuff, it’s more personal? I never know what that means in interviews, but in this case it means it’s literally personal: I never really thought I’d write a fantasy protagonist that grew up in the same place I did.
What was the main inspiration for Starling House, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?
I’m from Kentucky, and so are both sides of my family, way back. But none of my books and stories, prior to this one, were set there. It was only when we’d decided to leave – we moved to Virginia a few years ago – that I suddenly knew how to write about home.
There’s also a lot of John Prine in there, and family lore, and a very reasonable fear of sinkholes. The heart of it, I’d say, is loving a place that doesn’t always love you back.
Alix E. Harrow is the NYT-bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, Starling House, and various short fiction, including a duology of retold fairy tales (A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended). Her work has won a Hugo and a British Fantasy Award, and been shortlisted for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus, Southern Book Prize, and Goodreads Choice awards. She’s from Kentucky, but now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids.
Wole Talabi
What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?
While I read and write a lot of things, I am primarily a science fiction reader. So, when I read fantasy for pleasure, it tends to be contemporary fantasy, urban fantasy, or literary fiction with a speculative bent. Something that is both thoughtful and fun with unique style. As much as I appreciate epic or high fantasy, I don’t love it. Possibly because I came to fantasy via the everyday supernatural – I grew up with stories of spirits and shapeshifters and magic that were believed to be real, and I love stories that reflect that in some way.
Which may be why I love Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard about a man who follows his palm wine tapper into the land of the dead, encountering many supernatural adventures along the way – for its unapologetically creative amalgamation of several separate Yoruba folktales into an outlandish and wildly entertaining adventure told in naturalistic, heady prose.
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark is also one of my favorites. It’s such a clever and entertaining supernatural whodunnit set in an alternate steampunk Cairo with angels, demons and magic. It’s full of sly commentary about our world with engaging characters and richly imagined mythos.
I know not everyone considers alternate history a kind of fantasy, but I do, depending on the execution and by that measure, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson is also a favorite. The book imagines how world history might have been different if the Black Death had killed 99% of Europe’s population, instead of a third as it did in our reality and does so thoughtfully. It’s a rich and poetic rendition of a world that could have been.
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, perhaps my favorite of Lauren Beukes’ novels, takes place in Johannesburg, in a slum where criminals are forced to literally carry the burdens of their sins with them in the form of animals like witches’ familiars. It’s like crime fiction with drugs, sex, politics, music, social consciousness, journalism, and magic all mashed together and I loved it.
For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?
I think Fantasy, like all well-executed speculative fiction, can do something special – which is expand the scope of our natural human story telling ability, giving us a wider range of possibility in our fiction. More ways to explore, to reflect, to distort, to exaggerate, to abstract, or to ‘heighten’ any aspect of the human experience, to examine it in new and different ways, to reveal something about ourselves.
Your novel, Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?
Usually when I write, I start with an idea or a concept and then characters appear as a way for me to explore that idea. In the case of Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, it was the inverse. The characters of Shigidi and Nneoma essentially jumped into my head fully formed and the rest of the story blossomed out from them, as I tried to figure out who these characters were, what motivated them, the world they inhabited, and how it had shaped them. I loved going on that journey of discovery, building the story character-out instead of concept-in. And I think it shows in how much some readers have latched on to these flawed, fascinating characters emotionally.
What was the main inspiration for Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?
The book is the culmination of three elements.
First Shigidi himself, the protagonist. I have always been interested in the nature of faith, religion and mythology. Particularly Yoruba mythology but all mythologies really (and gods/creatures from other pantheons make appearances in the book). My version of Shigidi is inspired by the same-named minor god of nightmares in Yoruba mythology, who came across to me as someone stuck in an unfortunate situation. Doing a shitty, necessary job. I wanted to take him and turn him into an unexpected anti-hero. So, I wrote the short story called “I, Shigidi” around 2015/2016 which went through several iterations before being published as a novelette in Abyss & Apex magazine.
Second, Nneoma. The co-protagonist. I wrote a short story about her back in December of 2015, and she is inspired by both Judeo-Christian mysticism and my desire to subvert the tropes of classic Nigerian movies like Nneka the Pretty Serpent (1994), about dangerous, beautiful spirit-women who use seduction as power. I put Nneoma and Shigidi together because I knew a reluctant nightmare god and secretive succubus make a good pairing – Nneoma makes an appearance in the final version of “I, Shigidi”. But I always wanted to tell a bigger story with them as the main protagonists, I just wasn’t sure what story it would be, which is where the third element came in. I went back to London in 2018 and visited the British museum where I felt an overwhelming urge to liberate all the stolen cultural artifacts housed there. So, I took that feeling and channeled it into a story about Nneoma and Shigidi on a heist to retrieve an item – the titular brass head – from the museum while coming to terms with their own relationship and the world around them.
