by Neil Clarke
What made you choose to go from writing short fiction to a trilogy of novels? Has your writing and process changed with this longer project?
I’ve always wanted to write a novel, and it was the right time. I wanted to tell a story about the forces that create oppression and conflict. I knew I’d need a novel to do it justice.
My process changed a fair bit. I picked up Scrivener to help me organize research and scenes. I had to relax my prose a little, so I wouldn’t drive myself mad polishing every sentence. I spent a while practicing a sentence-level tension cycle that I hoped I could use to make the book taut, paranoid, and gripping.
I worry a lot more about my physical and mental health now. I could always produce short stories in a burst of creativity over a couple days. But now that I’m under contract, and I’m nervous about letting people down, I have to care for my resources and attention. It’s tough! I haven’t really figured it out yet.
In The Traitor Baru Cormorant, you give us a peek at a very complex world in varying stages of social, political, and economic unrest. What were some of the challenges you faced creating this world and the systems within it?
I think the biggest challenge was teaching that complexity! I wanted a world that felt as dynamic, unpredictable, and many-layered as ours—like tumbling through a storm of money and ideas. But I also wanted the reader to feel like Baru. She has a gift for understanding these big, complicated things.
I decided that Baru would look at the balance of power around the Ashen Sea as a game. I hoped readers would follow along and develop a kind of joyful game-knowledge of the world. Each of Aurdwynn’s Dukes has a political game, a natural resource, and a web of likes and dislikes. Baru learns how to play that game to win. And when the world refuses to obey her game-map, she makes mistakes.
(One of my favorite beats in the novel comes when Baru watches an army take shelter under hwacha bombardment. Hwachas are badass rocket-propelled arrow launchers. Baru watches the arrows strike the army, and instinctively understands how the different military budgets, shield-making materials, and tactical doctrines within the army come together to explain the pattern of casualties. I love seeing a huge chain of events and decisions being brought to a reckoning.)
I also thought a lot about how to defeat any suggestion of biological destiny. I want the cultures and ‘races’ in Baru’s world (I use scare quotes because these races are sociopolitical constructs, not descriptive maps of biological difference—Falcrest in particular is an expert at the tactical redefinition of races to aid its imperial goals) to be impossible to map directly to any real-world society or history. And I wanted the development of systems of oppression to occur via mechanisms specific to the history of this world. I don’t think I completely succeeded, but that’s where I aim!
I want the cultures of Baru’s world to feel like the product of their own climates, geographies, and histories. I think the fantasy secondary world is a great chance to say, hey, our world isn’t an inevitable and correct end state! We could’ve gone some other way!
Baru is a fascinatingly complicated and conflicted character that wears many masks. Instead of joining an outright rebellion, she chooses to fight the Masquerade from the inside by more subtle means. Why have her do this? Is it sometimes better to change something from within?
History is full of sobering, awful situations where the powerful stepped on the powerless.
We have a lot of stories about the exceptions: successful resistance, defiance against all odds. I wanted to write a novel about triumph in the worst case—a solitary woman targeted by intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia, fighting a long war against a powerful and intelligent empire who’ve passed over crude force in favor of efficient, calculated psychological warfare.
Few of us, reading this, are ever going to join an armed uprising. All of us are going to try to make a difference from the inside, by choosing how to live our lives in a world that makes us complicit in awful systems.
I also thought it would make for a straight-up awesome story, full of secrets, gambits, devastation, and different shades of victory.
At some point while writing, did any of the characters surprise you by taking on a life of their own? Some of them have so many secrets.
Xate Yawa! She’s hiding so much. I would love to see the story from her angle. She’s desperately trying to manage everything towards a specific objective, and Baru jeopardizes her life work.
I found Muire Lo a huge relief to write because he was able to express simple, direct caring in a way most of the other characters couldn’t. Tain Hu’s incredible strength, power, and confidence was a gift to me—I could always rely on her to cut through Baru’s webs and say, look, here is what we have to do, I believe in you, let’s get it done. Tain Hu puts her oaths and her beliefs above all other things, which is a great foil for Baru’s philosophy of exigency.
Many of the Dukes really came into their own during drafts. I think Duchess Erebog and Unuxekome both surprised me, particularly Unuxekome’s romanticism and Erebog’s level-headed pragmatism bouncing off Ihuake. But of all of them the ones I wish I could spend more time with are Nayauru, Autr, and Sahaule. I want to know how they work!
And, of course, I love the characters who are clearly living in their own story that just briefly intersects Baru’s. I’ll leave those for the reader to discover!
Your novel pulls from a variety of different areas: social engineering to Joseon Dynasty siege weaponry. Could you expand more on the other influences in your novel?
Cognitive psychology. Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars. Fantasy’s neglect of the Islamic Golden Age, the Indian Ocean trade system, and other dynamic, vital sections of history. Code Name Verity, indirectly—I hadn’t read it yet but people kept talking to me about it. Partible paternity in Amazon Basin societies. Naval warfare between Japan and Korea. The ugly history of eugenic ideology. Admiral Keumalahayati. 1984. Online discussion about who was and wasn’t allowed to be the protagonist of an epic fantasy novel, because some people would, it was said, be ‘too oppressed to do anything.’ Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen of Attolia. C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station. Civilization IV, but not V. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Everyone at the Alpha workshop who talked about making things hurt more. Yoon Ha Lee. Sundiata Keita. We Have Always Fought, by Kameron Hurley. Agh! I wish I could remember everything.
Is there anything you can tell us about the next book in the trilogy?
I think I can! If you read the letters at the end of the first book, you’ll find a lot of clues. The naval battle off Treatymont triggers tension between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo, and a second Armada War looms—kind of a fantasy Cuban Missile Crisis. The tension draws in Baru’s old friend Aminata, Baru’s second cousin Lao, and a laman named Tau-indi Bosoka, who’s one of the Oriati Federal Princes. Together they confront Falcrest’s monstrous ideologies, the many colorful characters in Parliament and the Throne, and the threat of total civilizational collapse in a whirlwind of plague, war, beetles, and cancer.
The first book was a very focused, emotionally rigorous story. I thought of it as a scalpel. I want the second book to have much more emotional range, to spend more time on day to day life, compassion, and friendship—even as we move from the testing grounds of Aurdwynn into the arena of Falcrest politics. Falcrest is a very different place, where the Masquerade enforces its ideology in subtle, hands-off ways. Baru can no longer count on being the smartest one in the room. And Baru has to learn to trust and love if she’s going to survive and maybe (eventually) be happy.
I think of the second book as a novel in conversation and argument with the first one.
Do you have any other projects in the works for after the Baru Cormorant trilogy?
Nothing formal. I have a space opera epic I’d like to write, Exordia—you can get a glimpse of it in my Shimmer story “Anna Saves Them All.” And I’ve been playing with a young adult novel, kind of Portal meets Marathon 2: Durandal, about a pair of sisters who build
a gate out of our world and end up in command of a haunted starship. For now, my eyes are on Baru. We’ll see where things go!
Since you’re an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, do you have any advice for budding authors?
Read! Read good authors, take apart their prose, read outside your favorite genres, read history, read discussion and criticism. The world is larger and stranger than you can imagine.
Write to satisfy yourself, and to express what you believe. Don’t pin your self-worth on your writing. Don’t let yourself feel like a failure if you don’t get published as soon as you want. There’s a long time ahead of you, and no timer on success.
Finally, which is more difficult to write: a trilogy of novels or video game item descriptions?
Ha! Destiny was trickier to write for, because I couldn’t micromanage every detail to make it all work.
About the Author
Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.
Another Word:
On Sunshine and Shadows
Jason Heller
For someone who was born in Connecticut and now lives in Colorado, I sure do wonder a lot about Florida. As it turns out, so does science fiction/fantasy. My excuse? I lived in the Sunshine State between the formative ages of four and thirteen. SFF’s excuse? Well, that’s a bit more complicated.
My first memory of Florida involves fireworks. Not just any fireworks, either. When I was four, my mom, my little brother, and I moved to the small Gulf Coast town of Englewood, Florida. The year was 1976. I remember watching the Bicentennial fireworks at the beach during that Fourth of July holiday. The magnificent explosions reflected in the waves, blooming underwater as well as in the sky, forming vast symmetrical patterns that seared themselves onto my tender gray matter.
Florida never stopped being magical. As I got older, I collected bugs, lizards, and frogs in picnic coolers, a fascination with creepy-crawly things that didn’t seem odd to me at all, at least not until other kids my age started pointing out my oddness, in the way that kids know how. As we moved from Englewood to nearby towns like North Port, Venice, and Port Charlotte, I learned to seek out the half-finished canals and abandoned construction sites deep in the swampy woods. My few friends and I once found a huge slab of Styrofoam in one of these lumber-strewn graveyards. We used it as a raft, to pole down those mucky, rain-filled proto-canals, like some kind of modern-day, mosquito-bitten Huck Finns. Along the way we’d carve hearts of palm out of wild palmetto bushes and eat them raw, dirt and all.
And then there was the Space Shuttle. In the early ’80s, I’d stand in our doorway to watch Shuttle launches, even though they were happening all the way across the state on the opposite coast. I could turn up our TV and hear the sound of the launch while seeing the silent, tiny trail of exhaust form on the eastern horizon, like a zipper being gracefully opened in the fabric of the sky.
In Florida, though, such magical things went hand in hand with horrific ones. My family moved so often because my family was poor. We were running out on rent, dodging angry landlords, occasionally getting evicted. I started over in new schools more times than I can count, perpetually the new kid in dirty, uncool clothes, marked for ridicule. At home, I regularly witnessed drug dealing, drug use, drunkenness, and brutal domestic abuse. For a while, my mom dated an African-American man—one of the few authentically nice boyfriends I remember her ever having—and I got to see what racism looked like firsthand, through the stares and remarks of strangers around me. An uncle of mine even wound up in prison in Florida, and having to visit him there became a frightening ordeal. In retrospect, though, it was no less frightening than the instability, intolerance, and economic hardship that seemed to suffuse the Sunshine State with shadows.
I discovered SFF in Florida. I’d ride my bike to the local library, then check out as many books by authors like Fred Saberhagen, Gordon R. Dickson, Anne McCaffrey, John Varley, and Roger Zelazny as I was allowed. I’d take them home to devour in the geeky sanctity of my room.
Imagine my awe when I discovered a fantasy series by an author named Piers Anthony that was set in Xanth: a magical realm that was shaped precisely like the peninsula of Florida. Xanth was tenuously connected to our world, which Anthony called Mundania.
The funny thing is, even at the age of ten, I got Anthony’s admittedly bad joke—but I didn’t agree with it. Florida may have been stultifying, but it was anything but mundane. Or rather, its mundaneness was part of its weirdness. Things in Florida moved so quietly, so slowly, so utterly hopelessly, that it seemed like some kind of primordial being held over from prehistory. The fact that the state is geographically estranged from the mainland, and surrounded by bodies of water on all sides, seemed to symbolize its otherness: Florida, a vestigial tail of a place, an embryonic island affixed forever to the mainland by a peninsular umbilicus, a pocket dimension into which unwanted things (like me and my family) fell.
I moved to Denver when I was thirteen. There I grew up, or at least older. As an adult I found out that the beloved Xanth books of my youth were, to put it very mildly, somewhat problematic in regard to their depiction of women (even more so than most of those books’ contemporaries in the ’70s and ’80s)—something I wrote about a little more extensively for The A.V. Club a couple years ago. But that sense of Florida as a liminal mundanely magical, magically mundane place never left me.
A few years back I wrote a couple short stories, “Behold: Skowt!” and “The Raincaller” (the former was published in Apex Magazine, the latter in Sybil’s Garage). They starred the same character, Oso, a hustling, graffiti-slinging street-kid struggling to survive in a post-collapse dystopia. They weren’t set in Florida—the world I built was a bit nebulous in that regard—but they could have been, right down to a canal-raft made of salvaged Styrofoam.
I’m not the only speculative fiction author who’s been drawing inspiration from Florida lately. Most famously, Florida native Karen Russell’s Pulitzer-finalist novel Swamplandia! took place in a magic-realist version of the Sunshine State, and dealt with, among many other things, alligator wrestling. (Two years earlier, I featured alligator wrestling in “The Raincaller.” Having alligators pop up occasionally in your backyard as a kid will leave that kind of mark on you.)
More recently, Laura Van Den Berg’s post-pandemic novel Find Me follows a young, virus-resistant woman’s path across America, one that ends in a dreamlike iteration of Florida; conversely, Jeffrey Rotter’s post-collapse fable The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering starts out in Florida before winding elsewhere across the globe. Rotter’s vision of Florida is particularly interesting to me—and particularly chilling. In his novel, America’s current climate of anti-intellectualism has resulted in a complete rejection of science and reason. In this return to a pre-Copernican cosmology, the ruins of Cape Canaveral have come to be known as “Cape Cannibal.” As someone who once watched the ’80s Space Shuttle launches from across the state—and who painfully remembers the Challenger disaster in 1986, as well as the Shuttle program’s more recent tragedies and dissolution—I found Rotter’s wry, bittersweet satire especially poignant. Even Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X, the indeterminate setting of his excellent Southern Reach Trilogy of last year, bears striking resemblances to the Floridian landscape. Then again, VanderMeer is a Tallahassee resident. Like I said, the place seeps into your blood.
In real life—and with all apologies to friends and colleagues who still live there—Florida is not always a wondrous place. It’s plagued by dodgy politics, class disparity, voter suppression, and, well, sinkholes that swallow people whole. (One of my favorite, bone-chilling headlines of all time, from USA Today in 2013: “Fla. sinkhole is considered victim’s grave.” The article even uses the term “chasm,”
eerily reminiscent of the infernally deep gorge known as the Gap Chasm in Anthony’s Xanth books.)
Granted, every state in America has its problems, my adopted Colorado very much included. But there’s just something about Florida—that stark contrast between its mundaneness and its magic, between its sunshine and its shadows—that makes the speculative mind wonder. And wander. And if it’s not careful, fall in.
About the Author
Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld; as part of the magazine’s 2012 editorial team, he received a Hugo Award. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a Senior Writer for The Onion’s pop-culture site, The A.V. Club. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, and others, and his SFF-related reviews and essays have been published in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly NPR.org, Tor.com, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor Books). He lives in Denver with this wife Angie.
Editor’s Desk:
The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Reviews
Neil Clarke
I’m often asked why we don’t have a review column in Clarkesworld, particularly one with a focus on short fiction. The answer has always flowed pretty quickly: “There’s no shortage of people writing reviews. I’d rather dedicate our time and effort towards something else.” What I don’t say is that with rare exception, they don’t have much value.
The sad truth about short fiction reviews is that the overwhelming majority of them have little-to-no impact on readership. After monitoring the incoming traffic for the online version of this magazine for nine years, I can say that the typical review has a statistically insignificant impact on the readership of a story or issue. The only notable exception to this has been reviews on high traffic sites, like io9 or Tor.com, that focus specifically on a single story. As the number of stories in a review increases, there’s a dramatic drop-off in story readership.