I think faith is at the heart of the story – faith in gods, faith in others, faith in ourselves. Belief in something. It is the thing that propels us to change ourselves, and the world around us. I explore faith in multiple ways in the novel and it is faith that brings Shigidi and Nneoma together and enables them grow over the course of the story.
WOLE TALABI is an engineer, writer, and editor from Nigeria. He is the author of the World Fantasy award nominated novel SHIGIDI AND THE BRASS HEAD OF OBALUFON, listed by the Washington Post as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023, which was also nominated for the Nebula award, Locus award, British Fantasy award and other major awards. His short fiction has appeared in places like Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, The Africa Risen anthology and is collected in the books CONVERGENCE PROBLEMS (2024) and INCOMPLETE SOLUTIONS (2019). He has also been a finalist for the Hugo, BSFA, and Crawford awards, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing. He has won the Nommo award for African speculative fiction and the Sidewise award for alternate history. He has edited five anthologies including the acclaimed AFRICANFUTURISM: AN ANTHOLOGY (2020) and MOTHERSOUND: THE SAUÚTIVERSE ANTHOLOGY (2023). He likes scuba diving, elegant equations, and oddly shaped things. He currently lives and works in Australia. Find him at wtalabi.wordpress.com and at @wtalabi online.
Martha Wells
What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?
The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo, and also her more recent novel The Fox Wife. I think the way both books gently blend a real historical time period with the supernatural is one of my favorite approaches to fantasy. Nghi Vo’s Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful are also great examples of this. Black Water Sister by Zen Cho and Will Do Magic For Small Change by Andrea Hairston blend subtle and fantastic fantasy with contemporary time periods. And the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is a fantasy mystery/detective procedural.
I also really love secondary worlds, the more different they are from our world, the better. Some examples are The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, Court of Fives by Kate Elliott, The Tiger’s Daughter by K Arsenault Rivera, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson. Also I’m a big fan of Tanith Lee and the lush, vivid fantasy worlds she created.
For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?
I think it’s the sense of the otherworldly for me, whether it’s a blend with our own world or a totally alien created world. I also love fantasy worlds that feel limitless, like you could travel through them forever and never find a border or boundary.
What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in Witch King, or other titles?
The feel of starting in a strange place and traveling to somewhere even stranger. I’ve always loved books that start that way, and it’s a fun way to write, to build the world outward and discover it with the reader. In Witch King I went a little further, starting in an enclosed, confined space, and going outward into a wider and wider world.
Witch King was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?
I was very excited, it was the first time I’ve ever made the WFA ballot! I think I learned a lot from writing The Murderbot Diaries, and I don’t think I could have written Witch King without that experience. Playing with perspective and point of view in Murderbot was a real education for me as a writer.
What I loved most about Witch King was getting back into creating a fantasy world, and also a new world, all new characters. Writing a series and having the room to continually add more complexity to your world and characters is great, but starting from a clean slate where anything could happen is a lot of fun.
What was the main inspiration for Witch King, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?
It was written in 2020 and it’s very much a pandemic book, in a lot of ways. In the first part of the year, I had been working on the next Murderbot Diaries novella, and once the lockdowns started, I had writer’s block and couldn’t make any progress. I was just stuck in place for about six terrible months. But I was reading a lot of the great fantasy that was coming out that year, and also watching the Chinese and Korean dramas/fantasies that were starting to become available on streaming channels. I decided to pull out an old idea I had tried to work on several times over the years, and then given up on. That ended up becoming the first chapter. For me, the heart of the story is fighting for your world and your way of life.
Martha Wells has been writing science fiction and fantasy since 1993. Her work includes The Murderbot Diaries, The Books of the Raksura, the Ile-Rien series, and most recently Witch King and its sequel Queen Demon, as well as other novels, short fiction, non-fiction, and media tie-ins. She is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and her work has won Nebula, Hugo, Locus Awards, and an Alex Award and a Dragon Award. It has also appeared on the World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, and the British Science Fiction Association Award ballots, as well as the New York Times, USA Today, and the Sunday Times Bestseller Lists. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages.